Marco Gori

Università degli Studi di Siena | UNISI · Department of Information Engineering and Mathematical

Machine Learning (ML) strongly relies on optimization procedures that are based on gradient descent. Several gradient-based update schemes have been proposed in the scientific literature, especially in the context of neural networks, that have become common optimizers in software libraries for ML. In this paper, we re-frame gradient-based update st...

The deployment of Deep Learning (DL) models is still precluded in those contexts where the amount of supervised data is limited. To answer this issue, active learning strategies aim at minimizing the amount of labelled data required to train a DL model. Most active strategies are based on uncertain sample selection, and even often restricted to sam...

The opaqueness of deep neural networks hinders their employment in safety-critical applications. This issue is driving the research community to focus on eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques. XAI algorithms can be categorized into two types: those that explain the predictions of black-box models and those that create interpretable m...

The intrinsic difficulty in adapting deep learning models to non-stationary environments limits the applicability of neural networks to real-world tasks. This issue is critical in practical supervised learning settings, such as the ones in which a pre-trained model computes projections toward a latent space where different task predictors are seque...

The classic computational scheme of convolutional layers leverages filter banks that are shared over all the spatial coordinates of the input, independently on external information on what is specifically under observation and without any distinctions between what is closer to the observed area and what is peripheral. In this paper we propose to go...

Injecting prior knowledge into the learning process of a neural architecture is one of the main challenges currently faced by the artificial intelligence community, which also motivated the emergence of neural-symbolic models. One of the main advantages of these approaches is their capacity to learn competitive solutions with a significant reductio...

The large and still increasing popularity of deep learning clashes with a major limit of neural network architectures, that consists in their lack of capability in providing human-understandable motivations of their decisions. In situations in which the machine is expected to support the decision of human experts, providing a comprehensible explana...

The generation of aesthetically pleasing graph layouts is the main purpose of Graph Drawing techniques. Recent contributions delved into the usage of Gradient-descent (GD) based schemes to optimize differentiable loss functions, built to measure the graph layout adherence to given layout characteristics. However, some properties cannot be easily ex...

In this paper, we present PARTIME, a software library written in Python and based on PyTorch, designed specifically to speed up neural networks whenever data is continuously streamed over time, for both learning and inference. Existing libraries are designed to exploit data-level parallelism, assuming that samples are batched, a condition that is n...

Nondestructive testing (NDT) is widely applied to defect identification of turbine components during manufacturing and operation. Operational efficiency is key for gas turbine OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturers). Automating the inspection process as much as possible, while minimizing the uncertainties involved, is thus crucial. We propose a mode...

The remarkable progress in computer vision over the last few years is, by and large, attributed to deep learning, fueled by the availability of huge sets of labeled data, and paired with the explosive growth of the GPU paradigm. While subscribing to this view, this book criticizes the supposed scientific progress in the field and proposes the inves...

Amongst a variety of approaches aimed at making the learning procedure of neural networks more effective, the scientific community developed strategies to order the examples according to their estimated complexity, to distil knowledge from larger networks, or to exploit the principles behind adversarial machine learning. A different idea has been r...

Explainable artificial intelligence has rapidly emerged since lawmakers have started requiring interpretable models for safety-critical domains. Concept-based neural networks have arisen as explainable-by-design methods as they leverage human-understandable symbols (i.e. concepts) to predict class memberships. However, most of these approaches focu...

What are the mechanisms behind learning to see? This is what we address this chapter, where the underlying computational process does in fact characterize the agent’s life in his own visual environment. This is built up on the neural architecture described in the previous chapter that is properly chosen for the incorporation of the motion consisten...

As we assume that there is an underlying process of eye movements, we recognize the importance of continuously interacting with motion fields, even in the case of still images. The trajectory of the point on which the agent focuses its attention is a fundamental information in the theory of visual perception that we want to propose. We argue how th...

By and large, the remarkable progress in visual object recognition in the last few years has been fueled by the availability of huge amounts of labelled data paired with powerful, bespoke computational resources. This has opened the doors to the massive use of deep learning, which has led to remarkable improvements on new challenging benchmarks. Wh...

Adversarial attacks on machine learning-based classifiers, along with defense mechanisms, have been widely studied in the context of single-label classification problems. In this paper, we shift the attention to multi-label classification, where the availability of domain knowledge on the relationships among the considered classes may offer a natur...

Neural-symbolic models bridge the gap between sub-symbolic and symbolic approaches, both of which have significant limitations. Sub-symbolic approaches, like neural networks, require a large amount of labeled data to be successful, whereas symbolic approaches, like logic reasoners, require a small amount of prior domain knowledge but do not easily...

Symmetries, invariances and conservation equations have always been an invaluable guide in Science to model natural phenomena through simple yet effective relations. For instance, in computer vision, translation equivariance is typically a built-in property of neural architectures that are used to solve visual tasks; networks with computational lay...

In the last few years, Deep Learning models have become increasingly popular. However, their deployment is still precluded in those contexts where the amount of supervised data is limited and manual labelling expensive. Active learning strategies aim at solving this problem by requiring supervision only on few unlabelled samples, which improve the...

This paper sustains the position that the time has come for thinking of learning machines that conquer visual skills in a truly human-like context, where a few human-like object supervisions are given by vocal interactions and pointing aids only. This likely requires new foundations on computational processes of vision with the final purpose of inv...

Sketching is a universal communication tool that, despite its simplicity, is able to efficiently express a large variety of concepts and, in some limited contexts, it can be even more immediate and effective that natural language. In this paper we explore the feasibility of using neural networks to approach sketching in the same way they are common...

Graph Drawing techniques have been developed in the last few years with the purpose of producing aesthetically pleasing node-link layouts. Recently, the employment of differentiable loss functions has paved the road to the massive usage of Gradient Descent and related optimization algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for the deve...

In the last few years, the scientific community showed a remarkable and increasing interest towards 3D Virtual Environments, training and testing Machine Learning-based models in realistic virtual worlds. On one hand, these environments could also become a mean to study the weaknesses of Machine Learning algorithms, or to simulate training settings...

The large and still increasing popularity of deep learning clashes with a major limit of neural network architectures, that consists in their lack of capability in providing human-understandable motivations of their decisions. In situations in which the machine is expected to support the decision of human experts, providing a comprehensible explana...

In the last decade, motivated by the success of Deep Learning, the scientific community proposed several approaches to make the learning procedure of Neural Networks more effective. When focussing on the way in which the training data are provided to the learning machine, we can distinguish between the classic random selection of stochastic gradien...

Explainable artificial intelligence has rapidly emerged since lawmakers have started requiring interpretable models for safety-critical domains. Concept-based neural networks have arisen as explainable-by-design methods as they leverage human-understandable symbols (i.e. concepts) to predict class memberships. However, most of these approaches focu...

Deep Learning architectures can develop feature representations and classification models in an integrated way during training. This joint learning process requires large networks with many parameters, and it is successful when a large amount of training data is available. Instead of making the learner develop its entire understanding of the world...

Nondestructive testing (NDT) is widely applied to defect identification of turbine components during manufacturing and operation. Operational efficiency is key for gas turbine OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturers). Automating the inspection process as much as possible, while minimizing the uncertainties involved, is thus crucial. We propose a mode...

By and large the process of learning concepts that are embedded in time is regarded as quite a mature research topic. Hidden Markov models, recurrent neural networks are, amongst others, successful approaches to learning from temporal data. In this paper, we claim that the dominant approach minimizing appropriate risk functions defined over time by...

Unsupervised learning from continuous visual streams is a challenging problem that cannot be naturally and efficiently managed in the classic batch-mode setting of computation. The information stream must be carefully processed accordingly to an appropriate spatio-temporal distribution of the visual data, while most approaches of learning commonly...

Background Timely recognition of malignant melanoma (MM) is challenging for dermatologists worldwide and represents the main determinant for mortality. Dermoscopic examination is influenced by dermatologists’ experience and fails to achieve adequate accuracy and reproducibility in discriminating atypical nevi (AN) from early melanomas (EM). Object...

The COVID-19 outbreak has stimulated the interest in the proposal of novel epidemiological models to predict the course of the epidemic so as to help planning effective control strategies. In particular, in order to properly interpret the available data, it has become clear that one must go beyond most classic epidemiological models and consider mo...

How will you react to the next post that you are going to read? In this paper we propose a learning system that is able to artificially alter the picture of a face in order to generate the emotion that is associated with a given input text. The face generation procedure is function of further information about the considered person, either given (t...

Visual attention refers to the human brain's ability to select relevant sensory information for preferential processing, improving performance in visual and cognitive tasks. It proceeds in two phases. One in which visual feature maps are acquired and processed in parallel. Another where the information from these maps is merged in order to select a...

Visual attention refers to the human brain's ability to select relevant sensory information for preferential processing, improving performance in visual and cognitive tasks. It proceeds in two phases. One in which visual feature maps are acquired and processed in parallel. Another where the information from these maps is merged in order to select a...

In this paper we present a foundational study on a constrained method that defines learning problems with Neural Networks in the context of the principle of least cognitive action, which very much resembles the principle of least action in mechanics. Starting from a general approach to enforce constraints into the dynamical laws of learning, this w...

In many real world applications, data are characterized by a complex structure, that can be naturally encoded as a graph. In the last years, the popularity of deep learning techniques has renewed the interest in neural models able to process complex patterns. In particular, inspired by the Graph Neural Network (GNN) model, different architectures h...

In this paper we study a constraint-based representation of neural network architectures. We cast the learning problem in the Lagrangian framework and we investigate a simple optimization procedure that is well suited to fulfil the so-called architectural constraints, learning from the available supervisions. The computational structure of the prop...

Recently, researchers in Machine Learning algorithms, Computer Vision scientists, engineers and others, showed a growing interest in 3D simulators as a mean to artificially create experimental settings that are very close to those in the real world. However, most of the existing platforms to interface algorithms with 3D environments are often desig...

Deep neural networks are usually considered black-boxes due to their complex internal architecture, that cannot straightforwardly provide human-understandable explanations on how they behave. Indeed, Deep Learning is still viewed with skepticism in those real-world domains in which incorrect predictions may produce critical effects. This is one of...

Neural-symbolic computing has now become the subject of interest of both academic and industry research laboratories. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely used in relational and symbolic domains, with widespread application of GNNs in combinatorial optimization, constraint satisfaction, relational reasoning and other scientific domains. Th...

Fast reactions to changes in the surrounding visual environment require efficient attention mechanisms to reallocate computational resources to most relevant locations in the visual field. While current computational models keep improving their predictive ability thanks to the increasing availability of data, they still struggle approximating the e...

Unsupervised learning from continuous visual streams is a challenging problem that cannot be naturally and efficiently managed in the classic batch-mode setting of computation. The information stream must be carefully processed accordingly to an appropriate spatio-temporal distribution of the visual data, while most approaches of learning commonly...

Adversarial attacks on machine learning-based classifiers, along with defense mechanisms, have been widely studied in the context of single-label classification problems. In this paper, we shift the attention to multi-label classification, where the availability of domain knowledge on the relationships among the considered classes may offer a natur...

Deep learning has been shown to achieve impressive results in several domains like computer vision and natural language processing. A key element of this success has been the development of new loss functions, like the popular cross-entropy loss, which has been shown to provide faster convergence and to reduce the vanishing gradient problem in very...

In spite of the amazing results obtained by deep learning in many applications, a real intelligent behavior of an agent acting in a complex environment is likely to require some kind of higher-level symbolic inference. Therefore, there is a clear need for the definition of a general and tight integration between low-level tasks, processing sensoria...

Deep learning is very effective at jointly learning feature representations and classification models, especially when dealing with high dimensional input patterns. Probabilistic logic reasoning, on the other hand, is capable of take consistent and robust decisions in complex environments. The integration of deep learning and logic reasoning is sti...

In the last few years we have seen a remarkable progress from the cultivation of the idea of expressing domain knowledge by the mathematical notion of constraint. However, the progress has mostly involved the process of providing consistent solutions with a given set of constraints, whereas learning “new” constraints, that express new knowledge, is...

Humans are continuously exposed to a stream of visual data with a natural temporal structure. However, most successful computer vision algorithms work at image level, completely discarding the precious information carried by motion. In this paper, we claim that processing visual streams naturally leads to formulate the motion invariance principle,...

Neural-symbolic computing has now become the subject of interest of both academic and industry research laboratories. Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have been widely used in relational and symbolic domains, with widespread application of GNNs in combinatorial optimization, constraint satisfaction, relational reasoning and other scientific domains. The...

In the last years, the popularity of deep learning techniques has renewed the interest in neural models able to process complex patterns, that are naturally encoded as graphs. In particular, different architectures have been proposed to extend the original Graph Neural Network (GNN) model. GNNs exploit a set of state variables, each assigned to a g...

In many real world applications, data are characterized by a complex structure, that can be naturally encoded as a graph. In the last years, the popularity of deep learning techniques has renewed the interest in neural models able to process complex patterns. In particular, inspired by the Graph Neural Network (GNN) model, different architectures h...

In this paper we study a constraint-based representation of neural network architectures. We cast the learning problem in the Lagrangian framework and we investigate a simple optimization procedure that is well suited to fulfil the so-called architectural constraints, learning from the available supervisions. The computational structure of the prop...

Human visual attention is a complex phenomenon. A computational modeling of this phenomenon must take into account where people look in order to evaluate which are the salient locations (spatial distribution of the fixations), when they look in those locations to understand the temporal development of the exploration (temporal order of the fixation...

Deep learning has been shown to achieve impressive results in several tasks where a large amount of training data is available. However, deep learning solely focuses on the accuracy of the predictions, neglecting the reasoning process leading to a decision, which is a major issue in life-critical applications. Probabilistic logic reasoning allows t...

This paper proposes an algebraic view of trees which opens the doors to an alternative computational scheme with respect to classic algorithms. In particular, it is shown that this view is very well-suited for machine learning and computational linguistics.

The Backpropagation algorithm relies on the abstraction of using a neural model that gets rid of the notion of time, since the input is mapped instantaneously to the output. In this paper, we claim that this abstraction of ignoring time, along with the abrupt input changes that occur when feeding the training set, are in fact the reasons why, in so...

In this paper we propose the use of continuous residual modules for graph kernels in Graph Neural Networks. We show the how both discrete and continuous residual layers allow for more robust training, being that continuous residual layers are those which are applied by integrating through an Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solver to produce th...

The neuron activation function plays a fundamental role in the complexity of learning. In particular, it is widely known that in recurrent networks the learning of long-term dependencies is problematic due to vanishing (or exploding) gradient and that such problem is directly related to the structure of the employed activation function. In this pap...

The growing ubiquity of Social Media data offers an attractive perspective for improving the quality of machine learning-based models in several fields, ranging from Computer Vision to Natural Language Processing. In this paper we focus on Facebook posts paired with reactions of multiple users, and we investigate their relationships with classes of...

The growing ubiquity of Social Media data offers an attractive perspective for improving the quality of machine learning-based models in several fields, ranging from Computer Vision to Natural Language Processing. In this paper we focus on Facebook posts paired with “reactions” of multiple users, and we investigate their relationships with classes...

In the last few years the systematic adoption of deep learning to visual generation has produced impressive results that, amongst others, definitely benefit from the massive exploration of convolutional architectures. In this paper, we propose a general approach to visual generation that combines learning capabilities with logic descriptions of the...

Humans are continuously exposed to a stream of visual data with a natural temporal structure. However, most successful computer vision algorithms work at image level, completely discarding the precious information carried by motion. In this paper, we claim that processing visual streams naturally leads to formulate the motion invariance principle,...

The puzzle of computer vision might find new challenging solutions when we realize that most successful methods are working at image level, which is remarkably more difficult than processing directly visual streams, just as it happens in nature. In this paper, we claim that the processing of a stream of frames naturally leads to formulate the motio...

Deep learning has been shown to achieve impressive results in several domains like computer vision and natural language processing. Deep architectures are typically trained following a supervised scheme and, therefore, they rely on the availability of a large amount of labeled training data to effectively learn their parameters. Neuro-symbolic appr...

Deep learning has been shown to achieve impressive results in several domains like computer vision and natural language processing. A key element of this success has been the development of new loss functions, like the popular cross-entropy loss, which has been shown to provide faster convergence and to reduce the vanishing gradient problem in very...

By and large the process of learning concepts that are embedded in time is regarded as quite a mature research topic. Hidden Markov models, recurrent neural networks are, amongst others, successful approaches to learning from temporal data. In this paper, we claim that the dominant approach minimizing appropriate risk functions defined over time by...

This paper proposes an in-depth re-thinking of neural computation that parallels apparently unrelated laws of physics, that are formulated in the variational framework of the least action principle. The theory holds for neural networks that are also based on any digraph, and the resulting computational scheme exhibits the intriguing property of bei...

Machine Learning algorithms are typically regarded as appropriate optimization schemes for minimizing risk functions that are constructed on the training set, which conveys statistical flavor to the corresponding learning problem. When the focus is shifted on perception, which is inherently interwound with time, recent alternative formulations of l...

The understanding of the mechanisms behind focus of attention in a visual scene is a problem of great interest in visual perception and computer vision. In this paper, we describe a model of scanpath as a dynamic process which can be interpreted as a variational law somehow related to mechanics, where the focus of attention is subject to a gravitat...