Sept 24 - AI, ML and Computer Vision Meetup

Join our virtual meetup on September 24 to hear talks from experts on cutting-edge topics across AI, ML, and computer vision.

Date, Time and Location

Sep 24, 2026
9:00 AM - 11:00 AM PST
Online. Register for the Zoom!

How Do Mercedes-Benz AI Principles Drive our Innovation?

At Mercedes-Benz, our AI Principles guide every step of innovation, emphasizing responsible use, safety and reliability, explainability, and the protection of privacy. These principles go beyond statements and actively shape how we design, test, and deploy AI systems in real-world automotive and enterprise settings. In this talk, I will present how these principles inspired our recent research on when reusing LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) is effective. By combining theoretical analysis with synthetic data as a proxy for enterprise scenarios, we uncovered the strengths and limitations of modular AI components under constrained data access. Our findings provide practical guidance on when reused LoRAs could deliver high-quality results.

About the Speaker

Mei-Yen Chen is a Senior Data Scientist at Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation GmbH in Germany with 10 years of industry experience in AI and data solutions. She leads early-stage AI projects across business functions and collaborates with research institutions on machine learning and responsible AI.

Region Tokens as the Visual Primitive: From Recognition to World Modeling

Patch-based tokenization has become the default interface between vision encoders and downstream models, yet patches carry no semantic structure and scale poorly with resolution and temporal extent. This talk presents a research program centered on replacing patch tokens with region-level representations — semantically dense tokens grounded in visual entities rather than arbitrary grid crops.

I will describe RELOCATE, REN, and T-REN, a progression of methods that produce region tokens via pooling, train them with region-level objectives, and extend them to video with temporal coherence. I will then present ongoing work integrating region tokens into VLMs to directly expand visual context capacity, and preliminary results on future region trajectory prediction as a foundation for world modeling.

The broader thesis is that region-level tokens are a more natural unit of visual computation than patches, and their advantage compounds as task complexity, resolution, and temporal horizon increase.

About the Speaker

Savya Khosla is a second-year Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Derek Hoiem and Prof. Alex Schwing.

Leveraging Text-To-Image Diffusion Models for Consistent Set-to-Set Generation

Image collections are humans' primary way of capturing the world, yet advances in generative editing remain largely inapplicable to this modality. We address this gap by introducing Match-and-Fuse - a zero-shot, training-free method for consistent set-to-set generation from image collections that share a common visual element but differ in viewpoint, capture time, and surrounding content.
Our key idea is a unified graph-based framework that combines dense correspondences with an emergent prior in text-to-image diffusion models to generate coherent canvases. We achieve state-of-the-art consistency and visual quality, and unlock new creative capabilities for content generation.

About the Speaker

Kate Feingold is a PhD student in Computer Vision at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Her research sits at the intersection of generative models, 3D/4D perception, and multimodal learning, focusing on problems where vision meets other modalities or paradigms in creative tasks.

Yield Estimation of a Coffee in a dense environment

This presentation provides a detailed workflow related to coffee yield estimation in a dense environment. With photos of pre-harvest coffee plants from a couple of coffee estates, details related to pre-processing, annotation to detect regions of interest (ROI), object detection training and inferencing results with various Yolo models and finally segmentation with SAM2 and Yolo*-seg with training and inference results to determine the count of raw, pre-mature, mature and over-mature coffee berries and finally the yield of the entire estate. All this is based on real world data captured on iPhone and android phones.

About the Speaker

Raghu M. Rao is a consultant working on applications of computer vision AI models. He was previously with AMD and Xilinx. He has a Ph.D. in Wireless Communications from UCLA and is a Senior Member, IEEE. His current interests are in applications of AI for agriculture, health care and wireless communications.