Speaker
Tae-Hyun Oh
Title
Generative Machine Perception: Learning to See Visually Subtle or Invisible Signals
Abstract
Humans rely heavily on visual signals sensed by our eyes, forming the basis of our visual perception system. To build human-like AI agents, computer vision techniques have advanced significantly as a core component. Despite these advancements, all vision systems, including our eyes, have fundamental limitations in seeing things that are small, occluded, or in the dark. In this talk, I present my recent journey toward building data-efficient, versatile, and generalizable machines by developing the next generation of machine perception, which is generative and multi-modal. The core idea is to exploit other multi-modal signals that describe the world around us, including sound and language, and pose them as generative cross-modal translation problems to fill in missing visual information beyond sight. I present deep learning systems that learn to perceive and visualize subtle signals, and what they sense about our world.
Bio
Tae-Hyun Oh is an Associate Professor at the School of Computing, KAIST, Daejeon, Korea. Prior to joining KAIST, he was with the Department of Electrical Engineering at POSTECH, Korea (2020–2023 as an Assistant Professor and 2023-2025 as an Associate Professor). He also served as Research Director at OpenLab, POSCO-RIST, Pohang, Korea, from 2021 to 2023. He received the B.E. degree in Computer Engineering from Kwang-Woon University, Korea, in 2010, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from KAIST, Korea, in 2012 and 2017, respectively. During his Ph.D. studies, he was a research intern at Microsoft Research Asia (Beijing, China, 2014–2015) and Microsoft Research (Redmond, WA, USA, 2016). Following his Ph.D., he was a postdoctoral associate at MIT CSAIL (2017–2019) and a postdoctoral researcher at Facebook AI Research (2019–2020). His research achievements have been recognized with the Best Poster Award at BMVC 2024, the Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship, the Gold Prize of the Samsung HumanTech Thesis Award, the Qualcomm Innovation Awards, the Excellent Research Achievement Award from Hyundai Motor Company, and multiple Top Research Achievement Awards from KAIST. He has served the research community as Area Chair for CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR; Senior Area Chair or Senior Program Chair for AAAI 2022 and ICCV 2025; and Associate Editor for the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV).
Language
English · Offline