Deepak Kumar

KDDI Research, Inc.

Fujimino, Saitama, Japan

I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in the AI Division at KDDI Research, Inc., Japan, where I work on Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for robot manipulation.

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from IIT Roorkee, advised by Prof. Balasubramanian Raman, with a thesis on multimodal affect and behavior analysis. Before that, I was a research intern at Samsung Research Institute Bangalore, working on Vision-Language Models, and an Assistant Professor at GBPUAT Pantnagar.

My research interests include robot learning with VLA models, multimodal affective computing (audio, video, text, and physiological signals), and Vision-Language Models.

VLA Models Robot Learning Affective Computing Multimodal Learning Vision-Language Models

News

Sep 20, 2026	Serving on the Technical Program Committee of PerAgents 2027, the First International Workshop on Pervasive Agentic Systems and Multimodal Foundation Models, co-located with PerCom 2027, Goa, India.
Sep 15, 2026	Serving as a Meta-Reviewer for CVIP 2026, the 11th International Conference on Computer Vision & Image Processing, NIT Calicut, India.
Jul 1, 2026	Became a reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM).
May 25, 2026	Attending FG 2026 in Kyoto, Japan, with registration and travel support from KDDI Research.
Apr 15, 2026	Our paper VIBE: Disentangling Social Dynamics via Kinematics-Informed Variational Inference for Behavioral Emotion is accepted at ICML 2026, Seoul.

All news

Sep 20, 2026	Serving on the Technical Program Committee of PerAgents 2027, the First International Workshop on Pervasive Agentic Systems and Multimodal Foundation Models, co-located with PerCom 2027, Goa, India.
Sep 15, 2026	Serving as a Meta-Reviewer for CVIP 2026, the 11th International Conference on Computer Vision & Image Processing, NIT Calicut, India.
Jul 1, 2026	Became a reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM).
May 25, 2026	Attending FG 2026 in Kyoto, Japan, with registration and travel support from KDDI Research.
Apr 15, 2026	Our paper VIBE: Disentangling Social Dynamics via Kinematics-Informed Variational Inference for Behavioral Emotion is accepted at ICML 2026, Seoul.
Apr 10, 2026	Became a reviewer for FG 2026, the 20th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition.
Apr 1, 2026	Joined KDDI Research, Inc. as a Postdoctoral Researcher.
Mar 1, 2026	Became a reviewer for ICPR 2026, the 28th International Conference on Pattern Recognition.
Dec 10, 2025	Became a reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (TAFFC).
Dec 1, 2025	Became a reviewer for Frontiers in Virtual Reality.
Nov 1, 2025	Became a reviewer for Frontiers in Psychology.
Oct 1, 2025	Became a reviewer for the RS4SD workshop at CIKM 2025.
Aug 14, 2025	Completed a six-month research internship at Samsung Research Institute Bangalore (SRI-B).
Aug 1, 2025	Became a reviewer for the 1M-Deepfakes Detection Challenge at ACM MM 2025.
Jul 16, 2025	Successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation at IIT Roorkee.
Jun 15, 2025	Became a reviewer for the Dataset Track of ACM MM 2025.
Jun 1, 2025	Became a reviewer for NGNDAI-2025, the International Conference on Next-Generation Networks and Deployable AI.
May 24, 2025	Submitted my Ph.D. thesis, From Signals to Visuals: Multimodal Affect and Behavior Analysis.
Feb 17, 2025	Started a research internship at Samsung Research Institute Bangalore (SRI-B), working on Vision-Language Models.
Dec 21, 2024	Received a travel grant to attend IndoML 2024 at BITS Pilani, Goa.
Dec 1, 2024	Became a reviewer for IEEE CINE 2024.
Nov 1, 2024	Became a reviewer for IEEE Signal Processing Letters.
Aug 2, 2024	Paper on engagement prediction accepted at ACM Multimedia 2024, Melbourne.
Aug 1, 2024	Paper on group emotion recognition accepted at ICPR 2024, Kolkata.
Jun 15, 2024	Paper on personality prediction from bioelectrical signals accepted in Elsevier Biomedical Signal Processing and Control.
Jun 10, 2024	Became a reviewer for CVIP 2024.
Jun 1, 2024	Finalist, Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship India 2024.
Apr 1, 2024	Paper Neuro-Emotional Mapping of Human Emotions via EEG Signals accepted at FG 2024, Istanbul.
Mar 15, 2024	Our team secured 2nd place in the Brain Responses to Emotional Avatars Challenge at FG 2024.
Mar 1, 2024	Paper on personality trait analysis from physiological signals accepted at IJCNN 2024, Yokohama.
Feb 1, 2024	Became a reviewer for IJCNN 2024.
Jan 31, 2024	Completed a six-month work-studentship at Deloitte US-India Offices.
Dec 15, 2023	Volunteered at ICVGIP 2023, IIT Ropar.
Jul 1, 2023	Selected for a six-month work-studentship at Deloitte, India.
Dec 1, 2022	Paper Speech-based Automatic Prediction of Interview Traits accepted at CVIP 2022, VNIT Nagpur.
Dec 1, 2021	Started my Ph.D. at the Machine Vision and Machine Intelligence Lab, IIT Roorkee, advised by Prof. Balasubramanian Raman.

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science

Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India

• Dec 2021 – Jul 2025

Thesis: From Signals to Visuals: Multimodal Affect and Behavior Analysis

Supervisor: Prof. Balasubramanian Raman

M.Tech. in Software Engineering

Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology Allahabad, Prayagraj, India

• Aug 2014 – Jun 2016

Supervisor: Prof. Rajesh Tripathi

B.Tech.

Uttar Pradesh Technical University, Lucknow, India

Work Experience

KDDI Research, Inc., Fujimino, Saitama, Japan

Postdoctoral ResearcherApr 2026 – Present

Working on Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for robot manipulation.

Samsung Research Institute Bangalore (SRI-B), India

Research InternFeb 2025 – Aug 2025

Worked on Vision-Language Models (VLMs).

Deloitte US-India Offices

Work-StudentshipAug 2023 – Jan 2024

College of Technology, GBPUAT, Pantnagar, Uttarakhand, India

Assistant Professor under TEQIP-III (NPIU-MHRD)Oct 2018 – Dec 2021

Awards & Honors

Dec 2024Travel Grant to attend the 5th Indian Symposium on Machine Learning (IndoML 2024), BITS Pilani Goa.
Oct 2024Top-3 paper in the MultiMediate Challenge at ACM Multimedia 2024.
Jun 2024Finalist, Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship India 2024.
May 20242nd place (team lead, “Syntax”) in the Brain Responses to Emotional Avatars Challenge, IEEE FG 2024.
Aug 2023First rank in the Data Science and AI Quiz by CommBank India at SocProS 2023, IIT Roorkee.
Nov 2022Microsoft Research registration and travel grant to present at CVIP 2022.

selected publications

ICML

VIBE: Disentangling Social Dynamics via Kinematics-Informed Variational Inference for Behavioral Emotion

Abhishek Pratap Singh, Vaibhav Pratap Singh, Deepak Kumar, and 1 more author

In Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026

Bib

@inproceedings{singh2026vibe,
  title = {VIBE: Disentangling Social Dynamics via Kinematics-Informed Variational Inference for Behavioral Emotion},
  author = {Singh, Abhishek Pratap and Singh, Vaibhav Pratap and Kumar, Deepak and Raman, Balasubramanian},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},
  year = {2026},
}

ACM MM

Towards Engagement Prediction: A Cross-Modality Dual-Pipeline Approach using Visual and Audio Features

Deepak Kumar, Surbhi Madan, Pradeep Singh, and 2 more authors

In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM), 2024

Bib

@inproceedings{kumar2024engagement,
  title = {Towards Engagement Prediction: A Cross-Modality Dual-Pipeline Approach using Visual and Audio Features},
  author = {Kumar, Deepak and Madan, Surbhi and Singh, Pradeep and Dhall, Abhinav and Raman, Balasubramanian},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM)},
  year = {2024},
}

BSPC

All Signals Point to Personality: A Dual-Pipeline LSTM-Attention and Symbolic Dynamics Framework for Predicting Personality Traits from Bioelectrical Signals

Deepak Kumar, Pradeep Singh, and Balasubramanian Raman

Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, 2024

Bib

@article{kumar2024personality,
  title = {All Signals Point to Personality: A Dual-Pipeline LSTM-Attention and Symbolic Dynamics Framework for Predicting Personality Traits from Bioelectrical Signals},
  author = {Kumar, Deepak and Singh, Pradeep and Raman, Balasubramanian},
  journal = {Biomedical Signal Processing and Control},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
  year = {2024},
}