Joseph Fioresi

Joseph Fioresi, Ishan Rajendrakumar Dave, Mubarak Shah

Video anomaly detection (VAD) without human monitoring is a complex computer vision task that can have a positive impact on society if implemented successfully. While recent advances have made significant progress in solving this task, most existing approaches overlook a critical real-world concern: privacy. With the increasing popularity of artificial intelligence technologies, it becomes crucial to implement proper AI ethics into their development. Privacy leakage in VAD allows models to pick up and amplify unnecessary biases related to people's personal information, which may lead to undesirable decision making. In this paper, we propose TeD-SPAD, a privacy-aware video anomaly detection framework that destroys visual private information in a self-supervised manner. In particular, we propose the use of a temporally-distinct triplet loss to promote temporally discriminative features, which complements current weakly-supervised VAD methods. Using TeD-SPAD, we achieve a positive trade-off between privacy protection and utility anomaly detection performance on three popular weakly supervised VAD datasets: UCF-Crime, XD-Violence, and ShanghaiTech. Our proposed anonymization model reduces private attribute prediction by 32.25% while only reducing frame-level ROC AUC on the UCF-Crime anomaly detection dataset by 3.69%. Project Page: https://joefioresi718.github.io/TeD-SPAD_webpage/

Ashmal Vayani, Parth Parag Kulkarni, Joseph Fioresi et al.

Medical diagnosis using Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has gained increasing attention due to capability of these models in providing precise diagnoses. These models generally combine medical questions with visual inputs to generate diagnoses or treatments. However, they are often overly general and unsuitable under the wide range of medical conditions in real-world healthcare. In clinical practice, diagnosis is performed by multiple specialists, each contributing domain-specific expertise. To emulate this process, a potential solution is to deploy a dynamic multi-agent LMM framework, where each agent functions as a medical specialist. Current approaches in this emerging area, typically relying on static or predefined selection of various specialists, cannot be adapted to the changing practical scenario. In this paper, we propose MedRoute, a flexible and dynamic multi-agent framework that comprises of a collaborative system of specialist LMM agents. Furthermore, we add a General Practitioner with an RL-trained router for dynamic specialist selection, and a Moderator that produces the final decision. In this way, our framework closely mirrors real clinical workflows. Extensive evaluations on text and image-based medical datasets demonstrate improved diagnostic accuracy, outperforming the state-of-the-art baselines. Our work lays a strong foundation for future research. Code and models are available at https://github.com/UCF-CRCV/MedRoute/.

Sirnam Swetha, Rohit Gupta, Parth Parag Kulkarni et al.

Video Question Answering (VideoQA) has made significant strides by leveraging multimodal learning to align visual and textual modalities. However, current benchmarks overwhelmingly focus on questions answerable through explicit visual content - actions, objects, and events directly observable within individual frames or short clips. In contrast, creative and cinematic videos - such as movies, TV shows, and narrative-driven content - employ storytelling techniques that deliberately omit certain depictions, requiring viewers to infer motives, relationships across discontinuous frames with disjoint visual contexts. Humans naturally excel at such implicit reasoning, seamlessly integrating information across time and context to construct coherent narratives. Yet current benchmarks fail to capture this essential dimension of human-like understanding. To bridge this gap, we present ImplicitQA, a novel benchmark specifically designed to test VideoQA models on human-like implicit reasoning. ImplicitQA comprises 1K meticulously annotated QA pairs drawn from 1K high-quality creative video clips covering 15 genres across 7 decades of content. Questions are systematically categorized into nine key reasoning dimensions: lateral and vertical spatial reasoning, depth and proximity, viewpoint and visibility, motion and trajectory, causal and motivational reasoning, social interactions, physical context, and inferred counting. These annotations are deliberately challenging, crafted by authors, validated through multiple annotators, and benchmarked against human performance to ensure high quality. Our extensive evaluations on 11 leading VideoQA models reveals consistent and significant performance degradation, underscoring their reliance on surface-level visual cues and highlighting the difficulty of implicit reasoning. https://huggingface.co/datasets/ucf-crcv/ImplicitQA.

Joseph Fioresi, Ishan Rajendrakumar Dave, Mubarak Shah

We introduce a novel formulation of visual privacy preservation for video foundation models that operates entirely in the latent space. While spatio-temporal features learned by foundation models have deepened general understanding of video content, sharing or storing these extracted visual features for downstream tasks inadvertently reveals sensitive personal information like skin color, gender, or clothing. Current privacy preservation methods focus on input-pixel-level anonymization, which requires retraining the entire utility video model and results in task-specific anonymization, making them unsuitable for recent video foundational models. To address these challenges, we introduce a lightweight Anonymizing Adapter Module (AAM) that removes private information from video features while retaining general task utility. AAM can be applied in a plug-and-play fashion to frozen video encoders, minimizing the computational burden of finetuning and re-extracting features. Our framework employs three newly designed training objectives: (1) a clip-level self-supervised privacy objective to reduce mutual information between static clips, (2) a co-training objective to retain utility across seen tasks, and (3) a latent consistency loss for generalization on unseen tasks. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate a significant 35% reduction in privacy leakage while maintaining near-baseline utility performance across various downstream tasks: Action Recognition (Kinetics400, UCF101, HMDB51), Temporal Action Detection (THUMOS14), and Anomaly Detection (UCF-Crime). We also provide an analysis on anonymization for sensitive temporal attribute recognition. Additionally, we propose new protocols for assessing gender bias in action recognition models, showing that our method effectively mitigates such biases and promotes more equitable video understanding.

Joseph Fioresi, Parth Parag Kulkarni, Ashmal Vayani et al.

Agentic systems solve complex tasks by coordinating multiple agents that iteratively reason, invoke tools, and exchange intermediate results. To improve robustness and solution quality, recent approaches deploy multiple agent teams running in parallel to explore diverse reasoning trajectories. However, parallel execution comes at a significant computational cost: when different teams independently reason about similar sub-problems or execute analogous steps, they repeatedly perform substantial overlapping computation. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose Learning to Share (LTS), a learned shared-memory mechanism for parallel agentic frameworks that enables selective cross-team information reuse while controlling context growth. LTS introduces a global memory bank accessible to all teams and a lightweight controller that decides whether intermediate agent steps should be added to memory or not. The controller is trained using stepwise reinforcement learning with usage-aware credit assignment, allowing it to identify information that is globally useful across parallel executions. Experiments on the AssistantBench and GAIA benchmarks show that LTS significantly reduces overall runtime while matching or improving task performance compared to memory-free parallel baselines, demonstrating that learned memory admission is an effective strategy for improving the efficiency of parallel agentic systems. Project page: https://joefioresi718.github.io/LTS_webpage/

Joseph Fioresi, Ishan Rajendrakumar Dave, Mubarak Shah

Bias in machine learning models can lead to unfair decision making, and while it has been well-studied in the image and text domains, it remains underexplored in action recognition. Action recognition models often suffer from background bias (i.e., inferring actions based on background cues) and foreground bias (i.e., relying on subject appearance), which can be detrimental to real-life applications such as autonomous vehicles or assisted living monitoring. While prior approaches have mainly focused on mitigating background bias using specialized augmentations, we thoroughly study both foreground and background bias. We propose ALBAR, a novel adversarial training method that mitigates foreground and background biases without requiring specialized knowledge of the bias attributes. Our framework applies an adversarial cross-entropy loss to the sampled static clip (where all the frames are the same) and aims to make its class probabilities uniform using a proposed entropy maximization loss. Additionally, we introduce a gradient penalty loss for regularization against the debiasing process. We evaluate our method on established background and foreground bias protocols, setting a new state-of-the-art and strongly improving combined debiasing performance by over 12% absolute on HMDB51. Furthermore, we identify an issue of background leakage in the existing UCF101 protocol for bias evaluation which provides a shortcut to predict actions and does not provide an accurate measure of the debiasing capability of a model. We address this issue by proposing more fine-grained segmentation boundaries for the actor, where our method also outperforms existing approaches. Project Page: https://joefioresi718.github.io/ALBAR_webpage/