Josiah Aklilu

About Me

Currently, I’m a Biomedical Data Science PhD student @Stanford where I’m grateful to be advised by Prof. Serena Yeung-Levy in the MARVL lab. My research interests lie at the intersection of AI and healthcare, centered in computer vision models for surgical skill assessment, training, and feedback. I’m also more generally interested in video understanding and multimodal models in biomedicine. I’ve interned with Hoifung’s group @Microsoft Research.

Previously, I received my Bachelor’s in Mathematics, Computer Science, and Physics @University of Denver with a Distinction in Computer Science.

News

[05/25] Co-organizing the 1st Workshop on Multimodal Foundation Models for Biomedicine (MMFM-BIOMED). Visit our poster session @CVPR2025!
[05/25] Checkout our method for zero-shot action localization accepted to the VidLLMs Workshop @CVPR2025!
[04/25] Our DropQuery method has been included in the new scikit-activeml AL package!
[03/25] How good are VLMs at surgical tasks? See our systematic evaluation of current SOTA in surgery!

Publications

CVPRw

Zero-shot Action Localization via the Confidence of Large Vision-Language Models

Josiah Aklilu, Xiaohan Wang, Serena Yeung-Levy

CVPR Workshop on Video Large Language Models, 2025.

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arXiv

Systematic evaluation of large vision-language models for surgical artificial intelligence

Anita Rau, Mark Endo, Josiah Aklilu, Jaewoo Heo, Khaled Saab, Alberto Paderno, Jeffrey Jopling, F. Christopher Holsinger, Serena Yeung-Levy

arXiv, 2025.

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NEJM AI

Artificial Intelligence identifies factors associated with blood loss and surgical experience in cholecystectomy

Josiah Aklilu, Min Woo Sun, Shelly Goel, Sebastiano Bartoletti, Anita Rau, Griffin Olsen, Kay S Hung, Sophie L Mintz, Vicki Luong, Arnold Milstein, Mark J Ott, Robert Tibshirani, Jeffrey K Jopling, Eric C Sorenson, Dan E Azagury, Serena Yeung-Levy

NEJM Artificial Intelligence, 2024.

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TMLR

Revisiting Active Learning in the Era of Vision Foundation Models

Sanket Rajan Gupte*, Josiah Aklilu*, Jeffrey J Nirschl, Serena Yeung-Levy

Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2024.

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ECCV

Depth-guided NeRF Training via Earth Mover’s Distance

Anita Rau, Josiah Aklilu, F. Christopher Holsinger, and Serena Yeung-Levy

European Conference on Computer Vision, 2024.

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MLHC

ALGES: Active learning with gradient embeddings for semantic segmentation of laparoscopic surgical images

Josiah Aklilu, Serena Yeung-Levy

Machine Learning for Health Care, 2022.

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