Pritam Sarkar (প্রীতম সরকার)
Postdoc at UBC and Vector Institute
Email: pritam.sarkar@queensu.ca
About
I am interested in advancing safe multimodal intelligence through designing algorithms that require minimal human supervision.
I am a postdoc at the University of British Columbia and Vector Institute, working with Leonid Sigal in the Computer Vision Group (CS). I completed my PhD in 2025 at Queen’s University with Ali Etemad. During my PhD I interned at Google and Borealis AI, and was affiliated with the Vector Institute, Ingenuity Labs, and Aiim Lab.
I received first prize in the IEEE Kingston Section Research Excellence Award (PhD) in 2023. Outside research I enjoy photography, film-making, coffee, long walks, and badminton.
Pro-bono activity for studentsClick to expand
I am dedicating a weekly time slot (45 minutes) to speak with graduate students who might lack access to a strong mentorship or peer support. Whether you want to brainstorm, refine your research direction, or get an external perspective on your work, I am happy to help.
Why am I doing this? I have been incredibly fortunate to have supportive mentors and peers throughout my career, but I also know the difficulty of working without it. This is my way of paying forward the support I have received, aiming to reach students outside my immediate network who might benefit from such support.
To express your interest, please send a brief message through this form, and I will get back to you. Before reaching out, please review my research interests to see if they (at least somewhat) align with yours.
To make the best use of our time, let us plan the discussion in the following format:
- 5 minutes: Quick introductions.
- 10 minutes: You describe your research problem, current progress, and specific challenges. Ideally some slides with specific points.
- 25 minutes: Brainstorming ideas and some actionable feedback.
- 5 minutes: Wrap up and any final questions/suggestions for me.
Please be assured that I will periodically review the submitted responses and reach out to selected candidates. However, due to limited time, I may not be able to respond to everyone. Based on my availability, I may schedule sessions during the weekends. Thank you for your understanding.
News
- Dec 25I joined UBC and Vector as a postdoc.
- Sep 25I successfully defended my PhD thesis! Here are the slides and Thesis.
Show older news
- Oct 25I am serving as an AC for WACV 2026.
- Sep 25Our proposed Self-alignment with RRPO got accepted in NeurIPS 2025.
- May 25Introduced VCRBench, the first video-based multi-step causal reasoning benchmark.
- Apr 25Introduced RRPO, a fine-grained self-alignment recipe to align Multimodal LLMs.
- Jan 25DPA got accepted in ICLR 2025.
- Dec 23XKD and RDDM got accepted in AAAI 2024.
- Nov 23I won first prize in IEEE Research Excellence Award (PhD).
- Sep 23Our paper on Video SSL in OOD got accepted in NeurIPS 2023 as a Spotlight.
- Aug 23Accepted an offer from Google to join as a Student Researcher.
- Nov 22AVCAffe and CrissCross (Oral) got accepted in AAAI 2023.
- Oct 22We organized AAAI 2023 Workshop on R2HCAI.
- Oct 22Honourable Mention in poster competitions at Robotics and AI Symposium 2022 and FEAS Research Symposium 2022 at Queen's University, Canada.
- Jun 22Accepted an offer from Borealis AI for a fall internship as a Machine Learning Research Intern.
- Oct 21Best poster award at Robotics and AI Symposium, Ingenuity Labs, 2021.
- Aug 21We organized AAAI 2022 Workshop on HC-SSL.
- Mar 21I received postgraduate affiliation award from Vector Institute. News.
- Dec 20Our paper CardioGAN got accepted in AAAI 2021.
- Aug 20My first transaction as a first author got accepted in IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.
- Apr 20Successfully defended my MASc thesis.
- Jan 20Conference paper on ECG-based SSL got accepted in IEEE ICASSP 2020 for oral presentation.
- Jun 19My first paper got accepted for oral presentation in IEEE ACII 2019.
- Sep 18Joined Queen's for a master's degree.
Research
My current research focus is multimodal AI with video, image, audio, and language.
Broadly interested in: generative models (LLMs, multimodal LLMs, diffusion models), foundation models (video, image, vision-language, audio-visual), self-supervised learning, alignment, reasoning, AI agents, computer vision.
Selected Publications
Please check my Google Scholar for full list of publications.
Preprint · Under review
arXiv
Code
Project
Mentoring & Student Supervision
I work with students at the undergraduate, master’s, and PhD levels. Current and past mentees:
- Ali Salamatian - Bachelor’s, University of British Columbia (2026–present).
- Yogesh Kulkarni - PhD, Arizona State University (2026-Present).
- Jiayun Luo (Letitia) — PhD, University of British Columbia (2026–present).
- Bicheng Xu — PhD, University of British Columbia (2025–present).
- Negin Baghbanzadeh — PhD, York University (2025–present).
- Shayan Samakosh — Master’s, York University (2025–present).
- Seth Grief-Albert — Bachelor’s, Queen’s University (summer 2024); continuing undergraduate studies.
- Vishal Narnaware — visiting student, University of Cambridge (2023–2024), co-mentored with Nikhil Churamani; next: PhD, University of Central Florida.
- Debaditya Shome — Master’s, Queen’s University (2022–2023); next: Applied AI Scientist, Homebase.
- Aaron Posen — Bachelor’s, Queen’s University (2021–2022); next: Data Engineer, Deloitte.
- Rachel Phinnemore — Bachelor’s, Queen’s University (2020–2021); next: Product Manager, Google.
Education & Employment
Timeline in reverse chronological order (present at top, older entries below).
Academic Service
Area Chair
- WACV 2026
Reviewer (selected venues)
- NeurIPS (2023, 2025), ICLR (2024, 2025), ICML (2024)
- CVPR (2023, 2024, 2026), ICCV (2023), ECCV (2022, 2024)
- PAMI (2023–present), IEEE T-AFFC (2022–present)