Katherine Xu

I am a second-year PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania advised by Jianbo Shi and affiliated with the GRASP Lab. My research is supported by the NDSEG Fellowship.

Prior to Penn, I received my bachelor's and master's in Computer Science (6-3) at MIT, where I conducted research at MIT CSAIL, MIT Quest for Intelligence, and MIT ESI. I've also had the pleasure of interning at Adobe, Meta, and Honda Research Institute.

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Research

I'm interested in enhancing AI systems for visual recognition and synthesis by integrating causality, controllability, and interpretability. Recently, I have been working on diffusion models and multimodal large language models.

Amodal Completion via Progressive Mixed Context Diffusion
Katherine Xu, Lingzhi Zhang, Jianbo Shi
IEEE/CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2024
Highlight - 2.8% of submissions, 11.9% of accepted papers
paper / project page / code

Generating hidden object parts using a pretrained diffusion inpainting model by tackling challenging occlusion and object co-occurrence.

Good Seed Makes a Good Crop: Discovering Secret Seeds in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Katherine Xu, Lingzhi Zhang, Jianbo Shi
IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025
NeurIPS Attributing Model Behavior at Scale Workshop, 2024
NeurIPS Foundation Model Interventions Workshop, 2024
paper / code

Detecting Image Attribution for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models in RGB and Beyond
Katherine Xu, Lingzhi Zhang, Jianbo Shi
IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2025
NeurIPS Attributing Model Behavior at Scale Workshop, 2024
NeurIPS Safe Generative AI Workshop, 2024
paper / code

Clim-Seg: A Generalizable Segmentation Model for Heat and Flood Risk Mapping
Anushka Ray*, Katherine Xu*, Norhan Bayomi, John E. Fernandez
Climate Risk Management, 2024
paper

Chemistry Insights for Large Pretrained Graph Neural Networks
Katherine Xu, Janice Lan
NeurIPS AI for Science Workshop, 2022
paper

Analyzing neural networks trained on the Open Catalyst dataset by comparing their predictions with chemical intuition. Work done during an internship at Meta.

A Novel Digital Algorithm for Identifying Liver Steatosis Using Smartphone-Captured Images
Katherine Xu*, Siavash Raigani*, ..., Katherine Fairchild, Leigh Anne Dageforde
Transplantation Direct, 2022
paper / code


Teaching and Service

penn Teaching Assistant, CIS 6800 Advanced Topics in Machine Perception (Fall 2023, Fall 2024)

Co-Organizer, GRASP Lab Student, Faculty, Industry (SFI) Seminar Series (Spring 2024 - present)

Co-Organizer, GRASP Lab Social Committee (Fall 2023 - Spring 2024)

Reviewer, ECCV 2024, WACV 2025