General information
Organisation
The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) is a key player in research, development and innovation in four main areas :
• defence and security,
• nuclear energy (fission and fusion),
• technological research for industry,
• fundamental research in the physical sciences and life sciences.
Drawing on its widely acknowledged expertise, and thanks to its 16000 technicians, engineers, researchers and staff, the CEA actively participates in collaborative projects with a large number of academic and industrial partners.
The CEA is established in ten centers spread throughout France
Reference
SL-DRT-26-0573
Direction
DRT
Thesis topic details
Category
Technological challenges
Thesis topics
Lightweight CNN and Causal GNN for scene understanding
Contract
Thèse
Job description
Scene understanding is a major challenge in computer vision, with recent approaches dominated by transformers (ViT, LLM, MLLM), which offer high performance but at a significant computational cost. This thesis proposes an innovative alternative combining lightweight convolutional neural networks (Lightweight CNN) and causal graph neural networks (Causal GNN) for efficient spatio-temporal analysis while optimizing computational resources. Lightweight CNNs enable high-performance extraction of visual features, while causal GNNs model dynamic relationships between objects in a scene graph, addressing challenges in object detection and relationship prediction in complex environments. Unlike current transformer-based models, this approach aims to reduce computational complexity while maintaining competitive accuracy, with potential applications in embedded vision and real-time systems.
University / doctoral school
Sciences et Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication (STIC)
Nice-Sophia-Antipolis
Thesis topic location
Site
Grenoble
Requester
Position start date
01/09/2026
Person to be contacted by the applicant
MESQUIDA Thomas
thomas.mesquida@cea.fr
CEA
DRT/DSCIN/LSTA
Tutor / Responsible thesis director
MARTINET Jean
jean.martinet@univ-cotedazur.fr
Université Côte d'Azur
I3S (Laboratoire d'Informatique, Signaux et Systèmes de Sophia Antipolis (UMR CNRS 7271)
Laboratoire I3S, Les Algorithmes - Bat Euclide B, 2000, Route des Lucioles
06900 Sophia Antipolis – France
04.89.15.43.86
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