Ehsan Pajouheshgar

Education

Postdoctoral Researcher — Computer Science & Applied Mathematics — EPFL

Aug 2025 – Present

Chair of Statistical Field Theory (Prof. C. Hongler) · Image and Visual Representation Lab (Prof. S. Süsstrunk)

Ph.D. in Computer Science — EPFL — GPA: 5.78 / 6

Sep 2020 – Jul 2025

Supervisor: Prof. Sabine Süsstrunk

B.Sc. in Computer Engineering, Minor in Pure Mathematics — Sharif University of Technology — GPA: 19.40 / 20

Sep 2015 – Jul 2020

Top 5 among 126 students

Technical Skills

Programming: Python, C++ · Frameworks: PyTorch, JAX, CUDA · Languages: Persian & Turkish (Native), English (Fluent), French (Beginner)

Honors & Awards

2025

Distinguished Ph.D. Thesis Award — EPFL

2024

Best Student Paper Award — ALife 2024

2023

Teaching Assistance Excellence Award — EPFL

2022

Best Paper Award — SIGGRAPH 2022

2020

Doctoral Fellowship — EDIC, EPFL

2019

Gold Medal — Iranian National Statistics Olympiad (Ranked 1st)

2016

30th team among 2,000+ — IEEE Xtreme Programming Competition

2014

Gold Medal — Iranian National Physics Olympiad

Publications

Exploring the Landscape of Non-Equilibrium Memories with Neural Cellular Automata

E. Pajouheshgar, A. Bhardwaj, N. Selub, E. Lake

Physical Review Letters (PRL)Demo

Mesh Neural Cellular Automata

E. Pajouheshgar*, Y. Xu*, A. Mordvintsev, E. Niklasson, T. Zhang, S. Süsstrunk

ACM TOG / SIGGRAPH 2024Demo

DyNCA: Real-time Dynamic Texture Synthesis Using Neural Cellular Automata

E. Pajouheshgar*, Y. Xu*, T. Zhang, S. Süsstrunk

CVPR 2023Demo

CLIPasso: Semantically-Aware Object Sketching

Y. Vinker, E. Pajouheshgar, J.Y. Bo, R.C. Bachmann, A.H. Bermano, D. Cohen-Or, A. Zamir, A. Shamir

ACM TOG / SIGGRAPH 2022★ Best Paper

NoiseNCA: Noisy Seed Improves Spatio-Temporal Continuity of Neural Cellular Automata

E. Pajouheshgar, Y. Xu, S. Süsstrunk

ALife 2024★ Best Student PaperDemo

Neural Particle Automata: Learning Self-Organizing Particle Dynamics

H. Kim*, E. Pajouheshgar*, S. Süsstrunk, W. Jakob, J. Park

Submitted to SIGGRAPH 2026Demo

Neural Cellular Automata: From Cells to Pixels

E. Pajouheshgar, Y. Xu, A. Abbasi, A. Mordvintsev, W. Jakob, S. Süsstrunk

Submitted to SIGGRAPH 2026Demo

The Mokume Dataset and Inverse Modeling of Solid Wood Textures

M. Larsson, H. Yamaguchi, E. Pajouheshgar, I-C. Shen, K. Tojo, C-M. Chang, et al.

ACM TOG / SIGGRAPH 2025

Volumetric Temporal Texture Synthesis for Smoke Stylization using Neural Cellular Automata

D. Wang, E. Pajouheshgar, Y. Xu, T. Zhang, S. Süsstrunk

BMVC 2025

Canonical Latent Representations in Conditional Diffusion Models

Y. Xu, T. Zhang, E. Pajouheshgar, S. Süsstrunk

Preprint

Emergent Dynamics in Neural Cellular Automata

Y. Xu, E. Pajouheshgar, S. Süsstrunk

ALife 2024

Optimizing Latent Space Directions for GAN-Based Local Image Editing

E. Pajouheshgar, T. Zhang, S. Süsstrunk

ICASSP 2022

ChOracle: A Unified Statistical Framework for Churn Prediction

A. Khodadadi, A. Hosseini, E. Pajouheshgar, F. Mansouri, H.R. Rabiee

IEEE TKDE 2020

Back to Square One: Probabilistic Trajectory Forecasting without Bells and Whistles

E. Pajouheshgar, C.H. Lampert

NeurIPS Workshop 2018

Work Experience

Data Scientist — Cafe Bazaar (Balad Maps), Tehran, Iran

May 2019 – Jul 2020

Computer vision team at Balad, a map and navigation service (Iran's equivalent of Google Maps)
Extracted structured information from proprietary KITTI-like driving datasets
Developed road extraction pipelines from satellite and aerial imagery

Teaching Experience

Teaching Assistant — EPFL, Lausanne

Spring 2026

Cellular Automata and Models of Artificial Life (MSc)

2022 – 2024

Computational Photography (MSc)

Fall 2023

Information, Computation, Communication (BSc)

Fall 2022

Linear Algebra (BSc)

Fall 2021

Machine Learning (MSc)

Teaching Assistant — Sharif University of Technology, Tehran

Spring 2019

Deep Learning (MSc)

Spring 2019

Stochastic Processes (MSc)

Fall 2018

Machine Learning (MSc)

Spring 2017

Advanced Programming in Java (BSc)

Fall 2016

Probability & Statistics (BSc)

Physics Instructor — Farzanegan 1 & Allame Helli High Schools, Tehran

2014 – 2016

Thermodynamics, Kinetic Theory, Electrodynamics, Experimental Physics (Olympiad students)