Antara Titikhsha

2papers

2 Papers

CVDec 25, 2025
Human-Aligned Generative Perception: Bridging Psychophysics and Generative Models

Antara Titikhsha, Om Kulkarni, Dharun Muthaiah

Text-to-image diffusion models generate highly detailed textures, yet they often rely on surface appearance and fail to follow strict geometric constraints, particularly when those constraints conflict with the style implied by the text prompt. This reflects a broader semantic gap between human perception and current generative models. We investigate whether geometric understanding can be introduced without specialized training by using lightweight, off-the-shelf discriminators as external guidance signals. We propose a Human Perception Embedding (HPE) teacher trained on the THINGS triplet dataset, which captures human sensitivity to object shape. By injecting gradients from this teacher into the latent diffusion process, we show that geometry and style can be separated in a controllable manner. We evaluate this approach across three architectures: Stable Diffusion v1.5 with a U-Net backbone, the flow-matching model SiT-XL/2, and the diffusion transformer PixArt-Σ. Our experiments reveal that flow models tend to drift back toward their default trajectories without continuous guidance, and we demonstrate zero-shot transfer of complex three-dimensional shapes, such as an Eames chair, onto conflicting materials such as pink metal. This guided generation improves semantic alignment by about 80 percent compared to unguided baselines. Overall, our results show that small teacher models can reliably guide large generative systems, enabling stronger geometric control and broadening the creative range of text-to-image synthesis.

4.9CVApr 16
Beyond Augmentation: Cross-Modal Transformer Fusion with Bi-directional Attention for Low-Data Aneurysm Screening

Antara Titikhsha, Divyanshu Tak

Intracranial aneurysm rupture causes subarachnoid hemorrhage with mortality near 50%, making early detection critical. Although CTA enables rapid screening, detecting small aneurysms within the complex three-dimensional branching of the Circle of Willis remains expertise-dependent. Existing automated systems are constrained by class imbalance, skull-base artifacts that mimic vascular contrast, and reliance on global binary classification without structured localization, limiting surgical relevance and interpretability. We propose CMTF-Net, a cross-modal target fusion framework that reframes aneurysm screening as anatomically structured reasoning. By supervising 14 vascular territories independently, the network encodes Circle of Willis geometry while allowing multi-segment activation, aligning model design with clinical workflow. CMTF-Net achieves near-perfect AUC-ROC with narrow confidence intervals and sustained precision under imbalance. Grad-CAM and causal maps show spatially localized activation along major arteries, supporting interpretable, anatomically grounded screening in low-data settings.