CV
Contact Information
| Name | Rohan Asthana |
| Professional Title | PhD Researcher in Machine Learning |
| rohan.asthana@fau.de | |
| Website | https://rohanasthana.github.io |
Professional Summary
PhD researcher at FAU working on “Structural and Geometric Signals for Designing, Evaluating, and Diagnosing Neural Models”, with 3 first-author publications at ICLR and TMLR. Research spans Diffusion Models, VLMs and VLAs; Neural Architecture Search (NAS) and Model Compression; and Predictive Maintenance with Nokia and Astrum IT. Industry experience at BMW Group and Fraunhofer IKS; official reviewer at TMLR; sub-reviewer for NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ICCV/ECCV and CVPR.
Experience
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2023 - Present Erlangen, Germany
Research Assistant
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
- Proposed an anisotropy-based metric for detecting and mitigating memorization in diffusion models (Stable Diffusion), ~5–8× faster than prior methods and requiring only 2 forward passes (ICLR 2026); also researching generalization in VLMs and VLA models.
- Developed DiNAS, a conditional graph diffusion model generating neural architectures in <0.2s across 6 benchmarks (TMLR 2024), and Dextr, a zero-shot NAS proxy using SVD and extrinsic curvature requiring only one unlabeled sample (TMLR 2025).
- Collaborating with Nokia and Astrum IT on remaining useful life (RUL) prediction of hardware components using pretrained time series foundation models.
- Supervised ~15 MSc theses and 2 seminars; co-wrote DFG research proposals.
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2022 - 2022 Munich, Germany
Machine Learning Intern
BMW Group
- Predicted Quality of Service attributes (ping, throughput) using large-scale real-world signal data with up to 7 million samples through CNNs, SVMs, and XGBoost, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy on ping prediction.
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2021 - 2021 Munich, Germany
Working Student
Fraunhofer Institute for Cognitive Systems IKS
- Built a reverse image search system using transfer learning embeddings and t-SNE to retrieve visually similar products with metadata (price, condition, material) from the web.
Education
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2023 - Present Erlangen, Germany
PhD
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Machine Learning (Chair of Multimedia Communications and Signal Processing)
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2020 - 2023 Ulm, Germany
M.Sc.
Ulm University
Cognitive Systems
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2016 - 2020 India
B.Tech.
Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam Technical University
Computer Science & Engineering
Publications
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Detecting and Mitigating Memorization in Diffusion Models through Anisotropy of the Log-Probability
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026
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Dextr: Zero-Shot Neural Architecture Search with Singular Value Decomposition and Extrinsic Curvature
Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 08/2025
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Multi-conditioned Graph Diffusion for Neural Architecture Search
Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 03/2024 (25 citations)
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Fake News Detection using Deep Learning Models: A Novel Approach
Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies
Skills
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Languages
German : B1
English : C1
Hindi : Native