Stefano Colamonaco

Andrea Asperti, Fabio Merizzi, Alberto Paparella et al.

In recent years traditional numerical methods for accurate weather prediction have been increasingly challenged by deep learning methods. Numerous historical datasets used for short and medium-range weather forecasts are typically organized into a regular spatial grid structure. This arrangement closely resembles images: each weather variable can be visualized as a map or, when considering the temporal axis, as a video. Several classes of generative models, comprising Generative Adversarial Networks, Variational Autoencoders, or the recent Denoising Diffusion Models have largely proved their applicability to the next-frame prediction problem, and is thus natural to test their performance on the weather prediction benchmarks. Diffusion models are particularly appealing in this context, due to the intrinsically probabilistic nature of weather forecasting: what we are really interested to model is the probability distribution of weather indicators, whose expected value is the most likely prediction. In our study, we focus on a specific subset of the ERA-5 dataset, which includes hourly data pertaining to Central Europe from the years 2016 to 2021. Within this context, we examine the efficacy of diffusion models in handling the task of precipitation nowcasting. Our work is conducted in comparison to the performance of well-established U-Net models, as documented in the existing literature. Our proposed approach of Generative Ensemble Diffusion (GED) utilizes a diffusion model to generate a set of possible weather scenarios which are then amalgamated into a probable prediction via the use of a post-processing network. This approach, in comparison to recent deep learning models, substantially outperformed them in terms of overall performance.

Robin Manhaeve, Stefano Colamonaco, Vincent Derkinderen et al.

DeepLog is an operational neurosymbolic framework that unifies logic and deep learning within standard PyTorch workflows. While existing neurosymbolic systems focus on a particular paradigm and semantics, DeepLog serves as a universal backend that can emulate many systems in the neurosymbolic alphabet soup. By treating diverse neurosymbolic languages as high-level specifications, the DeepLog software automatically compiles them into optimized arithmetic circuits. This design lowers the barrier for machine learning practitioners by treating logic as composable modules, while providing neurosymbolic developers with a shared, high-performance basis for prototyping new integration strategies. The code is available here: https://github.com/ML-KULeuven/deeplog

Stefano Colamonaco, David Debot, Pietro Barbiero et al.

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) aim to improve interpretability in Deep Learning by structuring predictions through human-understandable concepts, but they provide no way to verify whether learned concepts align with the human's intended meaning, hurting interpretability. We introduce Prototype-Grounded Concept Models (PGCMs), which ground concepts in learned visual prototypes: image parts that serve as explicit evidence for the concepts. This grounding enables direct inspection of concept semantics and supports targeted human intervention at the prototype level to correct misalignments. Empirically, PGCMs match the predictive performance of state-of-the-art CBMs while substantially improving transparency, interpretability, and intervenability.

Stefano Colamonaco, Andrei-Bogdan Florea, Jaron Maene

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) trains dense pixel-level segmentation models from partial or coarse annotations such as bounding boxes, scribbles, or image-level tags. While recent work leverages foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to generate pseudo-labels, these approaches typically depend on heuristic prompt choices and offer limited ways to incorporate prior knowledge or heterogeneous labels. We address this gap by taking a neurosymbolic perspective: integrating differentiable fuzzy logic with deep segmentation models. Weak annotations and domain-specific priors are unified as continuous logical constraints that fine-tune SAM under weak supervision. The refined foundation model then produces improved pseudo-labels, from which we train a second-stage prompt-free segmentation model. Experiments on Pascal VOC 2012 and the REFUGE2 optic disc/cup segmentation dataset show that our logic-guided fine-tuning yields higher-quality pseudo-labels, leading to state-of-the-art segmentation accuracy that often exceeds densely supervised baselines.

Fabio Merizzi, Andrea Asperti, Stefano Colamonaco

The Copernicus Regional Reanalysis for Europe, CERRA, is a high-resolution regional reanalysis dataset for the European domain. In recent years it has shown significant utility across various climate-related tasks, ranging from forecasting and climate change research to renewable energy prediction, resource management, air quality risk assessment, and the forecasting of rare events, among others. Unfortunately, the availability of CERRA is lagging two years behind the current date, due to constraints in acquiring the requisite external data and the intensive computational demands inherent in its generation. As a solution, this paper introduces a novel method using diffusion models to approximate CERRA downscaling in a data-driven manner, without additional informations. By leveraging the lower resolution ERA5 dataset, which provides boundary conditions for CERRA, we approach this as a super-resolution task. Focusing on wind speed around Italy, our model, trained on existing CERRA data, shows promising results, closely mirroring original CERRA data. Validation with in-situ observations further confirms the model's accuracy in approximating ground measurements.

Stefano Colamonaco, David Debot, Giuseppe Marra

Relational learning enables models to generalize across structured domains by reasoning over objects and their interactions. While recent advances in neurosymbolic reasoning and object-centric learning bring us closer to this goal, existing systems rely either on object-level supervision or on a predefined decomposition of the input into objects. In this work, we propose a neurosymbolic formulation for learning object-centric representations directly from raw unstructured perceptual data and using only distant supervision. We instantiate this approach in DeepObjectLog, a neurosymbolic model that integrates a perceptual module, which extracts relevant object representations, with a symbolic reasoning layer based on probabilistic logic programming. By enabling sound probabilistic logical inference, the symbolic component introduces a novel learning signal that further guides the discovery of meaningful objects in the input. We evaluate our model across a diverse range of generalization settings, including unseen object compositions, unseen tasks, and unseen number of objects. Experimental results show that our method outperforms neural and neurosymbolic baselines across the tested settings.