Title: Towards Fair and Controllable Diffusion Models

Time: 11:00 am to 12:00 noon. Wednesday, 24.09.2025

Abstract:

Diffusion models have transformed text-to-image generation, but challenges remain in fairness, representativeness, and user control. In this talk, we present some of our efforts that address these critical gaps. We begin by examining the demographic and geographic biases in popular generative models, showing over-representation of certain regions and attributes. To mitigate the biases in generative models, we propose distribution-guided debiasing methods that align outputs with desired attribute distributions without retraining, enabling fairer and more inclusive generations. Beyond fairness, we introduce fine-grained control mechanisms, enabling precise attribute editing and identity preservation, bridging realism with user-driven customization. We extend controllability to spatial reasoning with affordance-aware text-guided human placement, ensuring semantically plausible compositions, while the proposed zero-shot, depth-aware editing enables realistic scene modifications without additional supervision. We hope these contributions help in making the generative models that are equitable, transparent, and highly controllable for real-world applications.

Title: TBA

Time: 2:30 pm to 3:30 pm. Wednesday, 24.09.2025

Abstract: TBA

Title: Opportunities in Egocentric Vision

Time: 10:30 am to 11:30 am. Thursday, 25.09.2025

Abstract:

Forecasting the rise of wearable devices equipped with audio-visual feeds, this talk will present opportunities for research in egocentric video understanding. The talk argues for new ways to foresee egocentric videos as partial observations of a dynamic 3D world, where objects are out of sight but not out of mind. I’ll review new data collection and annotation HD-EPIC (https://hd-epic.github.io/) that merges video understanding with 3D modelling, showcasing current failures of VLMs in understanding the perspective outside the camera’s field of view — a task trivial for humans. 

All projects details are at: dimadamen.github.io/index.html

Title: TBA

Time: 3:30 pm to 4:30 pm. Thursday, 25.09.2025

Abstract: TBA

Title: TBA

Time: 9:00 am to 10:00 am. Friday, 26.09.2025

Abstract: TBA