Researcher in Artificial Intelligence

I am a Post-Doctoral researcher in the Explainable Machine Learning group at TUM and Helmholtz Munich, led by Prof. Zeynep Akata.

I am also a PhD cadidate in the Computer Vision group at the University of Freiburg, Germany, under the supervision of Prof. Thomas Brox. Expected graduation in May 2025 - website.

Research interests

My research focuses on advancing vision-language models for open-vocabulary recognition and generative evaluation. I am particularly interested in the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing, with a focus on developing models that can understand and generate visual content in a more human-like manner.

• Vision-Language Understanding: Integration of visual and linguistic information for multimodal reasoning.
• Open-Vocabulary Recognition: Recognition of objects and attributes beyond predefined categories, including fine-grained attributes like color, texture, and material.
• Human-Aligned AI: Development of AI systems that align with human preferences for improved interaction and collaboration, including building user studies to validate this alignment.
• AI Generation: Advancing image and text generation, with a focus on aligning both modalities effectively.
• Dataset, benchmark, and evaluation: Creating datasets and benchmarks for evaluating the performance of vision-language models.
• Weakly-Supervised and Multimodal Learning: Leveraging weakly supervised learning for grounding visual and textual data

Quick Facts

• 🎓 (Soon) PhD in Computer Science, focused on visual-language models
• 📍 Currently based in Munich, Germany
• 🧑‍🏫 Passionate about teaching and mentoring students
• 🎙️ Presented at conferences: ICLR, CVPR and NeurIPS
• 📝 Reviewed at NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, and TPAMI
• 🤝 Collaborated with researchers from Amazon, KAUST, and the University of Freiburg
• 🇨🇴 Colombian, with a background in mathematics and biomedical engineering
• 🎾💃 Enjoys playing tennis and dancing lindy hop and salsa
• 🗣️ I speak Spanish, English, German and a little French

Selected Publications

Check out my Google Scholar profile for a complete list of my publications.

• TIAlign: Text-Image Concept Human Alignment (WiML NeurIPS Workshop 2024 - Best poster award TWiML 2024)
• oVQA: Open-ended Visual Question Answering (Spotlight ICLR 2024)
• OVAD: Open-vocabulary Attribute Detection Dataset and Benchmark (CVPR 2023)
• LocOV: Localized Vision-Language Matching for Open-vocabulary Object Detection (GCPR 2022)

Biography

I am a Colombian researcher with a background in computer vision, artificial intelligence and biomedical engineering.

I (will) hold a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Freiburg, Germany, where I am part of the Computer Vision Group led by Prof. Thomas Brox. My research focuses on vision-language models, particularly in open-vocabulary recognition and generative evaluation.

During my PhD I did an internship at Amazon in Tübingen, where I worked on Vision-Language alignment and Generative AI with Betty Mohler and Ali Jahanian.

During 2019 I had the opportunity to work as a research intern at KAUST at the Image and Video Understanding Laboratory (IVUL), working on Video Object Segmentation.

Before that I obained my Master’s degree at the Biomedical Computer Vision Group led by Pablo Arbeláez at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia.

I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics and another in Biomedical Engineering from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia.

Scholarships and Grants

• Best Poster Award at the TWiML 2024 workshop presented at NeurIPS WiML. Outstanding Reviewer Award at NeurIPS D&B in 2023 and 2022.
• DAAD Research Grants for Doctoral Programs in Germany (2019/20), grant number 57440921. German-Colombian Academic Cooperation between the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation, grant BR 3815/9-1) and the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia.
• Beca YERLY. Mathematical Program Scholarship for Academic Excellence (2012). Scholarship for Academic Excellence (2012).

Teaching

Student Supervision

I have supervised several students in their Bachelor thesis at the University of Freiburg

• Improving Visual Grouping and Visual-Text Alignment for Open-Vocabulary Segmentation (Ayushi Sharma, 2023) - Supervision together with Silvio Galesso
• Multimodal attribute learning (Anna Stroganova, 2022)
• Improving Clip-Sentence Retrieval with COOT using large-scale noisy-aligned Training Data (Felix Jablonksi, 2022)
• Applying Hierarchical Representations from Video Retrieval to Video Captioning (Simon Ging, 2021)

Teaching Assistant

• Co-Organizer of the Deep Learning Lab (2021 and 2022 Freiburg)
• Assistant and Supervisor of the Deep Learning and Computer Vision Seminars (2019 - 2023 Freiburg)
• Assistant of Image Analysis and Processing (2018 Universidad de los Andes, Colombia)
• Lecturer of Linear Algebra and Integral Calculus and Differential Equations (before 2018 Universidad de los Andes, Colombia)