Education
CSAIL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
2018 – 2024
PhD, Computer Science
Advisor: Antonio Torralba
Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC)
2015 – 2017
MS, Electrical Engineering
CFIS, UPC
2011 – 2015
BS, Electrical Engineering
BS, Computer Engineering
Work / Research Experience
Amazon Science, BCN, Spain
Sep 2024 – Present
Applied Scientist
- Applied research in image generation and understanding for product placement and
marketing campaigns, deployed at Amazon scale.
- Trained and deployed large-scale multimodal diffusion models (vision-language and
image-editing foundation models) for product image generation using PyTorch and
distributed multi-GPU training.
- Built end-to-end Python ML pipelines for data curation, large-scale training,
evaluation, and deployment of LLMs and vision-language models.
- AGI team: designed and trained cartridges for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG),
enabling context compression and efficient long-context inference for large language
models.
Google, GeometricAI, NYC
Jun 2023 – Feb 2024
Research Internship
Research in volumetric rendering using wavelet decomposition
Google, Viscam, Cambridge, USA
Jun 2022 – Sep 2022
Research Internship
Research in object-centric depth reconstruction from single image
Uber ATG, San Francisco (remote)
Jun 2020 – Sep 2020
Research Summer Internship
Research in novel view synthesis for autonomous driving simulation
Research Assistant, CSAIL, MIT
May 2017 – May 2018
Advisor: Antonio Torralba
Research Assistant, Image Processing Group, UPC
Sep 2016 – Apr 2017
Advisor: Xavier Giró-i-Nieto
Zhilabs, Barcelona
Jun 2015 – Oct 2016
Software Engineer
Developed algorithms for root cause analysis in telecommunications networks
Research Assistant, Relational Algorithmics, Complexity and Learning Lab, UPC
Feb 2015 – Jul 2015
Advisor: Ricard Gavaldà
Publications
PLACID: Identity-Preserving Multi-Object Compositing via Video Diffusion
with Synthetic Trajectories
Gemma Canet Tarrés, Manel Baradad, Francesc Moreno-Noguer, Yumeng Li.
CVPR 2026
Separating Knowledge and Perception with Procedural Data
Adrián Rodríguez-Muñoz, Manel Baradad, Phillip Isola, Antonio Torralba.
ICML 2025
A Vision Check-up for Language Models
Pratyusha Sharma, Tamar Rott Shaham, Manel Baradad, Stephanie Fu,
Adrián Rodríguez-Muñoz, Shivam Duggal, Phillip Isola, Antonio Torralba.
CVPR 2024 (Highlight)
Procedural Image Programs for Representation Learning
Manel Baradad, Chun-Fu Chen, Jonas Wulff, Tongzhou Wang,
Rogerio Feris, Antonio Torralba, Phillip Isola.
NeurIPS 2022
Learning to See by Looking at Noise
Manel Baradad*, Jonas Wulff*, Tongzhou Wang, Phillip Isola, Antonio Torralba.
NeurIPS 2021 (Spotlight)
Height and Uprightness Invariance for 3D Prediction From a Single View
Manel Baradad, Antonio Torralba.
CVPR 2020
Using Unknown Occluders to Recover Hidden Scenes
Adam B. Yedidia, Manel Baradad, Christos Thrampoulidis,
William T. Freeman, Gregory W. Wornell.
CVPR 2019
Inferring Light Fields From Shadows
Manel Baradad, Vickie Ye, Adam B. Yedidia, Frédo Durand,
William T. Freeman, Gregory W. Wornell, Antonio Torralba.
CVPR 2018 (Spotlight)
Recurrent Neural Networks for Semantic Instance Segmentation
Amaia Salvador, Miriam Bellver, Victor Campos, Manel Baradad,
Ferran Marques, Jordi Torres, Xavier Giro-i-Nieto.
CVPR 2018 DeepVision Workshop
Characterizing chronic disease and polymedication prescription patterns
from electronic health records
Martí Zamora, Manel Baradad, Ester Amado, Silvia Cordomí, Esther Limón,
Juliana Ribera, Marta Arias, Ricard Gavaldà.
DSAA 2015
Preprints
Background Prompting for Improved Object Depth
Manel Baradad, Yuanzhen Li, Forrester Cole, Michael Rubinstein,
Antonio Torralba, William T. Freeman, Varun Jampani.
arXiv 2023
Deep Augmentation: Enhancing Self-Supervised Learning through
Transformations in Higher Activation Space
Rickard Brüel-Gabrielsson, Tongzhou Wang, Manel Baradad, Justin Solomon.
arXiv 2023
Honors and Awards
"laCaixa" fellowship for graduate studies in USA
2018
Full tuition and stipend for two years
"Fundació Catalunya-La Pedrera" fellowship
2015
Full tuition of the Master's degree
CFIS fellowship
2012
Full tuition of the Bachelor's degree
Languages
English: Fluent ·
Spanish, Catalan: Native ·
French: Basic (in progress)