About Me

Hi, I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Dept. of Psychology at Harvard University, advised by Prof. George Alvarez and Prof. Talia Konkle in the Vision Sciences Lab and Cognitive and Neural Organization Lab. I am grateful to be supported by the Graduate Fellowship at the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Vision. I am broadly interested in how the human mind transforms visual sensory information into meaningful percepts of the world, and whether we can use artificial vision models to dissect the sophisticated mechanisms that biological vision uses to isolate and segment different objects in a scene.

Specifically, I am exploring the tuning and spatial topographies of proto-object representations and the mid-level mechanisms that lead to the emergence of an object’s global shape information in both, humans and vision models. My recent work ventures into using self-supervised learning, knowledge distillation and vision-language alignment to identify the inductive biases that facilitate learning holistic shape representations that can capture human-like sensitivity to configural relations between object parts.

To achieve these goals, I use a multidisciplinary approach that combines computational models of vision, primarily deep neural networks, with behavioral psychophysics and neuroimaging data. By integrating these techniques, I aim to gain deeper insights into the emergent mechanistic signatures of mid-level computations that underlie biological and machine vision. Here’s a brief walkthrough about my ongoing research, and you can learn more about my background and previous work on the Harvard Brain Science Initiative page.

Here is our recent work on holistic processing and shape perception in vision models

Link to paper, project page, and tweet-thread

Check out our work on modeling cortical topographies

Link to paper and tweet-thread

Here’s some recent work on computational mechanims underlying mid-level object perception

Link to paper and tweet-thread

Talk on perceptual signatures of contour integration in humans and deep neural networks

Presented at Vision Sciences Society 2022

Talk on a topographic model of the human visual system using self-organizing constraints

Presented at Vision Sciences Society 2021