Research lab led by @y_m_asano at @utn_nuremberg. We conduct fundamental AI research and develop core technology for future Foundation Models.
Joined July 2024
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Happening Now! Come to VGI workshop @CVPR in Room 703 to listen to the excellent keynote speakers: Robert Geirhos @GoogleDeepMind; @AdtRaghunathan @CSDatCMU; @mattdeitke @Meta; @y_m_asano @funailab; @alexgkendall @wayve_ai; Andrea Vedaldi; Alexei Efros; Kristen Grauman @CVPRConf
Checkout our @CVPR VGI workshop on 3rd Jun 2026 cvpr2026-vgi-workshop.limitl… in Room 703, Led by @HirokatuKataoka with Yoshihiro Fukuhara, @YonglongT, @elliottszwu, Ryousuke Yamada, @jianyuan_wang, Kohsuke Ide, @xianzhengoxford, @Koichi_N_, @yimiche @Oxford_VGG! @CVPRConf #CVPR2026!!
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FunAI retweeted
Jun 3
Looking forward to speaking here at ~11:30 room 703. Spoiler slide below 👇
Checkout our @CVPR VGI workshop on 3rd Jun 2026 cvpr2026-vgi-workshop.limitl… in Room 703, Led by @HirokatuKataoka with Yoshihiro Fukuhara, @YonglongT, @elliottszwu, Ryousuke Yamada, @jianyuan_wang, Kohsuke Ide, @xianzhengoxford, @Koichi_N_, @yimiche @Oxford_VGG! @CVPRConf #CVPR2026!!
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Come join us!
Apr 30
🎉[openings] I’m hiring postdoctoral researchers to join our @FunAILab at UTN through the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship (@AvHStiftung), via the Henriette Herz Scouting Programme.
As a Henriette Herz Scout, I can nominate outstanding international researchers for this fellowship route. I’m especially keen to hear from candidates working on multimodal learning, video and image pretraining, and post-training.
Fellows would be hosted in our lab at UTN and work closely with us on these topics.
Key requirements:
* finished your doctoral studies less than 4 years ago or will finish in the next 6 months
* did not live/work in Germany in the last 10 years
* applications from female, trans* and/or non-binary candidates are highly encouraged!
Interested? Please send a short note with your CV, PhD year, current affiliation, 2–3 key publications, and a few lines on how your work connects.
Please share! 🔀
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Sakana means fish in Japanese.
Apr 10
Today we visited Japan's hottest AI startup @SakanaAILabs🎏🇯🇵!
We met their research scientists and discussed the implications and impact of some their works like "The AI scientist" and "Continous Thought Machines".
We presented our @FunAILab works, "Better Language Models Exhibit Higher Visual Alignment" and "Data Repetition Beats Data Scaling in Long-CoT Supervised Fine-Tuning". Got lots of cool questions and discussions! Thanks, Masanori Suganuma, @_yutaroyamada, @ciaran_regan_
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Today we had a joint workshop!
We got to know each other's research directions and make some personal connections!
@AIST_EN, @TUS_PR_en, @FragileGoodwill, @noagarciad
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Start of our workshop, organised by our postdoc fellow @FragileGoodwill!
Today we'll be getting to know each other's research directions and make some personal connections!
@AIST_EN, @TUS_PR_en, and @noagarciad and more: research-p.com/event/2690
'cc @HirokatuKataoka
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The next two weeks our lab will be in.. Japan!!
We'll visit @AIST_EN, @SakanaAILabs, @WbyT_Tech, @SonyAI_global , @jouhouken (NII), @TUS_PR_en and @RIKEN_JP.
We'll report what we learn, so come with us on this journey!
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Mar 30
[new CVPR'26 paper]
🔄 SSL works great when you have tons of data.
But in 3D… we don’t.
High-quality 3D scans are expensive, slow, and hard to scale. So what if we could pretrain 3D models without any real 3D scans? 1/
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Mar 26
Group picture of our @ELLISforEurope @Ellis_Amsterdam Foundation Model PhD school! 👏 🎉 @CSProfKGD @cgmsnoek @robrombach @FrankRHutter @YGandelsman @eliricci_ @nuriaoliver @sainingxie @PascalMettes, @KatiaShutova Hinrich Schütze, Robert Geirhos
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Spending the day in Nuremberg with @y_m_asano and his group ❤️
Missing the bus is not going to deter us, the talk must go on! 🤓
My slide deck is feature complete. Finally ready for my European speaking tour 🇪🇺
Plan to record this talk too, once back in my #Toronto home studio.
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13 Dec 2025
Happy to share what we've been cooking! 🎊🎊
Our next iteration of the ELLIS PhD school is set to be an *absolutely amazing* one with this stellar lineup of speakers. ..And we even have some more speakers to be confirmed. 👀
If you haven't yet, go apply :)
13 Dec 2025
🚀 Two Big Announcements for ELLIS | ELIAS | ELLIOT Winter School on Foundation Models (FoMo) 2026, which is organised at the Tolhuistuin from 24-27 March 2026!
1️⃣ We’re excited to reveal the incredible speaker lineup for FoMo 2026... (1)
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21 Aug 2025
Now finally accepted at @emnlpmeeting!
I think the technique and high-level ideas i) allow bidirectional attention for prompt & ii) (maybe) process input-query differently from answer generation will stick around.
29 May 2024
Today we introduce Bidirectional Instruction Tuning (Bitune). It's a new way of adapting LLMs for the instruction->answering stage.
It allows the model to process the instruction/question with bidirectional attention, while the answer generation remains causal.
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21 Jul 2025
Today we release Franca, a new vision Foundation Model that matches and sometimes outperforms DINOv2.
The data, the training code and the model weights (with intermediate checkpoints) are open-source, allowing everyone to build on this.
Methodologically, we introduce two new SSL components, one is a multi-granularity SK clustering loss that utilizes Matryoshka representations and a quick post-pretraining scheme to remove unwanted spatial biases.
This is the result of a close and fun collaboration @valeoai (in France) and @FunAILab (in Franconia)
21 Jul 2025
Can open-data models beat DINOv2? Today we release Franca, a fully open-sourced vision foundation model. Franca with ViT-G backbone matches (and often beats) proprietary models like SigLIPv2, CLIP, DINOv2 on various benchmarks setting a new standard for open-source research🧵
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16 Jul 2025
Hello FunAI Lab at UTN 👋
I’m excited to start a new chapter of my research journey here in Nuremberg as a visiting postdoc.
Excited for inspiring collaborations and impactful research ahead with @y_m_asano and the amazing students😀
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26 Nov 2024
LoRA et al. enable personalised model generation and serving, which is crucial as finetuned models still outperform general ones in many tasks. However, serving a base model with many LoRAs is very inefficient! Now, there's a better way: enter Prompt Generation Networks, presented today @BMVCconf
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15 Oct 2024
Is the community trying to surprise us today? 🤯
Because these benchmark-related papers from different research labs all dropped on the Daily Papers page at once! 🎉📑hf.co/papers
✨ LOKI: A Comprehensive Synthetic Data Detection Benchmark using Large Multimodal Models by Opendata lab
✨ MMIE: Massive Multimodal Interleaved Comprehension Benchmark for Large Vision-Language Models by @richardxp888
✨ MEGA-Bench: Scaling Multimodal Evaluation to over 500 Real-World Tasks by the TigerLab
✨ LiveXiv -- A Multi-Modal Live Benchmark Based on Arxiv Papers Content by @TelAvivUni @IBMResearch
✨ Omni-MATH: A Universal Olympiad Level Mathematic Benchmark For Large Language Models by @PKU1898 @AlibabaGroup
✨ TemporalBench: Benchmarking Fine-grained Temporal Understanding for Multimodal Video Models by @MuCai7
✨ LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memory by @DiWu0162 @TencentGlobal
✨ TVBench: Redesigning Video-Language Evaluation by @FunAILab
@_akhaliq
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15 Oct 2024
Today, we're introducing TVBench! 📹💬
Video-language evaluation is crucial, but are we doing it right? We find that current benchmarks fall short in testing temporal understanding. 🧵👇
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