Davide Bucciarelli

Davide Bucciarelli, Evelyn Turri, Lorenzo Baraldi et al.

Inference-time scaling has emerged as an effective way to improve generative models at test time by using a verifier to score and select candidate outputs. A common choice is to employ Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) as verifiers, which can improve performance but introduce substantial inference-time cost. Indeed, diffusion pipelines operate in an autoencoder latent space to reduce computation, yet MLLM verifiers still require decoding candidates to pixel space and re-encoding them into the visual embedding space, leading to redundant and costly operations. In this work, we propose Verifier on Hidden States (VHS), a verifier that operates directly on intermediate hidden representations of Diffusion Transformer (DiT) single-step generators. VHS analyzes generator features without decoding to pixel space, thereby reducing the per-candidate verification cost while improving or matching the performance of MLLM-based competitors. We show that, under tiny inference budgets with only a small number of candidates per prompt, VHS enables more efficient inference-time scaling reducing joint generation-and-verification time by 63.3%, compute FLOPs by 51% and VRAM usage by 14.5% with respect to a standard MLLM verifier, achieving a +2.7% improvement on GenEval at the same inference-time budget.

Evelyn Turri, Davide Bucciarelli, Sara Sarto et al.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) and related flow-based architectures are now among the strongest text-to-image generators, yet the internal mechanisms through which prompts shape image semantics remain poorly understood. In this work, we study massive activations: a small subset of hidden-state channels whose responses are consistently much larger than the rest. We show that, despite their sparsity, these few channels effectively draw the whole picture, in three complementary senses. First, they are functionally critical: a controlled disruption probe that zeroes the massive channels causes a sharp collapse in generation quality, while disrupting an equally-sized set of low-statistic channels has marginal effect. Second, they are spatially organized: restricting image-stream tokens to massive channels and clustering them yields coherent partitions that closely align with the main subject and salient regions, exposing a structured spatial code hidden inside an apparently outlier-like subspace. Third, they are transferable: transporting massive activations from one prompt-conditioned trajectory into another, shifts the final image toward the source prompt while preserving substantial content from the target, producing localized semantic interpolation rather than unstructured pixel blending. We exploit this property in two use cases: text-conditioned and image-conditioned semantic transport, where massive activations transport enables prompt interpolation and subject-driven generation without any additional training. Together, these results recast massive activations not as activation anomalies, but as a sparse prompt-conditioned carrier subspace that organizes and controls semantic information in modern DiT models.

Davide Bucciarelli, Nicholas Moratelli, Marcella Cornia et al.

The task of image captioning demands an algorithm to generate natural language descriptions of visual inputs. Recent advancements have seen a convergence between image captioning research and the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal LLMs -- like GPT-4V and Gemini -- which extend the capabilities of text-only LLMs to multiple modalities. This paper investigates whether Multimodal LLMs can supplant traditional image captioning networks by evaluating their performance on various image description benchmarks. We explore both the zero-shot capabilities of these models and their adaptability to different semantic domains through fine-tuning methods, including prompt learning, prefix tuning, and low-rank adaptation. Our results demonstrate that while Multimodal LLMs achieve impressive zero-shot performance, fine-tuning for specific domains while maintaining their generalization capabilities intact remains challenging. We discuss the implications of these findings for future research in image captioning and the development of more adaptable Multimodal LLMs.

Thomas Bertolani, Davide Bucciarelli, Leonardo Zini et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized language modeling through autoregressive generation, enabling strong performance across a wide range of tasks. Recently, Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have emerged as an alternative paradigm that generates text through iterative denoising rather than next-token prediction, allowing parallel refinement of entire sequences. While numerous diffusion-based architectures have been proposed, differences in evaluation protocols, datasets, inference budgets, and generation hyperparameters make it difficult to compare their capabilities and understand the trade-offs they offer. In this work, we present a systematic experimental analysis of modern DLMs. Specifically, we evaluate eight state-of-the-art DLMs across eight benchmarks spanning reasoning, coding, translation, knowledge, and structured problem solving, while explicitly considering both generation quality and computational efficiency. Beyond downstream evaluation, we analyze the impact of key inference-time factors, including denoising steps, context length, block size, and parallel unmasking strategies, and complement large-scale experiments with controlled comparisons of smaller models trained under identical conditions. Our analysis highlights the strengths and limitations of diffusion-based language modeling across different tasks, architectures, and inference budgets. We show that the behavior of DLMs is strongly influenced by generation-time design choices, leading to distinct trade-offs between performance and computational efficiency. Overall, our study provides practical insights into the capabilities and deployment characteristics of contemporary DLMs.