Sairam V C Rebbapragada

About Me

I am Sairam, a PhD candidate in Artificial Intelligence at IIT Hyderabad, India, where I am fortunate to be advised by Dr. Vineeth N Balasubramanian.

Research Interests

• Computer Vision & Deep Learning: Robust and Efficient Visual Perception. Specific interests include Multimodal Large Language Models, Visual GUI Agents, Learning with Limited Labels, Domain Adaptation & Generalization, Aerial Vision (tiny \& oriented object detection), Machine Unlearning, and Mechanistic Interpretability.

Brief objectives of my Research work in PhD:

Broadly, I like building visual perception systems that do not just work in clean benchmark settings, but remain reliable when deployed in real-world conditions: tiny objects, long-tailed data, limited labels, domain shifts, and real-time constraints. My work spans aerial/drone perception, object detection under distribution shifts, source-free adaptation, and efficient deployment. More recently, I have also been exploring GUI agents, MLLM safety/unlearning, and mechanistic interpretability. Along the way, my work has found homes in communities I deeply value, including CVPR, ECCV, ICRA, and WACV.

Hobbies:

I love nature, music and sports. I enjoy playing volleyball, table tennis, and carroms in my free time. Cooking is also one of my favorite pastimes. Additionally, I have a talent for whistling songs and playing the cajon.

News

• [June. 2026] Our paper on Real-Time Source-Free Object Detection is accepted at ECCV 2026. Looking forward to presenting it @Sweden.
• [June. 2026] Excited to present 3 papers at CVPR’26 @ Denver
• [Feb. 2026] 3 papers accepted at CVPR 2026
• [Jan. 2025] Excited to join Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Abu Dhabi, as a visiting student, where I will be working with Dr. Muhammad Haris Khan. Looking forward to a productive and insightful collaboration!
• [Dec. 2024] Selected for a poster presentation at ACM-PIC-2025 at Infosys, Mysore
• [Nov. 2024] Presented a poster at Amazon Research Days 2024, Bangalore
• [Sep. 2024] Thrilled to be selected for a poster presentation at IndoML 2024 at BITS Pilani Goa
• [Sep. 2024] Presented a lightning talk and a poster at the Young Researchers’ Forum on Data and AI for Public Good at IISc Bangalore.
• [July. 2024] Volunteered for code-walthrough in the hands-on session at IIIT Hyderabad’s 8th Summer School on AI with focus on Computer Vision & Machine Learning
• [May. 2024] Delivered an oral presentation at ICRA 2024. Find our paper here
• [Mar. 2024] Honored with the Research Excellence Award at IIT Hyderabad’s 16th Foundation Day. My heartfelt gratitude to Dr. Vineeth N Balasubramanian for his invaluable guidance.
• [Feb. 2024] Participating in Google Research Week 2024
• [Jan. 2024] Happy to share that our paper on Drone-to-Drone Detection using Vision Transformer Networks is accepted for presentation at ICRA 2024.
• [Mar. 2023] Our work titled ‘Do Models see Corruption as we see? An Item Response Theory based study in Computer Vision’ is accepted in PML4DC at ICLR 2023.
• [Jan. 2023] Attending Google Research Week’23 provided an incredible opportunity to meet and learn from some of the most brilliant minds in the field.
• [Dec. 2022] As a student volunteer for the esteemed ACML’22 conference, I had the privilege of interacting with an incredibly talented group of individuals from all around the world.
• [Aug. 2022] Happy to share that our paper on tackling the severe size imbalance in aerial object datasets got accepted in WACV 2023
• [Nov. 2020] Honoured to be awarded with a gold medal for academic excellence in Computer Science at IIIT, Tiruchirappalli

Publications

Services

Research venues attended:

• [Sep. 2024] Young Researchers’ Forum on Data and AI for Public Good, a spotlight event in the Symposium on Data for Public Good at IISc Bangalore
• [July. 2024] IIIT Hyderabad’s Summer School on AI with a focus on Computer Vision & Machine Learning
• [May. 2024] IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024
• [Feb. 2024] Google Research week 2024
• [Jan. 2023] Google Research week 2023
• [Dec. 2022] Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML) 2022