Team members
Elena Burceanu
I am a Research Scientist working on robust machine learning, with a current focus on out of distribution generalization: understanding and mitigating distribution shifts, spurious correlations, and shortcut features that hurt reliability in real settings. Recently, I have been increasingly interested in mechanistic interpretability as a way to diagnose why models latch onto spurious cues and to design interventions that improve generalization. I was an Associate Program Chair at NeurIPS 2025 and I am the Local Chair for CoLLAs 2026, Bucharest.
Andrei Manolache
I am a Ph.D. student at the IMPRS-IS and ELLIS, under the co-supervision of Mathias Niepert (University of Stuttgart) and Karsten Borgwardt (ETH Zürich & MPI-B) and a Researcher at Bitdefender’s Theoretical Research Laboratory. My focus is on robustness and trustworthiness of Geometric Deep Learning methods.
Marius Drăgoi
I earned my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence from Politehnica University of Bucharest. My earlier research focused on anomaly detection in scenarios involving distribution shifts. Currently, I am working on Large Language Models, with an emphasis on enhancing their reasoning capabilities.
Florin Gogianu
Currently pursuing a PhD in Reinforcement Learning under the supervision of Prof. Lucian Bușoniu following an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from University Politehnica of Bucharest and a BSc in Philosophy. I have a broad interest in Reinforcement Learning topics and I am currently focusing on questions regarding sample efficiency in the context of model-free value-based methods with neural network estimators.
Ștefan Smeu
I obtained my Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Bucharest. I am interested in self-supervised methods on audio-visual representation learning and currently conduct research on multimodal deepfake detection across audio and visual modalities.
Elisabeta Oneață
I have obtained my PhD in computer vision from the School of Advanced Studies of the Romanian Academy (SCOSAAR), with the thesis “Perceptual Models for Computational Visual Analysis”, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Cristian Sminchisescu. My work focused on 3D human pose estimation and perception in monocular images and videos. Currently I am interested in automatic detection of deepfake visual content.
Dan Oneață
I received my Ph.D. from Université Grenoble Alpes, where I worked on automatic action recognition in videos. During my postdoctoral research, I started investigating how to integrate vision with other modalities, such as speech and language. This work showed how visual grounding can help with tasks like speech recognition or language documentation, and how multimodal models relate to human learning. At Bitdefender, I apply multimodal learning to detect deepfakes across various media, including images, audio, and video.
Ioana Pintilie
I obtained my Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Bucharest, where I also completed my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. My background includes anomaly detection for multivariate time series data, and I am broadly interested in large language models, with a current focus on their reasoning capabilities and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR).
Cristian Păduraru
I earned a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Master’s degree in AI from the University of Bucharest. My research interests include bias identification and correction, interpretability, as well as representation learning.
Antonio Bărbălau
I have completed my doctoral studies, centered around weakly supervised and self-supervised learning, at the University of Bucharest under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Radu Ionescu. My present research focuses on model interpretability, test-time debiasing techniques, and robustness to distribution shifts.
Alexandra Dragomir
I obtained my Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Bucharest, where I also completed a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics. My research focuses on Natural Language Processing, with an emphasis on Large Language Models, particularly in areas such as preference optimization and continual learning.
Collaborators
Andrei Nicolicioiu
PhD Student @ University of Montreal
Teo Poncu
Research Scientist @ University Politehnica of Bucharest, nVidia DLI University Ambassador, Member of Engineering @ poolside
Dragoș Țânțaru
Research collaborator
Tudor Berariu
Research Scientist @ UiPath
Iulia Duță
PhD Student @ University of Cambridge