Parsa Madinei

Ziqi Wen, Parsa Madinei, Miguel P. Eckstein

Evaluating whether large vision-language models (VLMs) align with human perception for high-level semantic scene comprehension remains a challenge. Traditional white-box interpretability methods are inapplicable to closed-source architectures and passive metrics fail to isolate causal features. We introduce Counterfactual Semantic Saliency (CSS). This black-box, model-agnostic framework quantifies the importance of objects by measuring the semantic shift induced by their causal ablation from a scene. To evaluate AI-human semantic alignment, we tested prominent VLMs against a human psychophysics baseline comprising 16,289 valid responses across 307 complex natural scenes and 1,306 high-fidelity counterfactual variants. Our analysis reveals a pervasive scene comprehension gap: models exhibit an overreliance (relative to humans) on large objects (size bias), objects at the center of the image (center bias), and high saliency objects. In contrast, models rely less on people in the scenes than our human participants to describe the images. A model's size bias is a primary driver explaining variations in model-human semantic divergence. Code and data will be available at https://github.com/starsky77/Counterfactual-Semantic-Saliency.

Parsa Madinei, Ryan Solgi, Ziqi Wen et al.

We introduce INTERLACE, a novel framework that prunes redundant layers in VLMs while maintaining performance through sample-efficient finetuning. Existing layer pruning methods lead to significant performance drop when applied to VLMs. Instead, we analyze triplets of consecutive layers to identify local redundancy, removing the most redundant of the first two layers, finetune the remaining layer to compensate for the lost capacity, and freeze the third layer to serve as a stable anchor during finetuning. We found that this interleaved finetune-freeze design enables rapid convergence with minimal data after pruning. By finetuning only a subset of layers on just 1% of the FineVision dataset for one epoch, Interlace achieves 88.9% average performance retention after dropping 25% of the network, achieving SOTA performance. Our code is available at: https://github.com/pmadinei/Interlace.git

Parsa Madinei, Srijita Karmakar, Russell Cohen Hoffing et al.

We introduce IRIS (Intent Resolution via Inference-time Saccades), a novel training-free approach that uses eye-tracking data in real-time to resolve ambiguity in open-ended VQA. Through a comprehensive user study with 500 unique image-question pairs, we demonstrate that fixations closest to the time participants start verbally asking their questions are the most informative for disambiguation in Large VLMs, more than doubling the accuracy of responses on ambiguous questions (from 35.2% to 77.2%) while maintaining performance on unambiguous queries. We evaluate our approach across state-of-the-art VLMs, showing consistent improvements when gaze data is incorporated in ambiguous image-question pairs, regardless of architectural differences. We release a new benchmark dataset to use eye movement data for disambiguated VQA, a novel real-time interactive protocol, and an evaluation suite.

Rithik Vir, Parsa Madinei

Cooking meals can be difficult, causing many to resort to cookbooks and online recipes. However, relying on these traditional methods of cooking often results in missing ingredients, nutritional hazards, and unsatisfactory meals. Using Augmented Reality (AR) can address these issues; however, current AR cooking applications have poor user interfaces and limited accessibility. This paper proposes a prototype of an iOS application that integrates AR and Computer Vision (CV) into the cooking process. We leverage Google's Gemini Large Language Model (LLM) to identify ingredients in the camera's field of vision and generate recipe choices with detailed nutritional information. Additionally, this application uses Apple's ARKit to create an AR user interface compatible with iOS devices. Users can personalize their meal suggestions by inputting their dietary preferences and rating each meal. The application's effectiveness is evaluated through three rounds of user experience surveys. This application advances the field of accessible cooking assistance technologies, aiming to reduce food wastage and improve the meal planning experience.

Jonathan Skaza, Parsa Madinei, Ziqi Wen et al.

Visual complexity prediction is a fundamental problem in computer vision with applications in image compression, retrieval, and classification. Understanding what makes humans perceive an image as complex is also a long-standing question in cognitive science. Recent approaches have leveraged multimodal models that combine visual and linguistic representations, but it remains unclear whether language information is necessary for this task. We propose DReX (DINO-ResNet Fusion), a vision-only model that fuses self-supervised and convolutional representations through a learnable attention mechanism to predict image complexity. Our architecture integrates multi-scale hierarchical features from ResNet-50 with semantically rich representations from DINOv3 ViT-S/16, enabling the model to capture both low-level texture patterns and high-level semantic structure. DReX achieves state-of-the-art performance on the IC9600 benchmark (Pearson r = 0.9581), surpassing previous methods--including those trained on multimodal image-text data--while using approximately 21.5x fewer learnable parameters. Furthermore, DReX generalizes robustly across multiple datasets and metrics, achieving superior results on Pearson and Spearman correlation, Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), and Mean Absolute Error (MAE). Ablation and attention analyses confirm that DReX leverages complementary cues from both backbones, with the DINOv3 [CLS] token enhancing sensitivity to visual complexity. Our findings suggest that visual features alone can be sufficient for human-aligned complexity prediction and that, when properly fused, self-supervised transformers and supervised deep convolutional neural networks offer complementary and synergistic benefits for this task.

Ryan Solgi, Parsa Madinei, Jiayi Tian et al.

Large language models (LLM) and vision-language models (VLM) have achieved state-of-the-art performance, but they impose significant memory and computing challenges in deployment. We present a novel low-rank compression framework to address this challenge. First, we upper bound the change of network loss via layer-wise activation-based compression errors, filling a theoretical gap in the literature. We then formulate low-rank model compression as a bi-objective optimization and prove that a single uniform tolerance yields surrogate Pareto-optimal heterogeneous ranks. Based on our theoretical insights, we propose Pareto-Guided Singular Value Decomposition (PGSVD), a zero-shot pipeline that improves activation-aware compression via Pareto-guided rank selection and alternating least-squares implementation. We apply PGSVD to both LLM and VLM, showing better accuracy at the same compression levels and inference speedup.