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not yet published Conference article Open Access OPEN
Reviving ConvNeXt for efficient convolutional diffusion models
Kwon Taesung, Bianchi Lorenzo, Wittke Lennart, Watine Felix, Carrara Fabio, Ye Jong Chul, Weber Romann, Azevedo Vinicius
Recent diffusion models increasingly favor Transformer backbones, motivated by the remarkable scalability of fully attentional architectures. Yet the locality bias, parameter efficiency, and hardware friendliness--the attributes that established ConvNets as the efficient vision backbone--have seen limited exploration in modern generative modeling. Here we introduce the fully convolutional diffusion model (FCDM), a model having a backbone similar to ConvNeXt, but designed for conditional diffusion modeling. We find that using only 50% of the FLOPs of DiT-XL/2, FCDM-XL achieves competitive performance with 7× and 7.5× fewer training steps at 256×256 and 512×512 resolutions, respectively. Remarkably, FCDM-XL can be trained on a 4-GPU system, highlighting the exceptional training efficiency of our architecture. Our results demonstrate that modern convolutional designs provide a competitive and highly efficient alternative for scaling diffusion models, reviving ConvNeXt as a simple yet powerful building block for efficient generative modeling.

See at: arxiv.org Open Access | CNR IRIS Open Access | CNR IRIS Restricted | CNR IRIS Restricted


not yet published Conference article Open Access OPEN
One patch to caption them all: a unified zero-shot captioning framework
Bianchi Lorenzo, Pacini Giacomo, Carrara Fabio, Messina Nicola, Amato Giuseppe, Falchi Fabrizio
Zero-shot captioners are recently proposed models that utilize common-space vision-language representations to caption images without relying on paired image-text data. To caption an image, they proceed by textually decoding a text-aligned image feature, but they limit their scope to global representations and whole-image captions. We present a unified framework for zero-shot captioning that shifts from an image-centric to a patch-centric paradigm, enabling the captioning of arbitrary regions without the need of region-level supervision. Instead of relying on global image representations, we treat individual patches as atomic captioning units and aggregate them to describe arbitrary regions, from single patches to non-contiguous areas and entire images. We analyze the key ingredients that enable current latent captioners to work in our novel proposed framework. Experiments demonstrate that backbones producing meaningful, dense visual features, such as DINO, are key to achieving state-of-the-art performance in multiple region-based captioning tasks. Compared to other baselines and state-of-the-art competitors, our models achieve better performance on zero-shot dense captioning and region-set captioning. We also introduce a new trace captioning task that further demonstrates the effectiveness of patch-wise semantic representations for flexible caption generation. Project page at https://paciosoft.com/Patch-ioner/ .Project(s): Future Artificial Intelligence Research, Italian Strengthening of ESFRI RI RESILIENCE, Social and hUman ceNtered XR, a MUltimedia platform for Content Enrichment and Search in audiovisual archives

See at: arxiv.org Open Access | CNR IRIS Open Access | CNR IRIS Restricted | CNR IRIS Restricted


2026 Conference article Open Access OPEN
CountingDINO. A training-free pipeline for class-agnostic counting using unsupervised backbones
Pacini Giacomo, Bianchi Lorenzo, Ciampi Luca, Messina Nicola, Amato Giuseppe, Falchi Fabrizio
Class-agnostic counting (CAC) aims to estimate the number of objects in images without being restricted to predefined categories. However, while current exemplar-based CAC methods offer flexibility at inference time, they still heavily rely on labeled data for training, which limits scalability and generalization to many downstream use cases. In this paper, we introduce CountingDINO, the first training-free exemplar-based CAC framework that exploits a fully unsupervised feature extractor. Specifically, our approach employs self-supervised vision-only backbones to extract object-aware features, and it eliminates the need for annotated data throughout the entire proposed pipeline. At inference time, we extract latent object prototypes via ROI-Align from DINO features and use them as convolutional kernels to generate similarity maps. These are then transformed into density maps through a simple yet effective normalization scheme. We evaluate our approach on the FSC-147 and CARPK benchmarks, where we consistently outperform a baseline based on an SOTA unsupervised object detector under the same label- and training-free setting. Additionally, we achieve competitive results - and in some cases surpass - training-free methods that rely on supervised backbones, non-training-free unsupervised methods, as well as several fully supervised SOTA approaches. This demonstrates that label- and training-free CAC can be both scalable and effective. Website: https://lorebianchi98.github.io/CountingDINO/.DOI: 10.1109/wacv61042.2026.00085
DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2504.16570
Project(s): ITSERR Italian Strengthening of the ESFRI RI RESILIENCE, Tuscany Health Ecosystem
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See at: arXiv.org e-Print Archive Open Access | CNR IRIS Open Access | openaccess.thecvf.com Open Access | doi.org Restricted | DBLP Restricted | CNR IRIS Restricted


2025 Conference article Open Access OPEN
Talking to DINO: bridging self-supervised vision backbones with language for open-vocabulary segmentation
Barsellotti L., Bianchi L., Messina N., Carrara F., Cornia M., Baraldi L., Falchi F., Cucchiara R.
Open-Vocabulary Segmentation (OVS) aims at segmenting images from free-form textual concepts without predefined training classes. While existing vision-language models such as CLIP can generate segmentation masks by leveraging coarse spatial information from Vision Transformers, they face challenges in spatial localization due to their global alignment of image and text features. Conversely, self-supervised visual models like DINO excel in fine-grained visual encoding but lack integration with language. To bridge this gap, we present Talk2DINO, a novel hybrid approach that combines the spatial accuracy of DINOv2 with the language understanding of CLIP. Our approach aligns the textual embeddings of CLIP to the patch-level features of DINOv2 through a learned mapping function without the need to fine-tune the underlying backbones. At training time, we exploit the attention maps of DINOv2 to selectively align local visual patches with textual embeddings. We show that the powerful semantic and localization abilities of Talk2DINO can enhance the segmentation process, resulting in more natural and less noisy segmentations, and that our approach can also effectively distinguish foreground objects from the background. Experimental results demonstrate that Talk2DINO achieves state-of-the-art performance across several unsupervised OVS benchmarks.Source: PROCEEDINGS IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMPUTER VISION, pp. 22025-22035. Honolulu, Hawaii (USA), 19-23/10/2025
Project(s): Future Artificial Intelligence Research, Italian Strengthening of ESFRI RI RESILIENCE, SUN via OpenAIRE, a MUltimedia platform for Content Enrichment and Search in audiovisual archives

See at: CNR IRIS Open Access | openaccess.thecvf.com Open Access | CNR IRIS Restricted


2025 Other Open Access OPEN
ISTI-day 2025 Proceedings
Del Corso G., Pedrotti A., Federico G., Gennaro C., Carrara F., Amato G., Di Benedetto M., Gabrielli E., Belli D., Matrullo Zoe, Miori V., Tolomei Gabriele, Waheed T., Marchetti E., Calabrò Antonello., Rossetti G., Stella Massimo, Cazabet Rémy, Abramski K., Cau E., Citraro S., Failla A., Mesina V., Morini V., Pansanella V., Colantonio S., Germanese D., Pascali M. A., Bianchi L., Messina N., Falchi F., Barsellotti L., Pacini G., Cassese M., Puccetti G., Esuli A., Volpi L., Moreo Alejandro, Sebastiani F., Sperduti G., Nguyen Dong, Broccia G., Ter Beek M. H., Ferrari A., Massink M., Belmonte Gina, Ciancia V., Papini O., Canapa G., Catricalà B., Manca M., Paternò F., Santoro C., Zedda E., Gallo S., Maenza S., Mattioli A., Simeoli L., Rucci D., Carlini E., Dazzi P., Kavalionak H., Mordacchini M., Rulli C., Muntean Cristina Ioana, Nardini F. M., Perego R., Rocchietti G., Lettich F., Renso C., Pugliese C., Casini G., Haldimann Jonas, Meyer Thomas, Assante M., Candela L., Dell'Amico A., Frosini L., Mangiacrapa F., Oliviero A., Pagano P., Panichi G., Peccerillo B., Procaccini M., Mannocci A., Manghi P., Lonetti F., Kang Dongjae, Di Giandomenico F., Jee Eunkyoung, Lazzini G., Conti F., Scopigno R., D'Acunto M., Moroni D., Cafiso M., Paradisi P., Callieri M., Pavoni G., Corsini M., De Falco A., Sala F., Saraceni Q., Gattiglia Gabriele
ISTI-Day is an annual information and networking event organized by the Institute of Information Science and Technologies "A. Faedo" (ISTI) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR). This event features an opening talk of the Director of the Dept. DIITET (Emilio F. Campana) as well as an overview of the Institute's activities presented by the ISTI Director (Roberto Scopigno). Those institutional segments are complemented by dedicated presentations and round tables featuring former staff members, as well as internal and external collaborators. To foster a network of knowledge and collaboration among newcomers, the 2025 ISTI Day edition also includes a large poster session that provides a comprehensive overview of current research activities. Each of the 13 laboratories contributes 1–3 posters, highlighting the most innovative work and offering early-career researchers a platform for discussion. Thus these proceedings include the posters selected for ISTI-Day 2025, reflecting the diverse and innovative nature of the Institute's research.

See at: CNR IRIS Open Access | www.isti.cnr.it Open Access | CNR IRIS Restricted


2025 Conference article Open Access OPEN
Is CLIP the main roadblock for fine-grained open-world perception?
Bianchi L., Carrara F., Messina N., Falchi F.
Modern applications increasingly demand flexible computer vision models that adapt to novel concepts not encountered during training. This necessity is pivotal in emerging domains like extended reality, robotics, and autonomous driving, which require the ability to respond to open-world stimuli. A key ingredient is the ability to identify objects based on free-form textual queries defined at inference time – a task known as open-vocabulary object detection. Multimodal backbones like CLIP are the main enabling technology for current open-world perception solutions. Despite performing well on generic queries, recent studies highlighted limitations on the fine-grained recognition capabilities in open-vocabulary settings – i.e., for distinguishing subtle object features like color, shape, and material. In this paper, we perform a detailed examination of these open-vocabulary object recognition limitations to find the root cause. We evaluate the performance of CLIP, the most commonly used vision-language backbone, against a fine-grained object-matching benchmark, revealing interesting analogies between the limitations of open-vocabulary object detectors and their backbones. Experiments suggest that the lack of fine-grained understanding is caused by the poor separability of object characteristics in the CLIP latent space. Therefore, we try to understand whether fine-grained knowledge is present in CLIP embeddings but not exploited at inference time due, for example, to the unsuitability of the cosine similarity matching function, which may discard important object characteristics. Our preliminary experiments show that simple CLIP latent-space re-projections help separate fine-grained concepts, paving the way towards the development of backbones inherently able to process fine-grained details. The code for reproducing these experiments is available at https://github.com/lorebianchi98/FG-CLIP.DOI: 10.1109/cbmi62980.2024.10859215
Project(s): Future Artificial Intelligence Research, Italian Strengthening of ESFRI RI RESILIENCE, SUN via OpenAIRE, a MUltimedia platform for Content Enrichment and Search in audiovisual archives
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See at: CNR IRIS Open Access | ieeexplore.ieee.org Open Access | CNR IRIS Restricted | CNR IRIS Restricted


2025 Conference article Open Access OPEN
ReCoptic: computer vision for the reconstruction of dismembered coptic codices
Bianchi L., Falchi F., Moreo Fernandez A., Sebastiani F., Bianchi C.
In the course of history, many ancient codices (i.e., bound volumes of manuscripts) written in the Coptic language have been dismembered, often at the hand of sellers of antiques, into individual sheets, who have ended up scattered across the planet. Reconstructing these codices in their original form would be extremely important for a better understanding of the culture of Coptic-speaking communities, and is a long-standing goal of paleographers and egyptologists alike. In this paper we present ReCoptic, a probabilistic, “contrastive” image classification sys- tem based on computer vision techniques, whose goal is to aid scholars in reconstructing dismembered ancient Coptic codices. Given a collection of scans of individual pages of ancient Coptic manuscripts, the system evaluates, for each pair of such scans, the (“posterior”) probability that the two pages originate from the same codex, and ranks all such pairs in descending order of their associated posterior probability. The scholar can thus discover yet unknown pairs of pages originating from the same codex by examining, starting from the top of the list, the pairs proposed by ReCoptic. In experiments that we have run on a collection of 6,000+ pages of Coptic manuscripts, ReCoptic displays extremely high accuracy. The code for reproducing these experiments is available at https://github.com/lorebianchi98/ReCopticDOI: 10.1109/ieee-ch65308.2025.11279398
Project(s): ITSERR Italian Strengthening of the ESFRI RI RESILIENCE
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See at: CNR IRIS Open Access | ieeexplore.ieee.org Open Access | CNR IRIS Restricted | CNR IRIS Restricted


2024 Conference article Open Access OPEN
The devil is in the fine-grained details: evaluating open-vocabulary object detectors for fine-grained understanding
Bianchi L., Carrara F., Messina N., Gennaro C., Falchi F.
Recent advancements in large vision-language models enabled visual object detection in open-vocabulary scenar-ios, where object classes are defined in free-text formats during inference. In this paper, we aim to probe the state-of-the-art methods for open-vocabulary object detection to determine to what extent they understand finegrained prop-erties of objects and their parts. To this end, we intro-duce an evaluation protocol based on dynamic vocabulary generation to test whether models detect, discern, and as-sign the correct fine-grained description to objects in the presence of hard-negative classes. We contribute with a benchmark suite of increasing difficulty and probing dif-ferent properties like color, pattern, and material. We fur-ther enhance our investigation by evaluating several state-of-the-art open-vocabulary object detectors using the proposed protocol and find that most existing solutions, which shine in standard open-vocabulary benchmarks, struggle to accurately capture and distinguish finer object details. We conclude the paper by highlighting the limitations of current methodologies and exploring promising research directions to overcome the discovered drawbacks. Data and code are available at https://lorebianchi98.github.io/FG-OVD/.Source: PROCEEDINGS IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETY CONFERENCE ON COMPUTER VISION AND PATTERN RECOGNITION, pp. 22520-22529. Seattle (USA), 17-21/06/2024
DOI: 10.1109/cvpr52733.2024.02125
DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2311.17518
Project(s): SUN via OpenAIRE, a MUltimedia platform for Content Enrichment and Search in audiovisual archives
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See at: arXiv.org e-Print Archive Open Access | IRIS Cnr Open Access | ieeexplore.ieee.org Open Access | doi.org Restricted | doi.org Restricted | CNR IRIS Restricted | CNR IRIS Restricted


2024 Other Open Access OPEN
AIMH Research Activities 2024
Aloia N., Amato G., Bartalesi Lenzi V., Bianchi L., Bolettieri P., Bosio C., Carraglia M., Carrara F., Casarosa V., Cassese M., Ciampi L., Coccomini D. A., Concordia C., Connor R., Corbara S., De Martino C., Di Benedetto M., Esuli A., Falchi F., Fazzari E., Gennaro C., Iannello L., Negi K., Lagani G., Lenzi E., Leocata M., Malvaldi M., Meghini C., Messina N., Moreo Fernandez A., Nardi A., Pacini G., Pedrotti A., Pratelli N., Puccetti G., Rabitti F., Savino P., Scotti F., Sebastiani F., Sperduti G., Thanos C., Trupiano L., Vadicamo L., Vairo C., Versienti L., Volpi L.
The AIMH (Artificial Intelligence for Media and Humanities) laboratory is committed to advancing the field of Artificial Intelligence, with a special emphasis on its applications in digital media and the humanities. The lab aims to improve AI technologies, particularly in areas such as deep learning, text analysis, computer vision, multimedia information retrieval, content analysis, recognition, and retrieval. This report summarizes the laboratory’s achievements and activities over the course of 2024.DOI: 10.32079/isti-ar-2024/001
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See at: CNR IRIS Open Access | CNR IRIS Restricted


2023 Other Open Access OPEN
AIMH Research Activities 2023
Aloia N., Amato G., Bartalesi Lenzi V., Bianchi L., Bolettieri P., Bosio C., Carraglia M., Carrara F., Casarosa V., Ciampi L., Coccomini D. A., Concordia C., Corbara S., De Martino C., Di Benedetto M., Esuli A., Falchi F., Fazzari E., Gennaro C., Lagani G., Lenzi E., Meghini C., Messina N., Molinari A., Moreo Fernandez A., Nardi A., Pedrotti A., Pratelli N., Puccetti G., Rabitti F., Savino P., Sebastiani F., Sperduti G., Thanos C., Trupiano L., Vadicamo L., Vairo C., Versienti L.
The AIMH (Artificial Intelligence for Media and Humanities) laboratory is dedicated to exploring and pushing the boundaries in the field of Artificial Intelligence, with a particular focus on its application in digital media and humanities. This lab's objective is to enhance the current state of AI technology particularly on deep learning, text analysis, computer vision, multimedia information retrieval, multimedia content analysis, recognition, and retrieval. This report encapsulates the laboratory's progress and activities throughout the year 2023.DOI: https://doi.org/10.32079/isti-ar-2023/001
DOI: 10.32079/isti-ar-2023/001
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See at: CNR IRIS Open Access | ISTI Repository Open Access | CNR IRIS Restricted