Events

PhD Defense Exploring structured representations in Vision, Language and Abstract Reasoning
Export Event Save iCal Send to Google Calendar Send to Yahoo Calendar Send to Outlook Live Send to Microsoft Outlook Save iCal Preserve formatting in description (only supported in some calendar applications) Close Thursday, September 18, 2025, 03:30pm - 05:00pm

Speaker: Kalliopi Basioti

Bio

Location : CBIM 22

Committee: 

Professor Vladimir Pavlovic 

Assistant Professor Hao Wang

Associate Professor Yongfeng Zhang

Professor Olga Russakovsky (external)

Event Type: PhD Defense

Abstract: Recent AI breakthroughs have significantly improved performance across various tasks, yet machine learning models still struggle with scene understanding and abstract reasoning—challenges that humans solve effortlessly. In this talk, we explore how structured representations can enhance AI’s ability to address these problems. First, we examine how organizing multimodal information into structured formats helps summarize scene content and address data imbalances, achieving state-of-the-art results in controllable image captioning. Next, we introduce structured approaches to abstract visual reasoning, leading to interpretable representations, enhanced generative capabilities, and improved generalization both in- and out-of-distribution. Through these advances, we highlight how structured representations can drive more efficient and interpretable AI systems. 

Organization: 

Contact  Professor Vladimir Pavlovic

Zoom Link: https://rutgers.zoom.us/j/95258024957?pwd=zq6GwhESdpz8976Vs6zLjoenRou8ka.1