Welcome

I am a final-year PhD student in the Computer Vision and Machine Learning group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in the Saarland Informatics Campus, supervised by Prof. Bernt Schiele. I am also an associated member of the RTG Neuroexplicit Models of Language, Vision, and Action.

I am interested in understanding the inner workings and mechanisms of deep models—recently, specifically multimodal vision-language models—and making this understanding actionable for building trustworthy, performant, and safe systems.

Towards this, my PhD has focused on making interpretability practical. One line of work efficiently builds inherently interpretable variants of vision and vision-language foundation models such as CLIP and DINO, obtaining explanations via faithful attributions (B-cosification, ALOE) and named high-level concepts (Discover-then-Name, CFM) without sacrificing performance. Another line involves using explanations as a tool to guide and improve models via feedback from humans or teacher models.

I am looking for postdoctoral positions, ideally starting in early 2027. Please feel free to get in touch!

Previously, I completed the preparatory phase of my PhD at the Max Planck Graduate Center for Computer and Information Science, during which I worked on improving adversarial robustness of image classifiers against adversarial patch attacks. I received my B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering with the President of India Gold Medal from the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad in August 2019. At IIT Hyderabad, I worked on projects for improving crowd-sourced vote aggregation supervised by Prof. Vineeth N Balasubramanian; and for developing state-of-the-art incomplete MaxSAT solvers with Prof. Saurabh Joshi and Prof. Ruben Martins. Within this period, I also worked as an intern in the Machine Intelligence Laboratory at The University of Tokyo under Prof. Tatsuya Harada on visual relationship detection, and at Bosch on classification of fundus images using deep learning. More recently, during my PhD, I was an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon, where I worked on building a scalable pipeline to identify and fix defects in product catalog images.

News

Teaching and Supervision

Master Thesis

Bachelor Thesis

  • Jul 2025 – Oct 2025
    Moussa Herrmann
    Refining Concept Bottlenecks with Symbolic Relations
    Co-supervised with Jonas Fischer

Research Immersion / Student Research

Graduate Teaching Assistantships (Saarland University)

  • Explainable Machine Learning Seminar, Winter 2025–26
  • High-Level Computer Vision, Summer 2024
  • High-Level Computer Vision, Summer 2023

Undergraduate Teaching Assistantships (IIT Hyderabad)

  • CS6510: Applied Machine Learning, Spring 2019
  • CS6230: Optimization Methods in Machine Learning, Fall 2018
  • CS3423: Compilers-II, Fall 2018
  • CS2433: Principles of Programming Languages-II, Spring 2018
  • CS2400: Principles of Programming Languages-I, Fall 2017

Talks

Understanding and Improving Multimodal Models through the Lens of Interpretability May 2026
Bringing Interpretability to Vision-Language Foundation Models May 2026
Towards Inherent Interpretability for Foundation Models Oct 2025
Explainable Computer Vision: Feature Attributions, Concepts, and Beyond Jul 2025
Keeping the Model in the Loop: Attribution Methods and Beyond Nov 2024
Symposium on Explainable Artificial Intelligence Beyond Simple Attributions

Awards

Academic Awards

  • Outstanding Reviewer (∼5%) at CVPR 2026.
  • Top Reviewer (∼10%) at NeurIPS 2023.
  • Outstanding Reviewer (∼3.3%) at CVPR 2023.
  • President of India Gold Medal 2019 from IIT Hyderabad.
  • Institute Silver Medal 2019 from IIT Hyderabad.
  • Appreciation in Research Award 2019 from IIT Hyderabad.
  • Honda Young Engineer and Scientist Award 2018 from Honda Foundation, Japan.
  • Academic Excellence Award 2018 from IIT Hyderabad.
  • Academic Excellence Award 2016 from IIT Hyderabad.
  • National Talent Search Scheme (NTS) Scholarship 2013 from National Council of Educational Research and Training, India.

Team Competitions

Contact

  • sukrut.rao@mpi-inf.mpg.de
  • Max Planck Institute for Informatics
    Saarland Informatics Campus
    Campus E1 4, 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany