Golnaz Ghiasi
Golnaz Ghiasi is a researcher at Google DeepMind whose work runs from object detection to olympiad mathematics. Advised by Charless Fowlkes, they completed a PhD at the University of California, Irvine in 2016 on recognizing and segmenting objects under occlusion and clutter. With Tsung-Yi Lin and Quoc Le, they coauthored DropBlock in 2018 and NAS-FPN in 2019, and their Simple Copy-Paste and OpenSeg papers of 2021 and 2022 took on instance segmentation and open-vocabulary segmentation. In July 2025, an advanced version of Gemini Deep Think reached a gold-medal score at the International Mathematical Olympiad, with Ghiasi among the leads and key contributors of the team. Their work on mathematical reasoning continued with the IMO-Bench benchmarks in 2025 and, in February 2026, the paper introducing Aletheia, a math research agent.
Timeline
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2015–2016
A PhD at UC Irvine
Advised by Charless Fowlkes, they earn a PhD at the University of California, Irvine in 2016 with the dissertation "Recognizing and Segmenting Objects in the Presence of Occlusion and Clutter". Their joint papers with Fowlkes include a 2015 face detector that explicitly models occluded parts and a 2016 Laplacian pyramid architecture for semantic segmentation.
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2017
Real-time arbitrary style transfer
In 2017, they present a neural artistic stylization network at the British Machine Vision Conference with Honglak Lee, Manjunath Kudlur, Vincent Dumoulin and Jonathon Shlens. Trained on roughly 80,000 paintings, the model stylizes images in real time using any content and style image pair.
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2018–2019
DropBlock and NAS-FPN
With Tsung-Yi Lin and Quoc Le, they introduce DropBlock at NeurIPS in 2018, a structured form of dropout that drops contiguous regions of a feature map together. NAS-FPN, accepted at CVPR in 2019 with the same coauthors and Ruoming Pang, uses neural architecture search to discover a feature pyramid architecture for object detection.
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2021
Simple Copy-Paste augmentation
A CVPR 2021 paper they write with Yin Cui, Aravind Srinivas, Barret Zoph and others shows that randomly pasting objects onto images is a strong data augmentation for instance segmentation. On COCO, the method reaches 49.1 mask AP.
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2022
OpenSeg for open-vocabulary segmentation
OpenSeg, accepted at ECCV 2022 with Xiuye Gu, Yin Cui and Tsung-Yi Lin, organizes an image into regions named by arbitrary text. The model learns from image-level captions by aligning each word in a caption to one or a few predicted masks.
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December 2023
The Gemini model family
They coauthor the Gemini report of December 2023, which introduces a family of multimodal models in Ultra, Pro and Nano sizes that work across image, audio, video and text.
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2025
Gemini Deep Think at IMO 2025
In July 2025, an advanced version of Gemini Deep Think solves five of the six International Mathematical Olympiad problems perfectly for 35 points, a gold-medal score; Ghiasi is among the leads and key contributors of the IMO 2025 team. They also coauthor IMO-Bench, olympiad-level reasoning benchmarks published at EMNLP 2025 that played a role in that result.
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As of October 2026
Aletheia at Google DeepMind
In February 2026, they coauthor "Towards Autonomous Mathematics Research", which introduces Aletheia, a math research agent built on Gemini Deep Think that generates, verifies and revises solutions in natural language. Ghiasi is a researcher at Google DeepMind, where the Aletheia work is conducted.
Sources and credits
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- Golnaz Ghiasi - The Mathematics Genealogy Project
- [1506.08347] Occlusion Coherence: Detecting and Localizing Occluded Faces
- [1605.02264] Laplacian Pyramid Reconstruction and Refinement for Semantic Segmentation
- Golnaz Ghiasi - Google Research
- [1904.07392] NAS-FPN: Learning Scalable Feature Pyramid Architecture for Object Detection
- Simple Copy-Paste Is a Strong Data Augmentation Method for Instance Segmentation - CVPR 2021 Open Access Repository
- [2112.12143] Scaling Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation with Image-Level Labels
- [2312.11805] Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models
- Advanced version of Gemini with Deep Think officially achieves gold-medal standard at the International Mathematical Olympiad
- Golnaz Ghiasi - ACL Anthology
- Gemini Deep Think: Redefining the Future of Scientific Research
- Towards Autonomous Mathematics Research


