Iñigo Alonso

Iñigo Alonso, Eneko Agirre, Mirella Lapata

Table-to-text generation involves generating appropriate textual descriptions given structured tabular data. It has attracted increasing attention in recent years thanks to the popularity of neural network models and the availability of large-scale datasets. A common feature across existing methods is their treatment of the input as a string, i.e., by employing linearization techniques that do not always preserve information in the table, are verbose, and lack space efficiency. We propose to rethink data-to-text generation as a visual recognition task, removing the need for rendering the input in a string format. We present PixT3, a multimodal table-to-text model that overcomes the challenges of linearization and input size limitations encountered by existing models. PixT3 is trained with a new self-supervised learning objective to reinforce table structure awareness and is applicable to open-ended and controlled generation settings. Experiments on the ToTTo and Logic2Text benchmarks show that PixT3 is competitive and, in some settings, superior to generators that operate solely on text.

Rodrigo Agerri, Iñigo Alonso, Aitziber Atutxa et al.

Providing high quality explanations for AI predictions based on machine learning is a challenging and complex task. To work well it requires, among other factors: selecting a proper level of generality/specificity of the explanation; considering assumptions about the familiarity of the explanation beneficiary with the AI task under consideration; referring to specific elements that have contributed to the decision; making use of additional knowledge (e.g. expert evidence) which might not be part of the prediction process; and providing evidence supporting negative hypothesis. Finally, the system needs to formulate the explanation in a clearly interpretable, and possibly convincing, way. Given these considerations, ANTIDOTE fosters an integrated vision of explainable AI, where low-level characteristics of the deep learning process are combined with higher level schemes proper of the human argumentation capacity. ANTIDOTE will exploit cross-disciplinary competences in deep learning and argumentation to support a broader and innovative view of explainable AI, where the need for high-quality explanations for clinical cases deliberation is critical. As a first result of the project, we publish the Antidote CasiMedicos dataset to facilitate research on explainable AI in general, and argumentation in the medical domain in particular.

Iñigo Alonso, Eneko Agirre

Table-to-text systems generate natural language statements from structured data like tables. While end-to-end techniques suffer from low factual correctness (fidelity), a previous study reported gains when using manual logical forms (LF) that represent the selected content and the semantics of the target text. Given the manual step, it was not clear whether automatic LFs would be effective, or whether the improvement came from content selection alone. We present TlT which, given a table and a selection of the content, first produces LFs and then the textual statement. We show for the first time that automatic LFs improve quality, with an increase in fidelity of 30 points over a comparable system not using LFs. Our experiments allow to quantify the remaining challenges for high factual correctness, with automatic selection of content coming first, followed by better Logic-to-Text generation and, to a lesser extent, better Table-to-Logic parsing.

Iñigo Alonso, Maite Oronoz, Rodrigo Agerri

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential of facilitating the development of Artificial Intelligence technology to assist medical experts for interactive decision support, which has been demonstrated by their competitive performances in Medical QA. However, while impressive, the required quality bar for medical applications remains far from being achieved. Currently, LLMs remain challenged by outdated knowledge and by their tendency to generate hallucinated content. Furthermore, most benchmarks to assess medical knowledge lack reference gold explanations which means that it is not possible to evaluate the reasoning of LLMs predictions. Finally, the situation is particularly grim if we consider benchmarking LLMs for languages other than English which remains, as far as we know, a totally neglected topic. In order to address these shortcomings, in this paper we present MedExpQA, the first multilingual benchmark based on medical exams to evaluate LLMs in Medical Question Answering. To the best of our knowledge, MedExpQA includes for the first time reference gold explanations written by medical doctors which can be leveraged to establish various gold-based upper-bounds for comparison with LLMs performance. Comprehensive multilingual experimentation using both the gold reference explanations and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approaches show that performance of LLMs still has large room for improvement, especially for languages other than English. Furthermore, and despite using state-of-the-art RAG methods, our results also demonstrate the difficulty of obtaining and integrating readily available medical knowledge that may positively impact results on downstream evaluations for Medical Question Answering. So far the benchmark is available in four languages, but we hope that this work may encourage further development to other languages.

Iñigo Alonso, Gorka Azkune, Ander Salaberria et al.

Cross-modal entity linking refers to the ability to align entities and their attributes across different modalities. While cross-modal entity linking is a fundamental skill needed for real-world applications such as multimodal code generation, fake news detection, or scene understanding, it has not been thoroughly studied in the literature. In this paper, we introduce a new task and benchmark to address this gap. Our benchmark, MATE, consists of 5.5k evaluation instances featuring visual scenes aligned with their textual representations. To evaluate cross-modal entity linking performance, we design a question-answering task that involves retrieving one attribute of an object in one modality based on a unique attribute of that object in another modality. We evaluate state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and humans on this task, and find that VLMs struggle significantly compared to humans, particularly as the number of objects in the scene increases. Our analysis also shows that, while chain-of-thought prompting can improve VLM performance, models remain far from achieving human-level proficiency. These findings highlight the need for further research in cross-modal entity linking and show that MATE is a strong benchmark to support that progress.

Iñigo Alonso, Imanol Miranda, Eneko Agirre et al.

While table understanding increasingly relies on pixel-only settings where tables are processed as visual representations, current benchmarks predominantly use synthetic renderings that lack the complexity and visual diversity of real-world tables. Additionally, existing visual table understanding (VTU) datasets offer fixed examples with single visualizations and pre-defined instructions, providing no access to underlying serialized data for reformulation. We introduce TABLET, a large-scale VTU dataset with 4 million examples across 20 tasks, grounded in 2 million unique tables where 88% preserve original visualizations. Each example includes paired image-HTML representations, comprehensive metadata, and provenance information linking back to the source datasets. Fine-tuning vision-language models like Qwen2.5-VL-7B on TABLET improves performance on seen and unseen VTU tasks while increasing robustness on real-world table visualizations. By preserving original visualizations and maintaining example traceability in a unified large-scale collection, TABLET establishes a foundation for robust training and extensible evaluation of future VTU models.

Alberto Sabater, Iñigo Alonso, Luis Montesano et al.

Hand action recognition is a special case of action recognition with applications in human-robot interaction, virtual reality or life-logging systems. Building action classifiers able to work for such heterogeneous action domains is very challenging. There are very subtle changes across different actions from a given application but also large variations across domains (e.g. virtual reality vs life-logging). This work introduces a novel skeleton-based hand motion representation model that tackles this problem. The framework we propose is agnostic to the application domain or camera recording view-point. When working on a single domain (intra-domain action classification) our approach performs better or similar to current state-of-the-art methods on well-known hand action recognition benchmarks. And, more importantly, when performing hand action recognition for action domains and camera perspectives which our approach has not been trained for (cross-domain action classification), our proposed framework achieves comparable performance to intra-domain state-of-the-art methods. These experiments show the robustness and generalization capabilities of our framework.

Iñigo Alonso, Luis Riazuelo, Luis Montesano et al.

LIDAR semantic segmentation, which assigns a semantic label to each 3D point measured by the LIDAR, is becoming an essential task for many robotic applications such as autonomous driving. Fast and efficient semantic segmentation methods are needed to match the strong computational and temporal restrictions of many of these real-world applications. This work presents 3D-MiniNet, a novel approach for LIDAR semantic segmentation that combines 3D and 2D learning layers. It first learns a 2D representation from the raw points through a novel projection which extracts local and global information from the 3D data. This representation is fed to an efficient 2D Fully Convolutional Neural Network (FCNN) that produces a 2D semantic segmentation. These 2D semantic labels are re-projected back to the 3D space and enhanced through a post-processing module. The main novelty in our strategy relies on the projection learning module. Our detailed ablation study shows how each component contributes to the final performance of 3D-MiniNet. We validate our approach on well known public benchmarks (SemanticKITTI and KITTI), where 3D-MiniNet gets state-of-the-art results while being faster and more parameter-efficient than previous methods.

Iñigo Alonso, Ana C. Murillo

Event cameras, or Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS), are very promising sensors which have shown several advantages over frame based cameras. However, most recent work on real applications of these cameras is focused on 3D reconstruction and 6-DOF camera tracking. Deep learning based approaches, which are leading the state-of-the-art in visual recognition tasks, could potentially take advantage of the benefits of DVS, but some adaptations are needed still needed in order to effectively work on these cameras. This work introduces a first baseline for semantic segmentation with this kind of data. We build a semantic segmentation CNN based on state-of-the-art techniques which takes event information as the only input. Besides, we propose a novel representation for DVS data that outperforms previously used event representations for related tasks. Since there is no existing labeled dataset for this task, we propose how to automatically generate approximated semantic segmentation labels for some sequences of the DDD17 dataset, which we publish together with the model, and demonstrate they are valid to train a model for DVS data only. We compare our results on semantic segmentation from DVS data with results using corresponding grayscale images, demonstrating how they are complementary and worth combining.