{"690800":{"#nid":"690800","#data":{"type":"event","title":"PhD Defense by Nikolai Warner","body":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003ETitle\u003C\/strong\u003E: Improving Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Human-Centric Multimodal Vision\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EDate\u003C\/strong\u003E: Monday, June 22, 2026\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003ETime\u003C\/strong\u003E: 1:00 - 3:00 PM ET\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003ELocation\u003C\/strong\u003E: Coda C0915 Atlantic +\u0026nbsp; Remote (\u003Ca href=\u0022https:\/\/teams.microsoft.com\/meet\/250438047509225?p=kzLrPnM2Ap8Ny0Dq9t\u0022\u003Ehttps:\/\/teams.microsoft.com\/meet\/250438047509225?p=kzLrPnM2Ap8Ny0Dq9t\u003C\/a\u003E)\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EMeeting ID\u003C\/strong\u003E: 250 438 047 509 225 | Passcode: 2Tn3Us6F\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003ENikolai Warner\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003ERobotics Ph.D. Candidate\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EGeorge W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EGeorgia Institute of Technology\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003ECommittee\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EDr. Irfan Essa (Advisor) - School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EDr. Thomas Ploetz - School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EDr. Zsolt Kira - School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EDr. Judy Hoffman - School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EDr. Apaar Sadhwani - Amazon\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u0026nbsp;\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003E\u003Cstrong\u003EAbstract\u003C\/strong\u003E\u003C\/p\u003E\u003Cp\u003EDespite steady in-distribution progress on human-centric vision tasks and the emergence of powerful foundation models, in-the-wild and out-of-distribution performance still lags. This dissertation studies four such tasks (interactive segmentation, non-rigid image editing, 3D human pose estimation, and motion-language alignment) and traces their out-of-distribution gap to two distinct failures: a signal-side failure, where the input modality is ill-posed for the task, and a noise-side failure, where the supervision channel carries distribution-specific nuisance. On the signal side, DAISeg enriches click-conditioned segmentation with an open-vocabulary saliency channel (from +3 mIoU on seen classes up to +10.5 on unseen, beating SAM under text-conditioned clicks), and AugLift hands the 2D-to-3D lifter a per-joint depth lower bound (\u22128.9% OOD MPJPE across four architectures, plus cross-dataset SOTA when combined with DG techniques). On the noise side, IPC-Edit constructs supervision that had no public equivalent, filtering and composing three noisy proxies into a 13.5K-pair corpus for identity-preserving non-rigid editing (68.5% identity preservation vs. 61%), while MoCHA denoises supervision that already exists, distilling an LLM canonicalization operator that strips annotator style from captions and setting a new cross-distribution SOTA (T2M R@1 from 13.74 to 26.59, +94%).\u003C\/p\u003E","summary":"","format":"limited_html"}],"field_subtitle":"","field_summary":[{"value":"\u003Cp\u003Esee below\u003C\/p\u003E","format":"limited_html"}],"field_summary_sentence":[{"value":"Improving Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Human-Centric Multimodal Vision"}],"uid":"27707","created_gmt":"2026-06-17 16:51:01","changed_gmt":"2026-06-17 16:51:45","author":"Tatianna Richardson","boilerplate_text":"","field_publication":"","field_article_url":"","field_event_time":{"event_time_start":"2026-06-22T13:00:00-04:00","event_time_end":"2026-06-22T15:00:00-04:00","event_time_end_last":"2026-06-22T15:00:00-04:00","gmt_time_start":"2026-06-22 17:00:00","gmt_time_end":"2026-06-22 19:00:00","gmt_time_end_last":"2026-06-22 19:00:00","rrule":null,"timezone":"America\/New_York"},"location":"Coda C0915 Atlantic +  Remote ","extras":[],"groups":[{"id":"221981","name":"Graduate Studies"}],"categories":[],"keywords":[{"id":"100811","name":"Phd Defense"}],"core_research_areas":[],"news_room_topics":[],"event_categories":[{"id":"1788","name":"Other\/Miscellaneous"}],"invited_audience":[{"id":"78771","name":"Public"}],"affiliations":[],"classification":[],"areas_of_expertise":[],"news_and_recent_appearances":[],"phone":[],"contact":[],"email":[],"slides":[],"orientation":[],"userdata":""}}}