Katherine Xu

CS PhD Student • University of Pennsylvania

Profile Photo

Hello! I am a Computer Science PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania (2023–) advised by Professor Jianbo Shi, and a visiting PhD student at Berkeley AI Research (Jan 2026–).

My research takes a bottom-up view of generative and perception models — looking at the data they consume, the representations they form, and the traces they leave in their outputs — to better understand and control how these models perceive, generate, and reason.

I am supported by the NDSEG Fellowship, and have interned at Meta Superintelligence Labs (2025), Adobe Research (2024), and Meta FAIR (2022). I received my bachelor's and master's degrees in Computer Science (Course 6-3) from MIT, where I conducted research at CSAIL and the Quest for Intelligence.

If you'd like to chat about research or collaborate, please reach out!

News

  • Apr 2026: Accepted to the International Computer Vision Summer School. See you in Sicily!
  • Feb 2026: Vibe Spaces accepted to CVPR 2026. See you in Denver!
  • Jan 2026: SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts accepted to ICLR 2026.
  • Jun 2025: Started research scientist internship at Meta Superintelligence Labs.
  • Oct 2024: Secret Seeds and Origin Attribution accepted to WACV 2025. See you in Tucson!
  • Apr 2024: Awarded the NDSEG Fellowship (4.9% acceptance rate).
  • Feb 2024: Amodal Completion selected as a CVPR 2024 Highlight. See you in Seattle!
  • Jan 2023: Started my PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. See you in Philly!

Selected Publications

Awards

2024
NDSEG Fellowship (4.9% acceptance rate)
2021
Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society
2020
IEEE Eta Kappa Nu EECS Honor Society
2020
MIT Undergraduate Research and Innovation Scholar

Invited Talks

Mar 2026
NSF ARNI Language and Vision Working Group
Sep 2024
GRASP Lab Research Showcase
Feb 2024
NYC Computer Vision Day

Service

Organizer
  • Founder, NSF ARNI AI Institute Emerging Researchers Group (2024–2026)
  • Penn Vision and Learning Reading Group (2023–2025)
  • GRASP Student, Faculty, and Industry (SFI) Seminar Committee (2024–2025)
  • GRASP Lab Social Committee (2023–2024)
Teaching Assistant
  • Penn CIS 6800 Advanced Topics in Machine Perception (Fall 2023, Fall 2024)