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Julien Mairal

47 accepted papers

2026

Optimal transport unlocks end-to-end learning for single-molecule localization

ICLR 2026poster

Single‑molecule localization microscopy (SMLM) allows reconstructing cellular organelles and biology-relevant structures far beyond the limited spatial resolution imposed by optics constrains, using tagged biomolecule positions. Currently, efficient SMLM requires non‑overlapping emitting fluorophore…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

A New Statistical Model of Star Speckles for Learning to Detect and Characterize Exoplanets in Direct Imaging Observations

CVPR 2025poster

The search for exoplanets is an active field in astronomy, with direct imaging as one of the most challenging methods due to faint exoplanet signals buried within stronger residual starlight. Successful detection requires advanced image processing to separate the exoplanet signal from this nuisance…

2025

LUDVIG: Learning-Free Uplifting of 2D Visual Features to Gaussian Splatting Scenes

ICCV 2025poster

We address the problem of extending the capabilities of vision foundation models such as DINO, SAM, and CLIP, to 3D tasks. Specifically, we introduce a novel method to uplift 2D image features into Gaussian Splatting representations of 3D scenes. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on minimizing…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

MAP Estimation with Denoisers: Convergence Rates and Guarantees

NeurIPS 2025poster

Denoiser models have become powerful tools for inverse problems, enabling the use of pretrained networks to approximate the score of a smoothed prior distribution. These models are often used in heuristic iterative schemes aimed at solving Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) optimisation problems, where the…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Unsupervised Imaging Inverse Problems with Diffusion Distribution Matching

ICCV 2025poster

Inverse problems provide a fundamental framework for image reconstruction tasks, spanning deblurring, calibration, or low-light enhancement for instance. While widely used, they often assume full knowledge of the forward model -- an unrealistic expectation -- while collecting ground truth and measur…

2024

Functional Bilevel Optimization for Machine Learning

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

In this paper, we introduce a new functional point of view on bilevel optimization problems for machine learning, where the inner objective is minimized over a function space. These types of problems are most often solved by using methods developed in the parametric setting, where the inner objectiv…

2023

GloptiNets: Scalable Non-Convex Optimization with Certificates

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

We present a novel approach to non-convex optimization with certificates, which handles smooth functions on the hypercube or on the torus. Unlike traditional methods that rely on algebraic properties, our algorithm exploits the regularity of the target function intrinsic in the decay of its Fourier…

2023

Learning Reward Functions for Robotic Manipulation by Observing Humans

ICRA 2023poster

Observing a human demonstrator manipulate objects provides a rich, scalable and inexpensive source of data for learning robotic policies. However, transferring skills from human videos to a robotic manipulator poses several challenges, not least a difference in action and observation spaces. In this…

Cited by 26SourceScholar
2023

SLACK: Stable Learning of Augmentations With Cold-Start and KL Regularization

CVPR 2023poster

Data augmentation is known to improve the generalization capabilities of neural networks, provided that the set of transformations is chosen with care, a selection often performed manually. Automatic data augmentation aims at automating this process. However, most recent approaches still rely on som…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

Semi-Supervised Learning Made Simple With Self-Supervised Clustering

CVPR 2023poster

Self-supervised learning models have been shown to learn rich visual representations without requiring human annotations. However, in many real-world scenarios, labels are partially available, motivating a recent line of work on semi-supervised methods inspired by self-supervised principles. In this…

2023

Sequential Counterfactual Risk Minimization

ICML 2023poster

Counterfactual Risk Minimization (CRM) is a framework for dealing with the logged bandit feedback problem, where the goal is to improve a logging policy using offline data. In this paper, we explore the case where it is possible to deploy learned policies multiple times and acquire new data. We exte…

2022

Efficient Kernelized UCB for Contextual Bandits

AISTATS 2022poster

In this paper, we tackle the computational efficiency of kernelized UCB algorithms in contextual bandits. While standard methods require a $\mathcal{O}(CT^3)$ complexity where $T$ is the horizon and the constant $C$ is related to optimizing the UCB rule, we propose an efficient contextual algorithm…

Cited by 24SourcePDFScholar
2022

Self-Supervised Models Are Continual Learners

CVPR 2022poster

Self-supervised models have been shown to produce comparable or better visual representations than their supervised counterparts when trained offline on unlabeled data at scale. However, their efficacy is catastrophically reduced in a Continual Learning (CL) scenario where data is presented to the m…

Cited by 217PDFcodeScholar
2022

The Spectral Bias of Polynomial Neural Networks

ICLR 2022poster

Polynomial neural networks (PNNs) have been recently shown to be particularly effective at image generation and face recognition, where high-frequency information is critical. Previous studies have revealed that neural networks demonstrate a $\text{\it{spectral bias}}$ towards low-frequency function…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2021

A Trainable Optimal Transport Embedding for Feature Aggregation and its Relationship to Attention

ICLR 2021poster

We address the problem of learning on sets of features, motivated by the need of performing pooling operations in long biological sequences of varying sizes, with long-range dependencies, and possibly few labeled data. To address this challenging task, we introduce a parametrized representation of f…

2021

A Trainable Spectral-Spatial Sparse Coding Model for Hyperspectral Image Restoration

NeurIPS 2021poster

Hyperspectral imaging offers new perspectives for diverse applications, ranging from the monitoring of the environment using airborne or satellite remote sensing, precision farming, food safety, planetary exploration, or astrophysics. Unfortunately, the spectral diversity of information comes at the…

2021

Beyond Tikhonov: faster learning with self-concordant losses, via iterative regularization

NeurIPS 2021spotlight

The theory of spectral filtering is a remarkable tool to understand the statistical properties of learning with kernels. For least squares, it allows to derive various regularization schemes that yield faster convergence rates of the excess risk than with Tikhonov regularization. This is typically a…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2021

Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers

ICCV 2021poster

In this paper, we question if self-supervised learning provides new properties to Vision Transformer (ViT) that stand out compared to convolutional networks (convnets). Beyond the fact that adapting self-supervised methods to this architecture works particularly well, we make the following observati…

Cited by 6990PDFcodeScholar
2020

A Flexible Framework for Designing Trainable Priors with Adaptive Smoothing and Game Encoding

NeurIPS 2020poster

We introduce a general framework for designing and training neural network layers whose forward passes can be interpreted as solving non-smooth convex optimization problems, and whose architectures are derived from an optimization algorithm. We focus on convex games, solved by local agents represent…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2020

Fully Trainable and Interpretable Non-Local Sparse Models for Image Restoration

ECCV 2020poster

Non-local self-similarity and sparsity principles have proven to be powerful priors for natural image modeling. We propose a novel differentiable relaxation of joint sparsity that exploits both principles and leads to a general framework for image restoration which is (1) trainable end to end, (2) f…

2020

Screening Data Points in Empirical Risk Minimization via Ellipsoidal Regions and Safe Loss Functions

AISTATS 2020poster

We design simple screening tests to automatically discard data samples in empirical risk minimization withoutlosing optimization guarantees. We derive loss functions that produce dual objectives with a sparse solution. We also show how to regularize convex losses to ensure such a dual sparsity-induc…

2020

Selecting Relevant Features from a Multi-domain Representation for Few-shot Classification

ECCV 2020poster

Popular approaches for few-shot classification consist of first learning a generic data representation based on a large annotated dataset, before adapting the representation to new classes given only a few labeled samples. In this work, we propose a new strategy based on feature selection, which is…

2020

Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments

NeurIPS 2020poster

Unsupervised image representations have significantly reduced the gap with supervised pretraining, notably with the recent achievements of contrastive learning methods. These contrastive methods typically work online and rely on a large number of explicit pairwise feature comparisons, which is compu…

2019

A Generic Acceleration Framework for Stochastic Composite Optimization

NeurIPS 2019poster

In this paper, we introduce various mechanisms to obtain accelerated first-order stochastic optimization algorithms when the objective function is convex or strongly convex. Specifically, we extend the Catalyst approach originally designed for deterministic objectives to the stochastic setting. Give…

2019

A Kernel Perspective for Regularizing Deep Neural Networks

ICML 2019oral

We propose a new point of view for regularizing deep neural networks by using the norm of a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). Even though this norm cannot be computed, it admits upper and lower approximations leading to various practical strategies. Specifically, this perspective (i) provides…

2019

Unsupervised Pre-Training of Image Features on Non-Curated Data

ICCV 2019oral

Pre-training general-purpose visual features with convolutional neural networks without relying on annotations is a challenging and important task. Most recent efforts in unsupervised feature learning have focused on either small or highly curated datasets like ImageNet, whereas using uncurated raw…

Cited by 368PDFcodeScholar
2018

Catalyst for Gradient-based Nonconvex Optimization

AISTATS 2018poster

We introduce a generic scheme to solve nonconvex optimization problems using gradient-based algorithms originally designed for minimizing convex functions. Even though these methods may originally require convexity to operate, the proposed approach allows one to use them without assuming any knowled…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2018

Modeling Visual Context is Key to Augmenting Object Detection Datasets

ECCV 2018poster

Performing data augmentation for learning deep neural networks is well known to be important for training visual recognition systems. By artificially increasing the number of training examples, it helps reducing overfitting and improves generalization. For object detection, classical approaches for…

Cited by 314SourcePDFScholar
2018

Unsupervised Learning of Artistic Styles with Archetypal Style Analysis

NeurIPS 2018poster

In this paper, we introduce an unsupervised learning approach to automatically dis- cover, summarize, and manipulate artistic styles from large collections of paintings. Our method is based on archetypal analysis, which is an unsupervised learning technique akin to sparse coding with a geometric int…

2017

BlitzNet: A Real-Time Deep Network for Scene Understanding

ICCV 2017poster

Real-time scene understanding has become crucial in many applications such as autonomous driving. In this paper, we propose a deep architecture, called BlitzNet, that jointly performs object detection and semantic segmentation in one forward pass, allowing real-time computations. Besides the computa…

Cited by 264PDFScholar
2017

Learning Neural Representations of Human Cognition across Many fMRI Studies

NeurIPS 2017poster

Cognitive neuroscience is enjoying rapid increase in extensive public brain-imaging datasets. It opens the door to large-scale statistical models. Finding a unified perspective for all available data calls for scalable and automated solutions to an old challenge: how to aggregate heterogeneous infor…

2017

Stochastic Optimization with Variance Reduction for Infinite Datasets with Finite Sum Structure

NeurIPS 2017spotlight

Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for example by data augmentation. In such cases, the objective is n…

2016

Dictionary Learning for Massive Matrix Factorization

ICML 2016poster

Sparse matrix factorization is a popular tool to obtain interpretable data decompositions, which are also effective to perform data completion or denoising. Its applicability to large datasets has been addressed with online and randomized methods, that reduce the complexity in one of the matrix dime…

2015

Local Convolutional Features With Unsupervised Training for Image Retrieval

ICCV 2015poster

Patch-level descriptors underlie several important computer vision tasks, such as stereo-matching or content-based image retrieval. We introduce a deep convolutional architecture that yields patch-level descriptors, as an alternative to the popular SIFT descriptor for image retrieval. The propo…

Cited by 219PDFScholar