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
- 08/2026: One paper accepted at EMNLP Findings 2026.
- 06/2026: Gave a talk at Google in Munich, Germany.
- 06/2026: Co-organized the Saarbrücken Symposium on Interpretable, Trustworthy, and Accountable Artificial Intelligence.
- 06/2026: Our paper on building a language-aligned visual concept foundation model is accepted at ECCV 2026!
- 06/2026: Gave talks at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Northeastern University, Boston University, MIT CSAIL, and University of Washington.
- 05/2026: Gave a talk at the Multimodal AI Lab at TU Darmstadt, Germany.
- 05/2026: Selected as an Outstanding Reviewer for CVPR 2026.
- 05/2026: Our paper on building inherently interpretable vision foundation models is accepted at CVPR 2026!
- 05/2026: Gave a talk at the Tübingen AI Center, Germany.
- 04/2026: Co-organizing the 3rd Explainable Computer Vision: Challenges and Opportunities in the Era of Foundation Models (eXCV) Workshop at ECCV 2026.
- 01/2026: New preprint that builds a language-aligned visual concept foundation model.
- 12/2025: One paper accepted at TMLR.
- 10/2025: Invited talk at Guide Labs, USA.
- 09/2025: One paper accepted at NeurIPS 2025.
- 07/2025: Invited talk at IIIT Summer School on AI, India.
- 06/2025: Started working as an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon.
- 04/2025: Co-organizing the 2nd Explainable Computer Vision: Quo Vadis? (eXCV) Workshop at ICCV 2025.
- 02/2025: New preprint on transforming language models to be explainable.
- 01/2025: Co-organizing the 4th Explainable AI for Computer Vision (XAI4CV) Workshop at CVPR 2025.
- 11/2024: Invited talk at the Symposium on Explainable Artificial Intelligence Beyond Simple Attributions, Mainz, Germany.
- 10/2024: One paper accepted at NeurIPS 2024.
- 07/2024: Two papers accepted at ECCV 2024!
- 07/2024: Co-organizing the 1st Explainable Computer Vision: Where are We and Where are We Going? (eXCV) Workshop at ECCV 2024.
- 06/2024: Co-organizing the 3rd Explainable AI for Computer Vision (XAI4CV) Workshop at CVPR 2024.
- 12/2023: One paper accepted at IEEE TPAMI.
- 11/2023: Selected as a Top Reviewer for NeurIPS 2023.
- 10/2023: Served as a Student Volunteer at ICCV 2023.
- 07/2023: One paper accepted at ICCV 2023.
- 07/2023: Joined the RTG Neuroexplicit Models of Language, Vision, and Action as an associated member.
- 05/2023: Selected as an Outstanding Reviewer for CVPR 2023.
Publications
CFM: Language-aligned Concept Foundation Model for Vision
Align Once to Explain: Feature Alignment for Scalable B-cosification of Foundational Vision Transformers
TEVI: Text-Conditioned Editing of Visual Representations via Sparse Autoencoders for Improved Vision-Language Alignment
FaCT: Faithful Concept Traces for Explaining Neural Network Decisions
B-cos LM: Efficiently Transforming Pre-trained Language Models for Improved Explainability
B-cosification: Transforming Deep Neural Networks to be Inherently Interpretable
Discover-then-Name: Task-Agnostic Concept Bottlenecks via Automated Concept Discovery
Good Teachers Explain: Explanation-Enhanced Knowledge Distillation
Better Understanding Differences in Attribution Methods via Systematic Evaluations
Studying How to Efficiently and Effectively Guide Models with Explanations
Towards Better Understanding Attribution Methods
Adversarial Training against Location-Optimized Adversarial Patches
Open-WBO-Inc: Approximation Strategies for Incomplete Weighted MaxSAT
Approximation Strategies for Incomplete MaxSAT
Fast Dawid-Skene: A Fast Vote Aggregation Scheme for Sentiment Classification
Talks
Academic Activities
Organizer
- 3rd Explainable Computer Vision: Challenges and Opportunities in the Era of Foundation Models (eXCV) Workshop at ECCV 2026
- Saarbrücken Symposium on Interpretable, Trustworthy, and Accountable Artificial Intelligence
- 5th Explainable AI for Computer Vision (XAI4CV) Workshop at CVPR 2026
- 2nd Explainable Computer Vision: Quo Vadis? (eXCV) Workshop at ICCV 2025
- 4th Explainable AI for Computer Vision (XAI4CV) Workshop at CVPR 2025
- 1st Explainable Computer Vision: Where are We and Where are We Going? (eXCV) Workshop at ECCV 2024
- 3rd Explainable AI for Computer Vision (XAI4CV) Workshop at CVPR 2024
Reviewer
Conferences
- CVPR 2023–2026 (2x Outstanding Reviewer)
- NeurIPS 2023, 2025–2026 (1x Top Reviewer)
- ECCV 2024–2026
- ICML 2024–2026
- ICLR 2024
- ICCV 2023–2025
Journals
- IEEE TPAMI 2024
Workshops
- NeurIPS XAIA 2023
Miscellaneous
- Student Volunteer, ICCV 2023
Teaching and Supervision
Master Thesis
-
Raphael Maser, Aug 2025 – Mar 2026Towards Inherent Interpretability of Foundation Vision Models
-
Kai Wittenmayer, Mar 2025 – Dec 2025Family-CBM - Automatic Discovery of Hierarchies in Concept Bottleneck Models
-
Shreyash Arya, Dec 2023 – Jun 2024Increasing Interpretability of Deep Neural Networks via B-cosification
-
Amin Parchami-Araghi, Dec 2023 – Jun 2024A Good Teacher Explains: Explanation-enhanced Knowledge Distillation
Bachelor Thesis
-
Moussa Herrmann, Jul 2025 – Oct 2025Refining Concept Bottlenecks with Symbolic Relations
Research Immersion / Student Research
-
Tejas Dhopavkar, Mar 2026 – PresentBenchmarking Reasoning of Multimodal Models
-
Nhi Pham, Nov 2023 – Feb 2024Class Concept Discovery with B-cos Networks
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
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
- Open-WBO-Inc-complete secured the 3rd position in the 60 seconds category in the incomplete weighted MaxSAT track at the MaxSAT Evaluation 2020.
- Open-WBO-Inc-BMO-satlike secured the 3rd position in the 60 seconds category and the 300 seconds category in the incomplete weighted MaxSAT track at the MaxSAT Evaluation 2019.
- Open-WBO-Inc-BMO secured the 1st position in the 60 seconds category and 2nd position in the 300 seconds category in the incomplete weighted MaxSAT track at the MaxSAT Evaluation 2018. Open-WBO-Inc-Cluster secured the 4th position in both these categories.
- The MIL team secured the 6th position out of 232 teams in the Visual Relationship Detection track of the Google AI Open Images Challenge. A poster on the method was presented at the Open Images Challenge Workshop at ECCV 2018.