Ainaz Eftekhar

I am a PhD student at the University of Washington in Computer Science and Engineering supervised by Prof. Ali Farhadi (RAIVN Lab) and Prof. Ranjay Krishna.

In summer 2023, I was a research intern in the PRIOR team at Allen Institute for AI (AI2) closely working with Kuo-Hao Zeng and Ani Kembhavi.

Previously, I received my Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology. During the last year of my Bachelor, I was a visiting student at EPFL where I was working with at VILAB with Prof. Amir Zamir.

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Research

I'm interested in developing Reinforcement Learning strategies where the agents can explore in a unsupervised fashion through curiosity and intrinsic motivation signals, learn useful prior over representation and dynamics of the world and be able to quickly adapt to a variety of new tasks.

Publications & Preprints
Selective Visual Representations Improve Convergence and Generalization for Embodied-AI
Ainaz Eftekhar*, Kuo-Hao Zeng*, Jiafei Duan, Ali Farhadi, Ani Kembhavi, Ranjay Krishna
ICLR, 2024 [Spotlight]
project page / arXiv / code

Inspired by selective attention in humans—the process through which people filter their perception based on their experiences, knowledge, and the task at hand—we introduce a parameter-efficient approach to filter visual stimuli for Embodied-AI.

Omnidata: A Scalable Pipeline for Making Multi-Task Mid-Level Vision Datasets from 3D Scans
Ainaz Eftekhar*, Alexander Sax*, Roman Bachmann, Jitendra Malik, Amir Zamir
ICCV, 2021
project page / arXiv / code

A pipeline to resample comprehensive 3D scans from the real-world into static multi-task vision datasets.

Puzzle-AE: Novelty Detection in Images Through Solving Puzzles
Mohammadreza Salehi, Ainaz Eftekhar* Niousha Sadjadi, Mohammad Hossein Rohban, Hamid R. Rabiee
arXiv , 2020
arXiv / code

A self-supervised approach to Anomaly Detection.

Honors & Awards
  • 2021: EPFL Summer Research Fellowship: Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne
  • 2020: Top 5% Academic Ranking: Sharif University of Technology
  • 2016-2015: Bronze Medal: Iranian National Math Olympiad
  • 2013: Gold Medal in the 9th International Mathematics Contest: IMC (Singapore) [certificate]

Design and source code from Jon Barron's website.