M. Usman Rafique
I am a researcher working on computer vision and machine learning. My research areas include image synthesis, image understanding, and scene parsing and segmentation. I have been working with natural, outdoor scenes and remote sensing images (both aerial and satellite).
Recently, I have been working on large language models (LLMs) such as GPT. I have implemented GPT-Nano, a light-weight alternative of GPT-2 and GPT-3. I am currently working on efficient fine-tuning a 20 billion GPT model on a single GPU (blog post coming soon).
During PhD from the University of Kentucky, I was a member of the Multimodal Vision Research Lab working with Dr. Nathan Jacobs. My co-advisor was Dr. Samson Cheung. My PhD research was about combining information from multiple images for scene understanding and image synthesis.
After finishing PhD, I worked at Kitware Inc. as a senior research and development engineer for 1 year and 9 months.
My old website from my teaching days is available here.
Update July 2023 I am now looking for new opportunities :) Feel free to reach out, my contact details are on the left panel.
Update Aug 2023 I have finished my job search; excited to join RnD Lab of Bastian Solutions, a Toyota Advanced Logistics Company, as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer. I will be doing research on computer vision models for robotics and automation.
Research Projects
Near-Remote Sensing
Diverse View Synthesis
Novel View Synthesis
Multi-Image Fusion
Weakly Supervised Segmentation
Recent News
- Aug 21, 2023: glad to join RnD Lab of Bastian Solutions (a Toyota Advanced Logistics Company) as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer. I will be doing research on computer vision models for robotics and automation.
- June 5, 2023: implemented GPT-Nano, a light-weight large language model (LLM), implemented from scratch in PyTorch.
- May 6, 2023: recognized as an outstanding reviewer for CVPR 2023. I am very pleased to be one of 232 outstanding reviewers out of a total of 7000 reviewers.
- Jan 20, 2023: two papers accepted at IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) 2023.
- Jan 20, 2023: wrote a blog post: “Reflections on Reviewing Computer Vision Papers”.
- Aug 17, 2022: paper “Handling Image and Label Resolution Mismatch in Remote Sensing” (PDF) accepted to WACV 2023.
- March 3, 2022: paper “Revisiting Near/Remote Sensing With Geospatial Attention” (PDF) accepted to CVPR 2022.
- Feb 15, 2022: paper on sinkhole segmentation published to AGU Earth and Space Science Journal
- Nov 24 2021: recognized as an outstanding reviewer for BMVC 2021.
- Aug 2, 2021: joined Kitware Inc. as a Senior Research and Development Engineer
- June 8, 2021: I have successfully defended my PhD dissertation :confetti_ball: Bonus: the announcement tweet by my advisor
- May 20, 2021: recognized as an outstanding reviewer for CVPR 2021
- April 11, 2021: paper acceptd to NTIRE: New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement workshop and challenges at CVPR 2021
- March 16, 2021: paper accepted to IEEE International Geosciences and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) 2021
- December 12, 2020: gave a talk on “Automatic Identification of Sinkholes Using Deep Learning from Remote Sensing Data” at Kentucky Geological Survey
- July 31, 2020: paper accepted to BioImage Computing (BIC) workshop held at ECCV 2020
- July 29, 2020: paper accpeted to The British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC) 2020
- March 29, 2020: paper accepted to IEEE International Geosciences and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) 2020
- December 10, 2019: successfully defended my dissertation proposal
- June 17, 2019: presented my paper at EarthVision 2019 (CVPR 2019), Long Beach, CA
- April 5, 2019: paper accepted to IEEE International Geosciences and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS) 2019
- April 4, 2019: paper accepted at EarthVision Workshop 2019 held in conjunction with CVPR 2019