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Pietro Perona

47 accepted papers

2026

Linear Mechanisms for Spatiotemporal Reasoning in Vision Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

Spatio-temporal reasoning is a remarkable capability of Vision Language Models (VLMs), but the underlying mechanisms of such abilities remain largely opaque. We postulate that visual/geometrical and textual representations of spatial structure must be combined at some point in VLM computations. We s…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Kuramoto Orientation Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Orientation-rich images, such as fingerprints and textures, often exhibit coherent angular directional patterns that are challenging to model using standard generative approaches based on isotropic Euclidean diffusion. Motivated by the role of phase synchronization in biological systems, we propose…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Model Diagnosis and Correction via Linguistic and Implicit Attribute Editing

CVPR 2025poster

How can we troubleshoot a deep visual model, i.e., understand why it makes certain mistakes and further take action to correct its behavior? We design a Model Diagnosis and Correction system (MDC), an automated framework that analyzes the pattern of errors, proposes candidate causes of attributes, c…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Representational Similarity via Interpretable Visual Concepts

ICLR 2025poster

How do two deep neural networks differ in how they arrive at a decision? Measuring the similarity of deep networks has been a long-standing open question. Most existing methods provide a single number to measure the similarity of two networks at a given layer, but give no insight into what makes th…

2024

"A Framework for Efficient Model Evaluation through Stratification, Sampling, and Estimation"

ECCV 2024poster

"Model performance evaluation is a critical and expensive task in machine learning and computer vision. Without clear guidelines, practitioners often estimate model accuracy using a one-time completely random selection of the data. However, by employing tailored sampling and estimation strategies, o…

2024

Text-Image Alignment for Diffusion-Based Perception

CVPR 2024poster

Diffusion models are generative models with impressive text-to-image synthesis capabilities and have spurred a new wave of creative methods for classical machine learning tasks. However the best way to harness the perceptual knowledge of these generative models for visual tasks is still an open ques…

2023

BKinD-3D: Self-Supervised 3D Keypoint Discovery From Multi-View Videos

CVPR 2023poster

Quantifying motion in 3D is important for studying the behavior of humans and other animals, but manual pose annotations are expensive and time-consuming to obtain. Self-supervised keypoint discovery is a promising strategy for estimating 3D poses without annotations. However, current keypoint disco…

2023

Benchmarking Algorithmic Bias in Face Recognition: An Experimental Approach Using Synthetic Faces and Human Evaluation

ICCV 2023poster

We propose an experimental method for measuring bias in face recognition systems. Existing methods to measure bias depend on benchmark datasets that are collected in the wild and annotated for protected (e.g., race, gender) and non-protected (e.g., pose, lighting) attributes. Such observational data…

Cited by 15PDFScholar
2023

MABe22: A Multi-Species Multi-Task Benchmark for Learned Representations of Behavior

ICML 2023poster

We introduce MABe22, a large-scale, multi-agent video and trajectory benchmark to assess the quality of learned behavior representations. This dataset is collected from a variety of biology experiments, and includes triplets of interacting mice (4.7 million frames video+pose tracking data, 10 millio…

2023

Spatial Implicit Neural Representations for Global-Scale Species Mapping

ICML 2023poster

Estimating the geographical range of a species from sparse observations is a challenging and important geospatial prediction problem. Given a set of locations where a species has been observed, the goal is to build a model to predict whether the species is present or absent at any location. This pro…

2022

Multi-Dimensional, Nuanced and Subjective - Measuring the Perception of Facial Expressions

CVPR 2022poster

Humans can perceive multiple expressions, each one with varying intensity, in the picture of a face. We propose a methodology for collecting and modeling multidimensional modulated expression annotations from human annotators. Our data reveals that the perception of some expressions can be quite dif…

Cited by 9PDFScholar
2022

On Label Granularity and Object Localization

ECCV 2022poster

"Weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) aims to learn representations that encode object location using only image-level category labels. However, many objects can be labeled at different levels of granularity. Is it an animal, a bird, or a great horned owl? Which image-level labels should we…

2022

Rayleigh EigenDirections (REDs): Nonlinear GAN Latent Space Traversals for Multidimensional Features

ECCV 2022poster

"We present a method for finding paths in a deep generative model’s latent space that can maximally vary one set of image features while holding others constant. Crucially, unlike past traversal approaches, ours can manipulate arbitrary multidimensional features of an image such as facial identity a…

2022

Self-Supervised Keypoint Discovery in Behavioral Videos

CVPR 2022poster

We propose a method for learning the posture and structure of agents from unlabelled behavioral videos. Starting from the observation that behaving agents are generally the main sources of movement in behavioral videos, our method, Behavioral Keypoint Discovery (B-KinD), uses an encoder-decoder arch…

Cited by 36PDFcodeScholar
2022

The Caltech Fish Counting Dataset: A Benchmark for Multiple-Object Tracking and Counting

ECCV 2022poster

"We present the Caltech Fish Counting Dataset (CFC), a large-scale dataset for detecting, tracking, and counting fish in sonar videos. We identify sonar videos as a rich source of data for advancing low signal-to-noise computer vision applications and tackling domain generalization in multiple-objec…

2022

Towards Weakly-Supervised Text Spotting Using a Multi-Task Transformer

CVPR 2022poster

Text spotting end-to-end methods have recently gained attention in the literature due to the benefits of jointly optimizing the text detection and recognition components. Existing methods usually have a distinct separation between the detection and recognition branches, requiring exact annotations f…

Cited by 77PDFScholar
2022

Unsupervised and Semi-Supervised Bias Benchmarking in Face Recognition

ECCV 2022poster

"We introduce Semi-supervised Performance Evaluation for Face Recognition (SPE-FR). SPE-FR is a statistical method for evaluating the performance and algorithmic bias of face verification systems when identity labels are unavailable or incomplete. The method is based on parametric Bayesian modeling…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2021

Multi-Label Learning From Single Positive Labels

CVPR 2021poster

Predicting all applicable labels for a given image is known as multi-label classification. Compared to the standard multi-class case (where each image has only one label), it is considerably more challenging to annotate training data for multi-label classification. When the number of potential label…

Cited by 133PDFcodeScholar
2021

Sequence-to-Sequence Contrastive Learning for Text Recognition

CVPR 2021poster

We propose a framework for sequence-to-sequence contrastive learning (SeqCLR) of visual representations, which we apply to text recognition. To account for the sequence-to-sequence structure, each feature map is divided into different instances over which the contrastive loss is computed. This opera…

Cited by 162PDFcodeScholar
2021

Task Programming: Learning Data Efficient Behavior Representations

CVPR 2021poster

Specialized domain knowledge is often necessary to accurately annotate training sets for in-depth analysis, but can be burdensome and time-consuming to acquire from domain experts. This issue arises prominently in automated behavior analysis, in which agent movements or actions of interest are detec…

Cited by 63PDFcodeScholar
2021

The Multi-Agent Behavior Dataset: Mouse Dyadic Social Interactions

NeurIPS 2021poster

Multi-agent behavior modeling aims to understand the interactions that occur between agents. We present a multi-agent dataset from behavioral neuroscience, the Caltech Mouse Social Interactions (CalMS21) Dataset. Our dataset consists of trajectory data of social interactions, recorded from videos of…

Cited by 58SourcecodeScholar
2020

Rethinking Zero-Shot Video Classification: End-to-End Training for Realistic Applications

CVPR 2020poster

Trained on large datasets, deep learning (DL) can accurately classify videos into hundreds of diverse classes. However, video data is expensive to annotate. Zero-shot learning (ZSL) proposes one solution to this problem. ZSL trains a model once, and generalizes to new tasks whose classes are not pre…

Cited by 182PDFcodeScholar
2020

Towards causal benchmarking of bias in face analysis algorithms

ECCV 2020poster

Measuring algorithmic bias is crucial both to assess algorithmic fairness, and to guide the improvement of algorithms. Current bias measurement methods in computer vision are based on observational datasets, and conflate algorithmic bias with dataset bias. To address this problem we develop an exper…

Cited by 103SourcePDFScholar
2019

Task2Vec: Task Embedding for Meta-Learning

ICCV 2019poster

We introduce a method to generate vectorial representations of visual classification tasks which can be used to reason about the nature of those tasks and their relations. Given a dataset with ground-truth labels and a loss function, we process images through a "probe network" and compute an embeddi…

Cited by 386PDFScholar
2019

Teaching Multiple Concepts to a Forgetful Learner

NeurIPS 2019poster

How can we help a forgetful learner learn multiple concepts within a limited time frame? While there have been extensive studies in designing optimal schedules for teaching a single concept given a learner's memory model, existing approaches for teaching multiple concepts are typically based on heur…

Cited by 29SourcePDFScholar
2018

Near-Optimal Machine Teaching via Explanatory Teaching Sets

AISTATS 2018poster

Modern applications of machine teaching for humans often involve domain-specific, non- trivial target hypothesis classes. To facilitate understanding of the target hypothesis, it is crucial for the teaching algorithm to use examples which are interpretable to the human learner. In this paper, we pro…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2018

Teaching Categories to Human Learners With Visual Explanations

CVPR 2018poster

We study the problem of computer-assisted teaching with explanations. Conventional approaches for machine teaching typically only provide feedback at the instance level e.g., the category or label of the instance. However, it is intuitive that clear explanations from a knowledgeable teacher can…

Cited by 86SourcePDFScholar
2018

The INaturalist Species Classification and Detection Dataset

CVPR 2018poster

Existing image classification datasets used in computer vision tend to have a uniform distribution of images across object categories. In contrast, the natural world is heavily imbalanced, as some species are more abundant and easier to photograph than others. To encourage further progress in challe…

2018

Understanding the Role of Adaptivity in Machine Teaching: The Case of Version Space Learners

NeurIPS 2018poster

In real-world applications of education, an effective teacher adaptively chooses the next example to teach based on the learner’s current state. However, most existing work in algorithmic machine teaching focuses on the batch setting, where adaptivity plays no role. In this paper, we study the case…

Cited by 53SourcePDFScholar
2017

A Simple Multi-Class Boosting Framework with Theoretical Guarantees and Empirical Proficiency

ICML 2017poster

There is a need for simple yet accurate white-box learning systems that train quickly and with little data. To this end, we showcase REBEL, a multi-class boosting method, and present a novel family of weak learners called localized similarities. Our framework provably minimizes the training error of…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2017

Learning Recurrent Representations for Hierarchical Behavior Modeling

ICLR 2017poster

We propose a framework for detecting action patterns from motion sequences and modeling the sensory-motor relationship of animals, using a generative recurrent neural network. The network has a discriminative part (classifying actions) and a generative part (predicting motion), whose recurrent cells…

Cited by 59SourceScholar
2016

Cataloging Public Objects Using Aerial and Street-Level Images - Urban Trees

CVPR 2016accepted

Each corner of the inhabited world is imaged from multiple viewpoints with increasing frequency. Online map services like Google Maps or Here Maps provide direct access to huge amounts of densely sampled, georeferenced images from street view and aerial perspective. There is an opportunity to design…

Cited by 201SourcePDFScholar
2015

Building a Bird Recognition App and Large Scale Dataset With Citizen Scientists: The Fine Print in Fine-Grained Dataset Collection

CVPR 2015poster

We introduce tools and methodologies to collect high quality, large scale fine-grained computer vision datasets using citizen scientists -- crowd annotators who are passionate and knowledgeable about specific domains such as birds or airplanes. We worked with citizen scientists and domain experts t…

Cited by 737SourcePDFScholar