PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Anna Rohrbach

Anna Rohrbach is a computer vision researcher whose work connects images and video with language. She earned an applied mathematics master's in 2010 and a computer science PhD at Saarland University in 2017, then became a postdoctoral researcher with Trevor Darrell at UC Berkeley. She coauthored work on movie descriptions, phrase grounding, video summarization, and multimodal claim verification; she received the German Pattern Recognition Award in 2023. Since 2023, she is a full professor of Multimodal Grounded Learning at TU Darmstadt and hessian.AI, co-leads the Multimodal AI Lab, and her coauthored VeriTaS benchmark won ACL's 2026 Best Resource Paper Award.

Now at
Multimodal AI Lab

Timeline

  1. 2010

    An applied mathematics master's

    In 2010, she earns an M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics at Odessa I.I.Mechnikov National University in Ukraine.

  2. 2015

    A dataset for movie description

    In 2015, she coauthors A Dataset for Movie Description, which aligns audio descriptions with full-length HD movies and includes aligned movie scripts. The MPII-MD corpus contains over 68,000 sentences and video snippets from 94 HD movies.

  3. 2015–2016

    Grounding phrases in images

    In 2015, she coauthors Grounding of Textual Phrases in Images by Reconstruction, which learns to locate text phrases by attending to image regions and reconstructing each phrase. The paper appears at ECCV 2016.

  4. 2017

    A PhD and Berkeley postdoc

    In 2017, she earns a PhD in Computer Science at Saarland University. By October 2017, she works as a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley with Professor Trevor Darrell. In 2017, she coauthors Generating Descriptions with Grounded and Co-Referenced People, a movie-description model that grounds mentioned characters and resolves visual references between consecutive sentence or clip pairs.

  5. 2021

    CLIP-It for video summaries

    In 2021, she coauthors CLIP-It, a language-guided multimodal transformer for generic and query-focused video summarization that scores frames against a user query or an automatically generated video caption.

  6. 2023

    A Darmstadt professorship and award

    In 2023, she joins TU Darmstadt and hessian.AI as a full professor of Multimodal Grounded Learning, supported by a €2 million LOEWE Start Professorship from Hesse. She receives the German Pattern Recognition Award for her work at the intersection of vision and language.

  7. 2025

    Conference roles and DEFAME

    In 2025, she serves as an Area Chair for ICCV and joins the organizers' team as a Program Chair for ECCV 2026. She coauthors DEFAME, a zero-shot pipeline for open-domain text-image claim verification.

  8. 2026

    VeriTaS and a TU professorship

    In 2026, she coauthors VeriTaS, a dynamic benchmark for multimodal automated fact-checking that wins ACL's Best Resource Paper Award. Since 2023, she is a full professor of Multimodal Grounded Learning at TU Darmstadt and hessian.AI and co-leads the Multimodal AI Lab with Marcus Rohrbach.

Career

  1. Since 2023TU DarmstadtFull professor of Multimodal Grounded Learning
  2. Since 2023Multimodal AI LabCo-lead
  3. From 2017University of California, BerkeleyPostdoctoral researcher

Education

  1. 2017Saarland UniversityPhD in Computer Science
  2. 2010Odesa I. I. Mechnikov National UniversityM.Sc. in Applied Mathematics

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Anna Rohrbach. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes TU Darmstadt. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  3. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes TU Darmstadt. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  4. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes TU Darmstadt. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Anna Rohrbach yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Anna Rohrbach - Max Planck Institute for Informatics mpi-inf.mpg.de. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. A Dataset for Movie Description openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Grounding of Textual Phrases in Images by Reconstruction arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Generating Descriptions with Grounded and Co-Referenced People arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. CLIP-It! Language-Guided Video Summarization papers.neurips.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. German Pattern Recognition Award 2023 presented to Prof. Anna Rohrbach for Groundbreaking Contributions to AI Research – Computer Science – TU Darmstadt informatik.tu-darmstadt.de. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Anna Rohrbach – Vision and Language anna-rohrbach.net. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. DEFAME: Dynamic Evidence-based FAct-checking with Multimodal Experts proceedings.mlr.press. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. VeriTaS: The First Dynamic Benchmark for Multimodal Automated Fact-Checking arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. Best Resource Paper Award for Fact-Checking Research at ACL 2026 informatik.tu-darmstadt.de. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. Overview – Multimodal AI – TU Darmstadt informatik.tu-darmstadt.de. Checked 21 October 2026.