Yeh earns Google Research Scholar Award

01-14-2026

Raymond A. Yeh, assistant professor of computer science (photo by Brian Powell)

Purdue University’s Department of Computer Science Assistant Professor Raymond A. Yeh has received a Google Research Scholar Award, which provides unrestricted funding to support world-class research by early-career faculty in fields relevant to Google. The award offers funding to advance Yeh’s research on mitigating the harmful use of open-source generative AI models.

Yeh’s research focuses on improving the safety and robustness of large-scale text-to-image models, AI systems capable of generating realistic and artistic visual content from text prompts. As open-source releases make these technologies more widely accessible, Yeh’s work aims to ensure they are used responsibly.

“Open-source image generators have lowered the barrier to creating high-quality visual content,” Yeh said. “But as they become more powerful, it’s increasingly important to ‘immunize’ these models against harmful downstream uses.”

Yeh’s group recently demonstrated a model “immunization” technique in text-to-image generation in a paper published at ECCV 2024. Additionally, in collaboration with Assistant Professor Brian Bullins, the group explored the theoretical underpinnings of the “immunization” framework, resulting in an oral paper at ICML 2025; an honor with a 1% acceptance rate.

Beyond “immunization”, Yeh’s research also studies the design of equivariant deep neural networks; vision models that maintain consistent outputs even when images are rotated, translated, or scaled. His group develops advanced computer vision systems with recent works in anomaly detection and facial landmark detection.

Yeh’s research group website can be found here.

About the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University

Founded in 1962, the Department of Computer Science was created to be an innovative base of knowledge in the emerging field of computing as the first degree-awarding program in the United States. The department continues to advance the computer science industry through research. US News & Reports ranks Purdue CS #8 in computer engineering and #19 and #16 overall in undergraduate and graduate computer science, respectively. Additionally the program is ranked 6th in cybersecurity, 8th in software engineering, 13th in systems, 15th in programming languages and data analytics, and 18th in theory. Graduates of the program are able to solve complex and challenging problems in many fields. Our consistent success in an ever-changing landscape is reflected in the record undergraduate enrollment, increased faculty hiring, innovative research projects, and the creation of new academic programs. The increasing centrality of computer science in academic disciplines and society, and new research activities—centered around foundations and applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning, such as natural language processing, human computer interaction, vision, and robotics, as well as systems and security—are the future focus of the department. cs.purdue.edu