Fabio Maria Carlucci

Vasu Agrawal, Akinniyi Akinyemi, Kathryn Alvero et al.

Human communication involves a complex interplay of verbal and nonverbal signals, essential for conveying meaning and achieving interpersonal goals. To develop socially intelligent AI technologies, it is crucial to develop models that can both comprehend and generate dyadic behavioral dynamics. To this end, we introduce the Seamless Interaction Dataset, a large-scale collection of over 4,000 hours of face-to-face interaction footage from over 4,000 participants in diverse contexts. This dataset enables the development of AI technologies that understand dyadic embodied dynamics, unlocking breakthroughs in virtual agents, telepresence experiences, and multimodal content analysis tools. We also develop a suite of models that utilize the dataset to generate dyadic motion gestures and facial expressions aligned with human speech. These models can take as input both the speech and visual behavior of their interlocutors. We present a variant with speech from an LLM model and integrations with 2D and 3D rendering methods, bringing us closer to interactive virtual agents. Additionally, we describe controllable variants of our motion models that can adapt emotional responses and expressivity levels, as well as generating more semantically-relevant gestures. Finally, we discuss methods for assessing the quality of these dyadic motion models, which are demonstrating the potential for more intuitive and responsive human-AI interactions.

Roy Henha Eyono, Fabio Maria Carlucci, Pedro M Esperança et al.

State-of-the-art results in deep learning have been improving steadily, in good part due to the use of larger models. However, widespread use is constrained by device hardware limitations, resulting in a substantial performance gap between state-of-the-art models and those that can be effectively deployed on small devices. While Knowledge Distillation (KD) theoretically enables small student models to emulate larger teacher models, in practice selecting a good student architecture requires considerable human expertise. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) appears as a natural solution to this problem but most approaches can be inefficient, as most of the computation is spent comparing architectures sampled from the same distribution, with negligible differences in performance. In this paper, we propose to instead search for a family of student architectures sharing the property of being good at learning from a given teacher. Our approach AutoKD, powered by Bayesian Optimization, explores a flexible graph-based search space, enabling us to automatically learn the optimal student architecture distribution and KD parameters, while being 20x more sample efficient compared to existing state-of-the-art. We evaluate our method on 3 datasets; on large images specifically, we reach the teacher performance while using 3x less memory and 10x less parameters. Finally, while AutoKD uses the traditional KD loss, it outperforms more advanced KD variants using hand-designed students.

Chen Zhang, Shifeng Zhang, Fabio Maria Carlucci et al.

Explicit deep generative models (DGMs), e.g., VAEs and Normalizing Flows, have shown to offer an effective data modelling alternative for lossless compression. However, DGMs themselves normally require large storage space and thus contaminate the advantage brought by accurate data density estimation. To eliminate the requirement of saving separate models for different target datasets, we propose a novel setting that starts from a pretrained deep generative model and compresses the data batches while adapting the model with a dynamical system for only one epoch. We formalise this setting as that of One-Shot Online Adaptation (OSOA) of DGMs for lossless compression and propose a vanilla algorithm under this setting. Experimental results show that vanilla OSOA can save significant time versus training bespoke models and space versus using one model for all targets. With the same adaptation step number or adaptation time, it is shown vanilla OSOA can exhibit better space efficiency, e.g., $47\%$ less space, than fine-tuning the pretrained model and saving the fine-tuned model. Moreover, we showcase the potential of OSOA and motivate more sophisticated OSOA algorithms by showing further space or time efficiency with multiple updates per batch and early stopping.

Luca Robbiano, Muhammad Rameez Ur Rahman, Fabio Galasso et al.

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) is a key issue in visual recognition, as it allows to bridge different visual domains enabling robust performances in the real world. To date, all proposed approaches rely on human expertise to manually adapt a given UDA method (e.g. DANN) to a specific backbone architecture (e.g. ResNet). This dependency on handcrafted designs limits the applicability of a given approach in time, as old methods need to be constantly adapted to novel backbones. Existing Neural Architecture Search (NAS) approaches cannot be directly applied to mitigate this issue, as they rely on labels that are not available in the UDA setting. Furthermore, most NAS methods search for full architectures, which precludes the use of pre-trained models, essential in a vast range of UDA settings for reaching SOTA results. To the best of our knowledge, no prior work has addressed these aspects in the context of NAS for UDA. Here we tackle both aspects with an Adversarial Branch Architecture Search for UDA (ABAS): i. we address the lack of target labels by a novel data-driven ensemble approach for model selection; and ii. we search for an auxiliary adversarial branch, attached to a pre-trained backbone, which drives the domain alignment. We extensively validate ABAS to improve two modern UDA techniques, DANN and ALDA, on three standard visual recognition datasets (Office31, Office-Home and PACS). In all cases, ABAS robustly finds the adversarial branch architectures and parameters which yield best performances.

Silvia Bucci, Antonio D'Innocente, Yujun Liao et al.

Human adaptability relies crucially on learning and merging knowledge from both supervised and unsupervised tasks: the parents point out few important concepts, but then the children fill in the gaps on their own. This is particularly effective, because supervised learning can never be exhaustive and thus learning autonomously allows to discover invariances and regularities that help to generalize. In this paper we propose to apply a similar approach to the problem of object recognition across domains: our model learns the semantic labels in a supervised fashion, and broadens its understanding of the data by learning from self-supervised signals on the same images. This secondary task helps the network to focus on object shapes, learning concepts like spatial orientation and part correlation, while acting as a regularizer for the classification task over multiple visual domains. Extensive experiments confirm our intuition and show that our multi-task method combining supervised and self-supervised knowledge shows competitive results with respect to more complex domain generalization and adaptation solutions. It also proves its potential in the novel and challenging predictive and partial domain adaptation scenarios.

Vasco Lopes, Fabio Maria Carlucci, Pedro M Esperança et al.

The Neural Architecture Search (NAS) problem is typically formulated as a graph search problem where the goal is to learn the optimal operations over edges in order to maximise a graph-level global objective. Due to the large architecture parameter space, efficiency is a key bottleneck preventing NAS from its practical use. In this paper, we address the issue by framing NAS as a multi-agent problem where agents control a subset of the network and coordinate to reach optimal architectures. We provide two distinct lightweight implementations, with reduced memory requirements (1/8th of state-of-the-art), and performances above those of much more computationally expensive methods. Theoretically, we demonstrate vanishing regrets of the form O(sqrt(T)), with T being the total number of rounds. Finally, aware that random search is an, often ignored, effective baseline we perform additional experiments on 3 alternative datasets and 2 network configurations, and achieve favourable results in comparison.

Fabio Maria Carlucci, Antonio D'Innocente, Silvia Bucci et al.

Human adaptability relies crucially on the ability to learn and merge knowledge both from supervised and unsupervised learning: the parents point out few important concepts, but then the children fill in the gaps on their own. This is particularly effective, because supervised learning can never be exhaustive and thus learning autonomously allows to discover invariances and regularities that help to generalize. In this paper we propose to apply a similar approach to the task of object recognition across domains: our model learns the semantic labels in a supervised fashion, and broadens its understanding of the data by learning from self-supervised signals how to solve a jigsaw puzzle on the same images. This secondary task helps the network to learn the concepts of spatial correlation while acting as a regularizer for the classification task. Multiple experiments on the PACS, VLCS, Office-Home and digits datasets confirm our intuition and show that this simple method outperforms previous domain generalization and adaptation solutions. An ablation study further illustrates the inner workings of our approach.

Fabio Maria Carlucci

Deep learning has raised hopes and expectations as a general solution for many applications; indeed it has proven effective, but it also showed a strong dependence on large quantities of data. Luckily, it has been shown that, even when data is scarce, a successful model can be trained by reusing prior knowledge. Thus, developing techniques for transfer learning, in its broadest definition, is a crucial element towards the deployment of effective and accurate intelligent systems. This thesis will focus on a family of transfer learning methods applied to the task of visual object recognition, specifically image classification. Transfer learning is a general term, and specific settings have been given specific names: when the learner has only access to unlabeled data from the a target domain and labeled data from a different domain (the source), the problem is known as that of "unsupervised domain adaptation" (DA). The first part of this work will focus on three methods for this setting: one of these methods deals with features, one with images while the third one uses both. The second part will focus on the real life issues of robotic perception, specifically RGB-D recognition. Robotic platforms are usually not limited to color perception; very often they also carry a Depth camera. Unfortunately, the depth modality is rarely used for visual recognition due to the lack of pretrained models from which to transfer and little data to train one on from scratch. Two methods for dealing with this scenario will be presented: one using synthetic data and the other exploiting cross-modality transfer learning.

Paolo Russo, Fabio Maria Carlucci, Tatiana Tommasi et al.

The effectiveness of generative adversarial approaches in producing images according to a specific style or visual domain has recently opened new directions to solve the unsupervised domain adaptation problem. It has been shown that source labeled images can be modified to mimic target samples making it possible to train directly a classifier in the target domain, despite the original lack of annotated data. Inverse mappings from the target to the source domain have also been evaluated but only passing through adapted feature spaces, thus without new image generation. In this paper we propose to better exploit the potential of generative adversarial networks for adaptation by introducing a novel symmetric mapping among domains. We jointly optimize bi-directional image transformations combining them with target self-labeling. Moreover we define a new class consistency loss that aligns the generators in the two directions imposing to conserve the class identity of an image passing through both domain mappings. A detailed qualitative and quantitative analysis of the reconstructed images confirm the power of our approach. By integrating the two domain specific classifiers obtained with our bi-directional network we exceed previous state-of-the-art unsupervised adaptation results on four different benchmark datasets.

Antonio D'Innocente, Fabio Maria Carlucci, Mirco Colosi et al.

Despite the impressive progress brought by deep network in visual object recognition, robot vision is still far from being a solved problem. The most successful convolutional architectures are developed starting from ImageNet, a large scale collection of images of object categories downloaded from the Web. This kind of images is very different from the situated and embodied visual experience of robots deployed in unconstrained settings. To reduce the gap between these two visual experiences, this paper proposes a simple yet effective data augmentation layer that zooms on the object of interest and simulates the object detection outcome of a robot vision system. The layer, that can be used with any convolutional deep architecture, brings to an increase in object recognition performance of up to 7\%, in experiments performed over three different benchmark databases. Upon acceptance of the paper, our robot data augmentation layer will be made publicly available.

Fabio Maria Carlucci, Lorenzo Porzi, Barbara Caputo et al.

Classifiers trained on given databases perform poorly when tested on data acquired in different settings. This is explained in domain adaptation through a shift among distributions of the source and target domains. Attempts to align them have traditionally resulted in works reducing the domain shift by introducing appropriate loss terms, measuring the discrepancies between source and target distributions, in the objective function. Here we take a different route, proposing to align the learned representations by embedding in any given network specific Domain Alignment Layers, designed to match the source and target feature distributions to a reference one. Opposite to previous works which define a priori in which layers adaptation should be performed, our method is able to automatically learn the degree of feature alignment required at different levels of the deep network. Thorough experiments on different public benchmarks, in the unsupervised setting, confirm the power of our approach.

Fabio Maria Carlucci, Lorenzo Porzi, Barbara Caputo et al.

The empirical fact that classifiers, trained on given data collections, perform poorly when tested on data acquired in different settings is theoretically explained in domain adaptation through a shift among distributions of the source and target domains. Alleviating the domain shift problem, especially in the challenging setting where no labeled data are available for the target domain, is paramount for having visual recognition systems working in the wild. As the problem stems from a shift among distributions, intuitively one should try to align them. In the literature, this has resulted in a stream of works attempting to align the feature representations learned from the source and target domains. Here we take a different route. Rather than introducing regularization terms aiming to promote the alignment of the two representations, we act at the distribution level through the introduction of \emph{DomaIn Alignment Layers} (\DIAL), able to match the observed source and target data distributions to a reference one. Thorough experiments on three different public benchmarks we confirm the power of our approach.

Fabio Maria Carlucci, Paolo Russo, Barbara Caputo

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) trained on large scale RGB databases have become the secret sauce in the majority of recent approaches for object categorization from RGB-D data. Thanks to colorization techniques, these methods exploit the filters learned from 2D images to extract meaningful representations in 2.5D. Still, the perceptual signature of these two kind of images is very different, with the first usually strongly characterized by textures, and the second mostly by silhouettes of objects. Ideally, one would like to have two CNNs, one for RGB and one for depth, each trained on a suitable data collection, able to capture the perceptual properties of each channel for the task at hand. This has not been possible so far, due to the lack of a suitable depth database. This paper addresses this issue, proposing to opt for synthetically generated images rather than collecting by hand a 2.5D large scale database. While being clearly a proxy for real data, synthetic images allow to trade quality for quantity, making it possible to generate a virtually infinite amount of data. We show that the filters learned from such data collection, using the very same architecture typically used on visual data, learns very different filters, resulting in depth features (a) able to better characterize the different facets of depth images, and (b) complementary with respect to those derived from CNNs pre-trained on 2D datasets. Experiments on two publicly available databases show the power of our approach.

Ilja Kuzborskij, Fabio Maria Carlucci, Barbara Caputo

Since Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have become the leading learning paradigm in visual recognition, Naive Bayes Nearest Neighbour (NBNN)-based classifiers have lost momentum in the community. This is because (1) such algorithms cannot use CNN activations as input features; (2) they cannot be used as final layer of CNN architectures for end-to-end training , and (3) they are generally not scalable and hence cannot handle big data. This paper proposes a framework that addresses all these issues, thus bringing back NBNNs on the map. We solve the first by extracting CNN activations from local patches at multiple scale levels, similarly to [1]. We address simultaneously the second and third by proposing a scalable version of Naive Bayes Non-linear Learning (NBNL, [2]). Results obtained using pre-trained CNNs on standard scene and domain adaptation databases show the strength of our approach, opening a new season for NBNNs.