Publications by Rita Cucchiara

Image captioning is a challenging task that combines Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing to generate descriptive and accurate textual descriptions for input images. Research efforts in this field mainly focus on developing novel architectural components to extend image captioning models and using large-scale image-text datasets crawled from the web to boost final performance. In this work, we explore an alternative to web-crawled data and augment the training dataset with synthetic images generated by a latent diffusion model. In particular, we propose a simple yet effective synthetic data augmentation framework that is capable of significantly improving the quality of captions generated by a standard Transformer-based model, leading to competitive results on the COCO dataset.

Explainability and interpretability of deep neural networks have become of crucial importance over the years in Computer Vision, concurrently with the need to understand increasingly complex models. This necessity has fostered research on approaches that facilitate human comprehension of neural methods. In this work, we propose an explainable setting for visual navigation, in which an autonomous agent needs to explore an unseen indoor environment while portraying and explaining interesting scenes with natural language descriptions. We combine recent advances in ongoing research fields, employing an explainability method on images generated through agent-environment interaction. Our approach uses explainable maps to visualize model predictions and highlight the correlation between the observed entities and the generated words, to focus on prominent objects encountered during the environment exploration. The experimental section demonstrates that our approach can identify the regions of the images that the agent concentrates on to describe its point of view, improving explainability.

The field of multi-object tracking has recently seen a renewed interest in the good old schema of tracking-by-detection, as its simplicity and strong priors spare it from the complex design and painful babysitting of tracking-by-attention approaches. In view of this, we aim at extending tracking-by-detection to multi-modal settings, where a comprehensive cost has to be computed from heterogeneous information e.g., 2D motion cues, visual appearance, and pose estimates. More precisely, we follow a case study where a rough estimate of 3D information is also available and must be merged with other traditional metrics (e.g., the IoU). To achieve that, recent approaches resort to either simple rules or complex heuristics to balance the contribution of each cost. However, i) they require careful tuning of tailored hyperparameters on a hold-out set, and ii) they imply these costs to be independent, which does not hold in reality. We address these issues by building upon an elegant probabilistic formulation, which considers the cost of a candidate association as the negative log-likelihood yielded by a deep density estimator, trained to model the conditional joint probability distribution of correct associations. Our experiments, conducted on both simulated and real benchmarks, show that our approach consistently enhances the performance of several tracking-by-detection algorithms.

With the recent explosion of interest in visual Generative AI, the field of deepfake detection has gained a lot of attention. In fact, deepfake detection might be the only measure to counter the potential proliferation of generated media in support of fake news and its consequences. While many of the available works limit the detection to a pure and direct classification of fake versus real, this does not translate well to a real-world scenario. Indeed, malevolent users can easily apply post-processing techniques to generated content, changing the underlying distribution of fake data. In this work, we provide an in-depth analysis of the robustness of a deepfake detection pipeline, considering different image augmentations, transformations, and other pre-processing steps. These transformations are only applied in the evaluation phase, thus simulating a practical situation in which the detector is not trained on all the possible augmentations that can be used by the attacker. In particular, we analyze the performance of a k-NN and a linear probe detector on the COCOFake dataset, using image features extracted from pre-trained models, like CLIP and DINO. Our results demonstrate that while the CLIP visual backbone outperforms DINO in deepfake detection with no augmentation, its performance varies significantly in presence of any transformation, favoring the robustness of DINO.

Recent advancements in Digital Document Restoration (DDR) have led to significant breakthroughs in analyzing highly damaged written artifacts. Among those, there has been an increasing interest in applying Artificial Intelligence techniques for virtually unwrapping and automatically detecting ink on the Herculaneum papyri collection. This collection consists of carbonized scrolls and fragments of documents, which have been digitized via X-ray tomography to allow the development of ad-hoc deep learning-based DDR solutions. In this work, we propose a modification of the Fast Fourier Convolution operator for volumetric data and apply it in a segmentation architecture for ink detection on the challenging Herculaneum papyri, demonstrating its suitability via deep experimental analysis. To encourage the research on this task and the application of the proposed operator to other tasks involving volumetric data, we will release our implementation (https://github.com/aimagelab/vffc).

Image captioning, like many tasks involving vision and language, currently relies on Transformer-based architectures for extracting the semantics in an image and translating it into linguistically coherent descriptions. Although successful, the attention operator only considers a weighted summation of projections of the current input sample, therefore ignoring the relevant semantic information which can come from the joint observation of other samples. In this paper, we devise a network which can perform attention over activations obtained while processing other training samples, through a prototypical memory model. Our memory models the distribution of past keys and values through the definition of prototype vectors which are both discriminative and compact. Experimentally, we assess the performance of the proposed model on the COCO dataset, in comparison with carefully designed baselines and state-of-the-art approaches, and by investigating the role of each of the proposed components. We demonstrate that our proposal can increase the performance of an encoder-decoder Transformer by 3.7 CIDEr points both when training in cross-entropy only and when fine-tuning with self-critical sequence training. Source code and trained models are available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/PMA-Net.

Image-text matching is gaining a leading role among tasks involving the joint understanding of vision and language. In literature, this task is often used as a pre-training objective to forge architectures able to jointly deal with images and texts. Nonetheless, it has a direct downstream application: cross-modal retrieval, which consists in finding images related to a given query text or vice-versa. Solving this task is of critical importance in cross-modal search engines. Many recent methods proposed effective solutions to the image-text matching problem, mostly using recent large vision-language (VL) Transformer networks. However, these models are often computationally expensive, especially at inference time. This prevents their adoption in large-scale cross-modal retrieval scenarios, where results should be provided to the user almost instantaneously. In this paper, we propose to fill in the gap between effectiveness and efficiency by proposing an ALign And DIstill Network (ALADIN). ALADIN first produces high-effective scores by aligning at fine-grained level images and texts. Then, it learns a shared embedding space – where an efficient kNN search can be performed – by distilling the relevance scores obtained from the fine-grained alignments. We obtained remarkable results on MS-COCO, showing that our method can compete with state-of-the-art VL Transformers while being almost 90 times faster. The code for reproducing our results is available at https://github.com/mesnico/ALADIN.

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) in free-layout pages is a challenging image understanding task that can provide a relevant boost to the digitization of handwritten documents and reuse of their content. The task becomes even more challenging when dealing with historical documents due to the variability of the writing style and degradation of the page quality. State-of-the-art HTR approaches typically couple recurrent structures for sequence modeling with Convolutional Neural Networks for visual feature extraction. Since convolutional kernels are defined on fixed grids and focus on all input pixels independently while moving over the input image, this strategy disregards the fact that handwritten characters can vary in shape, scale, and orientation even within the same document and that the ink pixels are more relevant than the background ones. To cope with these specific HTR difficulties, we propose to adopt deformable convolutions, which can deform depending on the input at hand and better adapt to the geometric variations of the text. We design two deformable architectures and conduct extensive experiments on both modern and historical datasets. Experimental results confirm the suitability of deformable convolutions for the HTR task.