About me
I am a 4th year PhD candidate at University of California, Davis - ECE Department, advised by Prof. Chen-Nee Chuah, focusing on Security and Privacy of Computer Vision.
Previously:
- Fall 2025: PhD ML Engineer Intern at Cisco AI Defense under Prashanth Arun.
- Spring & Summer 2025: Applied Scientist intern at Amazon Ring (Sunnyvale, CA) under Noranart (Sol) Vesdapunt and Ning Zhou.
- Summer 2023: PhD Research Intern at Sony AI - PPML team under the mentorship of Dr. Lingjuan Lv and Dr. Vivek Sharma.
- Summer 2022: ML Research Engineer Intern at Sony - Imaging & Sensing under Mr. Hideshi Yamada.
Research Interests: Privacy-Preserving Computer Vision, Multi-Modal LLMs, Vision-Language Models, Generative AI
Selected Publications
Empowering Source-Free Domain Adaptation via MLLM-Guided Reliability-Based Curriculum Learning
Kartik Patwari*, Dongjie Chen*, Zhengfeng Lai, Xiaoguang Zhu, Samson Cheung, Chen-Nee Chuah
IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) , March 2026
Paper Code
Rendering-Refined Stable Diffusion for Privacy Compliant Synthetic Data
Kartik Patwari*, David Schneider*, Xiaoxiao Sun, Chen-Nee Chuah, Lingjuan Lyu, Vivek Sharma*
Preprint , December 2024
Paper Code
PerceptAnon: Exploring the Human Perception of Image Anonymization Beyond Pseudonymization for GDPR
Kartik Patwari*, Chen-Nee Chuah, Lingjuan Lyu, Vivek Sharma*
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) , July 2024
Paper Code Poster Website
See more…
News
💪 Succedfuly completed my PhD exit seminar / defense.
📄 First-author paper, “Empowering Source-Free Domain Adaptation with MLLM-driven Curriculum Learning” is accepted at The IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2026 !
💼📊 Joined Cisco Systems (San Jose, CA) as an ML Engineer Intern! I will be working on prompt injection attacks on multimodal models in AI defense team.