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Ismail Elezi

21 accepted papers

2026

A Benchmark for Deep Information Synthesis

ICLR 2026poster

Large language model (LLM)-based agents are increasingly used to solve complex tasks involving tool use, such as web browsing, code execution, and data analysis. However, current evaluation benchmarks do not adequately assess their ability to solve real-world tasks that require synthesizing informat…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

CASteer: Cross-Attention Steering for Controllable Concept Erasure

ICLR 2026poster

Diffusion models have transformed image generation, yet controlling their outputs for diverse applications, including content moderation and creative customization, remains challenging. Existing approaches usually require task-specific training and struggle to generalise across both concrete (e.g.,…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Do You See What I Am Pointing At? Gesture-Based Egocentric Video Question Answering

CVPR 2026

Understanding and answering questions based on a user's pointing gesture is essential for next-generation egocentric AI assistants. However, current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with such tasks due to the lack of gesture-rich data and their limited ability to infer fine-grained

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

MIDSTEER: Optimal Affine Framework for Steering Generative Models

ICML 2026poster

Steering intermediate representations has emerged as a powerful strategy for controlling generative models. However, despite its empirical success, it currently lacks a comprehensive theoretical framework. In this paper, we bridge this gap by formalizing the theory of concept steering. First, we est…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

ViCToR: Improving Visual Comprehension via Token Reconstruction for Pretraining LMMs

AAAI 2026technical

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) often face a modality representation gap during pretraining: while language embeddings remain stable, visual representations are highly sensitive to contextual noise (e.g., background clutter). To address this issue, we introduce a visual comprehension stage, which we

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

"Principal Components" Enable A New Language of Images

ICCV 2025poster

We introduce a novel visual tokenization framework that embeds a provable PCA-like structure into the latent token space. While existing visual tokenizers primarily optimize for reconstruction fidelity, they often neglect the structural properties of the latent space--a critical factor for both inte…

2025

Fractal Calibration for Long-tailed Object Detection

CVPR 2025poster

Real-world datasets follow an imbalanced distribution, which poses significant challenges in rare-category object detection. Recent studies tackle this problem by developing re-weighting and re-sampling methods, that utilise the class frequencies of the dataset. However, these techniques focus solel…

2025

From Attention to Activation: Unraveling the Enigmas of Large Language Models

ICLR 2025poster

We study two strange phenomena in auto-regressive Transformers: (1) the dominance of the first token in attention heads; (2) the occurrence of large outlier activations in the hidden states. We find that popular large language models, such as Llama attend maximally to the first token in 98% of attenti…

2025

Region-based Cluster Discrimination for Visual Representation Learning

ICCV 2025poster

Learning visual representations is foundational for a broad spectrum of downstream tasks. Although recent vision-language contrastive models, such as CLIP and SigLIP, have achieved impressive zero-shot performance via large-scale vision-language alignment, their reliance on global representations co…

2024

Three Heads Are Better than One: Complementary Experts for Long-Tailed Semi-supervised Learning

AAAI 2024technical

We address the challenging problem of Long-Tailed Semi-Supervised Learning (LTSSL) where labeled data exhibit imbalanced class distribution and unlabeled data follow an unknown distribution. Unlike in balanced SSL, the generated pseudo-labels are skewed towards head classes, intensifying the trainin…

2024

VeLoRA: Memory Efficient Training using Rank-1 Sub-Token Projections

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as powerful tools for tackling many language-processing tasks. Despite their success, training and fine-tuning these models is still far too computationally and memory intensive. In this paper, we identify and characterise the important components n…

2024

VkD: Improving Knowledge Distillation using Orthogonal Projections

CVPR 2024poster

Knowledge distillation is an effective method for training small and efficient deep learning models. However the efficacy of a single method can degenerate when transferring to other tasks modalities or even other architectures. To address this limitation we propose a novel constrained feature disti…

2023

Simple Cues Lead to a Strong Multi-Object Tracker

CVPR 2023poster

For a long time, the most common paradigm in MultiObject Tracking was tracking-by-detection (TbD), where objects are first detected and then associated over video frames. For association, most models resourced to motion and appearance cues, e.g., re-identification networks. Recent approaches based o…

2022

Learning to Discover and Detect Objects

NeurIPS 2022accept

We tackle the problem of novel class discovery and localization (NCDL). In this setting, we assume a source dataset with supervision for only some object classes. Instances of other classes need to be discovered, classified, and localized automatically based on visual similarity without any human su…

2022

Not All Labels Are Equal: Rationalizing the Labeling Costs for Training Object Detection

CVPR 2022poster

Deep neural networks have reached high accuracy on object detection but their success hinges on large amounts of labeled data. To reduce the labels dependency, various active learning strategies have been proposed, typically based on the confidence of the detector. However, these methods are biased…

Cited by 50PDFcodeScholar
2022

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Fully-Connected Layers for Low-Data Regimes

NeurIPS 2022accept

Convolutional neural networks were the standard for solving many computer vision tasks until recently, when Transformers of MLP-based architectures have started to show competitive performance. These architectures typically have a vast number of weights and need to be trained on massive datasets; he…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2021

Active Learning for Deep Object Detection via Probabilistic Modeling

ICCV 2021poster

Active learning aims to reduce labeling costs by selecting only the most informative samples on a dataset. Few existing works have addressed active learning for object detection. Most of these methods are based on multiple models or are straightforward extensions of classification methods, hence est…

Cited by 161PDFcodeScholar
2021

Learning Intra-Batch Connections for Deep Metric Learning

ICML 2021spotlight

The goal of metric learning is to learn a function that maps samples to a lower-dimensional space where similar samples lie closer than dissimilar ones. Particularly, deep metric learning utilizes neural networks to learn such a mapping. Most approaches rely on losses that only take the relations be…

2020

CIAGAN: Conditional Identity Anonymization Generative Adversarial Networks

CVPR 2020poster

The unprecedented increase in the usage of computer vision technology in society goes hand in hand with an increased concern in data privacy. In many real-world scenarios like people tracking or action recognition, it is important to be able to process the data while taking careful consideration in…

Cited by 255PDFcodeScholar
2020

The Group Loss for Deep Metric Learning

ECCV 2020poster

Deep metric learning has yielded impressive results in tasks such as clustering and image retrieval by leveraging neural networks to obtain highly discriminative feature embeddings, which can be used to group samples into different classes. Much research has been devoted to the design of smart loss…