I am a Senior Research Scientist at Cruise with a focus on GenAI for sensor simulation and foundation models for autonomous driving. Before that I was Research Scientist at Algolux where I worked on synthetic data and depth estimation for long-range, adverse-weather driving scenarios.
I completed my PhD in Computer Vision at Heidelberg University, Germany, supervised by Prof. Carsten Rother and and co-supervised by Prof. Andreas Geiger. During my PhD, I interned with the Learning and Perception Group at NVIDIA twice, hosted by Shalini De Mello and Jan Kautz.
My main focus during PhD was in developing algorithms and data for self-supervised learning of computer vision tasks through generative image/video synthesis.

Email : karthik.kovalam@gmail.com

---

Publications

VLM-AD: End-to-End Autonomous Driving through Vision-Language Model Supervision Yi Xu, Yuxin Hu, Zaiwei Zhang, Gregory P. Meyer, Siva Karthik Mustikovela, Siddhartha Srinivasa, Eric M. Wolff, Xin Huang Arxiv 24 [Paper]

ViP-LLaVA: Making Large Multimodal Models Understand Arbitrary Visual Prompts Mu Cai, Haotian Liu, Dennis Park, Siva Karthik Mustikovela, Gregory P. Meyer, Yuning Chai, Yong Jae Lee CVPR 24 [Paper]

Self-Supervised Object Detection via Generative Image Synthesis Siva Karthik M, Shalini De Mello, Aayush Prakash, Umar Iqbal, Sifei Liu, Thu Nguyen-Phuoc, Carsten Rother, Jan Kautz ICCV 21 [Paper]

Self-Supervised Viewpoint Learning From Image Collections Siva Karthik M, Varun Jampani , Shalini De Mello , Sifei Liu , Umar Iqbal , Carsten Rother, Jan Kautz CVPR 20 [Paper] [Project] [Code]

Intrinsic Autoencoders for Joint Deferred Neural Rendering and Intrinsic Image Decomposition Siva Karthik M*, Hassan Abu Alhaija* , Varun Jampani, Justus Thies, Matthias Niessner, Andreas Geiger, Carsten Rother 3DV 20 [Paper] [Poster]   *equal contribution

iPose: Instance-Aware 6D Pose Estimation of Partly Occluded Objects Siva Karthik M*, Omid Hosseini Jafari*, Karl Pertsch, Eric Brachmann, Carsten Rother ACCV 18 [Paper]   *equal contribution

Bounding Boxes, Segmentations and Object Coordinates: How Important is Recognition for 3D Scene Flow Estimation in Autonomous Driving Scenarios? Siva Karthik M*, Aseem Behl*, Omid Hosseini Jafari*, Hassan Abu Alhaija, Carsten Rother, Andreas Geiger ICCV 17 [Paper]   *equal contribution

Geometric Image Synthesis Hassan Abu Alhaija, Siva Karthik M, Andreas Geiger, Carsten Rother ACCV 18 [Paper] [video]

Augmented Reality Meets Computer Vision : Efficient Data Generation for Urban Driving Scenes Hassan Abu Alhaija, Siva Karthik M, Lars Mescheder, Andreas Geiger, Carsten Rother IJCV 18 [Paper]

Augmented Reality Meets Deep Learning for Car Instance Segmentation in Urban Scenes Hassan Abu Alhaija, Siva Karthik M, Lars Mescheder, Andreas Geiger, Carsten Rother BMVC 17 [Paper]

Can Ground Truth Label Propagation from Video help Semantic Segmentation? Siva Karthik M, Michael Yang, Carsten Rother Video Seg. Workshop, ECCV 16 [Paper]

Markov Random Field based Small Obstacle Discovery over Images Siva Karthik M*, Suryansh Kumar*, K Madhava Krishna ICRA 14 [Paper] *equal contribution

Guess from Far, Recognize when Near: Searching Floor for Small Objects Siva Karthik M, Sudhanshu Mittal, K Madhava Krishna ICVGIP 14 [Paper] [video]

---