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Mert R. Sabuncu

10 accepted papers

2026

BackSplit: The Importance of Sub-dividing the Background in Biomedical Lesion Segmentation

CVPR 2026

Segmenting small lesions in medical images remains notoriously difficult. Most prior work tackles this challenge by either designing better architectures, loss functions, or data augmentation schemes; and collecting more labeled data. We take a different view, arguing that part of the problem lies i

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Beyond Grid-Locked Voxels: Neural Response Functions for Continuous Brain Encoding

ICLR 2026poster

Neural encoding models aim to predict fMRI-measured brain responses to natural images. fMRI data is acquired as a 3D volume of voxels, where each voxel has a defined spatial location in the brain. However, conventional encoding models often flatten this volume into a 1D vector and treat voxel respon…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

RNED: Rotary Number Encoding and Decoding for Medical VLMs

CVPR 2026

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly adopted for medical applications, but their clinical utility is limited by a core weakness in quantitative reasoning. This limitation affects tasks ranging from regression of lesion sizes to prediction of bounding-box coordinates and stems from the disc

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

POROver: Improving Safety and Reducing Overrefusal in Large Language Models with Overgeneration and Preference Optimization

ICML 2025poster

Achieving both high safety and high usefulness simultaneously in large language models has become a critical challenge in recent years. Models often exhibit unsafe behavior or adopt an overly cautious approach leading to frequent overrefusal of benign prompts, which reduces their usefulness. A majo…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2023

Learning Invariant Representations with a Nonparametric Nadaraya-Watson Head

NeurIPS 2023poster

Machine learning models will often fail when deployed in an environment with a data distribution that is different than the training distribution. When multiple environments are available during training, many methods exist that learn representations which are invariant across the different distribu…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2023

Semi-Parametric Inducing Point Networks and Neural Processes

ICLR 2023poster

We introduce semi-parametric inducing point networks (SPIN), a general-purpose architecture that can query the training set at inference time in a compute-efficient manner. Semi-parametric architectures are typically more compact than parametric models, but their computational complexity is often qu…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2023

UniverSeg: Universal Medical Image Segmentation

ICCV 2023poster

While deep learning models have become the predominant method for medical image segmentation, they are typically not capable of generalizing to unseen segmentation tasks involving new anatomies, image modalities, or labels. Given a new segmentation task, researchers generally have to train or fine-t…

Cited by 157PDFcodeScholar
2022

Characterizing the Ventral Visual Stream with Response-Optimized Neural Encoding Models

NeurIPS 2022accept

Decades of experimental research based on simple, abstract stimuli has revealed the coding principles of the ventral visual processing hierarchy, from the presence of edge detectors in the primary visual cortex to the selectivity for complex visual categories in the anterior ventral stream. However,…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2018

An Unsupervised Learning Model for Deformable Medical Image Registration

CVPR 2018poster

We present a fast learning-based algorithm for deformable, pairwise 3D medical image registration. Current registration methods optimize an objective function independently for each pair of images, which can be time-consuming for large data. We define registration as a parametric function, and optim…

2018

Anatomical Priors in Convolutional Networks for Unsupervised Biomedical Segmentation

CVPR 2018poster

We consider the problem of segmenting a biomedical image into anatomical regions of interest. We specifically address the frequent scenario where we have no paired training data that contains images and their manual segmentations. Instead, we employ unpaired segmentation images that we use to build…