Projects

IARPA HIATUS: Human Interpretable Attribution of Text using Underlying Structure
Sep 2025 – Present USC ISI · UMD · UMich · UBirmingham
  • Formalized evaluation protocols for user and attribute privacy leakage in speech.
  • Developing a dataset and benchmark for authorship attribution from spoken language.
  • Designing methods for speaker anonymization across both acoustic and linguistic modalities.
Speaker Verification Speaker Anonymization DP
Visual Privacy Understanding
Sep 2024 – Present USC · Amazon
  • Received a gift award from the USC-Amazon Center on Secure and Trusted Machine Learning.
  • Developed a taxonomy of visual privacy risks grounded in legal frameworks.
  • Evaluated VLMs on privacy recognition and compositional reasoning.
  • Designing deployable VLM-as-a-judge models for privacy severity assessment, along with a dataset of compositional privacy risks.
  • Building a privacy advisory agent to detect, localize, and sanitize sensitive visual content for regulatory compliance.
Vision Language Models Benchmarking Reasoning Agentic AI
Horizon Europe - PILLAR-Robots: Purposeful Intrinsically motivated Lifelong Learning Autonomous Robots
Jan 2024 – Jul 2024 Athena RC · UDCoruna · CNR · Sorbonne · AI2Life · PAL Robotics
  • Developed robotic simulation pipelines
  • Enabled the robot to learn useful environmental information under minimal interaction during the exploration phase.
  • Investigated domain adaptation techniques to transfer learned behaviors from simulation to real-world robotic settings.
Vision Language Models Robotics Lifelong Learning
Enhancing Vision-Language Pre-training
Nov 2022 – Jul 2022 NTUA · UT Austin
  • Proposed a multimodal extension of contrastive vision–language models by incorporating dialogue as an additional modality.
  • Generated synthetic dialogue data to augment image–text datasets with richer contextual descriptions.
  • Developed a domain adaptation method to adapt models to dialogue inputs via a dual contrastive objective while preserving generalization.
Vision Language Models Self-supervised Learning Domain Adaptation Synthetic Data