Arya Farkhondeh

Education

PhD (Incomplete), Electrical Engineering @ EPFL

Jun 2023 - Nov 2024 · Lausanne, Switzerland

Machine Learning & Computer Vision: Multimodal Human Behavior Understanding in Videos.

MSc, Data Science @ Sapienza

Sep 2018 - Oct 2022 · Rome, Italy

Thesis on Self-Supervised 3D Gaze Estimation.

Erasmus @ University of Barcelona

Feb 2020 - Jul 2020 · Barcelona, Spain

Courses: Computer Vision, NLP, Bayesian Stats, Time Series Analysis.

Experience

Machine Learning Engineer @ Simi

Jul 2025 - Now · Munich, Germany

ML for human perception in the automotive space. Simi is part of ZF LIFETEC, ZF Group.

Research Assistant @ Idiap

Oct 2022 - May 2025 · Martigny, Switzerland

Multimodal human-centric video understanding (visual attention modeling, hand-object interaction, social interaction) and vision-language models (VLMs).

ML Research Intern @ CVC

Apr 2022 - Sep 2022 · Barcelona, Spain

Geometrically equivariant self-supervised representation learning for 3D gaze estimation.

Selected Publications

MTGS: A Novel Framework for Multi-Person Temporal Gaze Following and Social Gaze Prediction

NeurIPS 2024

Anshul Gupta, Samy Tafasca, Arya Farkhondeh, Pierre Vuillecard, Jean-Marc Odobez.

arXiv

ChildPlay-Hand: A Dataset of Hand Manipulations in the Wild

ECCV Workshops 2024

Arya Farkhondeh*, Samy Tafasca*, Jean-Marc Odobez.

arXiv data code

Exploring the Zero-Shot Capabilities of Vision-Language Models for Improving Gaze Following

CVPR Workshops 2024 (Nvidia Best Paper Award 🥇)

Anshul Gupta*, Pierre Vuillecard*, Arya Farkhondeh, Jean-Marc Odobez.

arXiv video

Towards Self-Supervised Gaze Estimation

BMVC 2022

Arya Farkhondeh, Cristina Palmero, Simone Scardapane, Sergio Escalera.

arXiv code website