CV

Contact Information

Name Rohan Asthana
Professional Title PhD Researcher in Machine Learning
Email 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

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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

  • 2023 - Present

    Erlangen, Germany

    PhD
    Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
    Machine Learning (Chair of Multimedia Communications and Signal Processing)
  • 2020 - 2023

    Ulm, Germany

    M.Sc.
    Ulm University
    Cognitive Systems
  • 2016 - 2020

    India

    B.Tech.
    Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam Technical University
    Computer Science & Engineering

Skills

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Languages

German : B1
English : C1
Hindi : Native