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Francesco Leofante

Francesco Leofante contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

4 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Attribution-based Explanations for Markov Decision Processes

Attribution techniques explain the outcome of an AI model by assigning a numerical score to its inputs. So far, these techniques have mainly focused on attributing importance to static input features at a single point in time, and thus fail to generalize to sequential decision-making settings. This paper fills this gap by introducing techniques to generate attribution-based explanations for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We give a formal characterization of what attributions should represent in MDPs, focusing on explanations that assign importance scores to both individual states and execution paths. We show how importance scores can be computed by leveraging techniques for strategy synthesis, enabling the efficient computation of these scores despite the non-determinism inherent in an MDP. We evaluate our approach on five case-studies, demonstrating its utility in providing interpretable insights into the logic of sequential decision-making agents.

preprint2024arXiv

Recourse under Model Multiplicity via Argumentative Ensembling (Technical Report)

Model Multiplicity (MM) arises when multiple, equally performing machine learning models can be trained to solve the same prediction task. Recent studies show that models obtained under MM may produce inconsistent predictions for the same input. When this occurs, it becomes challenging to provide counterfactual explanations (CEs), a common means for offering recourse recommendations to individuals negatively affected by models' predictions. In this paper, we formalise this problem, which we name recourse-aware ensembling, and identify several desirable properties which methods for solving it should satisfy. We show that existing ensembling methods, naturally extended in different ways to provide CEs, fail to satisfy these properties. We then introduce argumentative ensembling, deploying computational argumentation to guarantee robustness of CEs to MM, while also accommodating customisable user preferences. We show theoretically and experimentally that argumentative ensembling satisfies properties which the existing methods lack, and that the trade-offs are minimal wrt accuracy.

preprint2022arXiv

Robot Swarms as Hybrid Systems: Modelling and Verification

A swarm robotic system consists of a team of robots performing cooperative tasks without any centralized coordination. In principle, swarms enable flexible and scalable solutions; however, designing individual control algorithms that can guarantee a required global behavior is difficult. Formal methods have been suggested by several researchers as a mean to increase confidence in the behavior of the swarm. In this work, we propose to model swarms as hybrid systems and use reachability analysis to verify their properties. We discuss challenges and report on the experience gained from applying hybrid formalisms to the verification of a swarm robotic system.

preprint2020arXiv

Verification of Neural Networks: Enhancing Scalability through Pruning

Verification of deep neural networks has witnessed a recent surge of interest, fueled by success stories in diverse domains and by abreast concerns about safety and security in envisaged applications. Complexity and sheer size of such networks are challenging for automated formal verification techniques which, on the other hand, could ease the adoption of deep networks in safety- and security-critical contexts. In this paper we focus on enabling state-of-the-art verification tools to deal with neural networks of some practical interest. We propose a new training pipeline based on network pruning with the goal of striking a balance between maintaining accuracy and robustness while making the resulting networks amenable to formal analysis. The results of our experiments with a portfolio of pruning algorithms and verification tools show that our approach is successful for the kind of networks we consider and for some combinations of pruning and verification techniques, thus bringing deep neural networks closer to the reach of formally-grounded methods.