Bio
I am a Senior Applied Scientist / ML Engineer at Instacart on the Logistics ML / AI team, where I work on deep learning models for accurate delivery ETA prediction.
Previously, I was an Applied Scientist at Microsoft on the Bing Maps AI team, where I worked on a range of computer vision and geospatial machine learning problems including representation learning from aerial and street-view imagery, object detection, semantic segmentation, traffic prediction, and building LLM-powered agentic systems for urban navigation. Before Microsoft, I was a Software Engineer at Amazon where I worked on scene-boundary detection and video copyright infringement classification for Prime Video, as well as APIs, storage, and monitoring solutions.
My research interests span computer vision, vision-language models, self-supervised learning, and remote sensing. I have co-authored academic papers published at venues including WACV, ICLR, and ICML workshops, and hold a US patent with another pending. I received my M.S. in Computer Science from NYU Courant and my B.Tech. in Electronics & Communication Engineering from Delhi Technological University.
Conference / Workshop Publications
Subimage Overlap Prediction: Task-Aligned Self-Supervised Pretraining For Semantic Segmentation In Remote Sensing Imagery
Published in WACV 2026 Workshop: Computer Vision For Earth Observation (CV4EO), 2026
Recommended citation: Lakshay Sharma, Alex Marin. (2026). "Subimage Overlap Prediction: Task-Aligned Self-Supervised Pretraining For Semantic Segmentation In Remote Sensing Imagery." WACV 2026 Workshop: CV4EO.
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Landsat-Bench: Datasets and Benchmarks for Landsat Foundation Models
Published in ICML 2025 Workshop: TerraBytes - Towards global datasets and models for Earth Observation, 2025
Recommended citation: Isaac Corley, Lakshay Sharma, Ruth Crasto. (2025). "Landsat-Bench: Datasets and Benchmarks for Landsat Foundation Models." ICML 2025 Workshop: TerraBytes.
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SuoiAI: Building a Dataset for Aquatic Invertebrates in Vietnam
Published in ICLR 2025 Workshop: Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning, 2025
Recommended citation: Tue Vo, Lakshay Sharma, Tuan Dinh, Khuong Dinh, Trang Nguyen, Trung Phan, Minh Do, Duong Vu. (2025). "SuoiAI: Building a Dataset for Aquatic Invertebrates in Vietnam." ICLR 2025 Workshop: Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning.
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Other
Neural Image Captioning
arXiv, 2019
Experimentation and analysis of image captioning techniques.
Recommended citation: Elaina Tan*, Lakshay Sharma*. (2019). "Neural Image Captioning." arXiv preprint. (*Equal contribution)
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Natural Language Understanding with the Quora Question Pairs Dataset
arXiv, 2019
100+ citations. Duplicate question detection with ML / NLP techniques.
Recommended citation: Lakshay Sharma*, Laura Graesser*, Nikita Nangia*, Utku Evci*. (2019). "Natural Language Understanding with the Quora Question Pairs Dataset." arXiv preprint. (*Equal contribution)
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Sentiment Classification using Images and Label Embeddings
arXiv, 2017
Analysis and modeling of sentiment prediction for images and associated text captions.
Recommended citation: Laura Graesser, Abhinav Gupta, Lakshay Sharma, Evelina Bakhturina. (2017). "Sentiment Classification using Images and Label Embeddings." arXiv preprint.
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Patents
Lakshay Sharma et al. Temporal Localization of Mature Content in Long-Form Videos Using Only Video-Level Labels. US Patent 11829413.
Patent
Lakshay Sharma et al. Generating Improved Traffic Speed Data for Road Segments in a Geographical Area Using Traffic Speed Prediction Neural Networks. Patent in filed/pending status (United States).
Awards
- Winner of Best Technical Hack @ Microsoft Global Hackathon 2021 (for Subimage Overlap Prediction work)
- 1st place winner @ AWS DeepLens Hackathon for trash classification computer vision model; featured on AWS Blog and AWS YouTube
- Placed 13/96 in iMet2020 dataset classification challenge at CVPR 2020 Workshop on Fine-Grained Visual Categorization
- Toyota Motor Corporation Scholarship, awarded by International House NYC and Toyota
Service
- Peer reviewer / program committee member for multiple workshops/conferences including AAAI 2025, AAAI 2026, WACV 2025