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Alessandro Suglia

15 accepted papers

2026

VLM-RobustBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Robustness of Vision-Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Vision-language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on standard, high-quality datasets, but we still don't fully understand how they perform under real-world image distortions. We present **VLM-RobustBench**, a benchmark spanning 49 augmentation types across noise, blur, weather, digital, and g…

Cited by 7SourceScholar
2025

CROPE: Evaluating In-Context Adaptation of Vision and Language Models to Culture-Specific Concepts

NAACL 2025long

As Vision and Language models (VLMs) become accessible across the globe, it is important that they demonstrate cultural knowledge. In his paper, we introduce CROPE, a visual question answering benchmark designed to probe the knowledge of culture-specific concepts and evaluate the capacity for cultur…

2025

FOSSIL: Harnessing Feedback on Suboptimal Samples for Data-Efficient Generalisation with Imitation Learning for Embodied Vision-and-Language Tasks

EMNLP 2025

Current approaches to embodied AI tend to learn policies from expert demonstrations. However, without a mechanism to evaluate the quality of demonstrated actions, they are limited to learning from optimal behaviour or risk replicating errors and inefficiencies. While reinforcement learning offers on

2025

LLMs instead of Human Judges? A Large Scale Empirical Study across 20 NLP Evaluation Tasks

ACL 2025short

There is an increasing trend towards evaluating NLP models with LLMs instead of human judgments, raising questions about the validity of these evaluations, as well as their reproducibility in the case of proprietary models. We provide JUDGE-BENCH, an extensible collection of 20 NLP datasets with hum…

2025

Playpen: An Environment for Exploring Learning From Dialogue Game Feedback

EMNLP 2025

Interaction between learner and feedback-giver has come into focus recently for post-training of Large Language Models (LLMs), through the use of reward models that judge the appropriateness of a model’s response. In this paper, we investigate whether Dialogue Games—goal-directed and rule-governed a

2025

Triangulating LLM Progress through Benchmarks, Games, and Cognitive Tests

EMNLP 2025

We examine three evaluation paradigms: standard benchmarks (e.g., MMLU and BBH), interactive games (e.g., Signalling Games or Taboo), and cognitive tests (e.g., for working memory or theory of mind). First, we investigate which of the former two—benchmarks or games—is most effective at discriminatin

2024

AlanaVLM: A Multimodal Embodied AI Foundation Model for Egocentric Video Understanding

EMNLP 2024finding

AI personal assistants deployed via robots or wearables require embodied understanding to collaborate with humans effectively. However, current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) primarily focus on third-person view videos, neglecting the richness of egocentric perceptual experience. To address this gap,…

2024

Investigating the Role of Instruction Variety and Task Difficulty in Robotic Manipulation Tasks

EMNLP 2024main

Evaluating the generalisation capabilities of multimodal models based solely on their performance on out-of-distribution data fails to capture their true robustness. This work introduces a comprehensive evaluation framework that systematically examines the role of instructions and inputs in the gene…

2024

Lost in Space: Probing Fine-grained Spatial Understanding in Vision and Language Resamplers

NAACL 2024short

An effective method for combining frozen large language models (LLM) and visual encoders involves a resampler module that creates a ‘visual prompt’ which is provided to the LLM, along with the textual prompt. While this approach has enabled impressive performance across many coarse-grained tasks lik…

2024

PIXAR: Auto-Regressive Language Modeling in Pixel Space

ACL 2024findings

Recent work showed the possibility of building open-vocabulary large language models (LLMs) that directly operate on pixel representations. These models are implemented as autoencoders that reconstruct masked patches of rendered text.However, these pixel-based LLMs are limited to discriminative task…

2024

Repairs in a Block World: A New Benchmark for Handling User Corrections with Multi-Modal Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

In dialogue, the addressee may initially misunderstand the speaker and respond erroneously, often prompting the speaker to correct the misunderstanding in the next turn with a Third Position Repair (TPR). The ability to process and respond appropriately to such repair sequences is thus crucial in co…

2024

Shaking Up VLMs: Comparing Transformers and Structured State Space Models for Vision & Language Modeling

EMNLP 2024main

This study explores replacing Transformers in Visual Language Models (VLMs) with Mamba, a recent structured state space model (SSM) that demonstrates promising performance in sequence modeling. We test models up to 3B parameters under controlled conditions, showing that Mamba-based VLMs outperforms…

2023

Multitask Multimodal Prompted Training for Interactive Embodied Task Completion

EMNLP 2023long main

Interactive and embodied tasks pose at least two fundamental challenges to existing Vision \& Language (VL) models, including 1) grounding language in trajectories of actions and observations, and 2) referential disambiguation. To tackle these challenges, we propose an Embodied MultiModal Agent (EMM…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

ACT-Thor: A Controlled Benchmark for Embodied Action Understanding in Simulated Environments

COLING 2022main

Artificial agents are nowadays challenged to perform embodied AI tasks. To succeed, agents must understand the meaning of verbs and how their corresponding actions transform the surrounding world. In this work, we propose ACT-Thor, a novel controlled benchmark for embodied action understanding. We u…

2020

Imagining Grounded Conceptual Representations from Perceptual Information in Situated Guessing Games

COLING 2020main

In visual guessing games, a Guesser has to identify a target object in a scene by asking questions to an Oracle. An effective strategy for the players is to learn conceptual representations of objects that are both discriminative and expressive enough to ask questions and guess correctly. However, a…