Emmanuel G. Maminta
I am a Ph.D. student in Artificial Intelligence at the University of the Philippines Diliman, working in the Ubiquitous Computing Laboratory with Prof. Rowel O. Atienza.
My research focuses on embodied AI, multimodal AI, and vision-language models for retail applications (RetailVision, Physical Retail AI). Beyond my primary research focus, I am studying hand–object interaction, egocentric and exocentric computer vision, robotics, and world models.
In September 2026, I joined the Cohere Labs Open Science Community, where my focus is on multimodal AI and world models.
I also work as an AI Developer at OpenText Philippines, building enterprise AI products, agentic systems, and LLMOps/MLOps infrastructure. My applied work includes parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and harness engineering.
- Personal
- mnlmmnt@gmail.com
Metro Manila, Philippines
News
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Dec 2026
Our paper was accepted for an oral presentation at the Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV 2026) main conference in Osaka, Japan.
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Sep 2026
Joined the Cohere Labs Open Science Community, where my focus will be on multimodal AI and world models.
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Sep 2026
Presented our grocery product retrieval research at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2026) RetailVision Workshop in Malmö, Sweden.
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Aug 2026
Presented at the International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2026) in Lyon, France, and received the RRPR reproducibility badge.
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Aug 2026
Attended the AI Summer School at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where I received the Most Active Contributor Award from Microsoft Research Asia. I submitted the most contributions to the Global AI Value Challenge during the summer school.
Earlier updates
- 2025
Earned the NVIDIA-Certified Professional: Agentic AI and NVIDIA-Certified Associate: Generative AI LLMs certifications.
- Nov 2025
Our Sari Sandbox work was featured in Voxel51’s Best of ICCV 2025. Watch the recording.
- Oct 2025
Presented Sari Sandbox at the RetailVision Workshop at the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2025) in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, USA.
- 2025
Contributed the AnyMaths adapter to GEPA for prompt optimization in mathematical word problems and LLM reasoning.
- 2025
Released GEPA-Lite, a lightweight implementation of GEPA under the MIT License.
- 2025
Our paper, Sari Sandbox: A Virtual Retail Store Environment for Embodied AI Agents, was accepted at the RetailVision Workshop at the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2025). Paper · Project
- 2025
Presented research findings in a technical workshop with Analog Devices Philippines. Project
- 2025
Completed the M.Eng. in Artificial Intelligence program at the University of the Philippines. Capstone project
- 2024
Presented research with Nikko Carlo A. Yabut and Samsung Research & Development Institute Philippines at the first National Electrical, Electronics, and Computer Engineering Conference (NEECECon).
- 2023
Joined UCL as a graduate researcher on a collaborative project with Samsung Research & Development Institute Philippines on open-vocabulary object detection in vision-language models.
- 2022
Co-taught EEE 111 (Introduction to Programming and Computation) and EEE 121 (Data Structures and Algorithms) with Prof. Jhoanna Rhodette I. Pedrasa at UP Diliman.
- 2022
Began M.Eng.–Ph.D. studies as part of the pioneering Turing Batch in the University of the Philippines AI graduate program.
Publications
Late Interaction Ranking for Effective Closed-Catalog Grocery Product Retrieval
What Matters For Grocery Product Retrieval With Open Source Vision Language Models
Sari Sandbox: A Virtual Retail Store Environment for Embodied AI Agents
Scalable Early Detection of Mental Health Signals in Social Media Text
2025 · Preprint, not peer reviewed
Software
- I started OpenMPR to share open-source recipes for fine-grained grocery product retrieval.
- I contributed to stable-worldmodel, a platform for reproducible world model research and evaluation.
- I released GEPA-Lite, a lightweight implementation of Genetic-Pareto prompt optimization under the MIT License.
- I contributed the AnyMaths adapter to GEPA for prompt optimization on mathematical word problems and LLM reasoning.
Background
- Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence, University of the Philippines Diliman (ongoing; expected 2027)
- M.Eng. in Artificial Intelligence, University of the Philippines Diliman (2025)
- B.S. in Electrical Engineering, with honors, University of the Philippines Diliman (2022)
Previously, I collaborated with Samsung Research & Development Institute Philippines on open-vocabulary object detection and co-taught introductory programming and data structures at UP Diliman.
Other research interests
Resource-efficient pre-training, reinforcement learning for LLMs, reward modeling, preference learning, AI safety and alignment, chain-of-thought monitoring, and prompt optimization.
