Background
Since 2024, I am an Associate Professor at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, where I work on Deep Learning, Vision-and-Language integration, Large-Scale models and Multimedia. I teach in the courses of "Computer Vision and Cognitive Systems," Scalable AI, and Computer Architecture. My research interests span various areas, including Vision-and-Language integration, Multimodal Retrieval, Image and Video Captioning, Visual-Semantic alignment, Large-Scale model development, HPC and Embodied AI.
I have authored more than 120 publications in international journals and conferences. Currently, I serve as an Associate Editor for Computer Vision and Image Understanding and Pattern Recognition and act as an Area Chair for ICCV and major multimedia conferences. I am also a Scholar in the ELLIS society (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems), where I coordinate the Modena ELLIS Unit.
Since 2021, I have held the position of deputy director at the Interdepartmental Center on Digital Humanities at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. Earlier in my career, in 2017, I worked at the Facebook AI Research laboratory in Paris under the supervision of Hervé Jégou. During that time, I worked on the development of a video-matching algorithm that was adopted in production on the social network to detect abusive content.
News
We have open research collaborator positions within the PRIN projects "MUCES - a Multimedia platform for Content Enrichment and Search in audiovisual archives" and "MUSMA: Multimedia Understanding meets Social Media Analysis". If you are interested, please get in touch!
Tutorial on AI and HPC at ICIAP 2025
We are glad to announce that we will organize, together with NVIDIA, a tutorial on AI and HPC at ICIAP 2025. The tutorial is organized as part of the MINERVA European Project.
Three papers accepted at CVPR 2025!
Our papers "Augmenting Multimodal LLMs with Self-Reflective Tokens for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering", "Recurrence-Enhanced Vision-and-Language Transformers for Robust Multimodal Document Retrieval" and "Hyperbolic Safety-Aware Vision-Language Models" (joint collaboration with UvA) have been accepted to CVPR 2025!
Update: "Hyperbolic Safety-Aware Vision-Language Models" has been selected as highlight paper!
Update: Me and four of my co-authors have been selected as Outstanding Reviewers.
IRCDL 2026 in Modena
Happy to share that we will host the 2026 edition of IRCDL, the Conference on Information and Research Science Connecting to Digital and Library Science.
Area Chair for ACM Multimedia 2025
Happy to share that I will serve as an Area Chair for ACM Multimedia 2025!
Paper accepted at ICLR 2025
Our paper "Causal Graphical Models for Vision-Language Compositional Understanding" (with F. Parascandolo, N. Moratelli, E. Sangineto, R. Cucchiara) has been accepted to ICLR 2025!
Associate Editor for Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU)
Happy to share that I joined the CVIU Editorial Board as an Associate Editor!
CADL Workshop accepted at ISC 2025
Our "Computational Aspects of Deep Learning" Workshop, organized in conjunction with NVIDIA and CINECA, has been accepted in ISC High Performance 2025, the HPC Event.
Area Chair for ICCV 2025
Happy to share that I will serve as an Area Chair for ICCV 2025!
Two papers accepted at WACV 2025
Glad to announce that our papers, "Semantically Conditioned Prompts for Visual Recognition under Missing Modality Scenarios" (with V. Pipoli, F. Bolelli, S. Sarto, M. Cornia, C. Grana, R. Cucchiara and E. Ficarra) and "Perceive, Query & Reason: Enhancing Video QA with Question-Guided Temporal Queries" (with R. Amoroso, G. Zhang, R. Koner, R. Cucchiara, V. Tresp) have been accepted at WACV 2025!
Featured publications
Recurrence-Enhanced Vision-and-Language Transformers for Robust Multimodal Document Retrieval
Davide Caffagni, Sara Sarto, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
CVPR 2025
Hyperbolic Safety-Aware Vision-Language Models
Tobia Poppi, Tejaswi Kasarla, Pascal Mettes, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
CVPR 2025 Highlight
Augmenting Multimodal LLMs with Self-Reflective Tokens for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering
Federico Cocchi, Nicholas Moratelli, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
CVPR 2025
Causal Graphical Models for Vision-Language Compositional Understanding
Fiorenzo Parascandolo, Nicholas Moratelli, Enver Sangineto, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
ICLR 2025
Personalized Instance-based Navigation Toward User-Specific Objects in Realistic Environments
Luca Barsellotti, Roberto Bigazzi, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
NeurIPS 2024, Datasets and Benchmarks track
Safe-CLIP: Removing NSFW Concepts from Vision-and-Language Models
Samuele Poppi, Tobia Poppi, Federico Cocchi, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
ECCV 2024
Contrasting Deepfakes Diffusion via Contrastive Learning and Global-Local Similarities
Lorenzo Baraldi, Federico Cocchi, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Alessandro Nicolosi, Rita Cucchiara
ECCV 2024
BRIDGE: Bridging Gaps in Image Captioning Evaluation with Stronger Visual Cues
Sara Sarto, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
ECCV 2024
Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Segmentation with Offline Diffusion-Augmented Prototype Generation
Luca Barsellotti, Roberto Amoroso, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The Revolution of Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey
Davide Caffagni, Federico Cocchi, Luca Barsellotti, Nicholas Moratelli, Sara Sarto, Lorenzo Baraldi, Lorenzo Baraldi, Marcella Cornia, Rita Cucchiara
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Courses
Scalable AI (2024/2025)
Course material
Laurea Magistrale in Ingegneria Informatica
Lorenzo Baraldi, Giuseppe Fiameni
Computer Vision and Cognitive Systems (2024/2025)
Course material
Laurea Magistrale in Ingegneria Informatica
Rita Cucchiara, Lorenzo Baraldi
AI for Automotive (2024/2025)
Electronic Engineering for Intelligent Vehicles
Rita Cucchiara, Lorenzo Baraldi
Architettura dei Calcolatori (2024/2025)
Course material
· Upcoming exams
Ingegneria Informatica
Rita Cucchiara, Lorenzo Baraldi