Danilo Comminiello

LG
h-index25
51papers
1,304citations
Novelty49%
AI Score58

51 Papers

22.3AIJun 7, 2023Code
Generative Semantic Communication: Diffusion Models Beyond Bit Recovery

Eleonora Grassucci, Sergio Barbarossa, Danilo Comminiello

Semantic communication is expected to be one of the cores of next-generation AI-based communications. One of the possibilities offered by semantic communication is the capability to regenerate, at the destination side, images or videos semantically equivalent to the transmitted ones, without necessarily recovering the transmitted sequence of bits. The current solutions still lack the ability to build complex scenes from the received partial information. Clearly, there is an unmet need to balance the effectiveness of generation methods and the complexity of the transmitted information, possibly taking into account the goal of communication. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by proposing a novel generative diffusion-guided framework for semantic communication that leverages the strong abilities of diffusion models in synthesizing multimedia content while preserving semantic features. We reduce bandwidth usage by sending highly-compressed semantic information only. Then, the diffusion model learns to synthesize semantic-consistent scenes through spatially-adaptive normalizations from such denoised semantic information. We prove, through an in-depth assessment of multiple scenarios, that our method outperforms existing solutions in generating high-quality images with preserved semantic information even in cases where the received content is significantly degraded. More specifically, our results show that objects, locations, and depths are still recognizable even in the presence of extremely noisy conditions of the communication channel. The code is available at https://github.com/ispamm/GESCO.

6.6ASApr 5, 2022Code
Learning Speech Emotion Representations in the Quaternion Domain

Eric Guizzo, Tillman Weyde, Simone Scardapane et al.

The modeling of human emotion expression in speech signals is an important, yet challenging task. The high resource demand of speech emotion recognition models, combined with the the general scarcity of emotion-labelled data are obstacles to the development and application of effective solutions in this field. In this paper, we present an approach to jointly circumvent these difficulties. Our method, named RH-emo, is a novel semi-supervised architecture aimed at extracting quaternion embeddings from real-valued monoaural spectrograms, enabling the use of quaternion-valued networks for speech emotion recognition tasks. RH-emo is a hybrid real/quaternion autoencoder network that consists of a real-valued encoder in parallel to a real-valued emotion classifier and a quaternion-valued decoder. On the one hand, the classifier permits to optimize each latent axis of the embeddings for the classification of a specific emotion-related characteristic: valence, arousal, dominance and overall emotion. On the other hand, the quaternion reconstruction enables the latent dimension to develop intra-channel correlations that are required for an effective representation as a quaternion entity. We test our approach on speech emotion recognition tasks using four popular datasets: Iemocap, Ravdess, EmoDb and Tess, comparing the performance of three well-established real-valued CNN architectures (AlexNet, ResNet-50, VGG) and their quaternion-valued equivalent fed with the embeddings created with RH-emo. We obtain a consistent improvement in the test accuracy for all datasets, while drastically reducing the resources' demand of models. Moreover, we performed additional experiments and ablation studies that confirm the effectiveness of our approach. The RH-emo repository is available at: https://github.com/ispamm/rhemo.

8.6ASApr 4, 2022Code
Dual Quaternion Ambisonics Array for Six-Degree-of-Freedom Acoustic Representation

Eleonora Grassucci, Gioia Mancini, Christian Brignone et al.

Spatial audio methods are gaining a growing interest due to the spread of immersive audio experiences and applications, such as virtual and augmented reality. For these purposes, 3D audio signals are often acquired through arrays of Ambisonics microphones, each comprising four capsules that decompose the sound field in spherical harmonics. In this paper, we propose a dual quaternion representation of the spatial sound field acquired through an array of two First Order Ambisonics (FOA) microphones. The audio signals are encapsulated in a dual quaternion that leverages quaternion algebra properties to exploit correlations among them. This augmented representation with 6 degrees of freedom (6DOF) involves a more accurate coverage of the sound field, resulting in a more precise sound localization and a more immersive audio experience. We evaluate our approach on a sound event localization and detection (SELD) benchmark. We show that our dual quaternion SELD model with temporal convolution blocks (DualQSELD-TCN) achieves better results with respect to real and quaternion-valued baselines thanks to our augmented representation of the sound field. Full code is available at: https://github.com/ispamm/DualQSELD-TCN.

10.4LGSep 13, 2024Code
Hierarchical Hypercomplex Network for Multimodal Emotion Recognition

Eleonora Lopez, Aurelio Uncini, Danilo Comminiello

Emotion recognition is relevant in various domains, ranging from healthcare to human-computer interaction. Physiological signals, being beyond voluntary control, offer reliable information for this purpose, unlike speech and facial expressions which can be controlled at will. They reflect genuine emotional responses, devoid of conscious manipulation, thereby enhancing the credibility of emotion recognition systems. Nonetheless, multimodal emotion recognition with deep learning models remains a relatively unexplored field. In this paper, we introduce a fully hypercomplex network with a hierarchical learning structure to fully capture correlations. Specifically, at the encoder level, the model learns intra-modal relations among the different channels of each input signal. Then, a hypercomplex fusion module learns inter-modal relations among the embeddings of the different modalities. The main novelty is in exploiting intra-modal relations by endowing the encoders with parameterized hypercomplex convolutions (PHCs) that thanks to hypercomplex algebra can capture inter-channel interactions within single modalities. Instead, the fusion module comprises parameterized hypercomplex multiplications (PHMs) that can model inter-modal correlations. The proposed architecture surpasses state-of-the-art models on the MAHNOB-HCI dataset for emotion recognition, specifically in classifying valence and arousal from electroencephalograms (EEGs) and peripheral physiological signals. The code of this study is available at https://github.com/ispamm/MHyEEG.

12.8IVOct 16, 2023Code
Generalizing Medical Image Representations via Quaternion Wavelet Networks

Luigi Sigillo, Eleonora Grassucci, Aurelio Uncini et al.

Neural network generalizability is becoming a broad research field due to the increasing availability of datasets from different sources and for various tasks. This issue is even wider when processing medical data, where a lack of methodological standards causes large variations being provided by different imaging centers or acquired with various devices and cofactors. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel, generalizable, data- and task-agnostic framework able to extract salient features from medical images. The proposed quaternion wavelet network (QUAVE) can be easily integrated with any pre-existing medical image analysis or synthesis task, and it can be involved with real, quaternion, or hypercomplex-valued models, generalizing their adoption to single-channel data. QUAVE first extracts different sub-bands through the quaternion wavelet transform, resulting in both low-frequency/approximation bands and high-frequency/fine-grained features. Then, it weighs the most representative set of sub-bands to be involved as input to any other neural model for image processing, replacing standard data samples. We conduct an extensive experimental evaluation comprising different datasets, diverse image analysis, and synthesis tasks including reconstruction, segmentation, and modality translation. We also evaluate QUAVE in combination with both real and quaternion-valued models. Results demonstrate the effectiveness and the generalizability of the proposed framework that improves network performance while being flexible to be adopted in manifold scenarios and robust to domain shifts. The full code is available at: https://github.com/ispamm/QWT.

11.1HCOct 11, 2023Code
Hypercomplex Multimodal Emotion Recognition from EEG and Peripheral Physiological Signals

Eleonora Lopez, Eleonora Chiarantano, Eleonora Grassucci et al.

Multimodal emotion recognition from physiological signals is receiving an increasing amount of attention due to the impossibility to control them at will unlike behavioral reactions, thus providing more reliable information. Existing deep learning-based methods still rely on extracted handcrafted features, not taking full advantage of the learning ability of neural networks, and often adopt a single-modality approach, while human emotions are inherently expressed in a multimodal way. In this paper, we propose a hypercomplex multimodal network equipped with a novel fusion module comprising parameterized hypercomplex multiplications. Indeed, by operating in a hypercomplex domain the operations follow algebraic rules which allow to model latent relations among learned feature dimensions for a more effective fusion step. We perform classification of valence and arousal from electroencephalogram (EEG) and peripheral physiological signals, employing the publicly available database MAHNOB-HCI surpassing a multimodal state-of-the-art network. The code of our work is freely available at https://github.com/ispamm/MHyEEG.

4.3SPSep 13, 2024Code
PHemoNet: A Multimodal Network for Physiological Signals

Eleonora Lopez, Aurelio Uncini, Danilo Comminiello

Emotion recognition is essential across numerous fields, including medical applications and brain-computer interface (BCI). Emotional responses include behavioral reactions, such as tone of voice and body movement, and changes in physiological signals, such as the electroencephalogram (EEG). The latter are involuntary, thus they provide a reliable input for identifying emotions, in contrast to the former which individuals can consciously control. These signals reveal true emotional states without intentional alteration, thus increasing the accuracy of emotion recognition models. However, multimodal deep learning methods from physiological signals have not been significantly investigated. In this paper, we introduce PHemoNet, a fully hypercomplex network for multimodal emotion recognition from physiological signals. In detail, the architecture comprises modality-specific encoders and a fusion module. Both encoders and fusion modules are defined in the hypercomplex domain through parameterized hypercomplex multiplications (PHMs) that can capture latent relations between the different dimensions of each modality and between the modalities themselves. The proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art models on the MAHNOB-HCI dataset in classifying valence and arousal using electroencephalograms (EEGs) and peripheral physiological signals. The code for this work is available at https://github.com/ispamm/MHyEEG.

6.5CVMay 4, 2022Code
Hypercomplex Image-to-Image Translation

Eleonora Grassucci, Luigi Sigillo, Aurelio Uncini et al.

Image-to-image translation (I2I) aims at transferring the content representation from an input domain to an output one, bouncing along different target domains. Recent I2I generative models, which gain outstanding results in this task, comprise a set of diverse deep networks each with tens of million parameters. Moreover, images are usually three-dimensional being composed of RGB channels and common neural models do not take dimensions correlation into account, losing beneficial information. In this paper, we propose to leverage hypercomplex algebra properties to define lightweight I2I generative models capable of preserving pre-existing relations among image dimensions, thus exploiting additional input information. On manifold I2I benchmarks, we show how the proposed Quaternion StarGANv2 and parameterized hypercomplex StarGANv2 (PHStarGANv2) reduce parameters and storage memory amount while ensuring high domain translation performance and good image quality as measured by FID and LPIPS scores. Full code is available at: https://github.com/ispamm/HI2I.

13.8IVOct 11, 2023Code
Attention-Map Augmentation for Hypercomplex Breast Cancer Classification

Eleonora Lopez, Filippo Betello, Federico Carmignani et al.

Breast cancer is the most widespread neoplasm among women and early detection of this disease is critical. Deep learning techniques have become of great interest to improve diagnostic performance. However, distinguishing between malignant and benign masses in whole mammograms poses a challenge, as they appear nearly identical to an untrained eye, and the region of interest (ROI) constitutes only a small fraction of the entire image. In this paper, we propose a framework, parameterized hypercomplex attention maps (PHAM), to overcome these problems. Specifically, we deploy an augmentation step based on computing attention maps. Then, the attention maps are used to condition the classification step by constructing a multi-dimensional input comprised of the original breast cancer image and the corresponding attention map. In this step, a parameterized hypercomplex neural network (PHNN) is employed to perform breast cancer classification. The framework offers two main advantages. First, attention maps provide critical information regarding the ROI and allow the neural model to concentrate on it. Second, the hypercomplex architecture has the ability to model local relations between input dimensions thanks to hypercomplex algebra rules, thus properly exploiting the information provided by the attention map. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework on both mammography images as well as histopathological ones. We surpass attention-based state-of-the-art networks and the real-valued counterpart of our approach. The code of our work is available at https://github.com/ispamm/AttentionBCS.

11.3CVSep 17, 2024Code
Guess What I Think: Streamlined EEG-to-Image Generation with Latent Diffusion Models

Eleonora Lopez, Luigi Sigillo, Federica Colonnese et al.

Generating images from brain waves is gaining increasing attention due to its potential to advance brain-computer interface (BCI) systems by understanding how brain signals encode visual cues. Most of the literature has focused on fMRI-to-Image tasks as fMRI is characterized by high spatial resolution. However, fMRI is an expensive neuroimaging modality and does not allow for real-time BCI. On the other hand, electroencephalography (EEG) is a low-cost, non-invasive, and portable neuroimaging technique, making it an attractive option for future real-time applications. Nevertheless, EEG presents inherent challenges due to its low spatial resolution and susceptibility to noise and artifacts, which makes generating images from EEG more difficult. In this paper, we address these problems with a streamlined framework based on the ControlNet adapter for conditioning a latent diffusion model (LDM) through EEG signals. We conduct experiments and ablation studies on popular benchmarks to demonstrate that the proposed method beats other state-of-the-art models. Unlike these methods, which often require extensive preprocessing, pretraining, different losses, and captioning models, our approach is efficient and straightforward, requiring only minimal preprocessing and a few components. The code is available at https://github.com/LuigiSigillo/GWIT.

5.3LGOct 11, 2023Code
PHYDI: Initializing Parameterized Hypercomplex Neural Networks as Identity Functions

Matteo Mancanelli, Eleonora Grassucci, Aurelio Uncini et al.

Neural models based on hypercomplex algebra systems are growing and prolificating for a plethora of applications, ranging from computer vision to natural language processing. Hand in hand with their adoption, parameterized hypercomplex neural networks (PHNNs) are growing in size and no techniques have been adopted so far to control their convergence at a large scale. In this paper, we study PHNNs convergence and propose parameterized hypercomplex identity initialization (PHYDI), a method to improve their convergence at different scales, leading to more robust performance when the number of layers scales up, while also reaching the same performance with fewer iterations. We show the effectiveness of this approach in different benchmarks and with common PHNNs with ResNets- and Transformer-based architecture. The code is available at https://github.com/ispamm/PHYDI.

2.0CVSep 19, 2024Code
TACE: Tumor-Aware Counterfactual Explanations

Eleonora Beatrice Rossi, Eleonora Lopez, Danilo Comminiello

The application of deep learning in medical imaging has significantly advanced diagnostic capabilities, enhancing both accuracy and efficiency. Despite these benefits, the lack of transparency in these AI models, often termed "black boxes," raises concerns about their reliability in clinical settings. Explainable AI (XAI) aims to mitigate these concerns by developing methods that make AI decisions understandable and trustworthy. In this study, we propose Tumor Aware Counterfactual Explanations (TACE), a framework designed to generate reliable counterfactual explanations for medical images. Unlike existing methods, TACE focuses on modifying tumor-specific features without altering the overall organ structure, ensuring the faithfulness of the counterfactuals. We achieve this by including an additional step in the generation process which allows to modify only the region of interest (ROI), thus yielding more reliable counterfactuals as the rest of the organ remains unchanged. We evaluate our method on mammography images and brain MRI. We find that our method far exceeds existing state-of-the-art techniques in quality, faithfulness, and generation speed of counterfactuals. Indeed, more faithful explanations lead to a significant improvement in classification success rates, with a 10.69% increase for breast cancer and a 98.02% increase for brain tumors. The code of our work is available at https://github.com/ispamm/TACE.

20.7SDOct 23, 2023
SyncFusion: Multimodal Onset-synchronized Video-to-Audio Foley Synthesis

Marco Comunità, Riccardo F. Gramaccioni, Emilian Postolache et al.

Sound design involves creatively selecting, recording, and editing sound effects for various media like cinema, video games, and virtual/augmented reality. One of the most time-consuming steps when designing sound is synchronizing audio with video. In some cases, environmental recordings from video shoots are available, which can aid in the process. However, in video games and animations, no reference audio exists, requiring manual annotation of event timings from the video. We propose a system to extract repetitive actions onsets from a video, which are then used - in conjunction with audio or textual embeddings - to condition a diffusion model trained to generate a new synchronized sound effects audio track. In this way, we leave complete creative control to the sound designer while removing the burden of synchronization with video. Furthermore, editing the onset track or changing the conditioning embedding requires much less effort than editing the audio track itself, simplifying the sonification process. We provide sound examples, source code, and pretrained models to faciliate reproducibility

3.8LGSep 5, 2023
Enhancing Semantic Communication with Deep Generative Models -- An ICASSP Special Session Overview

Eleonora Grassucci, Yuki Mitsufuji, Ping Zhang et al.

Semantic communication is poised to play a pivotal role in shaping the landscape of future AI-driven communication systems. Its challenge of extracting semantic information from the original complex content and regenerating semantically consistent data at the receiver, possibly being robust to channel corruptions, can be addressed with deep generative models. This ICASSP special session overview paper discloses the semantic communication challenges from the machine learning perspective and unveils how deep generative models will significantly enhance semantic communication frameworks in dealing with real-world complex data, extracting and exploiting semantic information, and being robust to channel corruptions. Alongside establishing this emerging field, this paper charts novel research pathways for the next generative semantic communication frameworks.

7.9AIOct 11, 2023
Dual Quaternion Rotational and Translational Equivariance in 3D Rigid Motion Modelling

Guilherme Vieira, Eleonora Grassucci, Marcos Eduardo Valle et al.

Objects' rigid motions in 3D space are described by rotations and translations of a highly-correlated set of points, each with associated $x,y,z$ coordinates that real-valued networks consider as separate entities, losing information. Previous works exploit quaternion algebra and their ability to model rotations in 3D space. However, these algebras do not properly encode translations, leading to sub-optimal performance in 3D learning tasks. To overcome these limitations, we employ a dual quaternion representation of rigid motions in the 3D space that jointly describes rotations and translations of point sets, processing each of the points as a single entity. Our approach is translation and rotation equivariant, so it does not suffer from shifts in the data and better learns object trajectories, as we validate in the experimental evaluations. Models endowed with this formulation outperform previous approaches in a human pose forecasting application, attesting to the effectiveness of the proposed dual quaternion formulation for rigid motions in 3D space.

1.2DLFeb 19
The IJCNN 2025 Review Process

Michele Scarpiniti, Danilo Comminiello

The International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) is the premier international conference in the area of neural networks theory, analysis, and applications. The 2025 edition of the conference comprised 5,526 paper submissions, 7,877 active reviewers, 426 area chairs, 2,152 accepted papers, and more than 2,300 attendees. This represents a growth of about 100% in terms of submissions, 200% in terms of reviewers, and over 50% in terms of attendees as compared to the previous edition. In this paper, we describe several key aspects of the whole review process, including a strategy for ranking the scores provided by the reviewers by evaluating a score index and a calibrated version used experimentally to remove reviewer-specific bias from reviews.

10.5CVMay 16, 2024Code
Language-Oriented Semantic Latent Representation for Image Transmission

Giordano Cicchetti, Eleonora Grassucci, Jihong Park et al.

In the new paradigm of semantic communication (SC), the focus is on delivering meanings behind bits by extracting semantic information from raw data. Recent advances in data-to-text models facilitate language-oriented SC, particularly for text-transformed image communication via image-to-text (I2T) encoding and text-to-image (T2I) decoding. However, although semantically aligned, the text is too coarse to precisely capture sophisticated visual features such as spatial locations, color, and texture, incurring a significant perceptual difference between intended and reconstructed images. To address this limitation, in this paper, we propose a novel language-oriented SC framework that communicates both text and a compressed image embedding and combines them using a latent diffusion model to reconstruct the intended image. Experimental results validate the potential of our approach, which transmits only 2.09\% of the original image size while achieving higher perceptual similarities in noisy communication channels compared to a baseline SC method that communicates only through text.The code is available at https://github.com/ispamm/Img2Img-SC/ .

10.5CVApr 8, 2024Code
NAF-DPM: A Nonlinear Activation-Free Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Document Enhancement

Giordano Cicchetti, Danilo Comminiello

Real-world documents may suffer various forms of degradation, often resulting in lower accuracy in optical character recognition (OCR) systems. Therefore, a crucial preprocessing step is essential to eliminate noise while preserving text and key features of documents. In this paper, we propose NAF-DPM, a novel generative framework based on a diffusion probabilistic model (DPM) designed to restore the original quality of degraded documents. While DPMs are recognized for their high-quality generated images, they are also known for their large inference time. To mitigate this problem we provide the DPM with an efficient nonlinear activation-free (NAF) network and we employ as a sampler a fast solver of ordinary differential equations, which can converge in a few iterations. To better preserve text characters, we introduce an additional differentiable module based on convolutional recurrent neural networks, simulating the behavior of an OCR system during training. Experiments conducted on various datasets showcase the superiority of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art performance in terms of pixel-level and perceptual similarity metrics. Furthermore, the results demonstrate a notable character error reduction made by OCR systems when transcribing real-world document images enhanced by our framework. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/ispamm/NAF-DPM.

9.6CVMar 27, 2024Code
Ship in Sight: Diffusion Models for Ship-Image Super Resolution

Luigi Sigillo, Riccardo Fosco Gramaccioni, Alessandro Nicolosi et al.

In recent years, remarkable advancements have been achieved in the field of image generation, primarily driven by the escalating demand for high-quality outcomes across various image generation subtasks, such as inpainting, denoising, and super resolution. A major effort is devoted to exploring the application of super-resolution techniques to enhance the quality of low-resolution images. In this context, our method explores in depth the problem of ship image super resolution, which is crucial for coastal and port surveillance. We investigate the opportunity given by the growing interest in text-to-image diffusion models, taking advantage of the prior knowledge that such foundation models have already learned. In particular, we present a diffusion-model-based architecture that leverages text conditioning during training while being class-aware, to best preserve the crucial details of the ships during the generation of the super-resoluted image. Since the specificity of this task and the scarcity availability of off-the-shelf data, we also introduce a large labeled ship dataset scraped from online ship images, mostly from ShipSpotting\footnote{\url{www.shipspotting.com}} website. Our method achieves more robust results than other deep learning models previously employed for super resolution, as proven by the multiple experiments performed. Moreover, we investigate how this model can benefit downstream tasks, such as classification and object detection, thus emphasizing practical implementation in a real-world scenario. Experimental results show flexibility, reliability, and impressive performance of the proposed framework over state-of-the-art methods for different tasks. The code is available at: https://github.com/LuigiSigillo/ShipinSight .

7.6CVMar 26, 2024Code
Towards Explaining Hypercomplex Neural Networks

Eleonora Lopez, Eleonora Grassucci, Debora Capriotti et al.

Hypercomplex neural networks are gaining increasing interest in the deep learning community. The attention directed towards hypercomplex models originates from several aspects, spanning from purely theoretical and mathematical characteristics to the practical advantage of lightweight models over conventional networks, and their unique properties to capture both global and local relations. In particular, a branch of these architectures, parameterized hypercomplex neural networks (PHNNs), has also gained popularity due to their versatility across a multitude of application domains. Nonetheless, only few attempts have been made to explain or interpret their intricacies. In this paper, we propose inherently interpretable PHNNs and quaternion-like networks, thus without the need for any post-hoc method. To achieve this, we define a type of cosine-similarity transform within the parameterized hypercomplex domain. This PHB-cos transform induces weight alignment with relevant input features and allows to reduce the model into a single linear transform, rendering it directly interpretable. In this work, we start to draw insights into how this unique branch of neural models operates. We observe that hypercomplex networks exhibit a tendency to concentrate on the shape around the main object of interest, in addition to the shape of the object itself. We provide a thorough analysis, studying single neurons of different layers and comparing them against how real-valued networks learn. The code of the paper is available at https://github.com/ispamm/HxAI.

5.2CVMay 5, 2024Code
JOSENet: A Joint Stream Embedding Network for Violence Detection in Surveillance Videos

Pietro Nardelli, Danilo Comminiello

The increasing proliferation of video surveillance cameras and the escalating demand for crime prevention have intensified interest in the task of violence detection within the research community. Compared to other action recognition tasks, violence detection in surveillance videos presents additional issues, such as the wide variety of real fight scenes. Unfortunately, existing datasets for violence detection are relatively small in comparison to those for other action recognition tasks. Moreover, surveillance footage often features different individuals in each video and varying backgrounds for each camera. In addition, fast detection of violent actions in real-life surveillance videos is crucial to prevent adverse outcomes, thus necessitating models that are optimized for reduced memory usage and computational costs. These challenges complicate the application of traditional action recognition methods. To tackle all these issues, we introduce JOSENet, a novel self-supervised framework that provides outstanding performance for violence detection in surveillance videos. The proposed model processes two spatiotemporal video streams, namely RGB frames and optical flows, and incorporates a new regularized self-supervised learning approach for videos. JOSENet demonstrates improved performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, while utilizing only one-fourth of the frames per video segment and operating at a reduced frame rate. The source code is available at https://github.com/ispamm/JOSENet.

5.9CVMay 18, 2023Code
StawGAN: Structural-Aware Generative Adversarial Networks for Infrared Image Translation

Luigi Sigillo, Eleonora Grassucci, Danilo Comminiello

This paper addresses the problem of translating night-time thermal infrared images, which are the most adopted image modalities to analyze night-time scenes, to daytime color images (NTIT2DC), which provide better perceptions of objects. We introduce a novel model that focuses on enhancing the quality of the target generation without merely colorizing it. The proposed structural aware (StawGAN) enables the translation of better-shaped and high-definition objects in the target domain. We test our model on aerial images of the DroneVeichle dataset containing RGB-IR paired images. The proposed approach produces a more accurate translation with respect to other state-of-the-art image translation models. The source code is available at https://github.com/LuigiSigillo/StawGAN

16.8LGOct 8, 2021Code
PHNNs: Lightweight Neural Networks via Parameterized Hypercomplex Convolutions

Eleonora Grassucci, Aston Zhang, Danilo Comminiello

Hypercomplex neural networks have proven to reduce the overall number of parameters while ensuring valuable performance by leveraging the properties of Clifford algebras. Recently, hypercomplex linear layers have been further improved by involving efficient parameterized Kronecker products. In this paper, we define the parameterization of hypercomplex convolutional layers and introduce the family of parameterized hypercomplex neural networks (PHNNs) that are lightweight and efficient large-scale models. Our method grasps the convolution rules and the filter organization directly from data without requiring a rigidly predefined domain structure to follow. PHNNs are flexible to operate in any user-defined or tuned domain, from 1D to $n$D regardless of whether the algebra rules are preset. Such a malleability allows processing multidimensional inputs in their natural domain without annexing further dimensions, as done, instead, in quaternion neural networks for 3D inputs like color images. As a result, the proposed family of PHNNs operates with $1/n$ free parameters as regards its analog in the real domain. We demonstrate the versatility of this approach to multiple domains of application by performing experiments on various image datasets as well as audio datasets in which our method outperforms real and quaternion-valued counterparts. Full code is available at: https://github.com/eleGAN23/HyperNets.

23.8CVDec 16, 2024Code
Gramian Multimodal Representation Learning and Alignment

Giordano Cicchetti, Eleonora Grassucci, Luigi Sigillo et al.

Human perception integrates multiple modalities, such as vision, hearing, and language, into a unified understanding of the surrounding reality. While recent multimodal models have achieved significant progress by aligning pairs of modalities via contrastive learning, their solutions are unsuitable when scaling to multiple modalities. These models typically align each modality to a designated anchor without ensuring the alignment of all modalities with each other, leading to suboptimal performance in tasks requiring a joint understanding of multiple modalities. In this paper, we structurally rethink the pairwise conventional approach to multimodal learning and we present the novel Gramian Representation Alignment Measure (GRAM), which overcomes the above-mentioned limitations. GRAM learns and then aligns $n$ modalities directly in the higher-dimensional space in which modality embeddings lie by minimizing the Gramian volume of the $k$-dimensional parallelotope spanned by the modality vectors, ensuring the geometric alignment of all modalities simultaneously. GRAM can replace cosine similarity in any downstream method, holding for 2 to $n$ modalities and providing more meaningful alignment with respect to previous similarity measures. The novel GRAM-based contrastive loss function enhances the alignment of multimodal models in the higher-dimensional embedding space, leading to new state-of-the-art performance in downstream tasks such as video-audio-text retrieval and audio-video classification. The project page, the code, and the pretrained models are available at https://ispamm.github.io/GRAM/.

7.2CLJan 10, 2024
Generative AI Meets Semantic Communication: Evolution and Revolution of Communication Tasks

Eleonora Grassucci, Jihong Park, Sergio Barbarossa et al.

While deep generative models are showing exciting abilities in computer vision and natural language processing, their adoption in communication frameworks is still far underestimated. These methods are demonstrated to evolve solutions to classic communication problems such as denoising, restoration, or compression. Nevertheless, generative models can unveil their real potential in semantic communication frameworks, in which the receiver is not asked to recover the sequence of bits used to encode the transmitted (semantic) message, but only to regenerate content that is semantically consistent with the transmitted message. Disclosing generative models capabilities in semantic communication paves the way for a paradigm shift with respect to conventional communication systems, which has great potential to reduce the amount of data traffic and offers a revolutionary versatility to novel tasks and applications that were not even conceivable a few years ago. In this paper, we present a unified perspective of deep generative models in semantic communication and we unveil their revolutionary role in future communication frameworks, enabling emerging applications and tasks. Finally, we analyze the challenges and opportunities to face to develop generative models specifically tailored for communication systems.

5.1ASFeb 14, 2024
Overview of the L3DAS23 Challenge on Audio-Visual Extended Reality

Christian Marinoni, Riccardo Fosco Gramaccioni, Changan Chen et al.

The primary goal of the L3DAS23 Signal Processing Grand Challenge at ICASSP 2023 is to promote and support collaborative research on machine learning for 3D audio signal processing, with a specific emphasis on 3D speech enhancement and 3D Sound Event Localization and Detection in Extended Reality applications. As part of our latest competition, we provide a brand-new dataset, which maintains the same general characteristics of the L3DAS21 and L3DAS22 datasets, but with first-order Ambisonics recordings from multiple reverberant simulated environments. Moreover, we start exploring an audio-visual scenario by providing images of these environments, as perceived by the different microphone positions and orientations. We also propose updated baseline models for both tasks that can now support audio-image couples as input and a supporting API to replicate our results. Finally, we present the results of the participants. Further details about the challenge are available at https://www.l3das.com/icassp2023.

13.3IVOct 23, 2024
A Wavelet Diffusion GAN for Image Super-Resolution

Lorenzo Aloisi, Luigi Sigillo, Aurelio Uncini et al.

In recent years, diffusion models have emerged as a superior alternative to generative adversarial networks (GANs) for high-fidelity image generation, with wide applications in text-to-image generation, image-to-image translation, and super-resolution. However, their real-time feasibility is hindered by slow training and inference speeds. This study addresses this challenge by proposing a wavelet-based conditional Diffusion GAN scheme for Single-Image Super-Resolution (SISR). Our approach utilizes the diffusion GAN paradigm to reduce the timesteps required by the reverse diffusion process and the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) to achieve dimensionality reduction, decreasing training and inference times significantly. The results of an experimental validation on the CelebA-HQ dataset confirm the effectiveness of our proposed scheme. Our approach outperforms other state-of-the-art methodologies successfully ensuring high-fidelity output while overcoming inherent drawbacks associated with diffusion models in time-sensitive applications.

10.9SDDec 19, 2024
FolAI: Synchronized Foley Sound Generation with Semantic and Temporal Alignment

Riccardo Fosco Gramaccioni, Christian Marinoni, Emilian Postolache et al.

Traditional sound design workflows rely on manual alignment of audio events to visual cues, as in Foley sound design, where everyday actions like footsteps or object interactions are recreated to match the on-screen motion. This process is time-consuming, difficult to scale, and lacks automation tools that preserve creative intent. Despite recent advances in vision-to-audio generation, producing temporally coherent and semantically controllable sound effects from video remains a major challenge. To address these limitations, we introduce FolAI, a two-stage generative framework that decouples the when and the what of sound synthesis, i.e., the temporal structure extraction and the semantically guided generation, respectively. In the first stage, we estimate a smooth control signal from the video that captures the motion intensity and rhythmic structure over time, serving as a temporal scaffold for the audio. In the second stage, a diffusion-based generative model produces sound effects conditioned both on this temporal envelope and on high-level semantic embeddings, provided by the user, that define the desired auditory content (e.g., material or action type). This modular design enables precise control over both timing and timbre, streamlining repetitive tasks while preserving creative flexibility in professional Foley workflows. Results on diverse visual contexts, such as footstep generation and action-specific sonorization, demonstrate that our model reliably produces audio that is temporally aligned with visual motion, semantically consistent with user intent, and perceptually realistic. These findings highlight the potential of FolAI as a controllable and modular solution for scalable, high-quality Foley sound synthesis in professional and interactive settings. Supplementary materials are accessible on our dedicated demo page at https://ispamm.github.io/FolAI.

2.3SPMay 16, 2024
Rethinking Multi-User Semantic Communications with Deep Generative Models

Eleonora Grassucci, Jinho Choi, Jihong Park et al.

In recent years, novel communication strategies have emerged to face the challenges that the increased number of connected devices and the higher quality of transmitted information are posing. Among them, semantic communication obtained promising results especially when combined with state-of-the-art deep generative models, such as large language or diffusion models, able to regenerate content from extremely compressed semantic information. However, most of these approaches focus on single-user scenarios processing the received content at the receiver on top of conventional communication systems. In this paper, we propose to go beyond these methods by developing a novel generative semantic communication framework tailored for multi-user scenarios. This system assigns the channel to users knowing that the lost information can be filled in with a diffusion model at the receivers. Under this innovative perspective, OFDMA systems should not aim to transmit the largest part of information, but solely the bits necessary to the generative model to semantically regenerate the missing ones. The thorough experimental evaluation shows the capabilities of the novel diffusion model and the effectiveness of the proposed framework, leading towards a GenAI-based next generation of communications.

9.3SDOct 7, 2025
FoleyGRAM: Video-to-Audio Generation with GRAM-Aligned Multimodal Encoders

Riccardo Fosco Gramaccioni, Christian Marinoni, Eleonora Grassucci et al.

In this work, we present FoleyGRAM, a novel approach to video-to-audio generation that emphasizes semantic conditioning through the use of aligned multimodal encoders. Building on prior advancements in video-to-audio generation, FoleyGRAM leverages the Gramian Representation Alignment Measure (GRAM) to align embeddings across video, text, and audio modalities, enabling precise semantic control over the audio generation process. The core of FoleyGRAM is a diffusion-based audio synthesis model conditioned on GRAM-aligned embeddings and waveform envelopes, ensuring both semantic richness and temporal alignment with the corresponding input video. We evaluate FoleyGRAM on the Greatest Hits dataset, a standard benchmark for video-to-audio models. Our experiments demonstrate that aligning multimodal encoders using GRAM enhances the system's ability to semantically align generated audio with video content, advancing the state of the art in video-to-audio synthesis.

9.3SDOct 7, 2025
StereoSync: Spatially-Aware Stereo Audio Generation from Video

Christian Marinoni, Riccardo Fosco Gramaccioni, Kazuki Shimada et al.

Although audio generation has been widely studied over recent years, video-aligned audio generation still remains a relatively unexplored frontier. To address this gap, we introduce StereoSync, a novel and efficient model designed to generate audio that is both temporally synchronized with a reference video and spatially aligned with its visual context. Moreover, StereoSync also achieves efficiency by leveraging pretrained foundation models, reducing the need for extensive training while maintaining high-quality synthesis. Unlike existing methods that primarily focus on temporal synchronization, StereoSync introduces a significant advancement by incorporating spatial awareness into video-aligned audio generation. Indeed, given an input video, our approach extracts spatial cues from depth maps and bounding boxes, using them as cross-attention conditioning in a diffusion-based audio generation model. Such an approach allows StereoSync to go beyond simple synchronization, producing stereo audio that dynamically adapts to the spatial structure and movement of a video scene. We evaluate StereoSync on Walking The Maps, a curated dataset comprising videos from video games that feature animated characters walking through diverse environments. Experimental results demonstrate the ability of StereoSync to achieve both temporal and spatial alignment, advancing the state of the art in video-to-audio generation and resulting in a significantly more immersive and realistic audio experience.

10.4LGMay 11, 2024
Demystifying the Hypercomplex: Inductive Biases in Hypercomplex Deep Learning

Danilo Comminiello, Eleonora Grassucci, Danilo P. Mandic et al.

Hypercomplex algebras have recently been gaining prominence in the field of deep learning owing to the advantages of their division algebras over real vector spaces and their superior results when dealing with multidimensional signals in real-world 3D and 4D paradigms. This paper provides a foundational framework that serves as a roadmap for understanding why hypercomplex deep learning methods are so successful and how their potential can be exploited. Such a theoretical framework is described in terms of inductive bias, i.e., a collection of assumptions, properties, and constraints that are built into training algorithms to guide their learning process toward more efficient and accurate solutions. We show that it is possible to derive specific inductive biases in the hypercomplex domains, which extend complex numbers to encompass diverse numbers and data structures. These biases prove effective in managing the distinctive properties of these domains, as well as the complex structures of multidimensional and multimodal signals. This novel perspective for hypercomplex deep learning promises to both demystify this class of methods and clarify their potential, under a unifying framework, and in this way promotes hypercomplex models as viable alternatives to traditional real-valued deep learning for multidimensional signal processing.

6.2CVMay 1, 2025
Quaternion Wavelet-Conditioned Diffusion Models for Image Super-Resolution

Luigi Sigillo, Christian Bianchi, Aurelio Uncini et al.

Image Super-Resolution is a fundamental problem in computer vision with broad applications spacing from medical imaging to satellite analysis. The ability to reconstruct high-resolution images from low-resolution inputs is crucial for enhancing downstream tasks such as object detection and segmentation. While deep learning has significantly advanced SR, achieving high-quality reconstructions with fine-grained details and realistic textures remains challenging, particularly at high upscaling factors. Recent approaches leveraging diffusion models have demonstrated promising results, yet they often struggle to balance perceptual quality with structural fidelity. In this work, we introduce ResQu a novel SR framework that integrates a quaternion wavelet preprocessing framework with latent diffusion models, incorporating a new quaternion wavelet- and time-aware encoder. Unlike prior methods that simply apply wavelet transforms within diffusion models, our approach enhances the conditioning process by exploiting quaternion wavelet embeddings, which are dynamically integrated at different stages of denoising. Furthermore, we also leverage the generative priors of foundation models such as Stable Diffusion. Extensive experiments on domain-specific datasets demonstrate that our method achieves outstanding SR results, outperforming in many cases existing approaches in perceptual quality and standard evaluation metrics. The code will be available after the revision process.

1.2MMOct 7, 2025
Controllable Audio-Visual Viewpoint Generation from 360° Spatial Information

Christian Marinoni, Riccardo Fosco Gramaccioni, Eleonora Grassucci et al.

The generation of sounding videos has seen significant advancements with the advent of diffusion models. However, existing methods often lack the fine-grained control needed to generate viewpoint-specific content from larger, immersive 360-degree environments. This limitation restricts the creation of audio-visual experiences that are aware of off-camera events. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to introduce a framework for controllable audio-visual generation, addressing this unexplored gap. Specifically, we propose a diffusion model by introducing a set of powerful conditioning signals derived from the full 360-degree space: a panoramic saliency map to identify regions of interest, a bounding-box-aware signed distance map to define the target viewpoint, and a descriptive caption of the entire scene. By integrating these controls, our model generates spatially-aware viewpoint videos and audios that are coherently influenced by the broader, unseen environmental context, introducing a strong controllability that is essential for realistic and immersive audio-visual generation. We show audiovisual examples proving the effectiveness of our framework.

17.9LGSep 29, 2025
A TRIANGLE Enables Multimodal Alignment Beyond Cosine Similarity

Giordano Cicchetti, Eleonora Grassucci, Danilo Comminiello

Multimodal learning plays a pivotal role in advancing artificial intelligence systems by incorporating information from multiple modalities to build a more comprehensive representation. Despite its importance, current state-of-the-art models still suffer from severe limitations that prevent the successful development of a fully multimodal model. Such methods may not provide indicators that all the involved modalities are effectively aligned. As a result, some modalities may not be aligned, undermining the effectiveness of the model in downstream tasks where multiple modalities should provide additional information that the model fails to exploit. In this paper, we present TRIANGLE: TRI-modAl Neural Geometric LEarning, the novel proposed similarity measure that is directly computed in the higher-dimensional space spanned by the modality embeddings. TRIANGLE improves the joint alignment of three modalities via a triangle-area similarity, avoiding additional fusion layers or pairwise similarities. When incorporated in contrastive losses replacing cosine similarity, TRIANGLE significantly boosts the performance of multimodal modeling, while yielding interpretable alignment rationales. Extensive evaluation in three-modal tasks such as video-text and audio-text retrieval or audio-video classification, demonstrates that TRIANGLE achieves state-of-the-art results across different datasets improving the performance of cosine-based methods up to 9 points of Recall@1.

4.1LGSep 29, 2025
Training-Free Multimodal Guidance for Video to Audio Generation

Eleonora Grassucci, Giuliano Galadini, Giordano Cicchetti et al.

Video-to-audio (V2A) generation aims to synthesize realistic and semantically aligned audio from silent videos, with potential applications in video editing, Foley sound design, and assistive multimedia. Although the excellent results, existing approaches either require costly joint training on large-scale paired datasets or rely on pairwise similarities that may fail to capture global multimodal coherence. In this work, we propose a novel training-free multimodal guidance mechanism for V2A diffusion that leverages the volume spanned by the modality embeddings to enforce unified alignment across video, audio, and text. The proposed multimodal diffusion guidance (MDG) provides a lightweight, plug-and-play control signal that can be applied on top of any pretrained audio diffusion model without retraining. Experiments on VGGSound and AudioCaps demonstrate that our MDG consistently improves perceptual quality and multimodal alignment compared to baselines, proving the effectiveness of a joint multimodal guidance for V2A.

4.1LGSep 29, 2025
Semantic Compression via Multimodal Representation Learning

Eleonora Grassucci, Giordano Cicchetti, Aurelio Uncini et al.

Multimodal representation learning produces high-dimensional embeddings that align diverse modalities in a shared latent space. While this enables strong generalization, it also introduces scalability challenges, both in terms of storage and downstream processing. A key open problem is how to achieve semantic compression, reducing the memory footprint of multimodal embeddings while preserving their ability to represent shared semantic content across modalities. In this paper, we prove a strong connection between reducing the modality gap, which is the residual separation of embeddings from different modalities, and the feasibility of post-training semantic compression. When the gap is sufficiently reduced, embeddings from different modalities but expressing the same semantics share a common portion of the space. Therefore, their centroid is a faithful representation of such a semantic concept. This enables replacing multiple embeddings with a single centroid, yielding significant memory savings. We propose a novel approach for semantic compression grounded on the latter intuition, operating directly on pretrained encoders. We demonstrate its effectiveness across diverse large-scale multimodal downstream tasks. Our results highlight that modality alignment is a key enabler for semantic compression, showing that the proposed approach achieves significant compression without sacrificing performance.

2.6LGMay 8, 2024
Concrete Dense Network for Long-Sequence Time Series Clustering

Redemptor Jr Laceda Taloma, Patrizio Pisani, Danilo Comminiello

Time series clustering is fundamental in data analysis for discovering temporal patterns. Despite recent advancements, learning cluster-friendly representations is still challenging, particularly with long and complex time series. Deep temporal clustering methods have been trying to integrate the canonical k-means into end-to-end training of neural networks but fall back on surrogate losses due to the non-differentiability of the hard cluster assignment, yielding sub-optimal solutions. In addition, the autoregressive strategy used in the state-of-the-art RNNs is subject to error accumulation and slow training, while recent research findings have revealed that Transformers are less effective due to time points lacking semantic meaning, to the permutation invariance of attention that discards the chronological order and high computation cost. In light of these observations, we present LoSTer which is a novel dense autoencoder architecture for the long-sequence time series clustering problem (LSTC) capable of optimizing the k-means objective via the Gumbel-softmax reparameterization trick and designed specifically for accurate and fast clustering of long time series. Extensive experiments on numerous benchmark datasets and two real-world applications prove the effectiveness of LoSTer over state-of-the-art RNNs and Transformer-based deep clustering methods.

8.0ASFeb 21, 2022Code
L3DAS22 Challenge: Learning 3D Audio Sources in a Real Office Environment

Eric Guizzo, Christian Marinoni, Marco Pennese et al.

The L3DAS22 Challenge is aimed at encouraging the development of machine learning strategies for 3D speech enhancement and 3D sound localization and detection in office-like environments. This challenge improves and extends the tasks of the L3DAS21 edition. We generated a new dataset, which maintains the same general characteristics of L3DAS21 datasets, but with an extended number of data points and adding constrains that improve the baseline model's efficiency and overcome the major difficulties encountered by the participants of the previous challenge. We updated the baseline model of Task 1, using the architecture that ranked first in the previous challenge edition. We wrote a new supporting API, improving its clarity and ease-of-use. In the end, we present and discuss the results submitted by all participants. L3DAS22 Challenge website: www.l3das.com/icassp2022.

1.6LGApr 19, 2021
A New Class of Efficient Adaptive Filters for Online Nonlinear Modeling

Danilo Comminiello, Alireza Nezamdoust, Simone Scardapane et al.

Nonlinear models are known to provide excellent performance in real-world applications that often operate in non-ideal conditions. However, such applications often require online processing to be performed with limited computational resources. To address this problem, we propose a new class of efficient nonlinear models for online applications. The proposed algorithms are based on linear-in-the-parameters (LIP) nonlinear filters using functional link expansions. In order to make this class of functional link adaptive filters (FLAFs) efficient, we propose low-complexity expansions and frequency-domain adaptation of the parameters. Among this family of algorithms, we also define the partitioned-block frequency-domain FLAF, whose implementation is particularly suitable for online nonlinear modeling problems. We assess and compare frequency-domain FLAFs with different expansions providing the best possible tradeoff between performance and computational complexity. Experimental results prove that the proposed algorithms can be considered as an efficient and effective solution for online applications, such as the acoustic echo cancellation, even in the presence of adverse nonlinear conditions and with limited availability of computational resources.

13.1LGApr 19, 2021Code
Quaternion Generative Adversarial Networks

Eleonora Grassucci, Edoardo Cicero, Danilo Comminiello

Latest Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are gathering outstanding results through a large-scale training, thus employing models composed of millions of parameters requiring extensive computational capabilities. Building such huge models undermines their replicability and increases the training instability. Moreover, multi-channel data, such as images or audio, are usually processed by realvalued convolutional networks that flatten and concatenate the input, often losing intra-channel spatial relations. To address these issues related to complexity and information loss, we propose a family of quaternion-valued generative adversarial networks (QGANs). QGANs exploit the properties of quaternion algebra, e.g., the Hamilton product, that allows to process channels as a single entity and capture internal latent relations, while reducing by a factor of 4 the overall number of parameters. We show how to design QGANs and to extend the proposed approach even to advanced models.We compare the proposed QGANs with real-valued counterparts on several image generation benchmarks. Results show that QGANs are able to obtain better FID scores than real-valued GANs and to generate visually pleasing images. Furthermore, QGANs save up to 75% of the training parameters. We believe these results may pave the way to novel, more accessible, GANs capable of improving performance and saving computational resources.

7.3ASApr 12, 2021Code
L3DAS21 Challenge: Machine Learning for 3D Audio Signal Processing

Eric Guizzo, Riccardo F. Gramaccioni, Saeid Jamili et al.

The L3DAS21 Challenge is aimed at encouraging and fostering collaborative research on machine learning for 3D audio signal processing, with particular focus on 3D speech enhancement (SE) and 3D sound localization and detection (SELD). Alongside with the challenge, we release the L3DAS21 dataset, a 65 hours 3D audio corpus, accompanied with a Python API that facilitates the data usage and results submission stage. Usually, machine learning approaches to 3D audio tasks are based on single-perspective Ambisonics recordings or on arrays of single-capsule microphones. We propose, instead, a novel multichannel audio configuration based multiple-source and multiple-perspective Ambisonics recordings, performed with an array of two first-order Ambisonics microphones. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that a dual-mic Ambisonics configuration is used for these tasks. We provide baseline models and results for both tasks, obtained with state-of-the-art architectures: FaSNet for SE and SELDNet for SELD. This report is aimed at providing all needed information to participate in the L3DAS21 Challenge, illustrating the details of the L3DAS21 dataset, the challenge tasks and the baseline models.

8.5LGOct 22, 2020Code
A Quaternion-Valued Variational Autoencoder

Eleonora Grassucci, Danilo Comminiello, Aurelio Uncini

Deep probabilistic generative models have achieved incredible success in many fields of application. Among such models, variational autoencoders (VAEs) have proved their ability in modeling a generative process by learning a latent representation of the input. In this paper, we propose a novel VAE defined in the quaternion domain, which exploits the properties of quaternion algebra to improve performance while significantly reducing the number of parameters required by the network. The success of the proposed quaternion VAE with respect to traditional VAEs relies on the ability to leverage the internal relations between quaternion-valued input features and on the properties of second-order statistics which allow to define the latent variables in the augmented quaternion domain. In order to show the advantages due to such properties, we define a plain convolutional VAE in the quaternion domain and we evaluate its performance with respect to its real-valued counterpart on the CelebA face dataset.

6.6SPAug 8, 2019
A Multimodal Deep Network for the Reconstruction of T2W MR Images

Antonio Falvo, Danilo Comminiello, Simone Scardapane et al.

Multiple sclerosis is one of the most common chronic neurological diseases affecting the central nervous system. Lesions produced by the MS can be observed through two modalities of magnetic resonance (MR), known as T2W and FLAIR sequences, both providing useful information for formulating a diagnosis. However, long acquisition time makes the acquired MR image vulnerable to motion artifacts. This leads to the need of accelerating the execution of the MR analysis. In this paper, we present a deep learning method that is able to reconstruct subsampled MR images obtained by reducing the k-space data, while maintaining a high image quality that can be used to observe brain lesions. The proposed method exploits the multimodal approach of neural networks and it also focuses on the data acquisition and processing stages to reduce execution time of the MR analysis. Results prove the effectiveness of the proposed method in reconstructing subsampled MR images while saving execution time.

5.5NEFeb 6, 2019
Widely Linear Kernels for Complex-Valued Kernel Activation Functions

Simone Scardapane, Steven Van Vaerenbergh, Danilo Comminiello et al.

Complex-valued neural networks (CVNNs) have been shown to be powerful nonlinear approximators when the input data can be properly modeled in the complex domain. One of the major challenges in scaling up CVNNs in practice is the design of complex activation functions. Recently, we proposed a novel framework for learning these activation functions neuron-wise in a data-dependent fashion, based on a cheap one-dimensional kernel expansion and the idea of kernel activation functions (KAFs). In this paper we argue that, despite its flexibility, this framework is still limited in the class of functions that can be modeled in the complex domain. We leverage the idea of widely linear complex kernels to extend the formulation, allowing for a richer expressiveness without an increase in the number of adaptable parameters. We test the resulting model on a set of complex-valued image classification benchmarks. Experimental results show that the resulting CVNNs can achieve higher accuracy while at the same time converging faster.

13.8ASDec 17, 2018
Quaternion Convolutional Neural Networks for Detection and Localization of 3D Sound Events

Danilo Comminiello, Marco Lella, Simone Scardapane et al.

Learning from data in the quaternion domain enables us to exploit internal dependencies of 4D signals and treating them as a single entity. One of the models that perfectly suits with quaternion-valued data processing is represented by 3D acoustic signals in their spherical harmonics decomposition. In this paper, we address the problem of localizing and detecting sound events in the spatial sound field by using quaternion-valued data processing. In particular, we consider the spherical harmonic components of the signals captured by a first-order ambisonic microphone and process them by using a quaternion convolutional neural network. Experimental results show that the proposed approach exploits the correlated nature of the ambisonic signals, thus improving accuracy results in 3D sound event detection and localization.

1.8NEJul 11, 2018
Recurrent Neural Networks with Flexible Gates using Kernel Activation Functions

Simone Scardapane, Steven Van Vaerenbergh, Danilo Comminiello et al.

Gated recurrent neural networks have achieved remarkable results in the analysis of sequential data. Inside these networks, gates are used to control the flow of information, allowing to model even very long-term dependencies in the data. In this paper, we investigate whether the original gate equation (a linear projection followed by an element-wise sigmoid) can be improved. In particular, we design a more flexible architecture, with a small number of adaptable parameters, which is able to model a wider range of gating functions than the classical one. To this end, we replace the sigmoid function in the standard gate with a non-parametric formulation extending the recently proposed kernel activation function (KAF), with the addition of a residual skip-connection. A set of experiments on sequential variants of the MNIST dataset shows that the adoption of this novel gate allows to improve accuracy with a negligible cost in terms of computational power and with a large speed-up in the number of training iterations.

9.1NEFeb 26, 2018
Improving Graph Convolutional Networks with Non-Parametric Activation Functions

Simone Scardapane, Steven Van Vaerenbergh, Danilo Comminiello et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a class of neural networks that allow to efficiently perform inference on data that is associated to a graph structure, such as, e.g., citation networks or knowledge graphs. While several variants of GNNs have been proposed, they only consider simple nonlinear activation functions in their layers, such as rectifiers or squashing functions. In this paper, we investigate the use of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) when combined with more complex activation functions, able to adapt from the training data. More specifically, we extend the recently proposed kernel activation function, a non-parametric model which can be implemented easily, can be regularized with standard $\ell_p$-norms techniques, and is smooth over its entire domain. Our experimental evaluation shows that the proposed architecture can significantly improve over its baseline, while similar improvements cannot be obtained by simply increasing the depth or size of the original GCN.

33.4MLJul 2, 2016
Group Sparse Regularization for Deep Neural Networks

Simone Scardapane, Danilo Comminiello, Amir Hussain et al.

In this paper, we consider the joint task of simultaneously optimizing (i) the weights of a deep neural network, (ii) the number of neurons for each hidden layer, and (iii) the subset of active input features (i.e., feature selection). While these problems are generally dealt with separately, we present a simple regularized formulation allowing to solve all three of them in parallel, using standard optimization routines. Specifically, we extend the group Lasso penalty (originated in the linear regression literature) in order to impose group-level sparsity on the network's connections, where each group is defined as the set of outgoing weights from a unit. Depending on the specific case, the weights can be related to an input variable, to a hidden neuron, or to a bias unit, thus performing simultaneously all the aforementioned tasks in order to obtain a compact network. We perform an extensive experimental evaluation, by comparing with classical weight decay and Lasso penalties. We show that a sparse version of the group Lasso penalty is able to achieve competitive performances, while at the same time resulting in extremely compact networks with a smaller number of input features. We evaluate both on a toy dataset for handwritten digit recognition, and on multiple realistic large-scale classification problems.

1.0LGMay 25, 2016
Effective Blind Source Separation Based on the Adam Algorithm

Michele Scarpiniti, Simone Scardapane, Danilo Comminiello et al.

In this paper, we derive a modified InfoMax algorithm for the solution of Blind Signal Separation (BSS) problems by using advanced stochastic methods. The proposed approach is based on a novel stochastic optimization approach known as the Adaptive Moment Estimation (Adam) algorithm. The proposed BSS solution can benefit from the excellent properties of the Adam approach. In order to derive the new learning rule, the Adam algorithm is introduced in the derivation of the cost function maximization in the standard InfoMax algorithm. The natural gradient adaptation is also considered. Finally, some experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.