Papers, awards, talks and visits. There are more pictures on the photos page.
Non-verbal Communication In-the-Wild (Marcu, Costea, Lazăr, Leordeanu) and Authoring for Living Worlds: Tool-Constrained LLM Agents for Executable Multi-Actor Scenarios (Cudlenco, Mașala, Leordeanu) were accepted at ECCV 2026 in Malmö. Papers from 2026, photos.
We presented two papers at ERF 2026 in Stavanger: Non-verbal Real-time Human-AI Interaction in Constrained Robotic Environments (Costea, Marcu, Lazăr, Leordeanu) and Learning on the Fly: Replay-Based Continual Object Perception for Indoor Drones (Nae, Barbu, Mocanu, Leordeanu). Photo.
Bridging Explainability and Embeddings: BEE Aware of Spuriousness, written with Elena Burceanu and colleagues from Bitdefender, was accepted at ICLR 2026.
Sebastian Mocanu presented Efficient Self-Supervised Neuro-Analytic Visual Servoing for Real-time Quadrotor Control. Daniel Airinei, Elena Burceanu and Marius Leordeanu presented Inside Knowledge, on graph-based path generation and curriculum learning for indoor visual navigation.
NORCE and ADRA invited the lab to show its human–AI interaction and art projects at ADRF 2025. We went as part of the HRIA delegation. Marius Leordeanu gave a talk on the work, and Cristina Lazăr was invited as a VIP guest.
Nabil Belbachir, research director at NORCE and a long-time partner of the lab, came to Romania for the first time. We showed him the human–AI projects, including the 2019 painting that reacts to a viewer’s smile, which is on display at the Institute of Mathematics.
The Romanian Hub for Artificial Intelligence was officially launched at POLITEHNICA Bucharest. The lab is one of its research groups.
Marius Leordeanu announced the signing of the founding agreement for the Romanian Hub for Artificial Intelligence (HRIA) during the ELIAS Theme Development Workshop on Sustainability and AI in Bucharest.
Dragoș Costea presented A self-supervised cyclic neural-analytic approach for novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction, written with Alina Marcu and Marius Leordeanu.
Marius Leordeanu received the Grigore Constantin Moisil award for mathematics and computer science at the Romanian Research Gala 2024, held at the National Opera in Bucharest. He dedicated it to the whole group.
The group presented five papers at ICCV 2023 in Paris, among them the Dronescapes hypergraph paper and JEDI. Alina Marcu, Dragoș Costea, Mihai Pîrvu, Mihai Mașala and Emanuela Haller attended, along with Bogdan Alexe, Rahul Sukthankar (Google) and Nabil Belbachir (NORCE).
Marius Leordeanu attended the kick-off of ELIAS, the Horizon Europe network on sustainable AI. The UPB group is a member together with Bitdefender.
Marius Leordeanu presented our NORCE work on computer vision for fish farming at Aqua Nor in Trondheim, the largest aquaculture technology fair.
The Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization appointed Marius Leordeanu to its Scientific and Ethical Council for Artificial Intelligence. The same month he chaired the selection committee for the ministry’s digital transformation task force.
BookAuthority lists Unsupervised Learning in Space and Time (Springer, 2020) as the best-selling book on unsupervised learning published since 2020.
Xuan Zhang from NORCE spent a week with the group as part of the SpaceTime Vision project. We worked together, flew the drones and visited a few castles.
UFO Depth: Unsupervised learning with flow-based odometry optimization for metric depth estimation was presented as an oral at ICRA 2022.
Radu Tudor Ionescu gave a keynote at the 2nd Workshop on AI for Anomalies and Novelties (IJCAI 2021) and an invited talk at the Summer School on Image Processing 2021.
Marius Leordeanu was program chair of the 17th Embedded Vision Workshop at CVPR 2021, with talks by Andrew Davison, Antonios Gasteratos, Joyce Nakatumba-Nabende, Kurt Keutzer and Richard Bowden. He had the same role for the 16th edition at CVPR 2020.
Marius Leordeanu, Traian Rebedea, Bogdan Alexe and Radu Ionescu met the Minister of European Funds to discuss funding for AI research. The idea of a national AI hub, which later became HRIA, came out of these discussions.
Creating Roadmaps in Aerial Images with Generative Adversarial Networks and Smoothing-Based Optimization (Costea, Marcu, Leordeanu, Slușanschi) won the best presentation award at the UAVision workshop in Venice.