Building perceptual and multimodal models that help machines see games the way players do.
About
I am a senior researcher at Sony Interactive Entertainment in Berlin. My work sits at the intersection of computer vision, multimodal learning, and human visual perception, with games as the application domain — quality assessment, anomaly detection, and scene understanding.
I joined Sony in 2021 as part of GPAI (Game Platform AI), working on Video Quality Assessment for gaming content. In 2022, GPAI was merged into the larger Visual Computing Group (VCG), where I continued on VQA and contributed to leading the team’s VQA efforts for a period. Since summer 2025, I have moved to the Anomaly Detection team, focusing on gaming visual anomalies and temporal tokenizers for gameplay video.
Before Sony, I was a senior research engineer at Dolby (2021–2022) working on perceptual video encoding and human visual system modeling, and a research associate at TU Berlin on the EU H2020 ACCORDION project. I completed my Dr.-Ing. at TU Berlin (2016–2021) under Prof. Sebastian Möller, on QoE modeling for cloud gaming, as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow at Deutsche Telekom’s T-Labs within the QoE-NET ITN. I also chair the Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) group at the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG) and edit the ITU-T P.BBQCG work item on cloud gaming quality.
News
- Sep 2025 — Joined the Anomaly Detection team at Sony PlayStation, working on visual anomaly detection in games and temporal tokenizers.
- Sep 2025 — VideoGameQA-Bench: Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Video Game Quality Assurance accepted at NeurIPS 2025.
- 2025 — Non-Aligned Reference Image Quality Assessment for Novel View Synthesis accepted at WACV 2026; TriQA at ICIP 2025; Foundation Models Boost Low-Level Perceptual Similarity Metrics at ICASSP 2025.
- 2024 — Co-organized the Video Quality Assessment Challenge at AIS 2024 @ CVPR and the AIM 2024 UHD-IQA Challenge @ ECCV.
- 2024 — LAR-IQA: A Lightweight, Accurate, and Robust No-Reference IQA Model presented at ECCV Workshops.
- 2022 — Published the book Quality of Experience Modeling for Cloud Gaming Services (Springer, T-Labs Series).
- 2021 — Defended my PhD at TU Berlin and joined Dolby as a senior research engineer.
Selected Publications
- VideoGameQA-Bench: Evaluating Vision-Language Models for Video Game Quality Assurance M. R. Taesiri, et al. — NeurIPS 2025
- Non-Aligned Reference Image Quality Assessment for Novel View Synthesis A. Ghildyal, R. Sureddi, et al. — WACV 2026
- Foundation Models Boost Low-Level Perceptual Similarity Metrics A. Ghildyal, N. Barman, S. Zadtootaghaj — ICASSP 2025
- TriQA: Image Quality Assessment by Contrastive Pretraining on Ordered Distortion Triplets R. Sureddi, et al. — ICIP 2025
- LAR-IQA: A Lightweight, Accurate, and Robust No-Reference IQA Model N. Jamshidi Avanaki, et al. — ECCV Workshops 2024
- AIS 2024 Challenge on Video Quality Assessment of User-Generated Content: Methods and Results M. V. Conde, et al. — CVPR 2024
- Quality of Experience Modeling for Cloud Gaming Services S. Zadtootaghaj — Springer, T-Labs Series in Telecommunication Services, 2022. DOI
- NDNetGaming: Development of a No-Reference Deep CNN for Gaming Video Quality Prediction M. Utke, et al. — Multimedia Tools and Applications, 2020
- Quality Estimation Models for Gaming Video Streaming Services Using Perceptual Video Quality Dimensions S. Zadtootaghaj, et al. — ACM MMSys 2020
- GamingVideoSET: A Dataset for Gaming Video Streaming Applications N. Barman, S. Zadtootaghaj, et al. — NetGames 2018 (Best Paper Award)
A full list is on Google Scholar.
Service
- Chair, Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) group, VQEG
- Vice-chair, Emerging Technologies Group (ETG), VQEG
- Editor, ITU-T SG12 P.BBQCG — Parametric Bitstream-based Quality Assessment of Cloud Gaming Services
- Contributor to ITU-T recommendations G.1032, P.809, G.1072
- Reviewer for IEEE TCSVT, Quality and User Experience, Journal of Electronic Imaging, ECCV, QoMEX, ICC, ICME, PQS
elsewhere
Email · LinkedIn · GitHub · Google Scholar
Berlin, Germany