Industry Partner Talk (Google/DeepMind): Shift Happens: Robustness and Reliability of Multimodal Foundation Models, by Naman Goyal (Google DeepMind) and Jenny Ni (Google)
Abstract
Multimodal models perform well on curated benchmarks but often fail unpredictably when deployed in the real world, where input distributions shift, modalities may be missing, and data quality varies. This workshop focuses on the fundamental ML challenge of robustness under distribution shift in multimodal settings: how do models degrade when visual or textual inputs shift? Can we predict and mitigate failures before deployment? What theoretical frameworks govern cross-modal robustness?
Speaker Bio:
Naman Goyal: Naman is a machine learning research engineer at Google DeepMind, where he focuses on pushing the frontiers of large language model alignment and autonomous agent capabilities. He served as a Founding Engineer for Gemini Deep Research, pioneering the long-horizon planning and context management systems that power complex, multi-step AI research. Recently he has focused more on scalable oversight and alignment for long-running agents including transferring domain knowledge from coding agents to research agents. He is also a co-author of the foundational Gemini 2.5 technical report and recent paper on AI debate https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27483. Previously he worked on multimodal foundation models at NVIDIA and Apple. He holds a Masters in Computer Science from Columbia University and a Bachelors in Computer Science from IIT Ropar, where he was Institute Rank 1.
Jenny Ni: Jenny is a Senior AI Security and Trust & Safety Professional at Google, specializing in the development and deployment of secure, large-scale machine learning systems. With a deep expertise in multimodal AI safety, Jenny focuses on mitigating risks and building robust safeguards for complex AI models. Prior to her current role at Google, she drove key Trust & Safety initiatives at Apple. She brings a wealth of industry experience in scaling responsible AI systems from research into global consumer products.