04.07.2023

PhD student Karsten Roth receives Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Europe

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., announced the four winners of the 14th edition of the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF) Europe: Atri Bhattacharyya (EPFL), Karsten Roth (University of Tübingen), Siwei Zhang (ETH Zürich) and Tycho van der Ouderaa (Imperial College London).

QIF is an excellence award through which Qualcomm Technologies recognizes and mentors some of the most innovative engineering PhD students across Europe, India, and the United States. The European program rewards researchers in the fields of artificial intelligence and cybersecurity with individual prizes of USD $40,000 and dedicated mentors from the Qualcomm Technologies team.

One oft he winners is Karsten Roth, PhD Student at our Cluster’s Explainable Machine Learning Group lead by Zeynep Akata. He received the award for the project titled „Effective Lifelong Adaptation of Vision-Language Foundation Models across Domains for Practical Deployment“.

About the project: Open-vocabulary vision-language models are key for advancements in multimodal applications, but their usefulness diminishes as their training context becomes outdated. It is thus important to develop and understand mechanisms that allow us to continuously update these models without costly retraining. As a result, Karsten first proposes to benchmark current continual learning techniques and obtain insights on impact of various design choices considered in such techniques. The proposal then plans to leverage these insights and introduce extensions to improve performance of continual learning strategies. This work is expected to provide valuable insights into transferring continual learning research from small data and model regime to large-scale continuous adaptation in foundation models.

More information on the Qualcomm Technologies Website.