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Researcher profile

Massimiliano Luca

Massimiliano Luca contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Artificial IntelligenceSocial and Information NetworksMachine Learningcs.CYComputer Vision

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Published work

7 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Can VLM Agents Tell Who They Are at All?

In the animal kingdom, mirror self-recognition is a canonical probe of higher-order cognition, emerging only in some species. We ask whether an analogous functional capability emerges in embodied vision-language model (VLM) agents: can they recognize themselves in a mirror? We introduce a controlled 3D benchmark where a first-person VLM agent must infer a hidden body attribute from its reflection and select the matching target, while avoiding self-other misattribution. To separate mirror-grounded self-identification from shortcuts, we test mirror removal, misleading cues, and occluded reflections. We also evaluate the decision process through mirror seeking, temporal ordering, self-attribution, and reasoning-action consistency. Our experiments show that mirror-based self-identification emerges mainly in stronger VLMs. These models can use reflected evidence for action, whereas weaker models often inspect the mirror but fail to extract self-relevant information or misattribute their reflection. Language-vision conflict further shows that self-referential language alone is not evidence of grounded self-identification. Overall, mirror-based evaluation provides a diagnostic for whether embodied self-grounding is causally rooted in perception and action rather than priors, prompt compliance, or confabulation.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Deep Gravity: enhancing mobility flows generation with deep neural networks and geographic information

The movements of individuals within and among cities influence critical aspects of our society, such as well-being, the spreading of epidemics, and the quality of the environment. When information about mobility flows is not available for a particular region of interest, we must rely on mathematical models to generate them. In this work, we propose the Deep Gravity model, an effective method to generate flow probabilities that exploits many variables (e.g., land use, road network, transport, food, health facilities) extracted from voluntary geographic data, and uses deep neural networks to discover non-linear relationships between those variables and mobility flows. Our experiments, conducted on mobility flows in England, Italy, and New York State, show that Deep Gravity has good geographic generalization capability, achieving a significant increase in performance (especially in densely populated regions of interest) with respect to the classic gravity model and models that do not use deep neural networks or geographic data. We also show how flows generated by Deep Gravity may be explained in terms of the geographic features using explainable AI techniques.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Emotion Analysis using Multi-Layered Networks for Graphical Representation of Tweets

Anticipating audience reaction towards a certain piece of text is integral to several facets of society ranging from politics, research, and commercial industries. Sentiment analysis (SA) is a useful natural language processing (NLP) technique that utilizes both lexical/statistical and deep learning methods to determine whether different sized texts exhibit a positive, negative, or neutral emotion. However, there is currently a lack of tools that can be used to analyse groups of independent texts and extract the primary emotion from the whole set. Therefore, the current paper proposes a novel algorithm referred to as the Multi-Layered Tweet Analyzer (MLTA) that graphically models social media text using multi-layered networks (MLNs) in order to better encode relationships across independent sets of tweets. Graph structures are capable of capturing meaningful relationships in complex ecosystems compared to other representation methods. State of the art Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are used to extract information from the Tweet-MLN and make predictions based on the extracted graph features. Results show that not only does the MLTA predict from a larger set of possible emotions, delivering a more accurate sentiment compared to the standard positive, negative or neutral, it also allows for accurate group-level predictions of Twitter data.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Enhancing crowd flow prediction in various spatial and temporal granularities

Thanks to the diffusion of the Internet of Things, nowadays it is possible to sense human mobility almost in real time using unconventional methods (e.g., number of bikes in a bike station). Due to the diffusion of such technologies, the last years have witnessed a significant growth of human mobility studies, motivated by their importance in a wide range of applications, from traffic management to public security and computational epidemiology. A mobility task that is becoming prominent is crowd flow prediction, i.e., forecasting aggregated incoming and outgoing flows in the locations of a geographic region. Although several deep learning approaches have been proposed to solve this problem, their usage is limited to specific types of spatial tessellations and cannot provide sufficient explanations of their predictions. We propose CrowdNet, a solution to crowd flow prediction based on graph convolutional networks. Compared with state-of-the-art solutions, CrowdNet can be used with regions of irregular shapes and provide meaningful explanations of the predicted crowd flows. We conduct experiments on public data varying the spatio-temporal granularity of crowd flows to show the superiority of our model with respect to existing methods, and we investigate CrowdNet's reliability to missing or noisy input data. Our model is a step forward in the design of reliable deep learning models to predict and explain human displacements in urban environments.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Modeling International Mobility using Roaming Cell Phone Traces during COVID-19 Pandemic

Most of the studies related to human mobility are focused on intra-country mobility. However, there are many scenarios (e.g., spreading diseases, migration) in which timely data on international commuters are vital. Mobile phones represent a unique opportunity to monitor international mobility flows in a timely manner and with proper spatial aggregation. This work proposes using roaming data generated by mobile phones to model incoming and outgoing international mobility. We use the gravity and radiation models to capture mobility flows before and during the introduction of non-pharmaceutical interventions. However, traditional models have some limitations: for instance, mobility restrictions are not explicitly captured and may play a crucial role. To overtake such limitations, we propose the COVID Gravity Model (CGM), namely an extension of the traditional gravity model that is tailored for the pandemic scenario. This proposed approach overtakes, in terms of accuracy, the traditional models by 126.9% for incoming mobility and by 63.9% when modeling outgoing mobility flows.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Trajectory Test-Train Overlap in Next-Location Prediction Datasets

Next-location prediction, consisting of forecasting a user's location given their historical trajectories, has important implications in several fields, such as urban planning, geo-marketing, and disease spreading. Several predictors have been proposed in the last few years to address it, including last-generation ones based on deep learning. This paper tests the generalization capability of these predictors on public mobility datasets, stratifying the datasets by whether the trajectories in the test set also appear fully or partially in the training set. We consistently discover a severe problem of trajectory overlapping in all analyzed datasets, highlighting that predictors memorize trajectories while having limited generalization capacities. We thus propose a methodology to rerank the outputs of the next-location predictors based on spatial mobility patterns. With these techniques, we significantly improve the predictors' generalization capability, with a relative improvement on the accuracy up to 96.15% on the trajectories that cannot be memorized (i.e., low overlap with the training set).

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

A Survey on Deep Learning for Human Mobility

The study of human mobility is crucial due to its impact on several aspects of our society, such as disease spreading, urban planning, well-being, pollution, and more. The proliferation of digital mobility data, such as phone records, GPS traces, and social media posts, combined with the predictive power of artificial intelligence, triggered the application of deep learning to human mobility. Existing surveys focus on single tasks, data sources, mechanistic or traditional machine learning approaches, while a comprehensive description of deep learning solutions is missing. This survey provides a taxonomy of mobility tasks, a discussion on the challenges related to each task and how deep learning may overcome the limitations of traditional models, a description of the most relevant solutions to the mobility tasks described above and the relevant challenges for the future. Our survey is a guide to the leading deep learning solutions to next-location prediction, crowd flow prediction, trajectory generation, and flow generation. At the same time, it helps deep learning scientists and practitioners understand the fundamental concepts and the open challenges of the study of human mobility.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access