Here you can find a consolidated (a.k.a. slowly updated) list of my publications. A frequently updated (and possibly noisy) list of works is available on my Google Scholar profile.
Please find below a short list of highlight publications for my recent activity.
Caro, Valerio De; Bano, Saira; Machumilane, Achilles; Gotta, Alberto; Cassará, Pietro; Carta, Antonio; Sardianos, Christos; Chronis, Christos; Varlamis, Iraklis; Tserpes, Konstantinos; Lomonaco, Vincenzo; Gallicchio, Claudio; Bacciu, Davide AI-as-a-Service Toolkit for Human-Centered Intelligence in Autonomous Driving Conference Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2022), 2022. Lanciano, Giacomo; Galli, Filippo; Cucinotta, Tommaso; Bacciu, Davide; Passarella, Andrea Predictive Auto-scaling with OpenStack Monasca Conference Proceedings of the 14th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2021), 2021. Cossu, Andrea; Carta, Antonio; Lomonaco, Vincenzo; Bacciu, Davide Continual Learning for Recurrent Neural Networks: an Empirical Evaluation Journal Article In: Neural Networks, vol. 143, pp. 607-627, 2021. Carta, Antonio; Sperduti, Alessandro; Bacciu, Davide Encoding-based Memory for Recurrent Neural Networks Journal Article In: Neurocomputing, vol. 456, pp. 407-420, 2021. Averta, Giuseppe; Barontini, Federica; Valdambrini, Irene; Cheli, Paolo; Bacciu, Davide; Bianchi, Matteo Learning to Prevent Grasp Failure with Soft Hands: From Online Prediction to Dual-Arm Grasp Recovery Journal Article In: Advanced Intelligent Systems, 2021. Cossu, Andrea; Bacciu, Davide; Carta, Antonio; Gallicchio, Claudio; Lomonaco, Vincenzo Continual Learning with Echo State Networks Conference Proceedings of the 29th European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks, Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning (ESANN 2021)
, vol. 275-280, 2021. Resta, Michele; Monreale, Anna; Bacciu, Davide Occlusion-based Explanations in Deep Recurrent Models for Biomedical Signals Journal Article In: Entropy, vol. 23, no. 8, pp. 1064, 2021, (Special issue on Representation Learning). Bacciu, Davide; Sarli, Daniele Di; Faraji, Pouria; Gallicchio, Claudio; Micheli, Alessio Federated Reservoir Computing Neural Networks Conference Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2021), IEEE, 2021. Michele Barsotti Andrea Valenti, Davide Bacciu; Ascari, Luca A Deep Classifier for Upper-Limbs Motor Anticipation Tasks in an Online BCI Setting Journal Article In: Bioengineering , 2021. Carta, Antonio; Sperduti, Alessandro; Bacciu, Davide Short-Term Memory Optimization in Recurrent Neural Networks by Autoencoder-based Initialization Workshop 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020), Workshop on Beyond BackPropagation: Novel Ideas for Training Neural Architectures, 2020. Valenti, Andrea; Barsotti, Michele; Brondi, Raffaello; Bacciu, Davide; Ascari, Luca Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), IEEE, 2020. Cossu, Andrea; Carta, Antonio; Bacciu, Davide Continual Learning with Gated Incremental Memories for Sequential Data Processing Conference Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, 2020.@conference{decaro2022aiasaservice,
title = {AI-as-a-Service Toolkit for Human-Centered Intelligence in Autonomous Driving},
author = {Valerio De Caro and Saira Bano and Achilles Machumilane and Alberto Gotta and Pietro Cassará and Antonio Carta and Christos Sardianos and Christos Chronis and Iraklis Varlamis and Konstantinos Tserpes and Vincenzo Lomonaco and Claudio Gallicchio and Davide Bacciu},
url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.01645.pdf, arxiv},
year = {2022},
date = {2022-03-21},
urldate = {2022-03-21},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2022)},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
@conference{Lanciano2021,
title = { Predictive Auto-scaling with OpenStack Monasca},
author = {Giacomo Lanciano and Filippo Galli and Tommaso Cucinotta and Davide Bacciu and Andrea Passarella},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.02133, Arxiv},
doi = {10.1145/3468737.3494104},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-12-06},
urldate = {2021-12-06},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 14th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2021)},
pages = {1-10},
abstract = {Cloud auto-scaling mechanisms are typically based on reactive automation rules that scale a cluster whenever some metric, e.g., the average CPU usage among instances, exceeds a predefined threshold. Tuning these rules becomes particularly cumbersome when scaling-up a cluster involves non-negligible times to bootstrap new instances, as it happens frequently in production cloud services.
To deal with this problem, we propose an architecture for auto-scaling cloud services based on the status in which the system is expected to evolve in the near future. Our approach leverages on time-series forecasting techniques, like those based on machine learning and artificial neural networks, to predict the future dynamics of key metrics, e.g., resource consumption metrics, and apply a threshold-based scaling policy on them. The result is a predictive automation policy that is able, for instance, to automatically anticipate peaks in the load of a cloud application and trigger ahead of time appropriate scaling actions to accommodate the expected increase in traffic.
We prototyped our approach as an open-source OpenStack component, which relies on, and extends, the monitoring capabilities offered by Monasca, resulting in the addition of predictive metrics that can be leveraged by orchestration components like Heat or Senlin. We show experimental results using a recurrent neural network and a multi-layer perceptron as predictor, which are compared with a simple linear regression and a traditional non-predictive auto-scaling policy. However, the proposed framework allows for the easy customization of the prediction policy as needed. },
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
To deal with this problem, we propose an architecture for auto-scaling cloud services based on the status in which the system is expected to evolve in the near future. Our approach leverages on time-series forecasting techniques, like those based on machine learning and artificial neural networks, to predict the future dynamics of key metrics, e.g., resource consumption metrics, and apply a threshold-based scaling policy on them. The result is a predictive automation policy that is able, for instance, to automatically anticipate peaks in the load of a cloud application and trigger ahead of time appropriate scaling actions to accommodate the expected increase in traffic.
We prototyped our approach as an open-source OpenStack component, which relies on, and extends, the monitoring capabilities offered by Monasca, resulting in the addition of predictive metrics that can be leveraged by orchestration components like Heat or Senlin. We show experimental results using a recurrent neural network and a multi-layer perceptron as predictor, which are compared with a simple linear regression and a traditional non-predictive auto-scaling policy. However, the proposed framework allows for the easy customization of the prediction policy as needed. @article{Cossu2021b,
title = {Continual Learning for Recurrent Neural Networks: an Empirical Evaluation},
author = {Andrea Cossu and Antonio Carta and Vincenzo Lomonaco and Davide Bacciu},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.07492, Arxiv},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-12-03},
urldate = {2021-12-03},
journal = {Neural Networks},
volume = {143},
pages = {607-627},
abstract = { Learning continuously during all model lifetime is fundamental to deploy machine learning solutions robust to drifts in the data distribution. Advances in Continual Learning (CL) with recurrent neural networks could pave the way to a large number of applications where incoming data is non stationary, like natural language processing and robotics. However, the existing body of work on the topic is still fragmented, with approaches which are application-specific and whose assessment is based on heterogeneous learning protocols and datasets. In this paper, we organize the literature on CL for sequential data processing by providing a categorization of the contributions and a review of the benchmarks. We propose two new benchmarks for CL with sequential data based on existing datasets, whose characteristics resemble real-world applications. We also provide a broad empirical evaluation of CL and Recurrent Neural Networks in class-incremental scenario, by testing their ability to mitigate forgetting with a number of different strategies which are not specific to sequential data processing. Our results highlight the key role played by the sequence length and the importance of a clear specification of the CL scenario. },
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}
@article{Carta2021b,
title = {Encoding-based Memory for Recurrent Neural Networks},
author = {Antonio Carta and Alessandro Sperduti and Davide Bacciu},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.11771, Arxiv},
doi = {10.1016/j.neucom.2021.04.051},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-10-07},
urldate = {2021-10-07},
journal = {Neurocomputing},
volume = {456},
pages = {407-420},
publisher = {Elsevier},
abstract = {Learning to solve sequential tasks with recurrent models requires the ability to memorize long sequences and to extract task-relevant features from them. In this paper, we study the memorization subtask from the point of view of the design and training of recurrent neural networks. We propose a new model, the Linear Memory Network, which features an encoding-based memorization component built with a linear autoencoder for sequences. We extend the memorization component with a modular memory that encodes the hidden state sequence at different sampling frequencies. Additionally, we provide a specialized training algorithm that initializes the memory to efficiently encode the hidden activations of the network. The experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets show that specializing the training algorithm to train the memorization component always improves the final performance whenever the memorization of long sequences is necessary to solve the problem. },
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}
@article{Averta2021,
title = {Learning to Prevent Grasp Failure with Soft Hands: From Online Prediction to Dual-Arm Grasp Recovery},
author = {Giuseppe Averta and Federica Barontini and Irene Valdambrini and Paolo Cheli and Davide Bacciu and Matteo Bianchi},
doi = {10.1002/aisy.202100146},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-10-07},
urldate = {2021-10-07},
journal = {Advanced Intelligent Systems},
abstract = {Soft hands allow to simplify the grasp planning to achieve a successful grasp, thanks to their intrinsic adaptability. At the same time, their usage poses new challenges, related to the adoption of classical sensing techniques originally developed for rigid end defectors, which provide fundamental information, such as to detect object slippage. Under this regard, model-based approaches for the processing of the gathered information are hard to use, due to the difficulties in modeling hand–object interaction when softness is involved. To overcome these limitations, in this article, we proposed to combine distributed tactile sensing and machine learning (recurrent neural network) to detect sliding conditions for a soft robotic hand mounted on a robotic manipulator, targeting the prediction of the grasp failure event and the direction of sliding. The outcomes of these predictions allow for an online triggering of a compensatory action performed with a second robotic arm–hand system, to prevent the failure. Despite the fact that the network is trained only with spherical and cylindrical objects, we demonstrate high generalization capabilities of our framework, achieving a correct prediction of the failure direction in 75% of cases, and a 85% of successful regrasps, for a selection of 12 objects of common use.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}
@conference{Cossu2021,
title = { Continual Learning with Echo State Networks },
author = {Andrea Cossu and Davide Bacciu and Antonio Carta and Claudio Gallicchio and Vincenzo Lomonaco},
editor = {Michel Verleysen},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.07674, Arxiv},
doi = {10.14428/esann/2021.ES2021-80},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-10-06},
urldate = {2021-10-06},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 29th European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks, Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning (ESANN 2021)
},
volume = {275-280},
abstract = { Continual Learning (CL) refers to a learning setup where data is non stationary and the model has to learn without forgetting existing knowledge. The study of CL for sequential patterns revolves around trained recurrent networks. In this work, instead, we introduce CL in the context of Echo State Networks (ESNs), where the recurrent component is kept fixed. We provide the first evaluation of catastrophic forgetting in ESNs and we highlight the benefits in using CL strategies which are not applicable to trained recurrent models. Our results confirm the ESN as a promising model for CL and open to its use in streaming scenarios. },
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
@article{Resta2021,
title = { Occlusion-based Explanations in Deep Recurrent Models for Biomedical Signals },
author = {Michele Resta and Anna Monreale and Davide Bacciu},
editor = {Fabio Aiolli and Mirko Polato},
doi = {10.3390/e23081064},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-09-01},
urldate = {2021-09-01},
journal = {Entropy},
volume = {23},
number = {8},
pages = {1064},
abstract = { The biomedical field is characterized by an ever-increasing production of sequential data, which often come under the form of biosignals capturing the time-evolution of physiological processes, such as blood pressure and brain activity. This has motivated a large body of research dealing with the development of machine learning techniques for the predictive analysis of such biosignals. Unfortunately, in high-stakes decision making, such as clinical diagnosis, the opacity of machine learning models becomes a crucial aspect to be addressed in order to increase the trust and adoption of AI technology. In this paper we propose a model agnostic explanation method, based on occlusion, enabling the learning of the input influence on the model predictions. We specifically target problems involving the predictive analysis of time-series data and the models which are typically used to deal with data of such nature, i.e. recurrent neural networks. Our approach is able to provide two different kinds of explanations: one suitable for technical experts, who need to verify the quality and correctness of machine learning models, and one suited to physicians, who need to understand the rationale underlying the prediction to take aware decisions. A wide experimentation on different physiological data demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, both in classification and regression tasks. },
note = {Special issue on Representation Learning},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}
@conference{BacciuIJCNN2021,
title = {Federated Reservoir Computing Neural Networks},
author = {Davide Bacciu and Daniele Di Sarli and Pouria Faraji and Claudio Gallicchio and Alessio Micheli},
doi = {10.1109/IJCNN52387.2021.9534035},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-07-18},
urldate = {2021-07-18},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN 2021)},
publisher = {IEEE},
abstract = {A critical aspect in Federated Learning is the aggregation strategy for the combination of multiple models, trained on the edge, into a single model that incorporates all the knowledge in the federation. Common Federated Learning approaches for Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) do not provide guarantees on the predictive performance of the aggregated model. In this paper we show how the use of Echo State Networks (ESNs), which are efficient state-of-the-art RNN models for time-series processing, enables a form of federation that is optimal in the sense that it produces models mathematically equivalent to the corresponding centralized model. Furthermore, the proposed method is compliant with privacy constraints. The proposed method, which we denote as Incremental Federated Learning, is experimentally evaluated against an averaging strategy on two datasets for human state and activity recognition.},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
@article{Valenti2021,
title = {A Deep Classifier for Upper-Limbs Motor Anticipation Tasks in an Online BCI Setting},
author = {Andrea Valenti, Michele Barsotti, Davide Bacciu and Luca Ascari
},
url = {https://www.mdpi.com/2306-5354/8/2/21, Open Access },
doi = {10.3390/bioengineering8020021},
year = {2021},
date = {2021-02-05},
urldate = {2021-02-05},
journal = {Bioengineering },
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {article}
}
@workshop{CartaNeuripsWS2020,
title = { Short-Term Memory Optimization in Recurrent Neural Networks by Autoencoder-based Initialization },
author = {Antonio Carta and Alessandro Sperduti and Davide Bacciu
},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.02886, Arxiv},
year = {2020},
date = {2020-12-11},
urldate = {2020-12-11},
booktitle = {34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020), Workshop on Beyond BackPropagation: Novel Ideas for Training Neural Architectures},
abstract = {Training RNNs to learn long-term dependencies is difficult due to vanishing gradients. We explore an alternative solution based on explicit memorization using linear autoencoders for sequences, which allows to maximize the short-term memory and that can be solved with a closed-form solution without backpropagation. We introduce an initialization schema that pretrains the weights of a recurrent neural network to approximate the linear autoencoder of the input sequences and we show how such pretraining can better support solving hard classification tasks with long sequences. We test our approach on sequential and permuted MNIST. We show that the proposed approach achieves a much lower reconstruction error for long sequences and a better gradient propagation during the finetuning phase. },
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {workshop}
}
@conference{smc2020,
title = {ROS-Neuro Integration of Deep Convolutional Autoencoders for EEG Signal Compression in Real-time BCIs},
author = {Andrea Valenti and Michele Barsotti and Raffaello Brondi and Davide Bacciu and Luca Ascari},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.13485, Arxiv},
year = {2020},
date = {2020-10-11},
urldate = {2020-10-11},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC)},
publisher = {IEEE},
abstract = { Typical EEG-based BCI applications require the computation of complex functions over the noisy EEG channels to be carried out in an efficient way. Deep learning algorithms are capable of learning flexible nonlinear functions directly from data, and their constant processing latency is perfect for their deployment into online BCI systems. However, it is crucial for the jitter of the processing system to be as low as possible, in order to avoid unpredictable behaviour that can ruin the system's overall usability. In this paper, we present a novel encoding method, based on on deep convolutional autoencoders, that is able to perform efficient compression of the raw EEG inputs. We deploy our model in a ROS-Neuro node, thus making it suitable for the integration in ROS-based BCI and robotic systems in real world scenarios. The experimental results show that our system is capable to generate meaningful compressed encoding preserving to original information contained in the raw input. They also show that the ROS-Neuro node is able to produce such encodings at a steady rate, with minimal jitter. We believe that our system can represent an important step towards the development of an effective BCI processing pipeline fully standardized in ROS-Neuro framework. },
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}
@conference{Wcci20CL,
title = {Continual Learning with Gated Incremental Memories for Sequential Data Processing},
author = {Andrea Cossu and Antonio Carta and Davide Bacciu},
url = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.04077.pdf, Arxiv},
doi = {10.1109/IJCNN48605.2020.9207550},
year = {2020},
date = {2020-07-19},
urldate = {2020-07-19},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence},
keywords = {},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {conference}
}