Hi! I'm Juan
I am a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at KAUST, under the supervision of Bernard Ghanem.
At KAUST, I am part of the Image and Video Understanding Laboratory (IVUL) and the Artificial Intelligence Initiative (AII).
My research interests revolve broadly around Computer Vision. Recently, I finished an internship at Meta GenAI, where I worked with Albert Pumarola on efficient flow-based generative models.
I strive for balancing breadth and depth in my research. Thus, I am keen on learning from other topics and fields, and broadening my collaboration circles.
That being said, I am drawn to research that draws inspiration from human intelligence and perception.
You can download my CV here.
Interests
Generative AI
Computer Vision
Deep Learning
Education
PhD in Computer Science, ongoing
KAUST, supervised by Bernard GhanemMS in Biomedical Engineering, 2019
Universidad de los Andes, supervised by Pablo ArbeláezBS in Biomedical Engineering (cum laude), 2017
Universidad de los Andes
Short Biography
Before starting my PhD studies, I was a Research Intern at KAUST, supervised by Ali Thabet and Bernard Ghanem. Previous to that, I worked under Pablo Arbeláez (at BCV and CINFONIA, in Universidad de los Andes, Colombia) as a Graduate Research Assistant. Even before that, I was an undegraduate student, also at UniAndes.
Papers
Note: please refer to my Google Scholar for the most up-to-date list of papers.
Adaptive Guidance: Training-free Acceleration of Conditional Diffusion Models
A. Castillo*, J. Kohler*, Juan C. Pérez*, J.P. Pérez, A. Pumarola, B. Ghanem, P. Arbeláez, A. Thabet
ArXiv, 2024. LinkStyleAvatar: Stylizing Animatable Head Avatars
Juan C. Pérez, T. Nguyen-Phuoc, C. Cao, A. Sanakoyeu, T. Xu, T. Simon, P. Arbeláez, B. Ghanem, A. Thabet, A. Pumarola
Winter Conference on Applications in Computer Vision (WACV), 2024. LinkRe-ReND: Real-time Rendering of NeRFs across Devices
S. Rojas Martínez, J. Zarzar, Juan C. Pérez, A. Sanakoyeu, A. Thabet, A. Pumarola, B. Ghanem
International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023. Link.Revisiting Test Time Adaptation under Online Evaluation
M. Alfarra, H. Itani, A. Pardo, S. Alhuwaider, M. Ramazanova, Juan C. Pérez, Z. Cai, M. Müller, B. Ghanem
ArXiv, 2023. Link.Towards Characterizing the Semantic Robustness of Face Recognition
Juan C. Pérez, M. Alfarra, A. Thabet, P. Arbeláez, B. Ghanem
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop (CVPR-W), 2023. Link.On the Robustness of Quality Measures for GANs
M. Alfarra, Juan C. Pérez, A. Frühstück, P. H.S. Torr, P. Wonka, B. Ghanem
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022. Link.3DeformRS: Certifying Spatial Deformations on Point Clouds
G. Pérez*, Juan C. Pérez*, M. Alfarra*, S. Giancola, B. Ghanem
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022. Link.Combating Adversaries with Anti-Adversaries
M. Alfarra, Juan C. Pérez, A. Thabet, A. Bibi, P. H.S. Torr, B. Ghanem
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2022 – also: Best Extended Abstract Award at LatinX in AI Workshop, CVPR’22. Link.Certified Robustness in Federated Learning
M. Alfarra, Juan C. Pérez, E. Shulgin, P. Richtárik, B. Ghanem
Neural Information Processing Systems Workshop (NeurIPS-W), 2022. Link.Rethinking Clustering for Robustness
M. Alfarra*, Juan C. Pérez*, A. Bibi, A. Thabet, P. Arbeláez, B. Ghanem
British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), 2021. Link.Towards Robust General Medical Image Segmentation
L. Daza, Juan C. Pérez, P. Arbeláez
Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), 2021. Link.Enhancing Adversarial Robustness via Test-Time Transformation Ensembling
Juan C. Pérez, M. Alfarra, G. Jeanneret, L. Rueda, A. Thabet, B. Ghanem, P. Arbeláez
International Conference on Computer Vision Workshop (ICCV-W), 2021. Link.Generalized Real-World Super-Resolution through Adversarial Robustness
A. Castillo, M. Escobar, Juan C. Pérez, A. Romero, R. Timofte, L. Van Gool, P. Arbeláez
International Conference on Computer Vision Workshop (ICCV-W), 2021. Link.A Hierarchical Assessment of Adversarial Severity
G. Jeanneret, Juan C. Pérez, P. Arbeláez
Best Paper Award at International Conference on Computer Vision Workshop (ICCV-W), 2021. Link.Gabor Layers Enhance Network Robustness
Juan C. Pérez*, M. Alfarra*, G. Jeanneret*, A. Bibi, A. Thabet, B. Ghanem, P. Arbeláez
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2020. Link.Comprehensive Telestroke Network to Optimize Health Care Delivery for Cerebrovascular Diseases: Algorithm Development
H. Bayona, B. Ropero, A.J. Salazar, Juan C. Pérez, M.F. Granja, C.F. Martínez, N. Useche
Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR), 2020. Link.Design of a Telestroke System to Optimize Healthcare Delivery for Cerebrovascular Diseases in Colombia
B. Ropero, N. Useche, M.F. Granja, A.J. Salazar, Juan C. Pérez, H. Bayona, C.F. Martínez.
International Conference on eHealth, Telemedicine, and Social Medicine (eTELEMED), 2019. Link.Dynamic Multimodal Instance Segmentation Guided by Natural Language Queries
E. Margffoy-Tuay, Juan C. Pérez, E. Botero, P. Arbeláez
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2018. Link.
Honors and awards
KAUST PhD Fellowship
I received this fellowship, which covers all my PhD studies (starting in 2021).
Best Engineering Graduation Test Score
Achieved top score in Colombia's graduation test for engineers (in 2016).
Academic Excellence Scholarship
I was awarded this scholarship twice by Uniandinos (in 2016 and 2017).
Others
Running
I try to run at least a couple times a week. I'm far from being a fast runner. However, I do decently, considering I run in Saudi: average temperatures are ~30C and humidity rarely goes below 65%.
Reading
Reading is one of my favorite hobbies, and I try to do it every day. Mostly, I like reading non-fiction. My favorite authors are psychologists, which leads me to believe I would also have liked to do research on the human mind.
Many books I've read have changed my view of the world. Next, I enlist some that were eye-opening for me:
Learning How to Learn, by Oakley and Sejnowski
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Kahneman
How Emotions Are Made, by Feldman-Barret
The Blank Slate, The Language Instinct, and Enlightenment Now, by Pinker
The Happiness Hypothesis and The Righteous Mind, by Haidt
Factfulness, by Rosling
Range, by Epstein
Think Again and Originals, by Grant