Pramish Paudel
I am a researcher at INSAIT, where I am fortunate to work with Prof. Luc Van Gool and Prof. Dr. Danda Pani Paudel.
My research goal: world models capable of causal reasoning, so that AI can make scientific discoveries.
Scientists found an ancient lake on Mars from an orbital image. The discovery was possible because the human mind can reason about cause and effect.
My UG thesis, iHuman (ECCV 2024), was built at a college with no research lab and no GPU compute, and became the first top-tier vision paper from a Nepalese institute. I also co-founded sceneverse.ai (later widelabs.ai), part of Entrepreneur First (backed by Demis Hassabis, Eric Schmidt and Reid Hoffman). I worked on understanding videos and 3D CAD models, for clients like Pilatus Aircraft (demos).
E-mail: pramish[dot]paudel[at]gmail[dot]com
Publications
* equal contribution
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iSEE: Object Permanence Through Self-Supervision
A self-supervised method that learns object permanence from video without labels; within 4.1 mAP of a supervised tracker on LA-CATER.
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Vision Transformers Need Cross Aggregation for Patch Semantics (CALiT)
A loss on the CLS token sends most ViT patches nearly the same gradient. Cross aggregation fixes this and sharpens patch features, for 0.6% extra FLOPs on ViT-S.
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iHuman: Instant Animatable Digital Humans From Monocular Videos
Animatable 3D human reconstruction from monocular video. My undergraduate thesis.
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SceneBench: A Hierarchical Benchmark for Vision-Language Understanding of 3D Scenes
A benchmark for vision-language understanding of 3D scenes.
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iARCS: Iterative Agentic RL for Controllable 3D Scene Generation
Agentic RL that steers 3D scene generators toward language-specified constraints.
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iADD: Improving Alignment and Diversity in Diffusion Policy Optimization
RL post-training that improves both alignment and diversity of diffusion models.
Demos
Prototypes we built at sceneverse.ai (later widelabs.ai), including for companies like Pilatus Aircraft.
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Understanding the technician's work
Watches a technician work on an aircraft through their own eyes, and understands what they are doing.
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Recognizes parts and the technician's actions in video, given only the CAD model.
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Turns a CAD assembly into step-by-step work instructions.
Honors & Awards
- INSAIT Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF), 2024. Fully funded research fellowship for undergraduates worldwide; acceptance rate under 2%.
- University Grants Commission (UGC) Grant, 2023. Brought ~US$30K from UGC Nepal to my department for my project; one of 18 recipients across Nepal.
- Hult Prize Global Accelerator, Boston, 2022. Won the regional summit with MeasureMe.AI and reached the top 16 of 30,000+ teams competing for the US$1 million prize.
- Merit-based Scholarship, 2021. Awarded for one semester, Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering, Pulchowk Campus.
- Glocal 20 Under 20, 2017. Awarded at age 17 for the impact of an app I built at 14, which helped 20,000+ people. Broadcast on national TV.
Mentoring
- Research: Formed an undergraduate research group at Pulchowk Campus to build research culture in Nepal. Supervise 5 students on their final-year theses.
- Startups: Advise startups from recent graduates in Nepal to help startup culture flourish back home.
Academic Service
- Reviewer: ICLR, IEEE RA-L, ACM TOMM