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SUMMARY:IC Colloquium: Bridging Generative Models and Visual Communication
DTSTART:20260223T101500
DTEND:20260223T111500
DTSTAMP:20260527T162805Z
UID:392fa93e8045d8fea1723088663408380e92944bdc98a43175cb19d4
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Par : Yael Vinker - MIT\nIC Faculty candidate\n\nAbstract\nFro
 m rough sketches that spark ideas to polished designs that explain complex
  concepts\, visual communication is central to how humans think\, create\,
  and share knowledge. Yet despite major advances in generative AI\, we are
  still far from models that can reason and communicate through visual form
 s.\nI will present my work on bridging generative models and visual commun
 ication\, focusing on three complementary domains: (1) algorithms for gene
 rating and understanding sketches\, (2) systems that support exploratory v
 isual creation beyond one-shot generation\, and (3) methods for producing 
 editable\, parametric images for design applications.\nThese domains pose 
 unique challenges\, they are inherently data-scarce and rely on representa
 tions that go beyond pixel-based images commonly used in standard models. 
 I will show how the rich priors of vision-language models can be leveraged
  to address these challenges through novel optimization objectives and reg
 ularization techniques that connect their learned features with the specia
 lized representations required for visual communication.\nLooking ahead\, 
 this research lays the foundation for general-purpose visual communication
  technologies: intelligent systems that collaborate with humans in visual 
 domains\, enhancing how we design\, learn\, and exchange knowledge.\n\nBio
 \nYael Vinker is a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT CSAIL\, working with Prof
 . Antonio Torralba. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tel Av
 iv University\, advised by Profs. Daniel Cohen-Or and Ariel Shamir. Her re
 search spans computer graphics\, computer vision\, and machine learning\, 
 with a focus on generative models for visual communication. Her work has b
 een recognized with two Best Paper Awards (SIGGRAPH 2022\, SIGGRAPH Asia 2
 023) and a Best Paper Honorable Mention (SIGGRAPH 2023). She was selected 
 as an MIT EECS Rising Star (2024) and received the Blavatnik Prize for Out
 standing Israeli Doctoral Students in Computer Science (2024) as well as t
 he VATAT Ph.D. Fellowship.\n\nMore information\n 
LOCATION:BC 420 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==BC%20420 https://epfl.zoom.us/
 j/63470177982
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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