Paola Cascante-Bonilla is a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), working with Professor Hal Daumé III, developing methods and metrics related to trustworthy machine learning. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science at Rice University in 2024, advised by Professor Vicente Ordóñez Román, working on Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning. She is the recipient of the Ken Kennedy Institute SLB Graduate Fellowship (2022/23), and was selected as a Future Faculty Fellow by Rice's George R. Brown School of Engineering (2023) and as a Rising Star in EECS (2023). She received a Master of Computer Science at the University of Virginia and a B.S. in Engineering at the Tecnológico de Costa Rica. Previously, she interned at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) and twice at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. Before that, she spent 10 years working as a Software Engineer at different tech companies. Here is my CV and a Research Summary of my work during my graduate studies.
I'm joining Stony Brook University (SUNY) as an Assistant Professor
in the Department of Computer Science.
I'm looking for students to join my lab in Fall 2025.
If you're interested in doing some exciting research with me, please send me an email. |
dialpad Vision and Language & Multi-modal learning:Zero/few-shot learning, representation learning, continual learning.
Visual-question answering, crossmodal retrieval, multi-hop reasoning.
directions_run Synthetic data generation for compositionality and privacy protection:Simulated environments to provide a safe, controlled setting where agents can learn.
Virtual playgrounds that allow systems to experience and interact within the 3D space.
high_quality Dynamic evaluations and real-world applications:Data distribution and bias mitigation.
Assessing the performance and effectiveness of models under varying conditions.
Learning from Models and Data for Visual Grounding. Ruozhen He, Paola Cascante-Bonilla, Ziyan Yang, Alexander C. Berg, Vicente Ordóñez. March 2024. [project page] [bibtex] |
PropTest: Automatic Property Testing for Improved Visual Programming. Jaywon Koo, Ziyan Yang, Paola Cascante-Bonilla, Baishakhi Ray, Vicente Ordóñez. Findings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. EMNLP Findings 2024. Miami, Florida. November 2024. [project page] [bibtex] | ||
Grounding Language Models for Visual Entity Recognition. Zilin Xiao, Ming Gong, Paola Cascante-Bonilla, Xingyao Zhang, Jie Wu, and Vicente Ordonez. 2024 European Conference on Computer Vision. ECCV 2024. Milano, Italy. September 2024. [code] [bibtex] | ||
Improved Visual Grounding through Self-Consistent Explanations. Ruozhen He, Paola Cascante-Bonilla, Ziyan Yang, Alexander C. Berg, Vicente Ordóñez. 2024 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. CVPR 2024. Seattle, Washington. June 2024. [project page] [bibtex] | ||
Dense and Aligned Captions (DAC) Promote Compositional Reasoning in VL Models (spotlight). Sivan Doveh, Assaf Arbelle, Sivan Harary, Roei Herzig, Donghyun Kim, Paola Cascante-Bonilla, Amit Alfassy, Rameswar Panda, Raja Giryes, Rogerio Feris, Shimon Ullman, Leonid Karlinsky. Thirty-seventh Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. NeurIPS 2023. New Orleans, Lousiana. December 2023. [arxiv] [bibtex] | ||
Going Beyond Nouns With Vision & Language Models Using Synthetic Data. Paola Cascante-Bonilla, Khaled Shehada, James Seale Smith, Sivan Doveh, Donghyun Kim, Rameswar Panda, Gül Varol, Aude Oliva, Vicente Ordonez, Rogerio Feris, Leonid Karlinsky. The 19th International Conference on Computer Vision. ICCV 2023. Paris, France. December 2023. [arxiv] [project page] [bibtex] | ||
ConStruct-VL: Data-Free Continual Structured VL Concepts Learning. James Seale Smith, Paola Cascante-Bonilla, Assaf Arbelle, Donghyun Kim, Rameswar Panda, David Cox, Diyi Yang, Zsolt Kira, Rogerio Feris, Leonid Karlinsky. 2023 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. CVPR 2023. Vancouver, Canada. June 2023. [arxiv] [bibtex] | ||
CODA-Prompt: COntinual Decomposed Attention-based Prompting for Rehearsal-Free Continual Learning. James Seale Smith, Leonid Karlinsky, Vyshnavi Gutta, Paola Cascante-Bonilla, Donghyun Kim, Assaf Arbelle, Rameswar Panda, Rogerio Feris, Zsolt Kira. 2023 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. CVPR 2023. Vancouver, Canada. June 2023. [arxiv] [bibtex] | ||
SimVQA: Exploring Simulated Environments for Visual Question Answering. Paola Cascante-Bonilla, Hui Wu, Letao Wang, Rogerio Feris, Vicente Ordonez. 2022 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. CVPR 2022. New Orleans, Lousiana. June 2022. [arxiv] [project page] [bibtex] |
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On the Transferability of Visual Features in Generalized Zero-Shot Learning. Paola Cascante-Bonilla, Leonid Karlinsky, James Seale Smith, Yanjun Qi, Vicente Ordóñez. November 2022. [code] [bibtex] | ||
Evolving Image Compositions for Feature Representation Learning. Paola Cascante-Bonilla, Arshdeep Sekhon, Yanjun Qi, Vicente Ordonez. The 32nd British Machine Vision Conference. BMVC 2021. Virtual Conference. November 2021. [arxiv] [project page] [bibtex] |
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Curriculum Labeling: Revisiting Pseudo-Labeling for Semi-Supervised Learning. Paola Cascante-Bonilla, Fuwen Tan, Yanjun Qi, Vicente Ordonez. The 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI 2021. Virtual Conference. February 2021. [arxiv] [code] [bibtex] |
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Drill-down: Interactive Retrieval of Complex Scenes using Natural Language Queries. Fuwen Tan, Paola Cascante-Bonilla, Xiaoxiao Guo, Hui Wu, Song Feng, Vicente Ordonez. Conf. on Neural Information Processing Systems. NeurIPS 2019. Vancouver, Canada. December 2019. [arxiv] [code] [bibtex] |
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Moviescope: Large-scale Analysis of Movies using Multiple Modalities. Paola Cascante-Bonilla, Kalpathy Sitaraman, Mengjia Luo, Vicente Ordonez. August 2019. [arxiv] [project page] [bibtex] Media coverage: techxplore article |
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Chat-crowd: A Dialog-based Platform for Visual Layout Composition. Paola Cascante-Bonilla, Xuwang Yin, Vicente Ordonez, Song Feng. North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. NAACL 2019. System Demonstrations. Minneapolis, Minnesota. June 2019. [arxiv] [project page] [code] [bibtex] |