I also had the privilege to work with my good friend, the amazing Abby Stylianou (@abby621), on this year's Doctoral Consortium; had my advisor, Vicente Ordónez-Román (@bluevincent), meet my students; reconnect with... (2/n)

It was a privilege to work with my good friend, Paola Cascante-Bonilla, on this year's @CVPR Doctoral Consortium, again with support from the @NSF. What a remarkable group of graduating students (not all of whom are photographed here) -- you can see the list of recipients at docs.google.com/spreadsheets…

Thank you @Telegraph for covering our work @irisiris_l @niloofar_mire

🎓Still thinking about applying to the #CVPR2026 Doctoral Consortium? The submission deadline is April 13, 2026. If you are a PhD student nearing graduation, this is a great opportunity to network, receive mentorship, and present your work at CVPR. cvpr.thecvf.com/Conferences/…

🚨New paper on AI & Copyright 👨‍⚖️Courts have credited LLM companies' claims that safety alignment prevents reproduction of copyrighted expression. But what if fine-tuning on a simple writing task ruins it all? Worse : Fine-tuning on a single author's books (e.g., Murakami) unlocks verbatim recall of copyrighted books from 30 unrelated authors, sometimes as high as 90%. Joint work with @niloofar_mire (@LTIatCMU), Jane Ginsburg ( @ColumbiaLaw) and my amazing PhD student @irisiris_l (@sbucompsc ) (1/n)🧵

Do VLMs Need Vision Transformers? A controlled study of Transformer, state space, and hybrid vision backbones for frozen vision-language models. Finding: - Under matched settings, VMamba improves localization while staying competitive on open-ended VQA, making SSMs a practical alternative to ViTs. - Detection or segmentation pretraining generally improves VQA and localization, with the largest gains appearing in backbones that need more spatial inductive bias. - Better classification scores and naive scaling do not consistently predict stronger downstream VLM behavior, especially for grounding-sensitive tasks. - Some dense-objective checkpoints fail sharply in localization, but simple interface and connector adjustments recover much more robust behavior. Paper Title: Do VLMs Need Vision Transformers? Evaluating State Space Models as Project: lab-spell.github.io/vlm-ssm-… Link: arxiv.org/abs/2603.19209

📢 Call for Participation: The #CVPR2026 Doctoral Consortium submission portal is now open! Important Dates • Submission deadline: Apr 13, 2026 • Notification: Apr 27, 2026 (estimated) Details: cvpr.thecvf.com/Conferences/…

@dhillon_p and my work is in the @NewYorker today. Words can’t describe how I feel. Many thanks to Vauhini Vara for this beautiful and thought provoking essay. If you care about AI disclosures, Fair Use & the Future of Creative Labor I recommend reading it :)

🚨New paper on AI and copyright Several authors have sued LLM companies for allegedly using their books without permission for model training. 👩‍⚖️Courts, however, require empirical evidence of harm (e.g., market dilution). Our new pre-registered study addresses exactly this gap. Joint work with Profs @dhillon_p (@umsi) & Jane Ginsburg ( @ColumbiaLaw) (1/n)🧵

Privacy protection is vital — but blanket masking can cripple model performance. Our COLM 2025 paper introduces FiG-Priv, a fine-grained privacy protection framework that masks only high-risk content, keeping useful details for blind & low-vision users. 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2508.09245

Thanks @arankomatsuzaki, @ManuelFaysse, and @_akhaliq for reposting our work! We extended matryoshka to multi-vector embedding and were glad to see that the popular concept, test-time scaling in LLM, also works in retrieval. Work done with @AIatMeta & @vislang!

Honored to get the outstanding position paper award at @icmlconf :) Come attend my talk and poster tomorrow on human centered considerations for a safer and better future of work I will be recruiting PhD students at @stonybrooku @sbucompsc coming fall. Please get in touch.

#ICCV2025 is deeply committed to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion within our community. As part of this commitment, travel support is available to help broaden participation. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis until August 20, 2025 (anywhere on Earth).

Now accepted to @COLM_conf 🤩 Super excited for Montreal 🇨🇦🍁 This also marks my third successful collaboration with my good friend @PhilippeLaban