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.