About
I am Paolo Rota, a researcher and assistant professor at the University of Trento, working in computer vision, machine learning, and multimodal AI. My research focuses on vision-language models and activity recognition, with applications in video analytics and industrial AI.
Recently, I have been exploring topics such as zero-shot action recognition, temporal action localization, and vocabulary-free image classification, contributing to publications at conferences like CVPR, NeurIPS, and ICCV. I enjoy tackling challenges in open-world recognition and multimodal learning, always looking for ways to improve AI’s practical impact.
Outside of academia, I co-founded Mountain Maps, a startup that uses AI to enhance outdoor navigation and help people explore mountain environments more safely and enjoyably.
Research Interests
Vision and Language
Motion Understanding
Video Understanding
Supervisees
Papers (25)
2026
CVPR 2026
TerraScope: Pixel-Grounded Visual Reasoning for Earth Observation
2025
NeurIPS 2025
ConViS-Bench: Estimating Video Similarity Through Semantic Concepts
NeurIPS 2025
Oral
ImageNet-trained CNNs are not biased towards texture: Revisiting feature reliance through controlled suppression
Tom Burgert, Oliver Stoll, Paolo Rota, Begüm Demir
ICCV 2025
On Large Multimodal Models as Open-World Image Classifiers
ICIAP 2025
Automatic benchmarking of large multimodal models via iterative experiment programming
CVPR 2025
Multi-focal Conditioned Latent Diffusion for Person Image Synthesis
2024
CVPR 2024
Test-Time Zero-Shot Temporal Action Localization
ICPR 2024
Text-Enhanced Zero-Shot Action Recognition: A training-free approach
2023
CVPR 2023
AutoLabel: CLIP-based framework for Open-set Video Domain Adaptation
ICCV 2023
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Large Language-Vision Models for Source-free Video Domain Adaptation
NeurIPS 2023
Vocabulary-free Image Classification
2022
BMVC 2022
Cluster-level pseudo-labelling for source-free cross-domain facial expression recognition
CVIU 2022
Low-budget label query through domain alignment enforcement
ICPR 2022
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Video Transformers in Action Recognition
Victor G. Turrisi da Costa, Giacomo Zara, Paolo Rota, Thiago Oliveira-Santos, Nicu Sebe, Vittorio Murino, Elisa Ricci
IEEE Trans. Image Process. 2022
Variational Structured Attention Networks for Deep Visual Representation Learning
IEEE Trans. Multimedia 2022
Continual Attentive Fusion for Incremental Learning in Semantic Segmentation
Guanglei Yang, Enrico Fini, Dan Xu, Paolo Rota, Mingli Ding, Hao Tang, Xavier Alameda-Pineda, Elisa Ricci
TPAMI 2022
Uncertainty-aware Contrastive Distillation for Incremental Semantic Segmentation
Guanglei Yang, Enrico Fini, Dan Xu, Paolo Rota, Mingli Ding, Moin Nabi, Xavier Alameda-Pineda, Elisa Ricci
WACV 2022
Dual-Head Contrastive Domain Adaptation for Video Action Recognition
Victor G. Turrisi da Costa, Giacomo Zara, Paolo Rota, Thiago Oliveira-Santos, Nicu Sebe, Vittorio Murino, Elisa Ricci
2021
CVIU 2021
Curriculum self-paced learning for cross-domain object detection
2020
ACM Multimedia 2020
Class-Aware Modality Mix and Center-Guided Metric Learning for Visible-Thermal Person Re-Identification
Yongguo Ling, Zhun Zhong, Zhiming Luo, Paolo Rota, Shaozi Li, Nicu Sebe
IEEE Trans. Med. Imaging 2020
Deep learning for classification and localization of COVID-19 markers in point-of-care lung ultrasound
Subhankar Roy, Willi Menapace, Sebastiaan Oei, Ben Luijten, Enrico Fini, Cristiano Saltori, Iris Huijben, Nishith Chennakeshava, Federico Mento, Alessandro Sentelli, Emanuele Peschiera, Riccardo Trevisan, Giovanni Maschietto, Elena Torri, Riccardo Inchingolo, Andrea Smargiassi, Gino Soldati, Paolo Rota, Andrea Passerini, Ruud J G van Sloun, Elisa Ricci, Libertario Demi
arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.00238 2020
Low-Budget Unsupervised Label Query through Domain Alignment Enforcement
2019
CVPR Workshop 2019
Cut Quality Estimation in Industrial Laser Cutting Machines: A Machine Learning Approach
Giorgio Santolini, Paolo Rota, Davide Gandolfi, Paolo Bosetti