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Luca Franceschi

13 accepted papers

2026

Jet Expansions: Restructuring LLM Computation for Model Inspection

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models are becoming general knowledge engines for diverse applications. However, their computations are deeply entangled after training, resisting modularization which complicates interpretability, auditing, and long-term maintenance. We introduce Jet Expansions, a framework for expan…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Explaining Probabilistic Models with Distributional Values

ICML 2024spotlight

A large branch of explainable machine learning is grounded in cooperative game theory. However, research indicates that game-theoretic explanations may mislead or be hard to interpret. We argue that often there is a critical mismatch between what one wishes to explain (e.g. the output of a classifie…

2023

Adaptive Perturbation-Based Gradient Estimation for Discrete Latent Variable Models

AAAI 2023technical

The integration of discrete algorithmic components in deep learning architectures has numerous applications. Recently, Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation, a class of gradient estimators for discrete exponential family distributions, was proposed by combining implicit differentiation through pert…

2023

DAG Learning on the Permutahedron

ICLR 2023poster

We propose a continuous optimization framework for discovering a latent directed acyclic graph (DAG) from observational data. Our approach optimizes over the polytope of permutation vectors, the so-called Permutahedron, to learn a topological ordering. Edges can be optimized jointly, or learned cond…

2022

ReFactor GNNs: Revisiting Factorisation-based Models from a Message-Passing Perspective

NeurIPS 2022accept

Factorisation-based Models (FMs), such as DistMult, have enjoyed enduring success for Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) tasks, often outperforming Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, unlike GNNs, FMs struggle to incorporate node features and generalise to unseen nodes in inductive settings. Our wo…

2021

Implicit MLE: Backpropagating Through Discrete Exponential Family Distributions

NeurIPS 2021poster

Combining discrete probability distributions and combinatorial optimization problems with neural network components has numerous applications but poses several challenges. We propose Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (I-MLE), a framework for end-to-end learning of models combining discrete expo…

2020

Marthe: Scheduling the Learning Rate Via Online Hypergradients

IJCAI 2020poster

We study the problem of fitting task-specific learning rate schedules from the perspective of hyperparameter optimization, aiming at good generalization. We describe the structure of the gradient of a validation error w.r.t. the learning rate schedule -- the hypergradient. Based on this, we introduc…

2020

On the Iteration Complexity of Hypergradient Computation

ICML 2020poster

We study a general class of bilevel problems, consisting in the minimization of an upper-level objective which depends on the solution to a parametric fixed-point equation. Important instances arising in machine learning include hyperparameter optimization, meta-learning, and certain graph and recur…

2019

Fast and Continuous Foothold Adaptation for Dynamic Locomotion Through CNNs

RA-L 2019

Legged robots can outperform wheeled machines for most navigation tasks across unknown and rough terrains. For such tasks, visual feedback is a fundamental asset to provide robots with terrain awareness. However, robust dynamic locomotion on difficult terrains with real-time performance guarantees r

Cited by 81SourceScholar
2019

Learning Discrete Structures for Graph Neural Networks

ICML 2019oral

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models that have been successfully applied to a range of problems. Their major advantage lies in their ability to explicitly incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only b…

Cited by 526SourcePDFScholar
2018

Bilevel Programming for Hyperparameter Optimization and Meta-Learning

ICML 2018oral

We introduce a framework based on bilevel programming that unifies gradient-based hyperparameter optimization and meta-learning. We show that an approximate version of the bilevel problem can be solved by taking into explicit account the optimization dynamics for the inner objective. Depending on th…

Cited by 932SourcePDFScholar
2017

Forward and Reverse Gradient-Based Hyperparameter Optimization

ICML 2017poster

We study two procedures (reverse-mode and forward-mode) for computing the gradient of the validation error with respect to the hyperparameters of any iterative learning algorithm such as stochastic gradient descent. These procedures mirror two ways of computing gradients for recurrent neural network…

Cited by 569SourcePDFScholar