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Kushal Kafle

20 accepted papers

2026

Plot’n Polish: Zero-Shot Story Visualization and Disentangled Editing with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

AAAI 2026technical

Text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated significant capabilities to generate diverse and detailed visuals in various domains, and story visualization is emerging as a particularly promising application. However, as their use in real-world creative domains increases, the need for providing e

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

RetouchIQ: MLLM Agents for Instruction-Based Image Retouching with Generalist Reward

CVPR 2026

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown great potential for extending vision-language reasoning to professional tool-based image editing, enabling intuitive and creative editing. A promising direction is to use reinforcement learning (RL) to enable MLLMs to reason abou

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Seeing Through Words: Controlling Visual Retrieval Quality with Language

ICLR 2026poster

Text-to-image retrieval is a fundamental task in vision--language learning, yet in real-world scenarios it is often challenged by short and underspecified user queries. Such queries are typically only one or two words long, making them semantically ambiguous, prone to collisions across diverse visua…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Calibrating MLLM-as-a-judge via Multimodal Bayesian Prompt Ensembles

ICCV 2025poster

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly used to evaluate text-to-image (TTI) generation systems, providing automated judgments based on visual and textual context. However, these "judge" models often suffer from biases, overconfidence, and inconsistent performance across diverse im…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Improving Large Vision and Language Models by Learning from a Panel of Peers

ICCV 2025poster

Traditional alignment methods for Large Vision and Language Models (LVLMs) primarily rely on human-curated preference data. Human-generated preference data is costly; machine-generated preference data is limited in quality; and self-supervised preference data often introduces hallucinations. To over…

2025

MAGNET: Augmenting Generative Decoders with Representation Learning and Infilling Capabilities

ACL 2025long

While originally designed for unidirectional generative modeling, decoder-only large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being adapted for bidirectional modeling. However, unidirectional and bidirectional models are typically trained separately with distinct objectives (generation and representa…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Building Vision-Language Models on Solid Foundations with Masked Distillation

CVPR 2024poster

Recent advancements in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have marked a significant leap in bridging the gap between computer vision and natural language processing. However traditional VLMs trained through contrastive learning on limited and noisy image-text pairs often lack the spatial and linguistic u…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2024

FairDeDup: Detecting and Mitigating Vision-Language Fairness Disparities in Semantic Dataset Deduplication

CVPR 2024poster

Recent dataset deduplication techniques have demonstrated that content-aware dataset pruning can dramatically reduce the cost of training Vision-Language Pretrained (VLP) models without significant performance losses compared to training on the original dataset. These results have been based on prun…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

FineMatch: Aspect-based Fine-grained Image and Text Mismatch Detection and Correction

ECCV 2024poster

"Recent progress in large-scale pre-training has led to the development of advanced vision-language models (VLMs) with remarkable proficiency in comprehending and generating multimodal content. Despite the impressive ability to perform complex reasoning for VLMs, current models often struggle to eff…

2023

Improving Visual Grounding by Encouraging Consistent Gradient-Based Explanations

CVPR 2023poster

We propose a margin-based loss for tuning joint vision-language models so that their gradient-based explanations are consistent with region-level annotations provided by humans for relatively smaller grounding datasets. We refer to this objective as Attention Mask Consistency (AMC) and demonstrate t…

2022

Improving Closed and Open-Vocabulary Attribute Prediction Using Transformers

ECCV 2022poster

"We study recognizing attributes for objects in visual scenes. We consider attributes to be any phrases that describe an object’s physical and semantic properties, and its relationships with other objects. Existing work studies attribute prediction in a closed setting with a fixed set of attributes,…

Cited by 24SourcePDFScholar
2022

OccamNets: Mitigating Dataset Bias by Favoring Simpler Hypotheses

ECCV 2022poster

"Dataset bias and spurious correlations can significantly impair generalization in deep neural networks. Many prior efforts have addressed this problem using either alternative loss functions or sampling strategies that focus on rare patterns. We propose a new direction: modifying the network archit…

2021

AESOP: Abstract Encoding of Stories, Objects, and Pictures

ICCV 2021poster

Visual storytelling and story comprehension are uniquely human skills that play a central role in how we learn about and experience the world. Despite remarkable progress in recent years in synthesis of visual and textual content in isolation and learning effective joint visual-linguistic representa…

Cited by 19PDFcodeScholar
2021

Learning To Predict Visual Attributes in the Wild

CVPR 2021poster

Visual attributes constitute a large portion of information contained in a scene. Objects can be described using a wide variety of attributes which portray their visual appearance (color, texture), geometry (shape, size, posture), and other intrinsic properties (state, action). Existing work is most…

Cited by 132PDFScholar
2020

On the Value of Out-of-Distribution Testing: An Example of Goodhart's Law

NeurIPS 2020poster

Out-of-distribution (OOD) testing is increasingly popular for evaluating a machine learning system's ability to generalize beyond the biases of a training set. OOD benchmarks are designed to present a different joint distribution of data and labels between training and test time. VQA-CP has become t…

Cited by 173SourcePDFScholar
2020

REMIND Your Neural Network to Prevent Catastrophic Forgetting

ECCV 2020poster

People learn throughout life. However, incrementally updating conventional neural networks leads to catastrophic forgetting. A common remedy is replay, which is inspired by how the brain consolidates memory. Replay involves fine-tuning a network on a mixture of new and old instances. While there is…

2019

Answer Them All! Toward Universal Visual Question Answering Models

CVPR 2019poster

Visual Question Answering (VQA) research is split into two camps: the first focuses on VQA datasets that require natural image understanding and the second focuses on synthetic datasets that test reasoning. A good VQA algorithm should be capable of both, but only a few VQA algorithms are tested in t…

Cited by 108PDFcodeScholar
2018

DVQA: Understanding Data Visualizations via Question Answering

CVPR 2018poster

Bar charts are an effective way to convey numeric information, but today's algorithms cannot parse them. Existing methods fail when faced with even minor variations in appearance. Here, we present DVQA, a dataset that tests many aspects of bar chart understanding in a question answering framework. U…