Suhas Lohit

  • Biography

    Before coming to MERL, Suhas worked as an intern at MERL (summer 2018), SRI International (summer 2017) and Nvidia (summer 2016). His research interests include computer vision, computational imaging and deep learning. Recently, his research focus has been on creating hybrid model- and data-driven neural architectures for various applications in imaging and vision. He won the Best Paper Award at the CVPR workshop on Computational Cameras and Displays in 2015 and the University Graduate Fellowship at ASU for 2015-16.

  • Recent News & Events

    •  NEWS    MERL Papers and Workshops at CVPR 2024
      Date: June 17, 2024 - June 21, 2024
      Where: Seattle, WA
      MERL Contacts: Petros T. Boufounos; Moitreya Chatterjee; Anoop Cherian; Michael J. Jones; Toshiaki Koike-Akino; Jonathan Le Roux; Suhas Lohit; Tim K. Marks; Pedro Miraldo; Jing Liu; Kuan-Chuan Peng; Pu (Perry) Wang; Ye Wang; Matthew Brand
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
      Brief
      • MERL researchers are presenting 5 conference papers, 3 workshop papers, and are co-organizing two workshops at the CVPR 2024 conference, which will be held in Seattle, June 17-21. CVPR is one of the most prestigious and competitive international conferences in computer vision. Details of MERL contributions are provided below.

        CVPR Conference Papers:

        1. "TI2V-Zero: Zero-Shot Image Conditioning for Text-to-Video Diffusion Models" by H. Ni, B. Egger, S. Lohit, A. Cherian, Y. Wang, T. Koike-Akino, S. X. Huang, and T. K. Marks

        This work enables a pretrained text-to-video (T2V) diffusion model to be additionally conditioned on an input image (first video frame), yielding a text+image to video (TI2V) model. Other than using the pretrained T2V model, our method requires no ("zero") training or fine-tuning. The paper uses a "repeat-and-slide" method and diffusion resampling to synthesize videos from a given starting image and text describing the video content.

        Paper: https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-059
        Project page: https://merl.com/research/highlights/TI2V-Zero

        2. "Long-Tailed Anomaly Detection with Learnable Class Names" by C.-H. Ho, K.-C. Peng, and N. Vasconcelos

        This work aims to identify defects across various classes without relying on hard-coded class names. We introduce the concept of long-tailed anomaly detection, addressing challenges like class imbalance and dataset variability. Our proposed method combines reconstruction and semantic modules, learning pseudo-class names and utilizing a variational autoencoder for feature synthesis to improve performance in long-tailed datasets, outperforming existing methods in experiments.

        Paper: https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-040

        3. "Gear-NeRF: Free-Viewpoint Rendering and Tracking with Motion-aware Spatio-Temporal Sampling" by X. Liu, Y-W. Tai, C-T. Tang, P. Miraldo, S. Lohit, and M. Chatterjee

        This work presents a new strategy for rendering dynamic scenes from novel viewpoints. Our approach is based on stratifying the scene into regions based on the extent of motion of the region, which is automatically determined. Regions with higher motion are permitted a denser spatio-temporal sampling strategy for more faithful rendering of the scene. Additionally, to the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work to enable tracking of objects in the scene from novel views - based on the preferences of a user, provided by a click.

        Paper: https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-042

        4. "SIRA: Scalable Inter-frame Relation and Association for Radar Perception" by R. Yataka, P. Wang, P. T. Boufounos, and R. Takahashi

        Overcoming the limitations on radar feature extraction such as low spatial resolution, multipath reflection, and motion blurs, this paper proposes SIRA (Scalable Inter-frame Relation and Association) for scalable radar perception with two designs: 1) extended temporal relation, generalizing the existing temporal relation layer from two frames to multiple inter-frames with temporally regrouped window attention for scalability; and 2) motion consistency track with a pseudo-tracklet generated from observational data for better object association.

        Paper: https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-041

        5. "RILA: Reflective and Imaginative Language Agent for Zero-Shot Semantic Audio-Visual Navigation" by Z. Yang, J. Liu, P. Chen, A. Cherian, T. K. Marks, J. L. Roux, and C. Gan

        We leverage Large Language Models (LLM) for zero-shot semantic audio visual navigation. Specifically, by employing multi-modal models to process sensory data, we instruct an LLM-based planner to actively explore the environment by adaptively evaluating and dismissing inaccurate perceptual descriptions.

        Paper: https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-043

        CVPR Workshop Papers:

        1. "CoLa-SDF: Controllable Latent StyleSDF for Disentangled 3D Face Generation" by R. Dey, B. Egger, V. Boddeti, Y. Wang, and T. K. Marks

        This paper proposes a new method for generating 3D faces and rendering them to images by combining the controllability of nonlinear 3DMMs with the high fidelity of implicit 3D GANs. Inspired by StyleSDF, our model uses a similar architecture but enforces the latent space to match the interpretable and physical parameters of the nonlinear 3D morphable model MOST-GAN.

        Paper: https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-045

        2. “Tracklet-based Explainable Video Anomaly Localization” by A. Singh, M. J. Jones, and E. Learned-Miller

        This paper describes a new method for localizing anomalous activity in video of a scene given sample videos of normal activity from the same scene. The method is based on detecting and tracking objects in the scene and estimating high-level attributes of the objects such as their location, size, short-term trajectory and object class. These high-level attributes can then be used to detect unusual activity as well as to provide a human-understandable explanation for what is unusual about the activity.

        Paper: https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-057

        MERL co-organized workshops:

        1. "Multimodal Algorithmic Reasoning Workshop" by A. Cherian, K-C. Peng, S. Lohit, M. Chatterjee, H. Zhou, K. Smith, T. K. Marks, J. Mathissen, and J. Tenenbaum

        Workshop link: https://marworkshop.github.io/cvpr24/index.html

        2. "The 5th Workshop on Fair, Data-Efficient, and Trusted Computer Vision" by K-C. Peng, et al.

        Workshop link: https://fadetrcv.github.io/2024/

        3. "SuperLoRA: Parameter-Efficient Unified Adaptation for Large Vision Models" by X. Chen, J. Liu, Y. Wang, P. Wang, M. Brand, G. Wang, and T. Koike-Akino

        This paper proposes a generalized framework called SuperLoRA that unifies and extends different variants of low-rank adaptation (LoRA). Introducing new options with grouping, folding, shuffling, projection, and tensor decomposition, SuperLoRA offers high flexibility and demonstrates superior performance up to 10-fold gain in parameter efficiency for transfer learning tasks.

        Paper: https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-062
    •  
    •  TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2024] Melanie Mitchell presents talk titled "The Debate Over 'Understanding' in AI's Large Language Models"
      Date & Time: Tuesday, February 13, 2024; 1:00 PM
      Speaker: Melanie Mitchell, Santa Fe Institute
      MERL Host: Suhas Lohit
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Human-Computer Interaction
      Abstract
      • I will survey a current, heated debate in the AI research community on whether large pre-trained language models can be said to "understand" language -- and the physical and social situations language encodes -- in any important sense. I will describe arguments that have been made for and against such understanding, and, more generally, will discuss what methods can be used to fairly evaluate understanding and intelligence in AI systems. I will conclude with key questions for the broader sciences of intelligence that have arisen in light of these discussions.
    •  

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  • Awards

    •  AWARD    Best Paper - Honorable Mention Award at WACV 2021
      Date: January 6, 2021
      Awarded to: Rushil Anirudh, Suhas Lohit, Pavan Turaga
      MERL Contact: Suhas Lohit
      Research Areas: Computational Sensing, Computer Vision, Machine Learning
      Brief
      • A team of researchers from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Arizona State University (ASU) received the Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at WACV 2021 for their paper "Generative Patch Priors for Practical Compressive Image Recovery".

        The paper proposes a novel model of natural images as a composition of small patches which are obtained from a deep generative network. This is unlike prior approaches where the networks attempt to model image-level distributions and are unable to generalize outside training distributions. The key idea in this paper is that learning patch-level statistics is far easier. As the authors demonstrate, this model can then be used to efficiently solve challenging inverse problems in imaging such as compressive image recovery and inpainting even from very few measurements for diverse natural scenes.
    •  
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  • Research Highlights

  • Internships with Suhas

    • CV0056: Internship - "Small" Large Generative Models for Vision and Language

      MERL is looking for research interns to conduct research into novel architectures for "small" large generative models. We are currently exploring 0.5 - 2 billion parameter language models, text-to-image models and text-to-video models. Interesting research directions include (a) efficient learning for such models that improves the pareto front of current scaling laws for these sizes, (b) enhancing current transformer-based architectures, and (c) new architectural paradigms beyond transformers such as incorporating explicitly temporal designs. Prior experience with machine learning/computer vision/natural language processing research, and proficiency in building and experimenting with machine learning models using a framework like PyTorch are required. Candidates well into their PhD program with publications in top-tier machine learning, natural language processing or computer vision venues, ideally connected to building generative models, are strongly preferred. Candidates are also expected to collaborate with MERL researchers for preparing manuscripts for scientific publications based on the results obtained during the internship. Duration of the internship is 3 months with a flexible start date.

      Required Specific Experience

      • Research experience with recent vision and text generative models
      • Deep understanding of neural network architectures
      • Proficiency in machine learning frameworks like PyTorch

    See All Internships at MERL
  • MERL Publications

    •  Hegde, D., Lohit, S., Peng, K.-C., Jones, M.J., Patel, V.M., "Equivariant Spatio-Temporal Self-Supervision for LiDAR Object Detection", European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), Leonardis, A. and Ricci, E. and Roth, S. and Russakovsky, O. and Sattler, T. and Varol, G., Eds., DOI: 10.1007/​978-3-031-73347-5_27, September 2024, pp. 475-491.
      BibTeX TR2024-130 PDF Video Presentation
      • @inproceedings{Hegde2024sep,
      • author = {{Hegde, Deepti and Lohit, Suhas and Peng, Kuan-Chuan and Jones, Michael J. and Patel, Vishal M.}},
      • title = {Equivariant Spatio-Temporal Self-Supervision for LiDAR Object Detection},
      • booktitle = {European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)},
      • year = 2024,
      • editor = {Leonardis, A. and Ricci, E. and Roth, S. and Russakovsky, O. and Sattler, T. and Varol, G.},
      • pages = {475--491},
      • month = sep,
      • publisher = {Springer},
      • doi = {10.1007/978-3-031-73347-5_27},
      • issn = {0302-9743},
      • isbn = {978-3-031-73346-8},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-130}
      • }
    •  Cherian, A., Peng, K.-C., Lohit, S., Matthiesen, J., Smith, K., Tenenbaum, J.B., "Evaluating Large Vision-and-Language Models on Children's Mathematical Olympiads", arXiv, June 2024.
      BibTeX arXiv
      • @article{Cherian2024jun,
      • author = {Cherian, Anoop and Peng, Kuan-Chuan and Lohit, Suhas and Matthiesen, Joanna and Smith, Kevin and Tenenbaum, Joshua B.}},
      • title = {Evaluating Large Vision-and-Language Models on Children's Mathematical Olympiads},
      • journal = {arXiv},
      • year = 2024,
      • month = jun,
      • url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.15736}
      • }
    •  Ni, H., Egger, B., Lohit, S., Cherian, A., Wang, Y., Koike-Akino, T., Huang, S.X., Marks, T.K., "TI2V-Zero: Zero-Shot Image Conditioning for Text-to-Video Diffusion Models", IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), June 2024, pp. 9015-9025.
      BibTeX TR2024-059 PDF Video Software Presentation
      • @inproceedings{Ni2024jun,
      • author = {Ni, Haomiao and Egger, Bernhard and Lohit, Suhas and Cherian, Anoop and Wang, Ye and Koike-Akino, Toshiaki and Huang, Sharon X. and Marks, Tim K.},
      • title = {TI2V-Zero: Zero-Shot Image Conditioning for Text-to-Video Diffusion Models},
      • booktitle = {IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
      • year = 2024,
      • pages = {9015--9025},
      • month = jun,
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-059}
      • }
    •  Liu, X., Tai, Y.-W., Tang, C.-K., Miraldo, P., Lohit, S., Chatterjee, M., "Gear-NeRF: Free-Viewpoint Rendering and Tracking with Motion-aware Spatio-Temporal Sampling", IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), May 2024, pp. 19667-19679.
      BibTeX TR2024-042 PDF Videos Software
      • @inproceedings{Liu2024may,
      • author = {Liu, Xinhang and Tai, Yu-wing and Tang, Chi-Keung and Miraldo, Pedro and Lohit, Suhas and Chatterjee, Moitreya},
      • title = {Gear-NeRF: Free-Viewpoint Rendering and Tracking with Motion-aware Spatio-Temporal Sampling},
      • booktitle = {IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
      • year = 2024,
      • pages = {19667--19679},
      • month = may,
      • publisher = {IEEE},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2024-042}
      • }
    •  Hegde, D., Lohit, S., Peng, K.-C., Jones, M.J., Patel, V.M., "Multimodal 3D Object Detection on Unseen Domains", arXiv, April 2024.
      BibTeX arXiv
      • @article{Hegde2024apr,
      • author = {Hegde, Deepti and Lohit, Suhas and Peng, Kuan-Chuan and Jones, Michael J. and Patel, Vishal M.},
      • title = {Multimodal 3D Object Detection on Unseen Domains},
      • journal = {arXiv},
      • year = 2024,
      • month = apr,
      • url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11764}
      • }
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  • Other Publications

    •  Suhas Lohit, Qiao Wang and Pavan Turaga, "Temporal Transformer Networks: Joint Learning of Invariant and Discriminative Time Warping", Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2019, pp. 12426-12435.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{lohit2019temporal,
      • author = {Lohit, Suhas and Wang, Qiao and Turaga, Pavan},
      • title = {Temporal Transformer Networks: Joint Learning of Invariant and Discriminative Time Warping},
      • booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
      • year = 2019,
      • pages = {12426--12435}
      • }
    •  Suhas Lohit, Kuldeep Kulkarni, Ronan Kerviche, Pavan Turaga and Amit Ashok, "Convolutional neural networks for noniterative reconstruction of compressively sensed images", IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 326-340, 2018.
      BibTeX
      • @Article{lohit2018convolutional,
      • author = {Lohit, Suhas and Kulkarni, Kuldeep and Kerviche, Ronan and Turaga, Pavan and Ashok, Amit},
      • title = {Convolutional neural networks for noniterative reconstruction of compressively sensed images},
      • journal = {IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging},
      • year = 2018,
      • volume = 4,
      • number = 3,
      • pages = {326--340},
      • publisher = {IEEE}
      • }
    •  Suhas Lohit, Ankan Bansal, Nitesh Shroff, Jaishanker Pillai, Pavan Turaga and Rama Chellappa, "Predicting Dynamical Evolution of Human Activities from a Single Image", Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, 2018, pp. 383-392.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{lohit2018predicting,
      • author = {Lohit, Suhas and Bansal, Ankan and Shroff, Nitesh and Pillai, Jaishanker and Turaga, Pavan and Chellappa, Rama},
      • title = {Predicting Dynamical Evolution of Human Activities from a Single Image},
      • booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops},
      • year = 2018,
      • pages = {383--392}
      • }
    •  Suhas Lohit and Pavan Turaga, "Learning invariant Riemannian geometric representations using deep nets", Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops, 2017, pp. 1329-1338.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{lohit2017learning,
      • author = {Lohit, Suhas and Turaga, Pavan},
      • title = {Learning invariant Riemannian geometric representations using deep nets},
      • booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Workshops},
      • year = 2017,
      • pages = {1329--1338}
      • }
    •  Kuldeep Kulkarni, Suhas Lohit, Pavan Turaga, Ronan Kerviche and Amit Ashok, "Reconnet: Non-iterative reconstruction of images from compressively sensed measurements", Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2016, pp. 449-458.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{kulkarni2016reconnet,
      • author = {Kulkarni, Kuldeep and Lohit, Suhas and Turaga, Pavan and Kerviche, Ronan and Ashok, Amit},
      • title = {Reconnet: Non-iterative reconstruction of images from compressively sensed measurements},
      • booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
      • year = 2016,
      • pages = {449--458}
      • }
    •  Suhas Lohit, Kuldeep Kulkarni and Pavan Turaga, "Direct inference on compressive measurements using convolutional neural networks", 2016 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 2016, pp. 1913-1917.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{lohit2016direct,
      • author = {Lohit, Suhas and Kulkarni, Kuldeep and Turaga, Pavan},
      • title = {Direct inference on compressive measurements using convolutional neural networks},
      • booktitle = {2016 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP)},
      • year = 2016,
      • pages = {1913--1917},
      • organization = {IEEE}
      • }
    •  Qiao Wang, Suhas Lohit, Meynard John Toledo, Matthew P Buman and Pavan Turaga, "A statistical estimation framework for energy expenditure of physical activities from a wrist-worn accelerometer", 2016 38th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), 2016, pp. 2631-2635.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{wang2016statistical,
      • author = {Wang, Qiao and Lohit, Suhas and Toledo, Meynard John and Buman, Matthew P and Turaga, Pavan},
      • title = {A statistical estimation framework for energy expenditure of physical activities from a wrist-worn accelerometer},
      • booktitle = {2016 38th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC)},
      • year = 2016,
      • pages = {2631--2635},
      • organization = {IEEE}
      • }
    •  Suhas Lohit, Kuldeep Kulkarni, Pavan Turaga, Jian Wang and Aswin C Sankaranarayanan, "Reconstruction-free inference on compressive measurements", Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops, 2015, pp. 16-24.
      BibTeX
      • @Inproceedings{lohit2015reconstruction,
      • author = {Lohit, Suhas and Kulkarni, Kuldeep and Turaga, Pavan and Wang, Jian and Sankaranarayanan, Aswin C},
      • title = {Reconstruction-free inference on compressive measurements},
      • booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops},
      • year = 2015,
      • pages = {16--24}
      • }
  • Software & Data Downloads

  • Videos

  • MERL Issued Patents

    • Title: "Systems and Methods for Multi-Spectral Image Fusion Using Unrolled Projected Gradient Descent and Convolutinoal Neural Network"
      Inventors: Liu, Dehong; Lohit, Suhas; Mansour, Hassan; Boufounos, Petros T.
      Patent No.: 10,891,527
      Issue Date: Jan 12, 2021
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