I am Antonio Norelli, a Computer Science PhD student at the Sapienza University of Rome working on AI and deep learning in the GLADIA research group, advised by Emanuele Rodolร .
Before joining the group, I graduated in physics in 2016 (BSc), with a thesis on using neural networks to spot dark photons at CERN, advised by Stefano Giagu;
and two years later in computer science (MSc), by defeating the Italian Othello champion with a cheap reimplementation of AlphaGo Zero from scratch, advised by Alessandro Panconesi.
Along with Roberto Di Leonardo, he was also my tutor at the formidable Sapienza School for Advanced Studies.
Before and during my PhD, I worked as a Research Intern for Spiketrap with Andrea Vattani,
and as an Applied Scientist Intern for the Amazon Lablet in Tรผbingen with Francesco Locatello.
Recently, I spent time with Alex Bronsteinโs group at Technion in Haifa.
What makes us humans? I am interested in the intelligence that accounts for the difference existing between human beings and the other animals.
To me this gap is on par to the one between life and non-life and is the consequence of a fundamental property of nature, that should be understood in terms of information processing. Currently, I am persuaded that this intelligence coincides with our use of symbols, and that we shall model the mechanism through which humans link meaning to new signs. As when a scientist proposes a new theory.
Highlights of my research in this direction
- When a ML system becomes an artificial scientist: mastering the game of Zendo with Transformers.
Explanatory Learning: Beyond Empiricism in Neural Networks, 2022 [arXiv] [code] [Twitter thread] [Judea Pearl about this work]. - The meaning was already there: connecting text and images without training a neural network to do so.
ASIF: Coupled Data Turns Unimodal Models to Multimodal Without Training, 2022 [arXiv] [code] [Alex Smola about this work].
Other featured research
- It happens that different neural networks trained on the same stuff learn intrinsically equivalent latent spaces.
Relative Representations Enable Zero-shot Latent Space Communication, 2022 [arXiv] [code] [Oral at ICLR23 with 8-8-10 reviews]. - AlphaGo Zero for Othello. With two ideas to speed up the learning, and tested in a live match against a former world champion.
OLIVAW: Mastering Othello without Human Knowledge, nor a Penny, 2022 [arXiv] [Trailer of the match]. - With the right geometric prior, 11 samples are enough to train a generative model for 3D shapes of humans or animals.
LIMP: Learning Latent Shape Representations with Metric Preservation Priors, 2020 [arXiv] [code] [Oral at ECCV 2020 (2 min, 10min video)]. - The task with the widest gap between human and machine performance in BIG-bench, a collaborative effort to test Language Models.
Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and Extrapolating the Capabilities of Language Models, 2022 [arXiv] [SIT task].
Check my Google Scholar profile for a complete list of my articles.
Selected Invited Talks
- 12/06/2023 Simons Institute at the University of California, Berkeley (US ๐บ๐ธ). Opening talk at the workshop Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species II, organized by David Gruber, Shafi Goldwasser, and Michael Bronstein. Explanatory Learning: Unleashing New Knowledge in Unknown Languages [video recording]
- 15/02/2023 Univeristy of Cambridge, CS department (UK ๐ฌ๐ง). ASIF: Coupled Data Turns Unimodal Models to Multimodal Without Training
- 12/09/2022 Tokyo Institute of Technology, CS department (Japan ๐ฏ๐ต). From sound to metric priors: new paradigms for shape generation
- 09/06/2022 Quantum Photonics, ONG (Virtual ๐). How to create an artificial scientist
- 17/12/2021 International Symposium โGiornalismo e disinformazioneโ, UniPa (Palermo, ๐ฎ๐น). Unire i puntini: meraviglie e limiti dei moderni sistemi di IA
- 12/06/2020 Cassini Junior Workshop, French Embassy in Italy and SSAS (Rome ๐ฎ๐น). Towards a human-level artificial intelligence
- 19/02/2019 Italian Association for Machine Learning, ML meetup (Rome ๐ฎ๐น): The italian AlphaZero [360ยฐ clip]
Advising
I enjoy mentoring younger students and coadvising them on their thesis with prof. Rodolร . If you are super passionate about AI and looking for what to do next or for a thesis (maybe an AI agent for a board game involving a cool challenge?) feel free to reach out at [my last name] at di.uniroma1.it!
Students I am advising/had advised on their BSc/MSc thesis:
- Robert Adrian Minut, MSc, Backward LLMs (Now PhD at Sapienza)
- Alessandro Zirilli, BSc, AlphaZero for Hex
- Ahmedeo Shokry, MSc, AI and Feynman Diagrams
- Giovanni Quadraroli, BSc, DeepRL for Space Invaders
- Guido Maria DโAmely Di Melendugno, MSc, DL for Contract Bridge (Now PhD at Sapienza)
News
- 22/09/2023 ๐ค Invited talk at CENTAI (Turin, Italy ๐ฎ๐น), hosted by the wonderful group of Giovanni Petri: Explanatory Learning: Towards Artificial Scientific Discovery.
- 21/09/2023 ๐ฐ Two papers accepted at NeurIPS 23: ASIF: Coupled Data Turns Unimodal Models to Multimodal without Training and Latent Space Translation via Semantic Alignment, see you in New Orleans! ๐
- 08/08/2023 ๐ UniReps Workshop accepted at NeurIPS 2023! We will talk about Unifying Representations in Neural Models in New Orleans this November. I will serve as panel chair.
- 28/07/2023 ๐ฐ Presented our poster at the KLR workshop at ICML (Honolulu, US ๐บ๐ธ): Explanatory Learning: Towards Artificial Scientific Discovery
- 17/07/2023 ๐ค Invited speaker at the workshop il Futuro Annunciato, to show the golden path of Computer Science to young students from physics and other hard sciences. (Rocca Sinibalda, Italy ๐ฎ๐น)
- 14/07/2023 ๐ Back in Rome from Haifa: end of my visit at Technion. Updates on my project there soon!
- 15/06/2023 ๐ฌ Invited research visit to the Stanford NLP group (Palo Alto, US ๐บ๐ธ) hosted by Federico Bianchi to talk about ASIF.
- 14/06/2023 ๐ค Invited talk at BAIR (US ๐บ๐ธ), hosted by the Berkeley NLP Group: Explanatory Learning: Unleashing New Knowledge in Unknown Languages.
- 12/06/2023 ๐ค Invited talk at the Simons Institute at the University of California, Berkeley (US ๐บ๐ธ), for the workshop Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species II, organized by David Gruber, Shafi Goldwasser, and Michael Bronstein. Explanatory Learning: Unleashing New Knowledge in Unknown Languages [video recording]
- 05/05/2023 ๐ค Invited speaker at the panel Intelligenza artificiale: il racconto del cinema tra fantascienza e scenari of the 2023 Catania Book Festival (Catania, Italy ๐ฎ๐น).
- 18/03/2023 ๐ Moving to Haifa (Israel ๐ฎ๐ฑ) to start a research visit at Technion to work with Alex Bronstein.
- 21/02/2023 ๐ฌ Invited research visit to Deepmind (London, UK ๐ฌ๐ง) hosted by MarcโAurelio Ranzato to talk about ASIF and RelReps.
- 20/02/2023 ๐ฌ Invited research visit to the University of Oxford (UK ๐ฌ๐ง) hosted by Michael Bronstein to talk about Explanatory Learning, ASIF, and RelReps [Emanuele giving the talk].
- 16/02/2023 ๐ค Invited talk at Autodesk London (UK ๐ฌ๐ง) hosted by Hooman Shayani: ASIF: Coupled Data Turns Unimodal Models to Multimodal Without Training.
- 15/02/2023 ๐ค Invited talk at the University of Cambridge (UK ๐ฌ๐ง) hosted by Pietro Liรฒ: ASIF: Coupled Data Turns Unimodal Models to Multimodal Without Training.
- 14/02/2023 ๐ฌ Invited research visit to Imperial College London (UK ๐ฌ๐ง) hosted by Fabrizio Frasca to talk about ASIF and RelReps. [Lucaโs talk before mine].
- 13/02/2023 ๐ฌ Invited research visit to University College London (UK ๐ฌ๐ง), hosted by Andrew Saxe to talk about RelReps. [Lunch selfie]
- 07/02/2023 ๐ฌ Invited research visit to BOSCH AI (Renningen, Germany ๐ฉ๐ช) to talk about applications of our latest work Relative Representations Enable Zero-shot Latent Space Communication (RelReps).
- 02-03/2023 ๐จโ๐ซ Teaching assistant of the 2023 Deep Learning & applied AI course in Sapienza CS master degree. I was responsible for the first lab sessions (5 hours).
- 21/01/2023 ๐ฐ Relative Representations Enable Zero-shot Latent Space Communication accepted as notable-top-5% at ICLR-2023.
- 04/10/2022 ๐ฐ ASIF: Coupled Data Turns Unimodal Models to Multimodal Without Training is now on arXiv!
- 20/09/2022 ๐ค Invited speaker at the symposium Saremo assimilati? Meraviglie, trappole e limiti dellโintelligenza artificiale, organized by the italian Order of Journalists (Cagliari, Italy ๐ฎ๐น).
- 12/09/2022 ๐ค Invited talk at the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo, Japan ๐ฏ๐ต) hosted by Asako Kanezaki: From sound to metric priors: new paradigms for shape generation
- 06/09/2022 ๐ฐ Errare humanum est? a pilot study to evaluate the human-likeness of a AI othello playing agent published at IVA 22
- 05/09/2022 ๐ฐ Presented our poster at the ml4evolang workshop at the JCoLE conference (Kanazawa, Japan ๐ฏ๐ต): Learning to make sense out of ambiguous messages leads to language evolution, a simulation
- 19/07/2022 ๐ค Invited talk at DataScienceSeed (in italian, virtual): Explanatory Learning: puรฒ una macchina imparare a formulare teorie?
- 15/07/2022 ๐ Back in Rome from Tรผbingen: end of my internship at Amazon (internship project: ASIF)
- 09/06/2022 โญ Our Symbol Interpretation Task in BIG-bench is the one with the widest gap between human and machine performance
- 09/06/2022 ๐ค Invited talk at Quantum Photonics (virtual): How to create an artificial scientist
- 27/04/2022 ๐จโ๐ซ Guest lecture for the Computer Science course in Sapienza Deep Learning and applied AI, titled Towards an artificial scientist.
- 08/03/2022 ๐ฐ OLIVAW: Mastering Othello without Human Knowledge, nor a Penny published on IEEE Transactions on Games
- 25/01/2022 ๐ฐ Explanatory Learning: Beyond Empiricism in Neural Networks is now on arXiv! Twitter thread
- 15/01/2022 ๐ Moving to Tรผbingen (Germany ๐ฉ๐ช) to start a research internship at Amazon Science where I will work with Francesco Locatello.
- 17/12/2021 ๐ค Invited speaker at the International Symposium Giornalismo e disinformazione at UniPa (Palermo, Italy ๐ฎ๐น), panel Umano, troppo umano? Intelligenza Artificiale e disinformazione
- 08/11/2021 ๐ Organizer of the Sapienza CS Doctoral Workshop 2021 in the fortress of the medieval village of Bertinoro (Italy ๐ฎ๐น), a four-day summit of talks, activities, and networking.
- 02-05/2021 ๐จโ๐ซ Teaching assistant of the 2021 Deep Learning & applied AI course in Sapienza CS master degree. I was responsible for the lab sessions (20 hours), this year we added a tutorial on Transformers, I curated the first part. I coauthored midterm and written exams also this year.
- 13/11/2020 ๐ค Contributed talk at AAAI Fall Symposium on Abstraction and Analogy in AI (virtual): The value of a rationalist approach in AI
- 12/06/2020 ๐ค Invited talk at Cassini Junior Workshop, organized by French Embassy in Italy and SSAS (Rome ๐ฎ๐น): Towards a human-level artificial intelligence
- 27/03/2020 ๐ฐ LIMP: Learning latent shape representations with metric preservation priors accepted as oral at ECCV-2020.
- 26/02/2020 ๐ค Contributed talk at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (Haifa, Israel ๐ฎ๐ฑ) Learning deformable style transfer via differentiable intrinsic distances
- 02-05/2020 ๐จโ๐ซ Teaching assistant of the 2020 Deep Learning & applied AI course in Sapienza CS master degree. I was responsible for the lab sessions (20 hours), coauthoring 10 tutorials and the written exams.
- 01/11/2019 ๐ Started my PhD at Sapienza University of Rome advised by prof. Emanuele Rodolร
- 19/02/2019 ๐ค Invited talk at the ML meetup from the Italian Association for Machine Learning (Rome ๐ฎ๐น): The italian AlphaZero