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Valentino Maiorca

9 accepted papers

2025

Head Pursuit: Probing Attention Specialization in Multimodal Transformers

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Language and vision-language models have shown impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, but their internal mechanisms remain only partly understood. In this work, we study how individual attention heads in text-generative models specialize in specific semantic or visual attributes. Build…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

LinEAS: End-to-end Learning of Activation Steering with a Distributional Loss

NeurIPS 2025poster

The growing use of generative models in daily life calls for efficient mechanisms to control their generation, to e.g. produce safe content or provide users with tools to explore style changes. Ideally, such mechanisms should require low volume of unpaired data (\ie without explicit preference), and…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

From Bricks to Bridges: Product of Invariances to Enhance Latent Space Communication

ICLR 2024spotlight

It has been observed that representations learned by distinct neural networks conceal structural similarities when the models are trained under similar inductive biases. From a geometric perspective, identifying the classes of transformations and the related invariances that connect these representa…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2024

Latent Functional Maps: a spectral framework for representation alignment

NeurIPS 2024poster

Neural models learn data representations that lie on low-dimensional manifolds, yet modeling the relation between these representational spaces is an ongoing challenge. By integrating spectral geometry principles into neural modeling, we show that this problem can be better addressed in the function…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2023

ASIF: Coupled Data Turns Unimodal Models to Multimodal without Training

NeurIPS 2023poster

CLIP proved that aligning visual and language spaces is key to solving many vision tasks without explicit training, but required to train image and text encoders from scratch on a huge dataset. LiT improved this by only training the text encoder and using a pre-trained vision network. In this paper,…

Cited by 36SourcePDFScholar
2023

Accelerating Transformer Inference for Translation via Parallel Decoding

ACL 2023long

Autoregressive decoding limits the efficiency of transformers for Machine Translation (MT). The community proposed specific network architectures and learning-based methods to solve this issue, which are expensive and require changes to the MT model, trading inference speed at the cost of the transl…

2023

Latent Space Translation via Semantic Alignment

NeurIPS 2023poster

While different neural models often exhibit latent spaces that are alike when exposed to semantically related data, this intrinsic similarity is not always immediately discernible. Towards a better understanding of this phenomenon, our work shows how representations learned from these neural modules…

2023

Relative representations enable zero-shot latent space communication

ICLR 2023top-5%

Neural networks embed the geometric structure of a data manifold lying in a high-dimensional space into latent representations. Ideally, the distribution of the data points in the latent space should depend only on the task, the data, the loss, and other architecture-specific constraints. However, f…

Cited by 101SourcePDFScholar
2021

WikiNEuRal: Combined Neural and Knowledge-based Silver Data Creation for Multilingual NER

EMNLP 2021finding

Multilingual Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a key intermediate task which is needed in many areas of NLP. In this paper, we address the well-known issue of data scarcity in NER, especially relevant when moving to a multilingual scenario, and go beyond current approaches to the creation of multili…