arXiv subjects

Fausto Giunchiglia

Publications and source records attributed to Fausto Giunchiglia.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Plurification in/of language technology -- The integration of culture in next-generation AI

The paper explores how "culture" can be operationalised in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and what this reveals about the possibilities and limits of considering a plurality of cultural backgrounds in technological design. It proposes that cultural alignment cannot be achieved only by adding more examples of "other cultures", rather it requires plural epistemologies: allowing multiple, locally grounded ways of knowing. To analyze how this plurality of knowing can be addressed in NLP, the paper uses a socio-technical model of language technology (LT) design, the five layers of technological activity model, for collecting and systematizing approaches to culture in NLP. The analysis shows that while NLP research has made progress toward more culturally sensitive systems, many approaches remain partial, addressing "culture" primarily at the level of output or representation while leaving deeper questions of power, governance, and social context unresolved. The paper concludes that operationalising culture requires much more than technical adaptation; it suggests a reflexive and plural socio-technical approach that navigates potentials and limits of computational formalisation for accounting multiple linguistic and socio-cultural backgrounds.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

GSAM: A Generalizable and Safe Robotic Framework for Articulated Object Manipulation

Articulated object manipulation is a unique challenge for service robots. Existing methods employ end-to-end policy learning, visionmotion planning, and large-language/visual-language model (LLM/VLM), but often overlook the diversity of articulated objects and the complexity of interactions between end-effector and handle, leading to limited generalization and destructive collisions. To address this, we propose GSAM, a generalizable and safe robotic framework for articulated object manipulation. Specifically, a vision-based perceiver generates the kinematic parameters. Considering that pre-trained markers in perceiver yield raw estimations that may deviate from commonsense, we present a f ine-tuned VLM-based refiner, using chain-of-thought (COT) commonsense reasoning to refine perception. To prevent destructive collisions, we design an interaction constraint function generator, integrating articulated object, interaction pose, and obstacle avoidance knowledge into a base. LLM then functionalize these constraints and apply them to trajectory and posture planning. A kinematic-aware manipulation planner verifies reachability for trajectory and posture. Experiments on 50 hinge tasks across 5 object categories and 50 randomly initialized end-effectorhandle configurations show that GSAM reduces standard deviation by 3.1% and improves manipulation success rate by 36.0% compared to the best baseline, respectively demonstrating the superior object generalization and interaction safety of GSAM in practical scenarios.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

TRACE: Discovering Task-Specific Parameter via Adaptation-Aware Probing for Continual Fine-Tuning

In real-world deployment, LLMs are often adapted continually across tasks to keep LLMs up-to-date in production, where new fine-tuning should preserve previously learned skills. However, indiscriminately mixing tasks can dilute task specialization, while sequential fine-tuning (full-parameter or low rank adaptation) often causes catastrophic forgetting due to destructive overwriting. Replay-based continual tuning and maintaining separate task-specific adapters can mitigate forgetting, but introduce additional compute, storage, and management overhead. Recognizing the redundancy of LLM parameters for any single task, we reframe continual task adaptation as task-specific parameter discovery via adaptation-aware probing: a short warm-start probe exposes a task's adaptation trace, enabling us to identify and isolate the small subset of parameters essential for each task to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Building on this view, we introduce TRACE, a novel approach for discovering Task-specific paRameters via Adaptation-aware probing for Continual finE-tuning. We perform a short warm-start fine-tune to derive task-specific core parameters by comparing the warm-started and pre-trained models. Core parameters are identified via two strategies: importance scoring (L$_2$ norm and Fisher Information) and specificity analysis (cosine similarity of parameter updates). In continual fine-tuning settings, only the active task's core parameters are updated while others remain frozen, preserving prior knowledge. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple standard benchmarks to demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method. Additionally, we validate the generalization of our method through a cross-model and scale transferability study, demonstrating a "small-to-large" paradigm that guides the fine-tuning of large-scale models under resource constraints.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Advancing Graph Few-Shot Learning via In-Context Learning

Graph few-shot learning, which aims to classify nodes from novel classes with only a few labeled examples, is a widely studied problem in graph learning. However, existing methods often face two key limitations. First, the predominant graph few-shot learning paradigm relies on supervised tasks, failing to leverage the vast number of unlabeled nodes in the graph. Second, many approaches require complex task adaptation or fine-tuning during inference, limiting their efficiency and applicability. Inspired by the powerful in-context learning capabilities of large language models, we propose a novel model named VISION for adVancIng graph few-Shot learning via In-cOntext LearNing to address these challenges. Our model reframes graph few-shot learning as a fine-tuning-free sequence reasoning problem. At its core is a context-aware network that initializes nodes with role embeddings and employs a dual-context fusion module to synergistically integrate local topological structures and global task-level dependencies. This allows our model to dynamically generate class-aware representations for the query set conditioned on the support set context in a single forward pass. To effectively train our model, we introduce an unsupervised task generator that creates structure-adaptive features and constructs diverse pseudo-tasks from abundant unlabeled data. Our method unifies unsupervised meta-learning with graph in-context learning, achieving efficient inference. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model. Our public code can be found

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

KoRe: Compact Knowledge Representations for Large Language Models

Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performances in user-facing tasks such as question answering, as well as consistent improvements in reasoning capabilities. Still, the way these models encode knowledge seems inherently flawed: by design, LLMs encode world-knowledge within their parameters. This way of representing knowledge is inherently opaque, difficult to debug and update, and prone to hallucinations. On the other hand, Knowledge Graphs can provide human-readable and easily editable world knowledge representations, and their application in knowledge-intensive tasks has consistently proven beneficial to downstream performance. Nonetheless, current integration techniques require extensive retraining or finetuning. To overcome this issue, we introduce KoRe, a methodology to encode 1-hop sub-graphs into compact discrete knowledge tokens and inject them into a LLM backbone. We test the proposed approach on three established benchmarks, and report competitive performances coupled with a significant reduction (up to 10x) in token usage. Our results show that compact discrete KG representations can efficiently and effectively be used to ground modern LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Improving Graph Few-shot Learning with Hyperbolic Space and Denoising Diffusion

Graph few-shot learning, which focuses on effectively learning from only a small number of labeled nodes to quickly adapt to new tasks, has garnered significant research attention. Despite recent advances in graph few-shot learning that have demonstrated promising performance, existing methods still suffer from several key limitations. First, during the meta-training phase, these methods typically perform node representation learning in Euclidean space, which often fails to capture the inherently hierarchical structure existing in real-world graph data. Second, during the meta-testing phase, they usually fit an empirical target distribution derived from only a few support samples, even when this distribution significantly deviates from the true underlying distribution. To address these issues, we propose IMPRESS, a novel framework that IMproves graPh few-shot learning with hypeRbolic spacE and denoiSing diffuSion. Specifically, our model learns node representations in a hyperbolic space and enriches the support distribution through denoising diffusion mechanisms. Theoretically, IMPRESS achieves a tighter generalization bound. Empirically, IMPRESS consistently outperforms competitive baselines across multiple benchmark datasets.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Crowdsourcing of Real-world Image Annotation via Visual Properties

Recent advances in data-centric artificial intelligence highlight inherent limitations in object recognition datasets. One of the primary issues stems from the semantic gap problem, which results in complex many-to-many mappings between visual data and linguistic descriptions. This bias adversely affects performance in computer vision tasks. This paper proposes an image annotation methodology that integrates knowledge representation, natural language processing, and computer vision techniques, aiming to reduce annotator subjectivity by applying visual property constraints. We introduce an interactive crowdsourcing framework that dynamically asks questions based on a predefined object category hierarchy and annotator feedback, guiding image annotation by visual properties. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this methodology, and annotator feedback is discussed to optimize the crowdsourcing setup.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Toward Robust In-Context Learning: Leveraging Out-of-distribution Proxies for Target Inaccessible Demonstration Retrieval

Although studies have demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) can perform well on Out-of-Distribution (OOD) tasks, their advantage tends to diminish as the distribution shift becomes more severe. Consequently, researchers aim to retrieve distributionally similar and informative demonstrations from the available source domain to boost the inference capabilities of LLMs. However, in practical scenarios where the target domain is inaccessible, evaluating the unknown distribution is challenging, which indirectly impacts the quality of the selected demonstrations. To address this problem, we propose \textbf{DOPA}, a demonstration search framework that incorporates an OOD proxy to approximate the inaccessible target domain and guide the retrieval process. Building on proxy-based evaluation, DOPA further introduces a Mahalanobis distance-based global diversity constraint to ensure sufficient diversity among the retrieved demonstrations. Experimental results on multiple LLMs and tasks demonstrate that DOPA effectively enhances robustness in OOD settings\footnote{https://github.com/bort64/ood\_code}.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

What can Computer Vision learn from Ranganathan?

The Semantic Gap Problem (SGP) in Computer Vision (CV) arises from the misalignment between visual and lexical semantics leading to flawed CV dataset design and CV benchmarks. This paper proposes that classification principles of S.R. Ranganathan can offer a principled starting point to address SGP and design high-quality CV datasets. We elucidate how these principles, suitably adapted, underpin the vTelos CV annotation methodology. The paper also briefly presents experimental evidence showing improvements in CV annotation and accuracy, thereby, validating vTelos.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Hypergraph Contrastive Learning for both Homophilic and Heterophilic Hypergraphs

Hypergraphs, as a generalization of traditional graphs, naturally capture high-order relationships. In recent years, hypergraph neural networks (HNNs) have been widely used to capture complex high-order relationships. However, most existing hypergraph neural network methods inherently rely on the homophily assumption, which often does not hold in real-world scenarios that exhibit significant heterophilic structures. To address this limitation, we propose \textbf{HONOR}, a novel unsupervised \textbf{H}ypergraph c\textbf{ON}trastive learning framework suitable for both hom\textbf{O}philic and hete\textbf{R}ophilic hypergraphs. Specifically, HONOR explicitly models the heterophilic relationships between hyperedges and nodes through two complementary mechanisms: a prompt-based hyperedge feature construction strategy that maintains global semantic consistency while suppressing local noise, and an adaptive attention aggregation module that dynamically captures the diverse local contributions of nodes to hyperedges. Combined with high-pass filtering, these designs enable HONOR to fully exploit heterophilic connection patterns, yielding more discriminative and robust node and hyperedge representations. Theoretically, we demonstrate the superior generalization ability and robustness of HONOR. Empirically, extensive experiments further validate that HONOR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under both homophilic and heterophilic datasets.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Help the machine to help you: an evaluation in the wild of egocentric data cleaning via skeptical learning

Any digital personal assistant, whether used to support task performance, answer questions, or manage work and daily life, including fitness schedules, requires high-quality annotations to function properly. However, user annotations, whether actively produced or inferred from context (e.g., data from smartphone sensors), are often subject to errors and noise. Previous research on Skeptical Learning (SKEL) addressed the issue of noisy labels by comparing offline active annotations with passive data, allowing for an evaluation of annotation accuracy. However, this evaluation did not include confirmation from end-users, the best judges of their own context. In this study, we evaluate SKEL's performance in real-world conditions with actual users who can refine the input labels based on their current perspectives and needs. The study involves university students using the iLog mobile application on their devices over a period of four weeks. The results highlight the challenges of finding the right balance between user effort and data quality, as well as the potential benefits of using SKEL, which include reduced annotation effort and improved quality of collected data.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Graph Few-Shot Learning via Adaptive Spectrum Experts and Cross-Set Distribution Calibration

Graph few-shot learning has attracted increasing attention due to its ability to rapidly adapt models to new tasks with only limited labeled nodes. Despite the remarkable progress made by existing graph few-shot learning methods, several key limitations remain. First, most current approaches rely on predefined and unified graph filters (e.g., low-pass or high-pass filters) to globally enhance or suppress node frequency signals. Such fixed spectral operations fail to account for the heterogeneity of local topological structures inherent in real-world graphs. Moreover, these methods often assume that the support and query sets are drawn from the same distribution. However, under few-shot conditions, the limited labeled data in the support set may not sufficiently capture the complex distribution of the query set, leading to suboptimal generalization. To address these challenges, we propose GRACE, a novel Graph few-shot leaRning framework that integrates Adaptive spectrum experts with Cross-sEt distribution calibration techniques. Theoretically, the proposed approach enhances model generalization by adapting to both local structural variations and cross-set distribution calibration. Empirically, GRACE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across a wide range of experimental settings. Our code can be found here.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Understanding Gen Alpha Digital Language: Evaluation of LLM Safety Systems for Content Moderation

This research offers a unique evaluation of how AI systems interpret the digital language of Generation Alpha (Gen Alpha, born 2010-2024). As the first cohort raised alongside AI, Gen Alpha faces new forms of online risk due to immersive digital engagement and a growing mismatch between their evolving communication and existing safety tools. Their distinct language, shaped by gaming, memes, and AI-driven trends, often conceals harmful interactions from both human moderators and automated systems. We assess four leading AI models (GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and Llama 3) on their ability to detect masked harassment and manipulation within Gen Alpha discourse. Using a dataset of 100 recent expressions from gaming platforms, social media, and video content, the study reveals critical comprehension failures with direct implications for online safety. This work contributes: (1) a first-of-its-kind dataset capturing Gen Alpha expressions; (2) a framework to improve AI moderation systems for youth protection; (3) a multi-perspective evaluation including AI systems, human moderators, and parents, with direct input from Gen Alpha co-researchers; and (4) an analysis of how linguistic divergence increases youth vulnerability. Findings highlight the urgent need to redesign safety systems attuned to youth communication, especially given Gen Alpha reluctance to seek help when adults fail to understand their digital world. This study combines the insight of a Gen Alpha researcher with systematic academic analysis to address critical digital safety challenges.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Dual-level Mixup for Graph Few-shot Learning with Fewer Tasks

Graph neural networks have been demonstrated as a powerful paradigm for effectively learning graph-structured data on the web and mining content from it.Current leading graph models require a large number of labeled samples for training, which unavoidably leads to overfitting in few-shot scenarios. Recent research has sought to alleviate this issue by simultaneously leveraging graph learning and meta-learning paradigms. However, these graph meta-learning models assume the availability of numerous meta-training tasks to learn transferable meta-knowledge. Such assumption may not be feasible in the real world due to the difficulty of constructing tasks and the substantial costs involved. Therefore, we propose a SiMple yet effectIve approach for graph few-shot Learning with fEwer tasks, named SMILE. We introduce a dual-level mixup strategy, encompassing both within-task and across-task mixup, to simultaneously enrich the available nodes and tasks in meta-learning. Moreover, we explicitly leverage the prior information provided by the node degrees in the graph to encode expressive node representations. Theoretically, we demonstrate that SMILE can enhance the model generalization ability. Empirically, SMILE consistently outperforms other competitive models by a large margin across all evaluated datasets with in-domain and cross-domain settings. Our anonymous code can be found here.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Towards Open Diversity-Aware Social Interactions

Social Media and the Internet have catalyzed an unprecedented potential for exposure to human diversity in terms of demographics, talents, opinions, knowledge, and the like. However, this potential has not come with new, much-needed, instruments and skills to harness it. This paper presents our work on promoting richer and deeper social relations through the design and development of the "Internet of Us", an online platform that uses diversity-aware Artificial Intelligence to mediate and empower human social interactions. We discuss the multiple facets of diversity in social settings, the multidisciplinary work that is required to reap the benefits of diversity, and the vision for a diversity-aware hybrid human-AI society.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

DiversityOne: A Multi-Country Smartphone Sensor Dataset for Everyday Life Behavior Modeling

Understanding everyday life behavior of young adults through personal devices, e.g., smartphones and smartwatches, is key for various applications, from enhancing the user experience in mobile apps to enabling appropriate interventions in digital health apps. Towards this goal, previous studies have relied on datasets combining passive sensor data with human-provided annotations or self-reports. However, many existing datasets are limited in scope, often focusing on specific countries primarily in the Global North, involving a small number of participants, or using a limited range of pre-processed sensors. These limitations restrict the ability to capture cross-country variations of human behavior, including the possibility of studying model generalization, and robustness. To address this gap, we introduce DiversityOne, a dataset which spans eight countries (China, Denmark, India, Italy, Mexico, Mongolia, Paraguay, and the United Kingdom) and includes data from 782 college students over four weeks. DiversityOne contains data from 26 smartphone sensor modalities and 350K+ self-reports. As of today, it is one of the largest and most diverse publicly available datasets, while featuring extensive demographic and psychosocial survey data. DiversityOne opens the possibility of studying important research problems in ubiquitous computing, particularly in domain adaptation and generalization across countries, all research areas so far largely underexplored because of the lack of adequate datasets.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

A methodology and a platform for high-quality rich personal data

In the last years the pervasive use of sensors, as they exist in smart devices, e.g., phones, watches, medical devices, has increased dramatically the availability of personal data. However, existing research on data collection primarily focuses on the objective view of reality, as provided, for instance, by sensors, often neglecting the integration of subjective human input, as provided, for instance, by user answers to questionnaires. This limits substantially the exploitability of the collected data. In this paper we present a methodology and a platform specifically designed for the collection of a combination of large-scale sensor data and qualitative human feedback. The methodology has been designed to be deployed on top, and enriches the functionalities of, an existing data collection APP, called iLog, which has been used in large scale, worldwide data collection experiments. The main goal is to put the key actors involved in an experiment, i.e., the researcher in charge, the participant, and iLog in better control of the experiment itself, thus enabling a much improved quality and richness of the data collected. The novel functionalities of the resulting platform are: (i) a time-wise representation of the situational context within which the data collection is performed, (ii) an explicit representation of the temporal context within which the data collection is performed, (iii) a calendar-based dashboard for the real-time monitoring of the data collection context(s), and, finally, (iv) a mechanism for the run-time revision of the data collection plan. The practicality and utility of the proposed functionalities are demonstrated by showing how they apply to a case study involving 350 University students.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Boosting Short Text Classification with Multi-Source Information Exploration and Dual-Level Contrastive Learning

Short text classification, as a research subtopic in natural language processing, is more challenging due to its semantic sparsity and insufficient labeled samples in practical scenarios. We propose a novel model named MI-DELIGHT for short text classification in this work. Specifically, it first performs multi-source information (i.e., statistical information, linguistic information, and factual information) exploration to alleviate the sparsity issues. Then, the graph learning approach is adopted to learn the representation of short texts, which are presented in graph forms. Moreover, we introduce a dual-level (i.e., instance-level and cluster-level) contrastive learning auxiliary task to effectively capture different-grained contrastive information within massive unlabeled data. Meanwhile, previous models merely perform the main task and auxiliary tasks in parallel, without considering the relationship among tasks. Therefore, we introduce a hierarchical architecture to explicitly model the correlations between tasks. We conduct extensive experiments across various benchmark datasets, demonstrating that MI-DELIGHT significantly surpasses previous competitive models. It even outperforms popular large language models on several datasets.

cs.CL↗