Pascal Mettes

Pascal Mettes is a tenured Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam within the Informatics Institute, specializing in Artificial Intelligence. He leads groundbreaking research in hyperbolic deep learning, a field he has significantly advanced through theoretical developments and practical applications in computer vision and multimodal learning.

His research focuses on three primary domains: hyperbolic vision-language models that address the hierarchical nature of language-vision relationships; hierarchical deep learning using hyperbolic embeddings that naturally accommodate exponential growth patterns; and robust deep learning in hyperbolic space that improves out-of-distribution detection and network resilience. Mettes has established himself as a leading figure in this emerging field through numerous publications at top-tier conferences including CVPR, ICCV, ICML, NeurIPS, and ICLR.

His recent work demonstrates how hyperbolic geometry provides natural solutions to fundamental limitations in modern deep learning, particularly regarding hierarchical data structures that cannot be adequately represented in Euclidean space. The publication trends show increasing impact and recognition in the computer vision and machine learning communities, with multiple papers receiving oral presentations and best paper nominations.

• Best paper nomination ESWC25 for 'Designing Hierarchies for Optimal Hyperbolic Embedding'
• Finalist MM 2023 Best Open-Source Software Competition (for HypLL)
• Multiple reviewer awards across major conferences including CVPR, ICLR, ECCV, ICML, and NeurIPS
• MM 2016 Best Doctoral Student Award
• TRECVID 2015 Winner Multimedia Event Detection Benchmark

Mettes actively mentors eight PhD students working on hyperbolic learning and related topics, while also securing significant research funding including ELLIs PhD Award, NWO ClickNL, Google Perception Academic Funding, and Data Science Centre PhD Grants. He serves in prominent academic roles as Program Chair for International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval 2026 and has organized multiple workshops on hyperbolic learning at major conferences. His leadership in establishing hyperbolic deep learning as a recognized research direction is evident through his survey paper in IJCV 2024 and the development of the HypLL library for hyperbolic learning.