Presenting ERSM at IJCAI 2026

From 18 to 21 August 2026, I was in Bremen for IJCAI-ECAI 2026, the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, to present our paper Energy-Regularized Spatial Masking.

In one sentence: ERSM adds a light layer inside convolutional networks that learns, for each image, which regions are worth keeping and masks the rest, which makes the model more robust to occlusions and its decisions easier to read, without losing accuracy.

I was really happy to take part in my first A* conference. Joint work with Bilal Faye, Djamel Bouchaffra, Nadjib Lazaar, Hanane Azzag and Mustapha Lebbah. And at the conference gala dinner, there was robot football.