Paolo Rota

Associate Professor @ CIMeC/DISI - University of Trento

cognition Palazzo Fedrigotti - Room 216 - Rovereto
network_intelligence Polo Ferrari - Room 214 - Povo

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About me

I am Paolo Rota, associate 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.

News

21/07/2025

Alessandro successfully defended his PhD! Congrats!

21/07/2025

Paper accepted at ICIAP 2025 as oral presentation!

26/06/2025

Paper accepted at ICCV 2025!!

03/04/2025

Introduction to Machine Learning (for MSc in Data Science) web slides

03/03/2025

Paper accepted at CVPR 2025!

Current Students

Benedetta Liberatori

Co-advised with Elisa Ricci

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Vision and Language

Video Understanding

Jiaqi Liu

Co-advised with Nicu Sebe

Image Generation

Pose Transfer

Yan Shu

Co-advised with Nicu Sebe

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Remote Sensing

Vision and Language

Shiyao Xu

Co-advised with Gül Varol

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3D Human Motion Understanding

Vision and Language

Ester Riccardi

Co-advised with Roberto Bottini

Biological-inspired Media Generation

Former Students

Alessandro Conti

Giacomo Zara

Recent Publications

On Large Multimodal Models as Open-World Image Classifiers

Alessandro Conti, Massimiliano Mancini, Enrico Fini, Yiming Wang, Paolo Rota, Elisa Ricci. ICCV 2025.

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Automatic benchmarking of large multimodal models via iterative experiment programming

Alessandro Conti, Enrico Fini, Paolo Rota, Yiming Wang, Massimiliano Mancini, Elisa Ricci. ICIAP 2025.

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Multi-focal Conditioned Latent Diffusion for Person Image Synthesis

Jiaqi Liu, Jichao Zhang, Paolo Rota, Nicu Sebe. CVPR 2025.

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project page

Simplifying Open-Set Video Domain Adaptation with Contrastive Learning

Giacomo Zara, Victor Guilherme Turrisi da Costa, Subhankar Roy, Paolo Rota, Elisa Ricci. CVIU 2024.

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Text-Enhanced Zero-Shot Action Recognition: A Training-Free Approach

Massimo Bosetti, Shibingfeng Zhang, Benedetta Liberatori, Giacomo Zara, Elisa Ricci, Paolo Rota. ICPR 2024.

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Test-time zero-shot temporal action localization

Benedetta Liberatori, Alessandro Conti, Paolo Rota, Yiming Wang, Elisa Ricci. CVPR 2024.

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AutoLabel: CLIP-based framework for open-set video domain adaptation

Giacomo Zara, Subhankar Roy, Paolo Rota, Elisa Ricci. CVPR 2023.

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The unreasonable effectiveness of large language-vision models for source-free video domain adaptation

Giacomo Zara, Alessandro Conti, Subhankar Roy, Stéphane Lathuilière, Paolo Rota, Elisa Ricci. ICCV 2023.

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Vocabulary-free image classification

Alessandro Conti, Enrico Fini, Massimiliano Mancini, Paolo Rota, Yiming Wang, Elisa Ricci. NeurIPS 2023.

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