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Silvio Giancola

Silvio Giancola contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

9 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

GoTTA be Diverse: Rethinking Memory Policies for Test-Time Adaptation

Test-time adaptation (TTA) enables a pre-trained model to adapt online to an unlabeled test stream under distribution shift. While most TTA research focuses on the adaptation objective, practical streams also depend critically on the memory used to select which test samples drive adaptation. Existing memory mechanisms are usually evaluated as components of specific TTA algorithms, making it difficult to isolate which memory design choices matter and when they matter. In this work, we provide a systematic benchmark that decouples memory from the adaptation algorithm and evaluates memory policies under unified conditions across i.i.d., non-i.i.d., continual, and practical test streams. Our study shows that effective memory management requires more than retaining recent or class-balanced samples. In particular, intra-class diversity is a key factor for avoiding redundant buffers and maintaining representative adaptation signals under temporally correlated and label-skewed streams. Motivated by this finding, we introduce Guided Observational Test-Time Adaptation (GOTTA), a family of diversity-aware memory policies that combine class-balanced allocation with feature-space diversity. GOTTA memories act as drop-in replacements for existing buffers and can be paired with different TTA objectives. Across corruption benchmarks and video-stream settings, diversity-aware memory improves adaptation most clearly under constrained memory budgets and challenging non-i.i.d. streams, while remaining competitive as memory capacity increases. These results highlight memory management as a first-class component of robust test-time adaptation and identify diversity as a central principle for practical TTA.

preprint2026arXiv

SoccerLens: Grounded Soccer Video Understanding Beyond Accuracy

Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently shown strong potential in soccer video understanding. However, given the high complexity of soccer videos due to large viewpoint variations, rapid shot transitions, and cluttered scenes, it remains unclear on whether VLMs rely on meaningful visual evidence or exploit spurious correlations and shortcut learning. Existing evaluation protocols focus primarily on classification accuracy and do not assess visual grounding. To address this limitation, we introduce SoccerLens, a benchmark for grounded soccer video understanding. The benchmark contains annotated video segments spanning $13$ common soccer events, with structured visual cues organized into three levels of semantic relevance. We further extend the attribution method of Chefer [arXiv:2103.15679] to jointly model spatial and temporal attention, and introduce evaluation metrics that measure whether model attention aligns with annotated cues or drifts toward spurious regions. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art soccer VLMs shows that, despite strong classification accuracy, current models fail to exceed $50\%$ grounding performance even under the loosest cue definitions and consistently underutilize temporal information. These results reveal a substantial gap between predictive performance and true visual grounding, highlighting the need for grounded evaluation in complex spatio-temporal domains such as soccer.

preprint2022arXiv

3DeformRS: Certifying Spatial Deformations on Point Clouds

3D computer vision models are commonly used in security-critical applications such as autonomous driving and surgical robotics. Emerging concerns over the robustness of these models against real-world deformations must be addressed practically and reliably. In this work, we propose 3DeformRS, a method to certify the robustness of point cloud Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) against real-world deformations. We developed 3DeformRS by building upon recent work that generalized Randomized Smoothing (RS) from pixel-intensity perturbations to vector-field deformations. In particular, we specialized RS to certify DNNs against parameterized deformations (e.g. rotation, twisting), while enjoying practical computational costs. We leverage the virtues of 3DeformRS to conduct a comprehensive empirical study on the certified robustness of four representative point cloud DNNs on two datasets and against seven different deformations. Compared to previous approaches for certifying point cloud DNNs, 3DeformRS is fast, scales well with point cloud size, and provides comparable-to-better certificates. For instance, when certifying a plain PointNet against a 3° z-rotation on 1024-point clouds, 3DeformRS grants a certificate 3x larger and 20x faster than previous work.

preprint2022arXiv

MAD: A Scalable Dataset for Language Grounding in Videos from Movie Audio Descriptions

The recent and increasing interest in video-language research has driven the development of large-scale datasets that enable data-intensive machine learning techniques. In comparison, limited effort has been made at assessing the fitness of these datasets for the video-language grounding task. Recent works have begun to discover significant limitations in these datasets, suggesting that state-of-the-art techniques commonly overfit to hidden dataset biases. In this work, we present MAD (Movie Audio Descriptions), a novel benchmark that departs from the paradigm of augmenting existing video datasets with text annotations and focuses on crawling and aligning available audio descriptions of mainstream movies. MAD contains over 384,000 natural language sentences grounded in over 1,200 hours of videos and exhibits a significant reduction in the currently diagnosed biases for video-language grounding datasets. MAD's collection strategy enables a novel and more challenging version of video-language grounding, where short temporal moments (typically seconds long) must be accurately grounded in diverse long-form videos that can last up to three hours. We have released MAD's data and baselines code at https://github.com/Soldelli/MAD.

preprint2022arXiv

Real-time Hyperspectral Imaging in Hardware via Trained Metasurface Encoders

Hyperspectral imaging has attracted significant attention to identify spectral signatures for image classification and automated pattern recognition in computer vision. State-of-the-art implementations of snapshot hyperspectral imaging rely on bulky, non-integrated, and expensive optical elements, including lenses, spectrometers, and filters. These macroscopic components do not allow fast data processing for, e.g real-time and high-resolution videos. This work introduces Hyplex, a new integrated architecture addressing the limitations discussed above. Hyplex is a CMOS-compatible, fast hyperspectral camera that replaces bulk optics with nanoscale metasurfaces inversely designed through artificial intelligence. Hyplex does not require spectrometers but makes use of conventional monochrome cameras, opening up the possibility for real-time and high-resolution hyperspectral imaging at inexpensive costs. Hyplex exploits a model-driven optimization, which connects the physical metasurfaces layer with modern visual computing approaches based on end-to-end training. We design and implement a prototype version of Hyplex and compare its performance against the state-of-the-art for typical imaging tasks such as spectral reconstruction and semantic segmentation. In all benchmarks, Hyplex reports the smallest reconstruction error. We additionally present what is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest publicly available labeled hyperspectral dataset for semantic segmentation.

preprint2022arXiv

SCTN: Sparse Convolution-Transformer Network for Scene Flow Estimation

We propose a novel scene flow estimation approach to capture and infer 3D motions from point clouds. Estimating 3D motions for point clouds is challenging, since a point cloud is unordered and its density is significantly non-uniform. Such unstructured data poses difficulties in matching corresponding points between point clouds, leading to inaccurate flow estimation. We propose a novel architecture named Sparse Convolution-Transformer Network (SCTN) that equips the sparse convolution with the transformer. Specifically, by leveraging the sparse convolution, SCTN transfers irregular point cloud into locally consistent flow features for estimating continuous and consistent motions within an object/local object part. We further propose to explicitly learn point relations using a point transformer module, different from exiting methods. We show that the learned relation-based contextual information is rich and helpful for matching corresponding points, benefiting scene flow estimation. In addition, a novel loss function is proposed to adaptively encourage flow consistency according to feature similarity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves a new state of the art in scene flow estimation. Our approach achieves an error of 0.038 and 0.037 (EPE3D) on FlyingThings3D and KITTI Scene Flow respectively, which significantly outperforms previous methods by large margins.

preprint2020arXiv

A Context-Aware Loss Function for Action Spotting in Soccer Videos

In video understanding, action spotting consists in temporally localizing human-induced events annotated with single timestamps. In this paper, we propose a novel loss function that specifically considers the temporal context naturally present around each action, rather than focusing on the single annotated frame to spot. We benchmark our loss on a large dataset of soccer videos, SoccerNet, and achieve an improvement of 12.8% over the baseline. We show the generalization capability of our loss for generic activity proposals and detection on ActivityNet, by spotting the beginning and the end of each activity. Furthermore, we provide an extended ablation study and display challenging cases for action spotting in soccer videos. Finally, we qualitatively illustrate how our loss induces a precise temporal understanding of actions and show how such semantic knowledge can be used for automatic highlights generation.

preprint2020arXiv

Efficient Bird Eye View Proposals for 3D Siamese Tracking

Tracking vehicles in LIDAR point clouds is a challenging task due to the sparsity of the data and the dense search space. The lack of structure in point clouds impedes the use of convolution filters usually employed in 2D object tracking. In addition, structuring point clouds is cumbersome and implies losing fine-grained information. As a result, generating proposals in 3D space is expensive and inefficient. In this paper, we leverage the dense and structured Bird Eye View (BEV) representation of LIDAR point clouds to efficiently search for objects of interest. We use an efficient Region Proposal Network and generate a small number of object proposals in 3D. Successively, we refine our selection of 3D object candidates by exploiting the similarity capability of a 3D Siamese network. We regularize the latter 3D Siamese network for shape completion to enhance its discrimination capability. Our method attempts to solve both for an efficient search space in the BEV space and a meaningful selection using 3D LIDAR point cloud. We show that the Region Proposal in the BEV outperforms Bayesian methods such as Kalman and Particle Filters in providing proposal by a significant margin and that such candidates are suitable for the 3D Siamese network. By training our method end-to-end, we outperform the previous baseline in vehicle tracking by 12% / 18% in Success and Precision when using only 16 candidates.

preprint2020arXiv

LC-NAS: Latency Constrained Neural Architecture Search for Point Cloud Networks

Point cloud architecture design has become a crucial problem for 3D deep learning. Several efforts exist to manually design architectures with high accuracy in point cloud tasks such as classification, segmentation, and detection. Recent progress in automatic Neural Architecture Search (NAS) minimizes the human effort in network design and optimizes high performing architectures. However, these efforts fail to consider important factors such as latency during inference. Latency is of high importance in time critical applications like self-driving cars, robot navigation, and mobile applications, that are generally bound by the available hardware. In this paper, we introduce a new NAS framework, dubbed LC-NAS, where we search for point cloud architectures that are constrained to a target latency. We implement a novel latency constraint formulation to trade-off between accuracy and latency in our architecture search. Contrary to previous works, our latency loss guarantees that the final network achieves latency under a specified target value. This is crucial when the end task is to be deployed in a limited hardware setting. Extensive experiments show that LC-NAS is able to find state-of-the-art architectures for point cloud classification in ModelNet40 with minimal computational cost. We also show how our searched architectures achieve any desired latency with a reasonably low drop in accuracy. Finally, we show how our searched architectures easily transfer to a different task, part segmentation on PartNet, where we achieve state-of-the-art results while lowering latency by a factor of 10.