Mert Kilickaya

I am an AI researcher. My goal is to help automate vision. Can we build models that curate their own data, extract their own supervision, and adapt on the fly to changes in the real world?

I completed my PhD in computer vision at the University of Amsterdam’s Qualcomm Labs, supervised by Arnold Smeulders. Since then, I’ve been working in industry as a research engineer.

My work connects self-supervised visual representation learning, continual adaptation, and vision-language learning — from academic research to applied AI.

Mert Kilickaya
PhD in computer vision

News

Earlier news 2023–2024

Experience

  1. October 2026 — present

    Greyparrot

    Senior Research Engineer · Industrial visual intelligence

  2. 2023 — October 2026

    Agendia Amsterdam, Netherlands

    ML Researcher · Biomarker Discovery

  3. 2022 — 2023

    Eindhoven University of Technology Netherlands

    ML Researcher · Continual Pretraining Agents

    Learning to Learn Lab

  4. March 2021 — January 2022

    Huawei Visual Search Lab Helsinki, Finland

    Research Intern · Multimodal Learning

  5. 2017 — 2022

    Qualcomm Labs, University of Amsterdam Netherlands

    PhD Researcher · Deep Learning for Vision

    At Qualcomm Labs, supervised by Arnold Smeulders.

Research

I want visual models to take a more active role in their own learning: choosing useful data, learning from new observations, and adapting efficiently as conditions change. This goal connects my work in self-supervised, continual, and vision-language learning with applications from medical diagnostics to industrial visual intelligence.

A whole-slide tissue image enters a neural network, which produces a recurrence risk score.

ESMO 2026 · LBA20 (Oral)

AI Driven Digital Pathology for the 70 Gene Recurrence Signature: Development and Validation in Early Stage Breast Cancer

Agendia · Presented by Laura van ’t Veer

Our work at Agendia explores predicting recurrence risk directly from routine whole-slide images of breast cancer tissue, using supervision from the 70-gene signature.

Spectral images guide a search among candidate transformer architectures.

ECCV 2024

HyTAS: A Hyperspectral Image Transformer Architecture Search Benchmark and Analysis

Fangqin Zhou, Mert Kilickaya, Joaquin Vanschoren, Ran Piao

We present HyTAS, a quick method for hyperspectral vision transformer architecture search.

Local image context and spectral information combine in HyLITE for classification.

BMVC 2023

Locality-Aware Hyperspectral Classification

Fangqin Zhou, Mert Kilickaya, Joaquin Vanschoren

We propose HyLITE, a vision-transformer for hyperspectral image classification.

Semi-supervised, few-shot and self-supervised paths through incremental learning.

Preprint 2023

Towards Label-Efficient Incremental Learning: A Survey

Mert Kilickaya, Joost van de Weijer, Yuki Asano

We survey semi-, few-shot, and self-supervised incremental learning.

Two views of an instance support self-supervised learning that continues over time.

CVPRW 2023 (Oral)

Are Labels Needed for Incremental Instance Learning?

Mert Kilickaya, Joaquin Vanschoren

We introduce VINIL, a self-supervised incremental instance learner.

Image-level interaction labels guide alignment and localization of a person and an object.

BMVC 2021

Human-Object Interaction Detection via Weak Supervision

Mert Kilickaya, Arnold Smeulders

We introduce Align-Former to detect human-object interactions from an image.

Changing a visual composition produces a corresponding change in its representation.

WACV 2021

Structured Visual Search via Composition-aware Learning

Mert Kilickaya, Arnold Smeulders

We introduce composition-aware learning to improve visual image search.

Reference and candidate captions are compared through their meaning.

EACL 2017

Re-evaluating Automatic Metrics for Image Captioning

Mert Kilickaya, Aykut Erdem, Nazli Ikizler-Cinbis, Erkut Erdem

We propose Word-Mover Distance to evaluate image captioning.

Patents

Conversational image search: a visual query and a refinement lead to matching images.

Visual Image Search via Conversational Interaction (Huawei)

Mert Kilickaya, Baiqiang XIA

WO Patent, 2022

Human and hand cues guide a neural network to locate the interacted object.

Network for Interacted Object Localization (Qualcomm)

Mert Kilickaya, Arnold Smeulders

US Patent, 2022

Subject and object representations connect to recognize their interaction.

Subject-Object Interaction Recognition Model (Qualcomm)

Mert Kilickaya, Stratis Gavves, Arnold Smeulders

US Patent, 2022

Scene context and a human-object pair inform interaction learning.

Context-driven Learning of Human-object Interactions (Qualcomm)

Mert Kilickaya, Noureldien Hussein, Stratis Gavves, Arnold Smeulders

US Patent, 2021

People & Mentorship

Research is a shared endeavour. I’m fortunate to have worked with and supervised these thoughtful people.

Beyond Research

Away from research, I make visual memories. A few places, small observations, and moments worth keeping.

Amsterdam, Netherlands
Amsterdam, Netherlands · 2021
Rome, Italy
Rome, Italy · 2022
Explore my visual journal