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]