Rui Xiao

PhD Researcher, Explainable Machine Learning
Technical University of Munich · Munich Center for Machine Learning

Advised by Prof. Dr. Zeynep Akata and Prof. Dr. Stephan Alaniz

I am a PhD researcher in the Explainable Machine Learning group at the Technical University of Munich, advised by Prof. Dr. Zeynep Akata and Prof. Dr. Stephan Alaniz. My research is on learning across modalities and domains, with a particular focus on the fine-grained visual capabilities of vision-language models — what they actually perceive, where they fail, and how to make them see more faithfully.

Before starting my PhD I received an M.Sc. in Robotics, Cognition and Intelligence from TU Munich, and a B.Eng. in Automotive Engineering from Jilin University, China.

Feel free to reach out if you would like to chat about multimodal learning — or if you are a student at TUM looking for a thesis project in this area.

News

Mar 2026FINER is accepted to CVPR 2026 as an Oral and Award Candidate.
Oct 2025Preprint on training-free uncertainty guidance for MLLMs is out.
Feb 2025FLAIR and COSMOS are both accepted to CVPR 2025.
Dec 2024FLAIR and COSMOS preprints and code are released.
Oct 2023SCOPE is presented at the GRAIL workshop, MICCAI 2023.