NEC Laboratories America

Machine Learning | Deep Patel

Deep Patel

Deep Patel

Senior Associate Researcher

Machine Learning

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About

Deep Patel is a Senior Associate Researcher in the Machine Learning Department at NEC Laboratories America in Princeton, NJ. He earned his Bachelor of Science (BS) in Computer Science from Towson University.

At NEC, Deep contributes to platforms for intelligent visual analytics, visual search, and vision-language interaction, helping to develop video-based reasoning models that operate in real-time across multi-camera systems. His work includes optimizing neural architectures for embedded systems and designing scalable inference pipelines for video AI applications.

He plays a key role in bringing NEC’s media analytics solutions from lab prototypes to production-ready systems used in smart cities and enterprise monitoring.

Projects

eigen Video Understanding

Overview: Aiming to achieve near-human video understanding, in this project, we analyze several gigabytes of spatiotemporal data to perform action recognition, multi-person tracking, object permanence and video reasoning. eigen has built a scalable video-understanding platform for long-form video reasoning that scales to new environments and camera angles without any re-training.


Realtime Situational Awareness | Video Understanding

Overview: We have developed a system for real-time scene understanding and reasoning across various domains, including safety, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, and personal assistance. This system continuously monitors and analyzes video, acoustics, and time series data related to human activities, aiming to provide a comprehensive understanding of ongoing situations. The project utilizes advanced AI models to process large volumes of data, generating actionable insights that help users grasp complex scenarios.

Publications

Uncertainty-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Multimodal Large Language Models

Knowledge distillation establishes a learning paradigm that leverages both data supervision and teacher guidance. However, determining the optimal balance between learning from data and learning from the teacher is challenging, as some samples may be noisy while others are subject to teacher uncertainty.

Object-Aware 4D Human Motion Generation

Recent advances in video diffusion models have enabled the generation of high-quality videos. However, these videos still suffer from unrealistic deformations, semantic violations, and physical inconsistencies that are largely rooted in the absence of 3D physical priors. To address these challenges,

NEC Labs America Attends CVPR 2026 in Denver, CO June 3-7, 2026

NEC Labs America headed to Denver for CVPR 2026, one of the most prestigious gatherings in computer vision, machine learning, and pattern recognition. The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition brought innovators from around the world to share breakthroughs.

Training Small AI Models Without Blindly Trusting Big Teacher Models

Machine learning is shifting from learning from data alone to learning from both data and teacher models. Beta-KD uses uncertainty-aware Bayesian weighting to train compact multimodal AI without blindly trusting every teacher signal.

Making Video AI Fast Enough for the Real World

State-of-the-art video models are accurate but too slow for live deployment. This work transfers their knowledge into causal streaming models that process video frames in real time, achieving 4x lower latency with competitive accuracy across action detection and pedestrian intent tasks.

Uncertainty-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Multimodal Large Language Models

Knowledge distillation establishes a learning paradigm that leverages both data supervision and teacher guidance. However, determining the optimal balance between learning from data and learning from the teacher is challenging, as some samples may be noisy while others are subject to teacher uncertainty.

Distilling Offline Action Detection Models into Real-Time Streaming Models

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in offline video action detection, but their reliance on processing fixed-size clips with full spatio-temporal attention makes them computationally expensive and ill-suited for real-time streaming applications due to massive computational

Object-Aware 4D Human Motion Generation

Recent advances in video diffusion models have enabled the generation of high-quality videos. However, these videos still suffer from unrealistic deformations, semantic violations, and physical inconsistencies that are largely rooted in the absence of 3D physical priors. To address these challenges,

DiscussLLM: Teaching Large Language Models When to Speak

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding and generating human-like text, yet they largely operate as reactive agents, responding only when directly prompted. This passivity creates an “awareness gap,” limiting their potential as truly collaborative partners

Group Relative Augmentation for Data Efficient Action Detection

Adapting large Video-Language Models (VLMs) for action detection using only a few examples poses challenges like overfitting and the granularity mismatch between scene-level pre-training and required person-centric understanding. We propose an efficient adaptation strategy combining parameter-efficient

CALIBFREE: Self-Supervised Feature Disentanglement for Calibration-Free Multi-Camera Multi-Object Tracking

Multi-camera multi-object tracking (MCMOT) faces significant challenges in maintaining consistent object identities across varying camera perspectives, particularly when precise calibration and extensive annotations are required. In this paper, we present CalibFree, a self-supervised representation learning

Exploiting VLM Localizability and Semantics for Open Vocabulary Action Detection (WACV)

Action detection aims to detect (recognize and localize) human actions spatially and temporally in videos. Existing approaches focus on the closed-set setting where an action detector is trained and tested on videos from a fixed set of action categories. However, this constrained setting is not viable

Exploiting VLM Localizability and Semantics for Open Vocabulary Action Detection

Action detection aims to detect (recognize and localize) human actions spatially and temporally in videos. Existing approaches focus on the closed-set setting where an action detector is trained and tested on videos from a fixed set of action categories. However, this constrained setting is not viable

Learning to Localize Actions in Instructional Videos with LLM-Based Multi-Pathway Text-Video Alignment

Learning to localize temporal boundaries of procedure steps in instructional videos is challenging due to the limited availability of annotated large-scale training videos. Recent works focus on learning the cross-modal alignment between video segments and ASR-transcripted narration texts through contrastive

MCTR: Multi Camera Tracking Transformer

Multi-camera tracking plays a pivotal role in various real-world applications. While end-to-end methods have gained significant interest in single-camera tracking, multi-camera tracking remains predominantly reliant on heuristic techniques. In response to this gap, this paper introduces Multi-Camera

Introducing the Trustworthy Generative AI Project: Pioneering the Future of Compositional Generation and Reasoning

We are thrilled to announce the launch of our latest research initiative, the Trustworthy Generative AI Project. This ambitious project is set to revolutionize how we interact with multimodal content by developing cutting-edge generative models capable of compositional generation and reasoning across

Weakly-Supervised Temporal Action Localization with Multi-Modal Plateau Transformers

Weakly Supervised Temporal Action Localization (WSTAL) aims to jointly localize and classify action segments in untrimmed videos with only video level annotations. To leverage video level annotations most existing methods adopt the multiple instance learning paradigm where frame/snippet level action

Learning from Synthetic Human Group Activities

The study of complex human interactions and group activities has become a focal point in human-centric computer vision. However, progress in related tasks is often hindered by the challenges of obtaining large-scale labeled datasets from real-world scenarios. To address the limitation, we introduce M3Act,

Deep Video Codec Control for Vision Models

Standardized lossy video coding is at the core of almost all real-world video processing pipelines. Rate control is used to enable standard codecs to adapt to different network bandwidth conditions or storage constraints. However standard video codecs (e.g. H.264) and their rate control modules aim to

NEC Labs America Team Attending CVPR 2024 in Seattle

Our team will be attending CVPR 2024 (The IEEE /CVF Conference on Computer Vision & Pattern Recognition) from June 17-21! See you there at the NEC Labs America Booth 1716! Stay tuned for more information about our participation.

Differentiable JPEG: The Devil is in The Details

JPEG remains one of the most widespread lossy image coding methods. However, the non-differentiable nature of JPEG restricts the application in deep learning pipelines. Several differentiable approximations of JPEG have recently been proposed to address this issue. This paper conducts a comprehensive

Deep Video Codec Control

Deep Video Codec Control Lossy video compression is commonly used when transmitting and storing video data. Unified video codecs (e.g., H.264 or H.265) remain the emph(Unknown sysvar: (de facto)) standard, despite the availability of advanced (neural) compression approaches. Transmitting videos in the

Source-Free Video Domain Adaptation with Spatial-Temporal-Historical Consistency Learning

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) is an emerging research topic that studies how to adapt a pretrained source model using unlabeled target data. It is derived from unsupervised domain adaptation but has the advantage of not requiring labeled source data to learn adaptive models. This makes it particularly

Learning Higher-order Object Interactions for Keypoint-based Video Understanding

Action recognition is an important problem that requires identifying actions in video by learning complex interactions across scene actors and objects. However, modern deep-learning based networks often require significant computation and may capture scene context using various modalities that further