Gabriel Hili

Dylan Seychell, Gabriel Hili, Jonathan Attard et al.

In today`s media landscape, the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in shaping societal perspectives and journalistic integrity is becoming increasingly apparent. This paper presents two case studies centred on Malta`s media market featuring technical novelty. Despite its relatively small scale, Malta offers invaluable insights applicable to both similar and broader media contexts. These two projects focus on media monitoring and present tools designed to analyse potential biases in news articles and television news segments. The first project uses Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing techniques to analyse the coherence between images in news articles and their corresponding captions, headlines, and article bodies. The second project employs computer vision techniques to track individuals` on-screen time or visual exposure in news videos, providing queryable data. These initiatives aim to contribute to society by providing both journalists and the public with the means to identify biases. Furthermore, we make these tools accessible to journalists to improve the trustworthiness of media outlets by offering robust tools for detecting and reducing bias.

Matthias Bartolo, Dylan Seychell, Gabriel Hili et al.

This paper investigates the integration of the Learning Using Privileged Information (LUPI) paradigm in object detection to exploit fine-grained, descriptive information available during training but not at inference. We introduce a general, model-agnostic methodology for injecting privileged information-such as bounding box masks, saliency maps, and depth cues-into deep learning-based object detectors through a teacher-student architecture. Experiments are conducted across five state-of-the-art object detection models and multiple public benchmarks, including UAV-based litter detection datasets and Pascal VOC 2012, to assess the impact on accuracy, generalization, and computational efficiency. Our results demonstrate that LUPI-trained students consistently outperform their baseline counterparts, achieving significant boosts in detection accuracy with no increase in inference complexity or model size. Performance improvements are especially marked for medium and large objects, while ablation studies reveal that intermediate weighting of teacher guidance optimally balances learning from privileged and standard inputs. The findings affirm that the LUPI framework provides an effective and practical strategy for advancing object detection systems in both resource-constrained and real-world settings.