Julia Chae
I study how large vision and multimodal models can become more fine-grained, specialized, and useful for real-world and scientific applications.
I’m a PhD student in EECS at MIT CSAIL, advised by Sara Beery. I collaborate closely with Adobe Research, primarily with Cusuh Ham and Richard Zhang. Previously, I studied EngSci at the University of Toronto, working with Sanja Fidler, Florian Shkurti, and Steven Waslander. I co-organize MLTea at MIT.
research interests
I'm currently thinking a lot about:
- Fine-Grained Perception: Improving how vision and multimodal models distinguish subtle visual differences, particularly by leveraging specialized or synthetic data, or expert knowledge & feedback.
- Multimodal Representations: Understanding how models organize visual and semantic knowledge across modalities, and how the structure of their representations shapes their capabilities and specialization
- AI for Scientific Discovery: Accelerating scientific data curation and discovery with multimodal AI models.
news
| Oct 2026 | Received Honorable Mentions on the MIT Open Data Prize. |
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| Sept 2026 | Led the organization of the third CV4E Workshop at ECCV in Molmo. |
| June 2026 | Presented our paper, ID-Sim: An Identity-Focused Similarity Metric, at CVPR 2026 in Denver! |
| May 2026 | Started my internship at Adobe Research in SF working on multimodal embeddings, mentored by Cusuh Ham and hosted by Richard Zhang. |
| Jan 2026 | Gave talks on Interactive Discovery in Large-Scale Biodiversity Databases at Google-MIT lightning talks and the MIT Global Teaching Labs workshop. |
| Oct 19, 2025 | Excited to attend ICCV 2025, co-organize the 2nd CV4Ecology Workshop, and present our PRPG poster at the Instance-Level Recognition and Generation Workshop. |
| Jun 1, 2025 | Started an internship at Adobe Research working on designing a fine-grained visual perceptual metric (w/ mentor Cusuh Ham) |
| May 28, 2025 | Completed my Master of Science (SM) degree at MIT 🎓 |
| Apr 22, 2025 | Attending ICLR in Singapore to present Personalized Representation from Personalized Generation (PRPG) at the main conference! |
| Mar 5, 2025 | Gave a talk at Cohere (See recording here) |
| Jan 22, 2025 | Our paper, Personalized Representation from Personalized Generation was accepted to ICLR 2025! |
| Jan 6, 2025 | Served as an instructor for the three-week intensive Computer Vision for Ecology Workshop at Caltech Resnick Sustainability Institute |
| Sep 30, 2024 | Co-Organized 1st ever CV4E Workshop at ECCV in Milan! |