VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Pedro Sanchez
dblp:14/8283
· DBLP profile ↗
9ranked-venue papers
1as first author
9since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0003-2435-3049ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 5 · 5 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 2 · 1 first-author · 2 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 2 · 2 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | MemControl: Mitigating Memorization in Diffusion Models via Automated Parameter SelectionabstractDiffusion models excel in generating images that closely resemble their training data but are also susceptible to data memorization, raising privacy, ethical, and legal concerns, particularly in sensitive domains such as medical imaging. We hypothesize that this memorization stems from the overparameterization of deep models and propose that regularizing model capacity during fine-tuning can mitigate this issue. Firstly, we empirically show that regulating the model capacity via Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) mitigates memorization to some extent, however, it further requires the identification of the exact parameter subsets to be fine-tuned for high-quality generation. To identify these subsets, we introduce a bilevel optimization framework, MemControl, that automates parameter selection using memorization and generation quality metrics as rewards during fine-tuning. The parameter subsets discovered through MemControl achieve a superior tradeoff between generation quality and memorization. For the task of medical image generation, our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art memorization mitigation strategies by fine-tuning as few as 0.019% of model parameters. Moreover, we demonstrate that the discovered parameter subsets are transferable to non-medical domains. Our framework is scalable to large datasets, agnostic to reward functions, and can be integrated with existing approaches for further memorization mitigation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to empirically evaluate memorization in medical images and propose a targeted yet universal mitigation strategy. The code is available at this https URL. Raman Dutt, Ondrej Bohdal, Pedro Sanchez, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris, Timothy M. Hospedales |
WACV | 3 |
| 2025 | Zero-Shot Medical Phrase Grounding With Off-the-Shelf Diffusion ModelsabstractLocalizing the exact pathological regions in a given medical scan is an important imaging problem that traditionally requires a large amount of bounding box ground truth annotations to be accurately solved. However, there exist alternative, potentially weaker, forms of supervision, such as accompanying free-text reports, which are readily available. The task of performing localization with textual guidance is commonly referred to as phrase grounding. In this work, we use a publicly available Foundation Model, namely the Latent Diffusion Model, to perform this challenging task. This choice is supported by the fact that the Latent Diffusion Model, despite being generative in nature, contains cross-attention mechanisms that implicitly align visual and textual features, thus leading to intermediate representations that are suitable for the task at hand. In addition, we aim to perform this task in a zero-shot manner, i.e., without any training on the target task, meaning that the model's weights remain frozen. To this end, we devise strategies to select features and also refine them via post-processing without extra learnable parameters. We compare our proposed method with state-of-the-art approaches which explicitly enforce image-text alignment in a joint embedding space via contrastive learning. Results on a popular chest X-ray benchmark indicate that our method is competitive with SOTA on different types of pathology, and even outperforms them on average in terms of two metrics (mean IoU and AUC-ROC). Konstantinos Vilouras, Pedro Sanchez, Alison O'Neil, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris |
IEEE J. Biomed. Health Informatics | 2 |
| 2024 | Benchmarking Counterfactual Image GenerationabstractGenerative AI has revolutionised visual content editing, empowering users to effortlessly modify images and videos. However, not all edits are equal. To perform realistic edits in domains such as natural image or medical imaging, modifications must respect causal relationships inherent to the data generation process. Such image editing falls into the counterfactual image generation regime. Evaluating counterfactual image generation is substantially complex: not only it lacks observable ground truths, but also requires adherence to causal constraints. Although several counterfactual image generation methods and evaluation metrics exist a comprehensive comparison within a unified setting is lacking. We present a comparison framework to thoroughly benchmark counterfactual image generation methods. We evaluate the performance of three conditional image generation model families developed within the Structural Causal Model (SCM) framework. We incorporate several metrics that assess diverse aspects of counterfactuals, such as composition, effectiveness, minimality of interventions, and image realism. We integrate all models that have been used for the task at hand and expand them to novel datasets and causal graphs, demonstrating the superiority of Hierarchical VAEs across most datasets and metrics. Our framework is implemented in a user-friendly Python package that can be extended to incorporate additional SCMs, causal methods, generative models, and datasets for the community to build on. Code: https://github.com/gulnazaki/counterfactual-benchmark. Thomas Melistas, Nikos Spyrou, Nefeli Gkouti, Pedro Sanchez, Athanasios Vlontzos, Yannis Panagakis, Giorgos Papanastasiou, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris |
NeurIPS | 4 |
| 2024 | Compositionally Equivariant Representation LearningabstractDeep learning models often need sufficient supervision (i.e., labelled data) in order to be trained effectively. By contrast, humans can swiftly learn to identify important anatomy in medical images like MRI and CT scans, with minimal guidance. This recognition capability easily generalises to new images from different medical facilities and to new tasks in different settings. This rapid and generalisable learning ability is largely due to the compositional structure of image patterns in the human brain, which are not well represented in current medical models. In this paper, we study the utilisation of compositionality in learning more interpretable and generalisable representations for medical image segmentation. Overall, we propose that the underlying generative factors that are used to generate the medical images satisfy compositional equivariance property, where each factor is compositional (e.g., corresponds to human anatomy) and also equivariant to the task. Hence, a good representation that approximates well the ground truth factor has to be compositionally equivariant. By modelling the compositional representations with learnable von-Mises-Fisher (vMF) kernels, we explore how different design and learning biases can be used to enforce the representations to be more compositionally equivariant under un-, weakly-, and semi-supervised settings. Extensive results show that our methods achieve the best performance over several strong baselines on the task of semi-supervised domain-generalised medical image segmentation. Code will be made publicly available upon acceptance at https://github.com/vios-s. Xiao Liu 0037, Pedro Sanchez, Spyridon Thermos, Alison O'Neil, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris |
IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging | 2 |
| 2023 | Diffusion Models for Causal Discovery via Topological Ordering
Pedro Sanchez, Xiao Liu 0037, Alison O'Neil, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris |
ICLR | 1 |
| 2023 | The role of noise in denoising models for anomaly detection in medical images
Antanas Kascenas, Pedro Sanchez, Patrick Schrempf, William Clackett, Shadia Mikhael, Jeremy Voisey, Keith A. Goatman, Alexander J. Weir, Nicolas Pugeault, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris, Alison O'Neil |
Medical Image Anal. | 2 |
| 2022 | vMFNet: Compositionality Meets Domain-Generalised Segmentation
Xiao Liu 0037, Spyridon Thermos, Pedro Sanchez, Alison O'Neil, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris |
MICCAI (8) | 3 |
| 2022 | Learning disentangled representations in the imaging domainabstractDisentangled representation learning has been proposed as an approach to learning general representations even in the absence of, or with limited, supervision. A good general representation can be fine-tuned for new target tasks using modest amounts of data, or used directly in unseen domains achieving remarkable performance in the corresponding task. This alleviation of the data and annotation requirements offers tantalising prospects for applications in computer vision and healthcare. In this tutorial paper, we motivate the need for disentangled representations, revisit key concepts, and describe practical building blocks and criteria for learning such representations. We survey applications in medical imaging emphasising choices made in exemplar key works, and then discuss links to computer vision applications. We conclude by presenting limitations, challenges, and opportunities. Xiao Liu 0037, Pedro Sanchez, Spyridon Thermos, Alison O'Neil, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris |
Medical Image Anal. | 2 |
| 2021 | Accelerating ML Recommendation with over a Thousand RISC-V/Tensor Processors on Esperanto's ET-SoC-1 ChipabstractThe ET-SoC-1 has over a thousand RISC-V processors on a single TSMC 7nm chip, including: • 1088 energy-efficient ET-Minion 64-bit RISC-V in-order cores each with a vector/tensor unit • 4 high-performance ET-Maxion 64-bit RISC-V out-of-order cores • >160 million bytes of on-chip SRAM • Interfaces for large external memory with low-power LPDDR4x DRAM and eMMC FLASH • PCIe x8 Gen4 and other common I/O interfaces • Innovative low-power architecture and circuit techniques allows entire chip to • Compute at peak rates of 100 to 200 TOPS • Operate using under 20 watts for ML recommendation workloads David R. Ditzel, Roger Espasa, Nivard Aymerich, Allen Baum, Tom Berg, Jim Burr, Eric Hao, Jayesh Iyer, Miquel Izquierdo, Shankar Jayaratnam, Darren Jones, Chris Klingner, Stephen Lee, Marc Lupon, Grigorios Magklis, Bojan Maric, Rajib Nath, Mike Neilly, J. Duane Northcutt, Bill Orner, Jose Renau, Gerard Reves, Xavier Reves, Tom Riordan, Pedro Sanchez, Sridhar Samudrala, Guillem Sole, Raymond Tang, Tommy Thorn, Sebastia Tortella, Daniel Yau |
HCS | 26 |