About me
I am an Assistant Professor (maitre de conférences in French) in computer science at AgroParisTech in the MIA Paris-Saclay lab. I am interested in machine learning for environmental sciences. Currently, I focus on multimodal and multisource representation learning, with applications to the monitoring of industrial pollution and wildfire simulation.Previously, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at CNES in collaboration with the SPE lab from CNRS - Corsica University. I completed my PhD (manuscript) at ONERA, Magellium and ISAE-SUPAERO in close collaboration with the Toulouse Mathematics Institute on the semantic segmentation of airborne hyperspectral images for mapping impermeable surfaces in large urban areas.
I try to conduct my research following the principles of Slow Science and Open Science. I also attempt to limit the carbon footprint of my research, and I therefore do not travel by plane to attend conferences.
Open positions
- Research internship in machine learning for multimodal data analysis co-supervised with Vincent Guigue.
News
June 2025: Our papers introducing DEFLECT and p3VAE have been accepted to ICCV 2025 and Springer Machine Learning, respectively!
June 2025: For the tenth MILO seminar, we were glad to have a presentation of Maud Biquard (ISAE-SUPAERO / CNES) about image restoration with compressive variational autoencoders!
May 2025: For the ninth MILO seminar, we were delighted to welcome Benoit Dufumier (CEA) and Javiera Castillo-Navarro (CNAM) for a presentation about multimodal contrastive learning!
April 2025: For the eighth MILO seminar, we were glad to welcome Luca Savant from Turin University for a great talk about Gaussian Splattings for Earth observation!
Selected publications
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R. Thoreau, J. Levillain and D. Derksen MACLEAN workshop @ ECML-PKDD 2025. [arXiv] [code] [slides]
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R. Thoreau*, V. Marsocci* and D. Derksen (*Equal contribution) IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2025. [paper] [arXiv] [code] [poster] [video]
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R. Thoreau, L. Risser, V. Achard, B. Berthelot and X. Briottet Springer Machine Learning. [paper] [arXiv] [code] [slides]
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R. Thoreau, L. Risser, V. Achard, B. Berthelot and X. Briottet ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. [paper] [data set] [code] [arXiv]
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R. Thoreau, V. Achard, L. Risser, B. Berthelot and X. Briottet IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine. [paper] [code]
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Teaching
Current coursesI teach computer science (programming with Python / SQL, machine learning, and deep learning for image analysis) to undergraduate and graduate students at AgroParisTech. I am also involved, as a non-expert, in classes of ethics, history and philosophy of sciences.
Past courses (2020 - 2025)
- Machine learning (lectures) at Paul Sabatier University, M1 MAPI3,
- Introduction to machine learning (lectures) at Paul Sabatier University, 3rd year BS in Mathematics / Computer Science,
- Introduction to statistics (lectures) at Paul Sabatier University, 2nd year BS in Biochemistry,
- Integration and probability theory (tutorials) at ENSEEIHT engineering school,
- Statistical foundations of Machine Learning (practical works) at ISAE-SUPAERO, Data & Decision Sciences MS,
- Combinatorial optimization (practical works) at Paul Sabatier University, Computer Science MS,
- Algorithmic (practical works) at Paul Sabatier University, Computer Science BS,
- Introduction to python (practical works) at Paul Sabatier University, Civil Engineering BS.
Student supervision
- April to October 2025, Hugo André, final-year student at ISAE-SUPAERO on deep generative modeling for the inversion of industrial stack plumes from satellite images, in collaboration with Pierre-Yves Foucher (ONERA), Camille Desjardins, Laura Le Barbier and Solange Lemai-Chenevier (CNES).
- March to August 2023, Arthur Cassou, final-year student at ENSTA Bretagne on the integration of physical priors in generative models for hyperspectral data, in collaboration with Laurent Risser, Véronique Achard and Xavier Briottet.
- May to July 2022, Gaspard Loupit, second-year student at ISAE-SUPAERO on the comparison of features extracted by spatial-spectral convolutions to morphological profiles through LIME explanations for hyperspectral images, in collaboration with Véronique Achard.
- April to July 2022, Clément Lefranc, master student in computer science at Paul Sabatier University on the development of a QGIS plug-in for active learning on Earth observation data, namely AL4EO.