SYNASC 2026

28th International Symposium on Symbolic and Numeric Algorithms for Scientific Computing

September 14-17, Timișoara, România

INVITED SPEAKER

How AI Learns to See, Generate, and Judge Fairly

Nicu Sebe

University of Trento, Italy

ABSTRACT

In the first part of the lecture, I will explore how we teach AI to generate videos without relying on detailed annotations or object specific labels. By training on collections of similar videos – such as faces or human bodies – the model learns to generalize across an entire category. Building on this idea, we developed a Learnable Game Engine (LGE) that learns from simple monocular videos to keep track of scenes and objects and to re render them from different viewpoints. Much like a real game engine, it captures basic physics and logic, allowing users to control the scene or guide virtual agents through high level language instructions. The second part of the lecture turns to the safety and fairness of generative AI. Most existing approaches look only for predefined types of bias, but real world systems can exhibit unexpected ones. To address this, we introduce OpenBias, a method that uncovers and measures previously unknown biases in text to image models without relying on any preset list. Our experiments show that OpenBias aligns well with established methods and with human judgment, offering a more flexible way to assess fairness in generative systems.

SHORT BIO

Nicu Sebe is a professor in the University of Trento, Italy, where he is leading the research in the areas of multimedia information retrieval and human-computer interaction in computer vision applications. He received his PhD from the University of Leiden, The Netherlands and has been in the past with the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He was involved in the organization of the major conferences and workshops addressing the computer vision and human-centered aspects of multimedia information retrieval, among which as a General Co-Chair of the IEEE Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition Conference, FG 2008, ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval (ICMR) 2017 and ACM Multimedia 2013. He was a program chair of ACM Multimedia 2011 and 2007, ECCV 2016, ICCV 2017, ICPR 2020 and a general chair of ACM Multimedia 2022. He was a program chair of CVPR 2027 and a General Chair of ACM Multimedia 2027 and ECCV 2028. He is the Co-Editor in Chief of the Computer Vision and Image Understanding journal. He is a fellow of ELLIS, IAPR and a Senior member of ACM and IEEE.