Mahtab Bigverdiمهتاب بیگوردی
In Persian, Mahtab means moonlight🌙
Computer science PhD student at the University of Washington
About
I am a PhD student in the Paul G. Allen School at the University of Washington, advised by Ranjay Krishna and Linda Shapiro.
I work on the perceptual limits of vision-language models: what they actually see, where their spatial reasoning breaks down, and how to give them intermediate visual representations worth reasoning over.
I also work on developing and applying computer vision methods to medical and biomedical problems.
Before Seattle I earned my bachelor's degree in computer engineering at the Sharif University of Technology in Iran. In summer 2021 I received an International Undergraduate Excellence Award from the Chair for Computer Aided Medical Procedures & Augmented Reality (CAMPAR) at the Technical University of Munich.
Publications
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Ablate-to-Validate: Are Vision-Language Models Really Using Continuous Thought Tokens?
Preprint, 2026
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MedBLINK: Probing Basic Perception in Multimodal Language Models for Medicine
ICCV 2025 Workshop on Computer Vision for Automated Medical Diagnosis
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Gene-Level Representation Learning via Interventional Style Transfer in Optical Pooled Screening
CVPR 2024 Workshop on Computer Vision for Microscopy Image Analysis
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Data Alignment for Zero-Shot Concept Generation in Dermatology AI
ICLR 2024 Workshop on Navigating and Addressing Data Problems for Foundation Models
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* Equal contribution.
Experience
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Research assistant
2022 — presentUniversity of Washington, Seattle, WA
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Student Researcher
Summer 2026Google, Mountain View, CA
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Student Researcher
2025-2026Ai2, Seattle, WA
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Research intern
2023Genentech, South San Francisco, CA
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Research intern
2021 — 2022Technical University of Munich, Germany
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Research assistant
2019 — 2021Sharif University of Technology, Iran