Gert LekGert Lek

> About

I am a first-year PhD researcher at the Université de Neuchâtel, supervised by Prof. Lydia Y. Chen. My research focuses on AI Safety & Alignment, computer vision, and NLP.

// recent news

  • [2026]Detective SAM accepted at ICLR 2026 - read more
  • [2025]Detective SAM workshop paper accepted at ICML 2025 DIG-BUGS Workshop - read more

> Publications

Detective SAM: Adaptive AI-Image Forgery Localization

ICLR 2026

Gert Lek, Nicolas van Schaik, Chaoyi Zhu, Pin-Yu Chen, Robert Birke, Lydia Y. Chen

Extends SAM2 for image forgery localization with perturbation-driven forensic embeddings, lightweight feature adapters, and a learnable prompt module. Introduces AutoEditForge, an automated diffusion edit generation pipeline. Achieves SOTA on common benchmarks and modern editing models such as NanoBanana and Qwen-Image-Edit.

Detective SAM: Adapting SAM to Localize Diffusion-based Forgeries via Embedding Artifacts

ICML Workshop DIG-BUGS 2025

Gert Lek, Chaoyi Zhu, Pin-Yu Chen, Robert Birke, Lydia Y. Chen

Extends SAM with blur-driven forensic embedding signals, hierarchical learnable prompts, and lightweight adapters for automatic forgery mask generation. Outperforms prior methods on MagicBrush and CoCoGlide.

> Experience

PhD Researcher @ Université de Neuchâtel

2024 – Present

Research on AI Safety & Alignment, computer vision, and NLP. Supervised by Prof. Lydia Y. Chen.

R&D @ Ortec Finance

2023 – 2024

Reinforcement learning, bandit problems, and software development.

> Education

MSc Quantitative Finance @ Erasmus School of Economics

2022 – 2023

Thesis: "Interpretable High-dimensional Continuous RL" - Grade: 9.0/10

BSc Mathematics @ TU Delft

2019 – 2022

Thesis: "Robust Optimal Classification Trees" - Grade: 9.0/10

> Posts

> Contact

Feel free to reach out if you're interested in collaborating or have questions about my research.