PhD Candidate · Computer Science · UNC Charlotte

Rajatsubhra
Chakraborty

Third-year Ph.D. student researching the intersection of interpretability, fairness, and bias in generative vision, advised by Dr. Depeng Xu & Dr. Cori Faklaris.

From mangas to comic books to detective novels, these things keep me glued all day long. A foodie and a Batman fanatic, I spend most of my leisure time reading about human evolution and anthropology. Right now I'm trying to understand how models form and visualize concepts, and how biases get encoded in those processes. If you love playing FIFA and talking about research and comic books, do drop by Woodward Hall 3rd Floor, RM 331.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.– Carl Sagan
More About Me

I try to understand how generative vision models form and visualize concepts, and how social biases get encoded along the way. In text-to-image diffusion, demographic attributes like gender or race become entangled with ostensibly neutral concepts such as a profession, an object, or a setting, so that nudging one quietly drags the other along. I treat this concept entanglement as the real object of study, locating where it lives inside a model's cross-attention, measuring it spatially rather than only at the output, and asking how it forms over the course of generation.

From there the question becomes how to intervene without breaking the model. Instead of retraining on curated data, I look for lightweight, interpretable handles: steering the denoising trajectory, disentangling overlapping concepts, and using causal reasoning to separate what a model should attend to from the spurious correlations it has absorbed. The throughline across diffusion models, flow-based segmentation, and multilingual vision-language systems stays the same, which is to make a model's internal decisions legible and then make them fairer.

Computer Vision Fairness in AI Text-to-Image Models Large Vision Language Models Bias Mitigation Interpretability in GenAI
Currently Building
Active
Causality & Image EditingCausal structure in counterfactual image editing for controllable, bias-aware generation.
Active
Open-Vocabulary Segmentation in Flow-Based ModelsOpen-vocabulary segmentation built on flow-based generative backbones.
2025 – present
VLM-ProbeA bias discovery framework for text-to-image models, with an exploration into causality.
Research Experience
Summer 2026
Graduate Research Assistant · Dept. of Physics & Optical ScienceUniversity of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA

Building DM-QPMNet, a dual-modality fusion network for cell segmentation in quantitative phase microscopy. Developing physics-aware models that stay robust under low-visibility imaging conditions.

Jan 2025 – present
Graduate Researcher · Trustworthy AI LabUniversity of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA

Proposed BiasMap, a model-agnostic pipeline that localizes and quantifies entanglement between demographic and semantic concepts in Stable Diffusion via cross-attention attribution. Designed energy-guided diffusion with a differentiable SoftIoU objective for plug-and-play bias mitigation without retraining.

Aug 2023 – Jan 2025
Graduate Research Assistant · CharML LabUniversity of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA

Co-developed LLAVIDAL, a large language-vision model for activities of daily living, and curated the 100K-pair ADL-X dataset with 3D poses and object trajectories. Built a curriculum-based semi-supervised detector that lifted aerial object-detection mAP by 32% using only 20% ground images.

Mar 2022 – Jul 2022
Student Research Assistant · PURE LabWayne State University, Detroit, USA

Engineered a U-Net model for cervical texture segmentation in ultrasound images, improving accuracy and clinical usability. Built an automatic multiclass segmentation pipeline that classified medical-imaging regions by tissue type.

Oct 2020 – Dec 2020
Research InternFriedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany

Designed deep local descriptors using CNNs for instance-level recognition of historical architecture. Focused on robust feature matching for heritage-building and landmark recognition.

Jul 2020 – Aug 2020
Research Intern · CMATER LabJadavpur University, Kolkata, India

Developed transfer-learning models for handwritten character recognition, reaching 99.99% accuracy with a VGG16 backbone. Worked on Bangla and Devanagari script-recognition pipelines.

May 2020 – Jul 2020
Summer Research InternIndian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India

Designed an automatic text-detection pipeline for Indus Valley Civilization seals. Explored computer-vision approaches to localizing undeciphered scripts.

Education
Aug 2023 – present
Ph.D. in Computer ScienceUniversity of North Carolina, Charlotte, USA
2017 – 2021
B.Tech. in Computer Science & EngineeringFuture Institute of Engineering and Management, Kolkata, India

Selected publications. A full and current list lives on my Google Scholar.

2026
Vision-Language Models are Fragile Multilingual Associators
Ritabrata Chakraborty, Rajatsubhra Chakraborty, Shivakumara Palaiahnakote, Angelo Cangelosi, Umapada Pal
New PreprintM²BIND · 2026Website ↗
Vision-Language ModelsMultilingualInterpretability
BiasMap: Leveraging Cross-Attentions to Discover and Mitigate Hidden Social Biases in Text-to-Image Generation
Rajatsubhra Chakraborty, Xujun Che, Depeng Xu, Cori Faklaris, Xi Niu, Shuhan Yuan
ACM SIGKDD (KDD) 2026Paper ↗Website ↗
FairnessInterpretabilityText-to-ImageBias Mitigation
DM-QPMNet: Dual-modality Fusion Network for Cell Segmentation in Quantitative Phase Microscopy
Rajatsubhra Chakraborty, Ana Espinosa-Momox, Riley Haskin, Depeng Xu, Rosario Porras-Aguilar
IEEE ICIP 2026Paper ↗
Medical ImagingSegmentationQuantitative Phase Microscopy
2025
LLAVIDAL: A Large Language Vision Model for Daily Activities of Living
Dominick Reilly, Rajatsubhra Chakraborty, Arkaprava Sinha, Manish Kumar Govind, Pu Wang, Francois Bremond, Le Xue, Srijan Das
IEEE/CVF CVPR 2025Paper ↗Website ↗
Vision-Language ModelsVideo UnderstandingMultimodal
Do We Need Large VLMs for Spotting Soccer Actions?
Ritabrata Chakraborty, Rajatsubhra Chakraborty, Avijit Dasgupta, Sandeep Chaurasia
IJCNLP-AACL SRW 2025OralPaper ↗
Vision-Language ModelsVideoEfficiency
2024
Multiview Aerial Visual Recognition (MAVREC): Can Multi-view Improve Aerial Visual Perception?
Aritra Dutta, Srijan Das, Jacob Nielsen, Rajatsubhra Chakraborty, Mubarak Shah
IEEE/CVF CVPR 2024Paper ↗Website ↗
Object DetectionAerial / UAVMulti-view

Teaching is one of the most rewarding parts of the job. A record of my TA and lead-TA roles below.

Jan 2025 – present
Lead TA · ITSC 3146Intro to Operating Systems & Networking · UNC Charlotte
May 2025 – Aug 2025
TA · ITIS 4250 / 5250Computer Forensics · UNC Charlotte
Jan 2023 – May 2023
TA · CSC 7760 & CSC 5750Deep Learning & Principles of Web Technologies · Wayne State University
Aug 2022 – Dec 2022
TA · CSC 1100 & CSC 2110Problem-Solving & Programming and Computer Science I · Wayne State University
📄

New preprint out: Vision-Language Models are Fragile Multilingual Associators (M²BIND), with Ritabrata Chakraborty, Shivakumara Palaiahnakote, Angelo Cangelosi, and Umapada Pal. Project site is live!

🎉

Yaay! I have passed my Qualifier Examination!

🥳

DM-QPMNet has been accepted to the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) 2026! See you all in Tampere, Finland! 🇫🇮

🔥

BiasMap has been accepted to the ACM SIGKDD (KDD) 2026 (18% acceptance rate)! The project website is live. See you all in Jeju, South Korea! 🇰🇷

🎤

I gave a contributed talk in Room 213 of Music City Centre, Nashville, TN, at the DemoDiv CVPR workshop on June 11th at 11:45 AM.

📄

BiasMap: Can Cross-Attention Uncover Hidden Social Biases? was accepted at the CVPR 2025 DemoDiv Workshop. It was my first collaborative work with Dr. Depeng Xu and Dr. Cori Faklaris.

🔭

TruthLens preprint is out now!

🤌

LLAVIDAL is accepted to CVPR 2025! See you soon, Nashville!

🗞️

A short version of LLAVIDAL was accepted at the MAR and VLM workshops at NeurIPS 2024!

🛰️

MAVREC was accepted at CVPR 2024! See you soon, Seattle!

Service to the research community: reviewing, mentoring, and volunteering.

Reviewer & Program Committee
  • Program Committee Member, PAKDD 2026
  • Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2026
  • IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP) 2026
  • Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2025
  • ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 2025
  • ACL Student Research Workshop (ACL SRW) 2025
  • ICML DIGBUGS Workshop, Program Committee Member 2025, Vancouver, BC
  • IEEE Transactions on Multimedia 2025
  • DemoDiv Workshop, CVPR 2025, Nashville, TN
  • ReGen AI Workshop, CVPR 2025, Nashville, TN
  • International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) 2024
Student Mentoring
Fall 2025 – present
Kevin Richards · Graduate Student, UNC Charlotte Multimodal LLMs in UAV LiDAR. Congrats to Kevin on passing his Honors Thesis! 🎓
Aug 2025 – Dec 2025
Monica Phann · Undergraduate Student, UNC Charlotte Bias Mitigation in Diffusion Models and VLMs.

When I'm not chasing cross-attention maps, I'm chasing light on the street. A rotating set of frames across street, travel, and the in-between.