• Yang, J. (CSE) – Towards Controllable and Compositional Generative Vision

    Virtual Event

    Diffusion-based text-to-image models can generate impressive images, but they largely treat an image as a single, flat output, which makes precise editing of individual elements difficult. This proposal studies layered generative representations that align with professional editing workflows, enabling users to manipulate foreground objects while preserving the rest of the scene. A central focus is […]

  • Li, X. (CSE) – Compute-Efficient Scaling of Fully-Open Visual Encoders

    Virtual Event

    Vision encoders have demonstrated significant performance gains in visual generation and multimodal reasoning. These improvements are primarily attributed to the scaling of data, model capacity, and compute. However, this progress is becoming less accessible due to a lack of transparency in data curation and training recipes. In combination with the high compute requirements of foundation-scale […]

  • Centering the Experiences of Undocumented Transfer Students at HSIs: A Brown Bag Presentation by Valeria Alonso Blanco

    Huerta Center Conference Room (Casa Latina) 641 Merrill Rd, Santa Cruz,, CA

      The Huerta Center is proud to present a brown bag presentation by Graduate Student Research Awardee Valeria Alonso Blanco. She will present on a qualitative study that explores how undocumented Latinx transfer students navigate institutional support, belonging, and barriers at a four-year Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). Findings reveal gaps between institutional commitments and student […]

  • Sambamurthy, A. (AM) – Lazy Diffusion: Resolving Spectral Collapse in Generative Models for Turbulence

    Engineering 2 Engineering 2 1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA
    Hybrid Event

    Diffusion-based generative models offer a principled framework for probabilistic forecasting, but we show they suffer from a fundamental spectral collapse when applied to turbulent flows. A Fourier-space analysis of the forward SDE reveals that the mode-wise signal-to-noise ratio decays monotonically in wavenumber for power-law spectra, rendering high-wavenumber content indistinguishable from noise. We reinterpret the noise […]