Maria-Teresa De Rosa-Palmini
Short Bio
I am a 2nd year PhD researcher at the Digital Society Initiative at the University of Zurich. My current research is embedded within the project "The Canon of Latent Spaces: How Large AI Models Encode Art and Culture" under the guidance of Dr. Eva Cetinić. I work on evaluation benchmarking and explainability for multimodal AI models, investigating how generative systems learn, represent, and reproduce cultural and societal knowledge, as well as how users interpret and interact with AI-generated content. By integrating methods from machine learning, digital humanities, and human–AI interaction, my work aims to support the development of AI systems that are more transparent, interpretable, and aligned with human values.
Research Interests
- Model Evaluation & Explainability
- AI Fairness
- Multimodal Models
- Cultural Bias
- Representation and Equity in Generative AI
Research Papers
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The Persistence of Cultural Memory: Investigating Multimodal Iconicity in Diffusion Models (2025). Maria-Teresa De Rosa Palmini and Eva Cetinic. Under Review. Preprint available on: ArXiv
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Synthetic History: Evaluating Visual Representations of the Past in Diffusion Models (2025). Maria-Teresa De Rosa Palmini and Eva Cetinic. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026). Available on: ArXiv
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Exploring Language Patterns of Prompts in Text-to-Image Generation and Their Impact on Visual Diversity (2025). Maria-Teresa De Rosa Palmini and Eva Cetinic. ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT 2025). Available on: ArXiv , Proceedings
- Civiverse: A Dataset for Analyzing User Engagement with Open-Source Text-to-Image Models (2024). Maria-Teresa De Rosa Palmini, Laura Wagner, Eva Cetinic. Critical evaluation of generative models and their impact on society (CEGIS) workshop at European Conference of Computer Vision (ECCV 2024). Available on: ArXiv , Proceedings