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Mehrtash Harandi

71 accepted papers

2026

$f$-Divergence Self-Play for Tabular Anomaly Detection via Large Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Anomaly detection in tabular data poses significant challenges due to heterogeneous feature types—mixing numerical, categorical, and textual attributes, which complicate learning meaningful representations of normality. Recent work has applied large language models (LLMs) to this problem by serializ…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Align-SAM: Seeking Flatter Minima for Better Cross-Subset Alignment

ICLR 2026poster

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has proven effective in enhancing deep neural network training by simultaneously minimizing the training loss and the sharpness of the loss landscape, thereby guiding models toward flatter minima that are empirically linked to improved generalization. From another…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Antibody: Strengthening Defense Against Harmful Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models via Attenuating Harmful Gradient Influence

ICLR 2026poster

Fine-tuning-as-a-service introduces a threat to Large Language Models' safety when service providers fine-tune their models on poisoned user-submitted datasets, a process known as harmful fine-tuning attacks. In this work, we show that by regularizing the gradient contribution of harmful samples enc…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

DIET: Machine Unlearning on a Data-Diet

AAAI 2026technical

Machine Unlearning (MU) aims to remove the influence of specific knowledge from a pretrained model. Existing methods often rely on retained training data to preserve utility; such dependence is impractical due to privacy and scalability constraints. A further complication arises when unlearning is a

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

DTO-KD: Dynamic Trade-off Optimization for Effective Knowledge Distillation

ICLR 2026oral

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a widely adopted framework for compressing large models into compact student models by transferring knowledge from a high-capacity teacher. Despite its success, KD presents two persistent challenges: (1) the trade-off between optimizing for the primary task loss and mi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Massive Activations are the Key to Local Detail Synthesis in Diffusion Transformers

ICLR 2026poster

Massive Activations (MAs) are a well-documented phenomenon across Transformer architectures, and prior studies in both LLMs and ViTs have shown that they play a substantial role in shaping model behavior. However, the nature and function of MAs within Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) remain largely une…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Modality Alignment across Trees on Heterogeneous Hyperbolic Manifolds

ICLR 2026poster

Modality alignment is critical for vision-language models (VLMs) to effectively integrate information across modalities. However, existing methods extract hierarchical features from text while representing each image with a single feature, leading to asymmetric and suboptimal alignment. To address t…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

PCGS: Progressive Compression of 3D Gaussian Splatting

AAAI 2026technical

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieves impressive rendering fidelity and speed for novel view synthesis. However, its substantial data size poses a significant challenge for practical applications. While many compression techniques have been proposed, they fail to efficiently utilize existing bitstre

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Sharpness-Aware Minimization in Logit Space Efficiently Enhances Direct Preference Optimization

ICLR 2026poster

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a popular algorithm for aligning pretrained large language models with human preferences, owing to its simplicity and training stability. However, DPO suffers from the recently identified squeezing effect (also known as likelihood displacement), wh…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Test-Time Instance-Specific Parameter Composition: A New Paradigm for Adaptive Generative Modeling

CVPR 2026

Existing generative models, such as diffusion and auto-regressive networks, are inherently static, relying on a fixed set of pretrained parameters to handle all inputs. In contrast, humans flexibly adapt their internal generative representations to each perceptual or imaginative context. Inspired by

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

pH-Strips for Selective Forgetting: A Blunt but Fast Diagnostic Baseline for Machine Unlearning

CVPR 2026

Machine Unlearning (MU), erasing undesirable content from Artificial Intelligence (AI) models, plays an essential role in developing safe and trustworthy AI systems.Despite notable advances, the baseline MU methods rely on retraining from scratch without the data to be removed, which is computationa

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Fast Feedforward 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression

ICLR 2025poster

With 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) advancing real-time and high-fidelity rendering for novel view synthesis, storage requirements pose challenges for their widespread adoption. Although various compression techniques have been proposed, previous art suffers from a common limitation: for any existing…

2025

Geometry-Aware Collaborative Multi-Solutions Optimizer for Model Fine-Tuning with Parameter Efficiency

NeurIPS 2025poster

We propose a framework grounded in gradient flow theory and informed by geometric structure that provides multiple diverse solutions for a given task, ensuring collaborative results that enhance performance and adaptability across different tasks. This framework enables flexibility, allowing for eff…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Token-Level Self-Play with Importance-Aware Guidance for Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Leveraging the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) through preference optimization is crucial for aligning model outputs with human values. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has recently emerged as a simple yet effective method by directly optimizing on preference data without the need for expl…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Unleashing Diffusion Transformers for Visual Correspondence by Modulating Massive Activations

NeurIPS 2025poster

Pre-trained stable diffusion models (SD) have shown great advances in visual correspondence. In this paper, we investigate the capabilities of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for accurate dense correspondence. Distinct from SD, DiTs exhibit a critical phenomenon in which very few feature activations…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Unveiling m-Sharpness Through the Structure of Stochastic Gradient Noise

NeurIPS 2025poster

Sharpness‐aware minimization (SAM) has emerged as a highly effective technique for improving model generalization, but its underlying principles are not fully understood. We investigated the phenomenon known as m-sharpness, where the performance of SAM improves monotonically as the micro-batch size…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Backpropagation-free Network for 3D Test-time Adaptation

CVPR 2024poster

Real-world systems often encounter new data over time which leads to experiencing target domain shifts. Existing Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) methods tend to apply computationally heavy and memory-intensive backpropagation-based approaches to handle this. Here we propose a novel method that uses a bac…

2024

Canonical Shape Projection is All You Need for 3D Few-shot Class Incremental Learning

ECCV 2024poster

"In recent years, robust pre-trained foundation models have been successfully used in many downstream tasks. Here, we would like to use such powerful models to address the problem of few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL) tasks on 3D point cloud objects. Our approach is to reprogram the well-kn…

2024

Concealing Sensitive Samples against Gradient Leakage in Federated Learning

AAAI 2024technical

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed learning paradigm that enhances users' privacy by eliminating the need for clients to share raw, private data with the server. Despite the success, recent studies expose the vulnerability of FL to model inversion attacks, where adversaries reconstruct users’…

2024

Explicit Eigenvalue Regularization Improves Sharpness-Aware Minimization

NeurIPS 2024poster

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has attracted significant attention for its effectiveness in improving generalization across various tasks. However, its underlying principles remain poorly understood. In this work, we analyze SAM’s training dynamics using the maximum eigenvalue of the Hessian as…

2024

FIRE: A Dataset for Feedback Integration and Refinement Evaluation of Multimodal Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Vision language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive progress in diverse applications, becoming a prevalent research direction. In this paper, we build FIRE, a feedback-refinement dataset, consisting of 1.1M multi-turn conversations that are derived from 27 source datasets, empowering VLMs to spon…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

HAC: Hash-grid Assisted Context for 3D Gaussian Splatting Compression

ECCV 2024poster

"3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a promising framework for novel view synthesis, boasting rapid rendering speed with high fidelity. However, the substantial Gaussians and their associated attributes necessitate effective compression techniques. Nevertheless, the sparse and unorganized na…

2024

NAYER: Noisy Layer Data Generation for Efficient and Effective Data-free Knowledge Distillation

CVPR 2024poster

Data-Free Knowledge Distillation (DFKD) has made significant recent strides by transferring knowledge from a teacher neural network to a student neural network without accessing the original data. Nonetheless existing approaches encounter a significant challenge when attempting to generate samples f…

2024

Text-Enhanced Data-free Approach for Federated Class-Incremental Learning

CVPR 2024poster

Federated Class-Incremental Learning (FCIL) is an underexplored yet pivotal issue involving the dynamic addition of new classes in the context of federated learning. In this field Data-Free Knowledge Transfer (DFKT) plays a crucial role in addressing catastrophic forgetting and data privacy problems…

2023

Energy-based Self-Training and Normalization for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

ICCV 2023poster

We propose an Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) method by making use of Energy-Based Learning (EBL) and demonstrate 1. EBL can be used to improve the instance selection for a self-training task on the unlabelled target domain, and 2. alignment and normalizing energy scores can learn domain-invari…

Cited by 9PDFScholar
2023

Hyperbolic Audio-visual Zero-shot Learning

ICCV 2023poster

Audio-visual zero-shot learning aims to classify samples consisting of a pair of corresponding audio and video sequences from classes that are not present during training. An analysis of the audio-visual data reveals a large degree of hyperbolicity, indicating the potential benefit of using a hyperb…

Cited by 22PDFScholar
2023

Vector Quantized Wasserstein Auto-Encoder

ICML 2023poster

Learning deep discrete latent presentations offers a promise of better symbolic and summarized abstractions that are more useful to subsequent downstream tasks. Inspired by the seminal Vector Quantized Variational Auto-Encoder (VQ-VAE), most of work in learning deep discrete representations has main…

Cited by 18SourcePDFScholar
2022

Adaptive Poincaré Point to Set Distance for Few-Shot Classification

AAAI 2022technical

Learning and generalizing from limited examples, i.e., few-shot learning, is of core importance to many real-world vision applications. A principal way of achieving few-shot learning is to realize an embedding where samples from different classes are distinctive. Recent studies suggest that embeddin…

Cited by 55SourcePDFScholar
2022

Efficient Riemannian Meta-Optimization by Implicit Differentiation

AAAI 2022technical

To solve optimization problems with nonlinear constrains, the recently developed Riemannian meta-optimization methods show promise, which train neural networks as an optimizer to perform optimization on Riemannian manifolds. A key challenge is the heavy computational and memory burdens, because com…

2022

Hyperbolic Feature Augmentation via Distribution Estimation and Infinite Sampling on Manifolds

NeurIPS 2022accept

Learning in hyperbolic spaces has attracted growing attention recently, owing to their capabilities in capturing hierarchical structures of data. However, existing learning algorithms in the hyperbolic space tend to overfit when limited data is given. In this paper, we propose a hyperbolic feature a…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2022

Implicit Motion Handling for Video Camouflaged Object Detection

CVPR 2022poster

We propose a new video camouflaged object detection (VCOD) framework that can exploit both short-term dynamics and long-term temporal consistency to detect camouflaged objects from video frames. An essential property of camouflaged objects is that they usually exhibit patterns similar to the backgro…

Cited by 104PDFcodeScholar
2022

Learning Instance and Task-Aware Dynamic Kernels for Few-Shot Learning

ECCV 2022poster

"Learning and generalizing to novel concepts with few samples (Few-Shot Learning) is still an essential challenge to real-world applications. A principle way of achieving few-shot learning is to realize a model that can rapidly adapt to the context of a given task. Dynamic networks have been shown c…

2022

On Enforcing Better Conditioned Meta-Learning for Rapid Few-Shot Adaptation

NeurIPS 2022accept

Inspired by the concept of preconditioning, we propose a novel method to increase adaptation speed for gradient-based meta-learning methods without incurring extra parameters. We demonstrate that recasting the optimisation problem to a non-linear least-squares formulation provides a principled way t…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2022

On Generalizing Beyond Domains in Cross-Domain Continual Learning

CVPR 2022poster

In the real world, humans have the ability to accumulate new knowledge in any conditions. However, deeplearning suffers from the phenomenon so-called catastrophic forgetting of the previously observed knowledge after learning a new task. Many recent methods focus on preventing catastrophic forgettin…

Cited by 42PDFScholar
2022

Rethinking Generalization in Few-Shot Classification

NeurIPS 2022accept

Single image-level annotations only correctly describe an often small subset of an image’s content, particularly when complex real-world scenes are depicted. While this might be acceptable in many classification scenarios, it poses a significant challenge for applications where the set of classes di…

2021

Learning a Gradient-free Riemannian Optimizer on Tangent Spaces

AAAI 2021technical

A principal way of addressing constrained optimization problems is to model them as problems on Riemannian manifolds. Recently, Riemannian meta-optimization provides a promising way for solving constrained optimization problems by learning optimizers on Riemannian manifolds in a data-driven fashion,…

2021

Reinforced Attention for Few-Shot Learning and Beyond

CVPR 2021poster

Few-shot learning aims to correctly recognize query samples from unseen classes given a limited number of support samples, often by relying on global embeddings of images. In this paper, we propose to equip the backbone network with an attention agent, which is trained by reinforcement learning. The…

Cited by 53PDFScholar
2021

Semantic-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning

CVPR 2021poster

Few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL) portrays the problem of learning new concepts gradually, where only a few examples per concept are available to the learner. Due to the limited number of examples for training, the techniques developed for standard incremental learning cannot be applied ve…

Cited by 241PDFScholar
2021

Synthesized Feature Based Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning on a Mixture of Subspaces

ICCV 2021poster

Few-shot class incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to incrementally add sets of novel classes to a well-trained base model in multiple training sessions with the restriction that only a few novel instances are available per class. While learning novel classes, FSCIL methods gradually forget base (old)…

Cited by 86PDFScholar
2020

Hierarchical Neural Architecture Search for Deep Stereo Matching

NeurIPS 2020poster

To reduce the human efforts in neural network design, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has been applied with remarkable success to various high-level vision tasks such as classification and semantic segmentation. The underlying idea for the NAS algorithm is straightforward, namely, to allow the netw…

2020

On Modulating the Gradient for Meta-Learning

ECCV 2020poster

Inspired by optimization techniques, we propose a novel meta-learning algorithm with gradient modulation to encourage fast-adaptation of neural networks in the absence of abundant data. Our method, termed ModGrad, is designed to circumvent the noisy nature of the gradients which is prevalent in low-…

2019

Bilinear Attention Networks for Person Retrieval

ICCV 2019poster

This paper investigates a novel Bilinear attention (Bi-attention) block, which discovers and uses second order statistical information in an input feature map, for the purpose of person retrieval. The Bi-attention block uses bilinear pooling to model the local pairwise feature interactions along eac…

Cited by 184PDFScholar
2018

Deep Unsupervised Saliency Detection: A Multiple Noisy Labeling Perspective

CVPR 2018poster

The success of current deep saliency detection methods heavily depends on the availability of large-scale supervision in the form of per-pixel labeling. Such supervision, while labor-intensive and not always possible, tends to hinder the generalization ability of the learned models. By contrast, tra…

Cited by 219SourcePDFScholar
2018

Geometry Aware Constrained Optimization Techniques for Deep Learning

CVPR 2018poster

In this paper, we generalize the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and RMSProp algorithms to the setting of Riemannian optimization. SGD is a popular method for large scale optimization. In particular, it is widely used to train the weights of Deep Neural Networks. However, gradients computed using…

2018

Museum Exhibit Identification Challenge for the Supervised Domain Adaptation and Beyond

ECCV 2018poster

We study an open problem of artwork identification and propose a new dataset dubbed Open Museum Identification Challenge (Open MIC). It contains photos of exhibits captured in 10 distinct exhibition spaces of several museums which showcase paintings, timepieces, sculptures, glassware, relics, scienc…

Cited by 54SourcePDFScholar
2017

Efficient Optimization for Linear Dynamical Systems with Applications to Clustering and Sparse Coding

NeurIPS 2017poster

Linear Dynamical Systems (LDSs) are fundamental tools for modeling spatio-temporal data in various disciplines. Though rich in modeling, analyzing LDSs is not free of difficulty, mainly because LDSs do not comply with Euclidean geometry and hence conventional learning techniques can not be applied d…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2017

Joint Dimensionality Reduction and Metric Learning: A Geometric Take

ICML 2017poster

To be tractable and robust to data noise, existing metric learning algorithms commonly rely on PCA as a pre-processing step. How can we know, however, that PCA, or any other specific dimensionality reduction technique, is the method of choice for the problem at hand? The answer is simple: We cannot!…

Cited by 80SourcePDFScholar
2017

Learning Discriminative ab-Divergences for Positive Definite Matrices

ICCV 2017poster

Symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrices are useful for capturing second-order statistics of visual data. To compare two SPD matrices, several measures are available, such as the affine-invariant Riemannian metric, Jeffreys divergence, Jensen-Bregman logdet divergence, etc.; however, their behavio…

Cited by 6PDFScholar
2016

Sparse Coding and Dictionary Learning With Linear Dynamical Systems

CVPR 2016oral

Linear Dynamical Systems (LDSs) are the fundamental tools for encoding spatio-temporal data in various disciplines. To enhance the performance of LDSs, in this paper, we address the challenging issue of performing sparse coding on the space of LDSs, where both data and dictionary atoms are LDSs. Rat…

Cited by 38PDFScholar
2015

Beyond Gauss: Image-Set Matching on the Riemannian Manifold of PDFs

ICCV 2015poster

State-of-the-art image-set matching techniques typically implicitly model each image-set with a Gaussian distribution. Here, we propose to go beyond these representations and model image-sets as probability distribution functions (PDFs) using kernel density estimators. To compare and match image-set…

Cited by 63PDFScholar