Emanuele Mezzi

Emanuele Mezzi, Gertjan Burghouts, Maarten Kruithof

Text-to-image retrieval in remote sensing (RS) has advanced rapidly with the rise of large vision-language models (LVLMs) tailored for aerial and satellite imagery, culminating in remote sensing large vision-language models (RS-LVLMS). However, limited explainability and poor handling of complex spatial relations remain key challenges for real-world use. To address these issues, we introduce RUNE (Reasoning Using Neurosymbolic Entities), an approach that combines Large Language Models (LLMs) with neurosymbolic AI to retrieve images by reasoning over the compatibility between detected entities and First-Order Logic (FOL) expressions derived from text queries. Unlike RS-LVLMs that rely on implicit joint embeddings, RUNE performs explicit reasoning, enhancing performance and interpretability. For scalability, we propose a logic decomposition strategy that operates on conditioned subsets of detected entities, guaranteeing shorter execution time compared to neural approaches. Rather than using foundation models for end-to-end retrieval, we leverage them only to generate FOL expressions, delegating reasoning to a neurosymbolic inference module. For evaluation we repurpose the DOTA dataset, originally designed for object detection, by augmenting it with more complex queries than in existing benchmarks. We show the LLM's effectiveness in text-to-logic translation and compare RUNE with state-of-the-art RS-LVLMs, demonstrating superior performance. We introduce two metrics, Retrieval Robustness to Query Complexity (RRQC) and Retrieval Robustness to Image Uncertainty (RRIU), which evaluate performance relative to query complexity and image uncertainty. RUNE outperforms joint-embedding models in complex RS retrieval tasks, offering gains in performance, robustness, and explainability. We show RUNE's potential for real-world RS applications through a use case on post-flood satellite image retrieval.

Qi Huang, Emanuele Mezzi, Osman Mutlu et al.

We introduce a novel metric for measuring semantic continuity in Explainable AI methods and machine learning models. We posit that for models to be truly interpretable and trustworthy, similar inputs should yield similar explanations, reflecting a consistent semantic understanding. By leveraging XAI techniques, we assess semantic continuity in the task of image recognition. We conduct experiments to observe how incremental changes in input affect the explanations provided by different XAI methods. Through this approach, we aim to evaluate the models' capability to generalize and abstract semantic concepts accurately and to evaluate different XAI methods in correctly capturing the model behaviour. This paper contributes to the broader discourse on AI interpretability by proposing a quantitative measure for semantic continuity for XAI methods, offering insights into the models' and explainers' internal reasoning processes, and promoting more reliable and transparent AI systems.

Emanuele Mezzi, Aurora Papotti, Fabio Massacci et al.

The use of AI technologies is being integrated into the secure development of software-based systems, with an increasing trend of composing AI-based subsystems (with uncertain levels of performance) into automated pipelines. This presents a fundamental research challenge and seriously threatens safety-critical domains. Despite the existing knowledge about uncertainty in risk analysis, no previous work has estimated the uncertainty of AI-augmented systems given the propagation of errors in the pipeline. We provide the formal underpinnings for capturing uncertainty propagation, develop a simulator to quantify uncertainty, and evaluate the simulation of propagating errors with one case study. We discuss the generalizability of our approach and its limitations and present recommendations for evaluation policies concerning AI systems. Future work includes extending the approach by relaxing the remaining assumptions and by experimenting with a real system.

Emanuele Mezzi, Fabio Massacci, Katja Tuma

Several recent works have argued that Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to tame the data deluge in the cybersecurity field, by improving the automation of Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) tasks. This work presents an evaluation methodology that other than allowing to test LLMs on CTI tasks when using zero-shot learning, few-shot learning and fine-tuning, also allows to quantify their consistency and their confidence level. We run experiments with three state-of-the-art LLMs and a dataset of 350 threat intelligence reports and present new evidence of potential security risks in relying on LLMs for CTI. We show how LLMs cannot guarantee sufficient performance on real-size reports while also being inconsistent and overconfident. Few-shot learning and fine-tuning only partially improve the results, thus posing doubts about the possibility of using LLMs for CTI scenarios, where labelled datasets are lacking and where confidence is a fundamental factor.

Emanuele Mezzi, Asimina Mertzani, Michael P. Manis et al.

Since the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022, Large language models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMM) have transformed content creation, enabling the generation of human-quality content, spanning every medium, text, images, videos, and audio. The chances offered by generative AI models are endless and are drastically reducing the time required to generate content and usually raising the quality of the generation. However, considering the complexity and the difficult traceability of the generated content, the use of these tools provides challenges in attributing AI-generated content. The difficult attribution resides for a variety of reasons, starting from the lack of a systematic fingerprinting of the generated content and ending with the enormous amount of data on which LLMs and LMM are trained, which makes it difficult to connect generated content to the training data. This scenario is raising concerns about intellectual property and ethical responsibilities. To address these concerns, in this paper, we bridge the technological, ethical, and legislative aspects, by proposing a review of the legislative and technological instruments today available and proposing a legal framework to ensure accountability. In the end, we propose three use cases of how these can be combined to guarantee that attribution is respected. However, even though the techniques available today can guarantee a greater attribution to a greater extent, strong limitations still apply, that can be solved uniquely by the development of new attribution techniques, to be applied to LLMs and LMMs.