arXiv subjects

Luigi Cinque

Publications and source records attributed to Luigi Cinque.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Subject-Level Unknown-Identity Identification from Leap Motion Controller 2 Hand Landmarks

This work studies subject recognition from Leap Motion Controller 2 (LMC2) hand landmark data under a subject-level unknown-identity identification protocol on the Multi View Leap2 Hand Pose (ML2HP) dataset. Using only the landmark modality, we retain the original geometric representation and enrich it with fingertip-to-palm distances and palm-normalized inter-finger angular descriptors. Evaluation is performed under a Leave-One-Subject-Out (LOSO) protocol in which, for each outer fold, one subject is excluded from the enrolled set and treated as unknown at test time. To avoid tuning on the true outer unknown subject, the unknown-rejection threshold is selected in an inner validation step by temporarily withholding one enrolled subject from the inner gallery and using it only for threshold estimation. We compare a tree ensemble baseline with two neural alternatives: a learned embedding baseline based on centroid matching and cosine-similarity-based rejection, and an MLP+OpenMax model, which represents a more established open-set recognition approach. Under this evaluation setup, Extra Trees remains the strongest overall method, indicating that the main challenge on this benchmark is not enrolled-subject discrimination alone, but robust score separation between known and unknown probes. The results support the feasibility of compact, interpretable landmark-based descriptors for contactless hand-based unknown-subject rejection and identification on a small-cohort dataset.

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arXiv2025

A Unified Framework for Diffusion Model Unlearning with f-Divergence

Most existing methods for concept unlearning in text-to-image diffusion models minimize a mean squared error (MSE) loss between the denoiser outputs conditioned on a target and an anchor concept, which is implicitly the KL divergence between two Gaussians. We generalize this objective to any $f$-divergence, recovering MSE as the KL instance, and identify a family of $\alpha$-divergences whose Gaussian closed-form yields cheap, MSE-like training objectives. For the remaining $f$-divergences, we provide a min-max objective based on the variational formulation of the $f$-divergence. We theoretically analyze and numerically validate how different $f$-divergences impact the gradient magnitude and the convergence properties of the algorithm, affecting the quality of unlearning. For instance, we observe that the Hellinger closed-form instance consistently dominates MSE across multiple scenarios. More generally, the proposed unified framework offers a flexible paradigm for selecting the optimal divergence based on the application and user goal, allowing for finer control over the trade-off between unlearning efficacy and generative fidelity.

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arXiv2025

Revisiting Deepfake Detection: Chronological Continual Learning and the Limits of Generalization

The rapid evolution of deepfake generation technologies poses critical challenges for detection systems, as non-continual learning methods demand frequent and expensive retraining. We reframe deepfake detection (DFD) as a Continual Learning (CL) problem, proposing an efficient framework that incrementally adapts to emerging visual manipulation techniques while retaining knowledge of past generators. Our framework, unlike prior approaches that rely on unreal simulation sequences, simulates the real-world chronological evolution of deepfake technologies in extended periods across 7 years. Simultaneously, our framework builds upon lightweight visual backbones to allow for the real-time performance of DFD systems. Additionally, we contribute two novel metrics: Continual AUC (C-AUC) for historical performance and Forward Transfer AUC (FWT-AUC) for future generalization. Through extensive experimentation (over 600 simulations), we empirically demonstrate that while efficient adaptation (+155 times faster than full retraining) and robust retention of historical knowledge is possible, the generalization of current approaches to future generators without additional training remains near-random (FWT-AUC $\approx$ 0.5) due to the unique imprint characterizing each existing generator. Such observations are the foundation of our newly proposed Non-Universal Deepfake Distribution Hypothesis. \textbf{Code will be released upon acceptance.}

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arXiv2024

Semantically Guided Action Anticipation

Unsupervised domain adaptation remains a critical challenge in enabling the knowledge transfer of models across unseen domains. Existing methods struggle to balance the need for domain-invariant representations with preserving domain-specific features, which is often due to alignment approaches that impose the projection of samples with similar semantics close in the latent space despite their drastic domain differences. We introduce a novel approach that shifts the focus from aligning representations in absolute coordinates to aligning the relative positioning of equivalent concepts in latent spaces. Our method defines a domain-agnostic structure upon the semantic/geometric relationships between class labels in language space and guides adaptation, ensuring that the organization of samples in visual space reflects reference inter-class relationships while preserving domain-specific characteristics. We empirically demonstrate our method's superiority in domain adaptation tasks across four diverse image and video datasets. Remarkably, we surpass previous works in 18 different adaptation scenarios across four diverse image and video datasets with average accuracy improvements of +3.32% on DomainNet, +5.75% in GeoPlaces, +4.77% on GeoImnet, and +1.94% mean class accuracy improvement on EgoExo4D.

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arXiv2024

CycleBNN: Cyclic Precision Training in Binary Neural Networks

This paper works on Binary Neural Networks (BNNs), a promising avenue for efficient deep learning, offering significant reductions in computational overhead and memory footprint to full precision networks. However, the challenge of energy-intensive training and the drop in performance have been persistent issues. Tackling the challenge, prior works focus primarily on task-related inference optimization. Unlike prior works, this study offers an innovative methodology integrating BNNs with cyclic precision training, introducing the CycleBNN. This approach is designed to enhance training efficiency while minimizing the loss in performance. By dynamically adjusting precision in cycles, we achieve a convenient trade-off between training efficiency and model performance. This emphasizes the potential of our method in energy-constrained training scenarios, where data is collected onboard and paves the way for sustainable and efficient deep learning architectures. To gather insights on CycleBNN's efficiency, we conduct experiments on ImageNet, CIFAR-10, and PASCAL-VOC, obtaining competitive performances while using 96.09\% less operations during training on ImageNet, 88.88\% on CIFAR-10 and 96.09\% on PASCAL-VOC. Finally, CycleBNN offers a path towards faster, more accessible training of efficient networks, accelerating the development of practical applications. The PyTorch code is available at \url{https://github.com/fedeloper/CycleBNN/}

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arXiv2024

NT-ViT: Neural Transcoding Vision Transformers for EEG-to-fMRI Synthesis

This paper introduces the Neural Transcoding Vision Transformer (\modelname), a generative model designed to estimate high-resolution functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) samples from simultaneous Electroencephalography (EEG) data. A key feature of \modelname is its Domain Matching (DM) sub-module which effectively aligns the latent EEG representations with those of fMRI volumes, enhancing the model's accuracy and reliability. Unlike previous methods that tend to struggle with fidelity and reproducibility of images, \modelname addresses these challenges by ensuring methodological integrity and higher-quality reconstructions which we showcase through extensive evaluation on two benchmark datasets; \modelname outperforms the current state-of-the-art by a significant margin in both cases, e.g. achieving a $10\times$ reduction in RMSE and a $3.14\times$ increase in SSIM on the Oddball dataset. An ablation study also provides insights into the contribution of each component to the model's overall effectiveness. This development is critical in offering a new approach to lessen the time and financial constraints typically linked with high-resolution brain imaging, thereby aiding in the swift and precise diagnosis of neurological disorders. Although it is not a replacement for actual fMRI but rather a step towards making such imaging more accessible, we believe that it represents a pivotal advancement in clinical practice and neuroscience research. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/rom42pla/ntvit}.

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arXiv2024

ReViT: Enhancing Vision Transformers Feature Diversity with Attention Residual Connections

Vision Transformer (ViT) self-attention mechanism is characterized by feature collapse in deeper layers, resulting in the vanishing of low-level visual features. However, such features can be helpful to accurately represent and identify elements within an image and increase the accuracy and robustness of vision-based recognition systems. Following this rationale, we propose a novel residual attention learning method for improving ViT-based architectures, increasing their visual feature diversity and model robustness. In this way, the proposed network can capture and preserve significant low-level features, providing more details about the elements within the scene being analyzed. The effectiveness and robustness of the presented method are evaluated on five image classification benchmarks, including ImageNet1k, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, Oxford Flowers-102, and Oxford-IIIT Pet, achieving improved performances. Additionally, experiments on the COCO2017 dataset show that the devised approach discovers and incorporates semantic and spatial relationships for object detection and instance segmentation when implemented into spatial-aware transformer models.

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arXiv2024

Semantically Guided Representation Learning For Action Anticipation

Action anticipation is the task of forecasting future activity from a partially observed sequence of events. However, this task is exposed to intrinsic future uncertainty and the difficulty of reasoning upon interconnected actions. Unlike previous works that focus on extrapolating better visual and temporal information, we concentrate on learning action representations that are aware of their semantic interconnectivity based on prototypical action patterns and contextual co-occurrences. To this end, we propose the novel Semantically Guided Representation Learning (S-GEAR) framework. S-GEAR learns visual action prototypes and leverages language models to structure their relationship, inducing semanticity. To gather insights on S-GEAR's effectiveness, we test it on four action anticipation benchmarks, obtaining improved results compared to previous works: +3.5, +2.7, and +3.5 absolute points on Top-1 Accuracy on Epic-Kitchen 55, EGTEA Gaze+ and 50 Salads, respectively, and +0.8 on Top-5 Recall on Epic-Kitchens 100. We further observe that S-GEAR effectively transfers the geometric associations between actions from language to visual prototypes. Finally, S-GEAR opens new research frontiers in anticipation tasks by demonstrating the intricate impact of action semantic interconnectivity.

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arXiv2022

SIRe-Networks: Convolutional Neural Networks Architectural Extension for Information Preservation via Skip/Residual Connections and Interlaced Auto-Encoders

Improving existing neural network architectures can involve several design choices such as manipulating the loss functions, employing a diverse learning strategy, exploiting gradient evolution at training time, optimizing the network hyper-parameters, or increasing the architecture depth. The latter approach is a straightforward solution, since it directly enhances the representation capabilities of a network; however, the increased depth generally incurs in the well-known vanishing gradient problem. In this paper, borrowing from different methods addressing this issue, we introduce an interlaced multi-task learning strategy, defined SIRe, to reduce the vanishing gradient in relation to the object classification task. The presented methodology directly improves a convolutional neural network (CNN) by preserving information from the input image through interlaced auto-encoders (AEs), and further refines the base network architecture by means of skip and residual connections. To validate the presented methodology, a simple CNN and various implementations of famous networks are extended via the SIRe strategy and extensively tested on five collections, i.e., MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Caltech-256; where the SIRe-extended architectures achieve significantly increased performances across all models and datasets, thus confirming the presented approach effectiveness.

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arXiv2022

Ensemble CNN and Uncertainty Modeling to Improve Automatic Identification/Segmentation of Multiple Sclerosis Lesions in Magnetic Resonance Imaging

To date, several automated strategies for identification/segmentation of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) lesions with the use of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) have been presented, but they are outperformed by human experts, from whom they act very differently. This is mainly due to: the ambiguity originated by MRI instabilities; peculiar variability of MS; non specificity of MRI regarding MS. Physicians partially manage the uncertainty generated by ambiguity relying on radiological/clinical/anatomical background and experience. To emulate human diagnosis, we present an automated framework for identification/segmentation of MS lesions from MRI based on three pivotal concepts: 1. the modelling of uncertainty; 2. the proposal of two, separately trained, CNN, one optimized for lesions and the other for lesions with respect to the environment surrounding them, respectively repeated for axial, coronal and sagittal directions; 3. the definition of an ensemble classifier to merge the information collected by different CNN. The proposed framework is trained, validated and tested on the 2016 MSSEG benchmark public data set from a single imaging modality, the FLuid-Attenuated Inversion Recovery (FLAIR). The comparison with the ground-truth and with each of 7 human raters, proves that there is no significant difference between the automated and the human raters.

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arXiv2022

3D Hand Pose and Shape Estimation from RGB Images for Keypoint-Based Hand Gesture Recognition

Estimating the 3D pose of a hand from a 2D image is a well-studied problem and a requirement for several real-life applications such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and hand gesture recognition. Currently, reasonable estimations can be computed from single RGB images, especially when a multi-task learning approach is used to force the system to consider the shape of the hand when its pose is determined. However, depending on the method used to represent the hand, the performance can drop considerably in real-life tasks, suggesting that stable descriptions are required to achieve satisfactory results. In this paper, we present a keypoint-based end-to-end framework for 3D hand and pose estimation and successfully apply it to the task of hand gesture recognition as a study case. Specifically, after a pre-processing step in which the images are normalized, the proposed pipeline uses a multi-task semantic feature extractor generating 2D heatmaps and hand silhouettes from RGB images, a viewpoint encoder to predict the hand and camera view parameters, a stable hand estimator to produce the 3D hand pose and shape, and a loss function to guide all of the components jointly during the learning phase. Tests were performed on a 3D pose and shape estimation benchmark dataset to assess the proposed framework, which obtained state-of-the-art performance. Our system was also evaluated on two hand-gesture recognition benchmark datasets and significantly outperformed other keypoint-based approaches, indicating that it is an effective solution that is able to generate stable 3D estimates for hand pose and shape.

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arXiv2022

Study on Transfer Learning Capabilities for Pneumonia Classification in Chest-X-Rays Image

Over the last year, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) and its variants have highlighted the importance of screening tools with high diagnostic accuracy for new illnesses such as COVID-19. To that regard, deep learning approaches have proven as effective solutions for pneumonia classification, especially when considering chest-x-rays images. However, this lung infection can also be caused by other viral, bacterial or fungi pathogens. Consequently, efforts are being poured toward distinguishing the infection source to help clinicians to diagnose the correct disease origin. Following this tendency, this study further explores the effectiveness of established neural network architectures on the pneumonia classification task through the transfer learning paradigm. To present a comprehensive comparison, 12 well-known ImageNet pre-trained models were fine-tuned and used to discriminate among chest-x-rays of healthy people, and those showing pneumonia symptoms derived from either a viral (i.e., generic or SARS-CoV-2) or bacterial source. Furthermore, since a common public collection distinguishing between such categories is currently not available, two distinct datasets of chest-x-rays images, describing the aforementioned sources, were combined and employed to evaluate the various architectures. The experiments were performed using a total of 6330 images split between train, validation and test sets. For all models, common classification metrics were computed (e.g., precision, f1-score) and most architectures obtained significant performances, reaching, among the others, up to 84.46% average f1-score when discriminating the 4 identified classes. Moreover, confusion matrices and activation maps computed via the Grad-CAM algorithm were also reported to present an informed discussion on the networks classifications.

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arXiv2022

Medicinal Boxes Recognition on a Deep Transfer Learning Augmented Reality Mobile Application

Taking medicines is a fundamental aspect to cure illnesses. However, studies have shown that it can be hard for patients to remember the correct posology. More aggravating, a wrong dosage generally causes the disease to worsen. Although, all relevant instructions for a medicine are summarized in the corresponding patient information leaflet, the latter is generally difficult to navigate and understand. To address this problem and help patients with their medication, in this paper we introduce an augmented reality mobile application that can present to the user important details on the framed medicine. In particular, the app implements an inference engine based on a deep neural network, i.e., a densenet, fine-tuned to recognize a medicinal from its package. Subsequently, relevant information, such as posology or a simplified leaflet, is overlaid on the camera feed to help a patient when taking a medicine. Extensive experiments to select the best hyperparameters were performed on a dataset specifically collected to address this task; ultimately obtaining up to 91.30\% accuracy as well as real-time capabilities.

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arXiv2022

Analyzing EEG Data with Machine and Deep Learning: A Benchmark

Nowadays, machine and deep learning techniques are widely used in different areas, ranging from economics to biology. In general, these techniques can be used in two ways: trying to adapt well-known models and architectures to the available data, or designing custom architectures. In both cases, to speed up the research process, it is useful to know which type of models work best for a specific problem and/or data type. By focusing on EEG signal analysis, and for the first time in literature, in this paper a benchmark of machine and deep learning for EEG signal classification is proposed. For our experiments we used the four most widespread models, i.e., multilayer perceptron, convolutional neural network, long short-term memory, and gated recurrent unit, highlighting which one can be a good starting point for developing EEG classification models.

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arXiv2022

Human Silhouette and Skeleton Video Synthesis through Wi-Fi signals

The increasing availability of wireless access points (APs) is leading towards human sensing applications based on Wi-Fi signals as support or alternative tools to the widespread visual sensors, where the signals enable to address well-known vision-related problems such as illumination changes or occlusions. Indeed, using image synthesis techniques to translate radio frequencies to the visible spectrum can become essential to obtain otherwise unavailable visual data. This domain-to-domain translation is feasible because both objects and people affect electromagnetic waves, causing radio and optical frequencies variations. In literature, models capable of inferring radio-to-visual features mappings have gained momentum in the last few years since frequency changes can be observed in the radio domain through the channel state information (CSI) of Wi-Fi APs, enabling signal-based feature extraction, e.g., amplitude. On this account, this paper presents a novel two-branch generative neural network that effectively maps radio data into visual features, following a teacher-student design that exploits a cross-modality supervision strategy. The latter conditions signal-based features in the visual domain to completely replace visual data. Once trained, the proposed method synthesizes human silhouette and skeleton videos using exclusively Wi-Fi signals. The approach is evaluated on publicly available data, where it obtains remarkable results for both silhouette and skeleton videos generation, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed cross-modality supervision strategy.

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arXiv2021

Multimodal Feature Fusion and Knowledge-Driven Learning via Experts Consult for Thyroid Nodule Classification

Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) is becoming a prominent approach to assist clinicians spanning across multiple fields. These automated systems take advantage of various computer vision (CV) procedures, as well as artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, to formulate a diagnosis of a given image, e.g., computed tomography and ultrasound. Advances in both areas (CV and AI) are enabling ever increasing performances of CAD systems, which can ultimately avoid performing invasive procedures such as fine-needle aspiration. In this study, a novel end-to-end knowledge-driven classification framework is presented. The system focuses on multimodal data generated by thyroid ultrasonography, and acts as a CAD system by providing a thyroid nodule classification into the benign and malignant categories. Specifically, the proposed system leverages cues provided by an ensemble of experts to guide the learning phase of a densely connected convolutional network (DenseNet). The ensemble is composed by various networks pretrained on ImageNet, including AlexNet, ResNet, VGG, and others. The previously computed multimodal feature parameters are used to create ultrasonography domain experts via transfer learning, decreasing, moreover, the number of samples required for training. To validate the proposed method, extensive experiments were performed, providing detailed performances for both the experts ensemble and the knowledge-driven DenseNet. As demonstrated by the results, the proposed system achieves relevant performances in terms of qualitative metrics for the thyroid nodule classification task, thus resulting in a great asset when formulating a diagnosis.

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arXiv2020

Convolutional Neural Networks for Automatic Detection of Artifacts from Independent Components Represented in Scalp Topographies of EEG Signals

Electroencephalography (EEG) measures the electrical brain activity in real-time by using sensors placed on the scalp. Artifacts, due to eye movements and blink, muscular/cardiac activity and generic electrical disturbances, have to be recognized and eliminated to allow a correct interpretation of the useful brain signals (UBS) of EEG. Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is effective to split the signal into independent components (ICs) whose re-projections on 2D scalp topographies (images), also called topoplots, allow to recognize/separate artifacts and by UBS. Until now, IC topoplot analysis, a gold standard in EEG, has been carried on visually by human experts and, hence, not usable in automatic, fast-response EEG. We present a completely automatic and effective framework for EEG artifact recognition by IC topoplots, based on 2D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), capable to divide topoplots in 4 classes: 3 types of artifacts and UBS. The framework setup is described and results are presented, discussed and compared with those obtained by other competitive strategies. Experiments, carried on public EEG datasets, have shown an overall accuracy of above 98%, employing 1.4 sec on a standard PC to classify 32 topoplots, that is to drive an EEG system of 32 sensors. Though not real-time, the proposed framework is efficient enough to be used in fast-response EEG-based Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) and faster than other automatic methods based on ICs.

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arXiv2020

A Light CNN for detecting COVID-19 from CT scans of the chest

OVID-19 is a world-wide disease that has been declared as a pandemic by the World Health Organization. Computer Tomography (CT) imaging of the chest seems to be a valid diagnosis tool to detect COVID-19 promptly and to control the spread of the disease. Deep Learning has been extensively used in medical imaging and convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been also used for classification of CT images. We propose a light CNN design based on the model of the SqueezeNet, for the efficient discrimination of COVID-19 CT images with other CT images (community-acquired pneumonia and/or healthy images). On the tested datasets, the proposed modified SqueezeNet CNN achieved 83.00\% of accuracy, 85.00\% of sensitivity, 81.00\% of specificity, 81.73\% of precision and 0.8333 of F1Score in a very efficient way (7.81 seconds medium-end laptot without GPU acceleration). Besides performance, the average classification time is very competitive with respect to more complex CNN designs, thus allowing its usability also on medium power computers. In the next future we aim at improving the performances of the method along two directions: 1) by increasing the training dataset (as soon as other CT images will be available); 2) by introducing an efficient pre-processing strategy.

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