Francesco Ortu receives the Artificial Intelligence Prize from the University of Trieste

Francesco Ortu was awarded the Artificial Intelligence Prize from the University of Trieste for his thesis “Interpreting How Large Language Models Handle Facts and Counterfactuals through Mechanistic Interpretability” as part of the Master’s program in “Data Science and Scientific Computing”. This work was developed at the Institute for Research and Technological Innovation (RIT) of Area Science Park. The study focuses on how generative language models, like those behind ChatGPT, react when presented with text containing false information.

The work was published in the Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and presented last August in Bangkok at one of the most important conferences on Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence for Natural Language.

“Research on interpretability,” explains Francesco Ortu, “aims to bridge the gap between empirical approaches and our scientific understanding of the inner workings of generative language models (LLMs). So far, most existing research in this area has focused on how models copy or recall factual knowledge. In our study, we analyzed how information propagates within the neural network, identifying the ‘neurons’ that choose whether to promote or suppress false information proposed by the user.”

Congratulations to Francesco, with best wishes for pursuing exciting discoveries during his PhD, which will soon begin at the Laboratory of Data Engineering in Area Science Park.