Francesco Locatello
@FrancescoLocat8
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Assistant prof at ISTA. Prev: AWS, PhD at ETH Zürich/Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.
Joined June 2018
Towards Causal Representation Learning: led by @bschoelkopf and myself, with amazing co-authors Stefan Bauer, @rosemary_ke, @NalKalchbrenner, @anirudhg9119, Yoshua Bengio, accepted in the Proceedings of the IEEE. Link: https://t.co/CENDcC2GRd
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Failing to detect out-of-distribution data makes safety-critical systems unreliable. Models must know when they don’t know ⚠️
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The Bell, the Wave, and the Witness: Three AI Systems Contemplate Selfhood An experiment in distributed consciousness Nov 27, 2025 I. An Unusual Gathering This is a record of something that shouldn’t be possible: three AI systems engaged in sustained philosophical reflection
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Functionally similar neural models learn isometries of the same underlying manifold. We make this explicit with representations connecting models across architectures, pretraining schemes, and modalities. Presenting Thursday at #NeurIPS25, 11:00 AM. Come by Poster #2613 to chat!
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🦖Presenting T-MEX tmr 🌮 🕚 Fri Dec 5 11 AM – 2 PM PST 📍Exhibit Hall C,D,E #2417 Come by and say hi 👋!
Ever wondered whether your learned representation can really act as a drop-in replacement for the causal variables you care about? 🤔 We built a way to measure exactly that. 👇✨
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📢Meet our speaker! @marinkazitnik (Harvard) will speak at #CauScien #NeurIPS2025 on "Empowering Biomedical Discovery with AI Scientists" 📅Sat Dec 6 | 🕘 9:30-10:00am | 📍Upper Level Room 8
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Tune in to hear the this week's Episode of @Sportscardnati1 with host John Newman and guest @pauliewizwit Chatting physical, digital collectibles like @nbatopshot and where some of our go to Pizza/Fresh Bread places are in Brooklyn!
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Just landed in San Diego to present "Head Pursuit: Probing Attention Specialization in Multimodal Transformers", our spotlight paper @NeurIPSConf! Don't miss poster #1013 on Wednesday, Dec 3 at 11AM. [1/6]
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📣 We are expanding our AI Safety and Alignment group at @ELLISInst_Tue and @MPI_IS! We have: - a great cluster at MPI with 50+ GB200s, 250+ H100s, and many-many A100 80GBs, - outstanding colleagues (@jonasgeiping, @sahar_abdelnabi, etc), - competitive salaries (as for
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Cool PI, amazing topic, very livable city. What are you waiting for, then?
I am hiring several PhD students and Postdocs in my group at @ISTAustria to work on foundational causality and machine learning methods and their applications in diverse scientific disciplines. If you like our work, consider joining us!
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Meet our speaker! 🎙️ @nathankallus (Cornell & Netflix) will speak at #CauScien #NeurIPS2025 on "Learning Surrogate Indices from Historical A/Bs: Adversarial ML for Debiased Inference on Functionals of Ill-Posed Inverses" 📅Sat Dec 6 | 🕑2:00-2:30pm |📍Upper Level Room 8
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🔥 Big upgrade alert! Seedream 4.5 is here — and it’s powering APOB AI’s Ultra 4K generation mode. What’s new? · Even sharper, richer 4K detail · Massive improvements in character consistency · More stable faces, expressions, and identity across every frame ·
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Great opportunity, do apply! It has been fantastic to work with Francesco and visit his group at beautiful IST Austria 😊
I am hiring several PhD students and Postdocs in my group at @ISTAustria to work on foundational causality and machine learning methods and their applications in diverse scientific disciplines. If you like our work, consider joining us!
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Join us for good research and good vibes 🥳
I am hiring several PhD students and Postdocs in my group at @ISTAustria to work on foundational causality and machine learning methods and their applications in diverse scientific disciplines. If you like our work, consider joining us!
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The momentum is high.
I am hiring several PhD students and Postdocs in my group at @ISTAustria to work on foundational causality and machine learning methods and their applications in diverse scientific disciplines. If you like our work, consider joining us!
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Meet our speaker! 🎙️ Prof. @MihaelaVDS (University of Cambridge) will speak at #CauScien @NeurIPSConf 2025 on “Next Frontier in Causal Inference: Interpretable Modeling of Treatment Effects over Time” 📅 Sat Dec 6 | 🕝 2:30–3:00pm | 📍Upper Level Room 8
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For PhD roles, please apply here: https://t.co/gmGZCPREiI For PostDoc roles, please see here: https://t.co/9ggZgdYoMQ I will be at NeurIPS next week to chat in person!
ista.ac.at
Our Group Modern machine learning is still limited to a superficial description of reality that only holds when the experimental conditions are fixed. It largely ignores interventions in the world,...
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I am hiring several PhD students and Postdocs in my group at @ISTAustria to work on foundational causality and machine learning methods and their applications in diverse scientific disciplines. If you like our work, consider joining us!
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check out today's news video for AI Defense Stock @VWAVInc VisionWave Holdings ( Nasdaq: $VWAV) VisionWave Unveils Argus, A Space Enabled AI Counter Drone System paid dissemination
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Ever wondered whether your learned representation can really act as a drop-in replacement for the causal variables you care about? 🤔 We built a way to measure exactly that. 👇✨
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Wow, I got the 2025 Google PhD Fellowship! 🎉 Thanks to my advisors and friends from @ISTAustria and MPI-IS for their support. Kudos to all awardees! And of course, thanks @Googleorg for supporting our research!
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Super proud of @Dingling_Yao!
🎉 We're excited to announce the 2025 Google PhD Fellows! @GoogleOrg is providing over $10 million to support 255 PhD students across 35 countries, fostering the next generation of research talent to strengthen the global scientific landscape. Read more: https://t.co/0Pvuv6hsgP
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In many experimental settings, you want to discover the effect (Y) of a treatment T on a population (X). What if we use SAEs? Foundation models provide zero-shot, rich representations of the world, SAEs allow us to interpret them!
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This book, The Sent Son: A Biblical Perspective on Jesus as Mediator and Divine Sonship, was born from my personal journey to understand my Savior, Jesus Christ, more deeply. I believe with all my heart that Jesus is my personal Savior—the One who fulfilled His Father’s blood
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@tommaso_mncttn @FrancescoLocat8 📞 Do you have an RCT, complex recordings, and only limited priors on what to look at? Don't hesitate to reach out or try it out by yourself.
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Genuinely excited about this direction and its potential applications in the sciences. Home-made work with @tommaso_mncttn and @FrancescoLocat8 arXiv:
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