Amaya Dharmasiri

I am a 3rd-year PhD student in the Princeton Visual AI Lab, advised by Dr. Olga Russakovsky. My research interests lie at the intersection of Computer Vision and Machine Learning. I am broadly interested in building models, and understanding data that leads to robust, generalizable, and data-efficient representations across modalities.

Before joining Princeton, I was a research assistant at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), advised by Dr. Salman H. Khan (MBZUAI) and Dr. Sadeep Jayasumana (Google Research). I received my Bachelor's degree in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, where I completed my undergraduate thesis on learning representations for 3D point clouds and semantic manipulation of 3D point cloud objects, advised by Dr. Ranga Rodrigo and Dr. Kanchana Thilakarathna.

I am excited about a range of problems at the intersections of Vision, Language, and Representation Learning, including:

• Distribution shift challenges of data accumulation in scaling up, and data selection in scaling down
• Scaling vision-language models while mitigating shortcut learning and bias
• Analysis of dataset-level and example-level mechanisms that lead to visual understanding and generalization
• Understanding and mitigating social biases perpetuated by large vision and language models

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