Hi there!

Education

  • 2023: PhD in Language Sciences at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Industrial PhD jointly with Facebook AI Research (FAIR) Paris
  • 2019: MSc in Cognitive Science at University of Trento
  • 2019: Diploma in Cognitive Neuroscience at SISSA (International School For Advanced Studies), Trieste
  • 2017: B.S.Eng. in Computer Science Engineering at La Sapienza University of Rome

Publications

Goodarzi, S. and Kagita, N. and Minn, D. and Wang, S. and Dessì, R. and Toshniwal, S. and Williams, A. and Lanchantin, J. and Koustuv Sinha
Cross-Domain Image Captioning with Discriminative Finetuning
EMNLP 2023 (Findings), Singapore
Dessì, R. and Bevilacqua, M. and Gualdoni, E. and Rakotonirina, N.C. and Franzon, F. and Baroni M.
Cross-Domain Image Captioning with Discriminative Finetuning
CVPR 2023, Vancouver
Schick, T. and Dwivedi-Yu, J. and Dessì, R. and Raileanu, R. and Lomeli, M. and Zettlemoyer, L. and Cancedda, N. and Scialom T.
Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools
NeurIPS 2023, New Orleans
Mialon, G., and Dessì, R. and Lomeli, M., and Nalmpantis, C. and Pasunuru, R., and Raileanu, R. and Rozière, R. and Schick, T. and Dwivedi-Yu, J., and Celikyilmaz, A. and Grave, E., and LeCun, Y. and Scialom T.
Augmented Language Models: a Survey
TMLR
Rakotonirina, N.C. and Dessì, R. and Petroni F., and Riedel, S. and Baroni M.
Can discrete information extraction prompts generalize across language models?
ICLR 2023, Kigali
Dessì, R. and Gualdoni, E. and Franzon, F. and Boleda, G. and Baroni M.
Communication breakdown: On the low mutual intelligibility between human and neural captioning
EMNLP 2022, Abu Dhabi
Dessì, R. and Kharitonov, E. and Baroni M.
Interpretable agent communication from scratch (with a generic visual processor emerging on the side)
NeurIPS 2020, Virtual
Dessì, R. and Bouchacourt, D. and Crepaldi, D. and Baroni M.
Focus on What's Informative and Ignore What's not: Communication Strategies in a Referential Game
2019 Workshop on Emergent Commuincation at NeurIPS, Vancouver
Dessi, R. and Baroni M.
CNNs found to jump around more skillfully than RNNs: Compositional generalization in seq2seq convolutional networks
ACL 2019, Florence
Di Gangi, M.A. and Negri, M. and Cattoni, R. and Dessì, R. and Turchi M.
Enhancing transformer for end-to-end speech-to-text translation
MT Summit 2019, Dublin
Di Gangi, M.A. and Dessì, R. and Cattoni, R. and Negri, M. and Turchi M.
Fine-tuning on Clean Data for End-to-End Speech Translation: FBK @ IWSLT 2018
IWSLT 2018, Bruges

Volunteering

  • Tutorial on ”Emergent Language-Based Coordination In Deep Multi-Agent Systems” at EMNLP 2022. Presented together with Marco Baroni (Universitat Pompeu Fabra / ICREA) and Angeliki Lazaridou (DeepMind)
  • Reviewer for ICML 2023, NeurIPS 2023, 2022, 2021; ICLR 2024, 2022 (selected as Highlighted Reviewer); ACL Rolling Review (NAACL 2022, EMNLP 2022), LREC-COLING 2024, Frontiers in Robotics and AI
  • Co-organizer of the Emergent Communication: New Frontiers workshop at ICLR 2022 and Talking to Strangers: Zero-Shot Emergent Communication workshop at NeurIPS 2020
  • PC member for the Student Research Workshop at EACL 2022, and 2020, BlackboxNLP workshop at EMNLP 2021, Cooperative AI workshop at NeurIPS 2021, Gamification and Multiagent Solutions workshop at ICLR 2022, Hybrid Human-Machine Learning and Decision Making at ECML PKDD 2023
  • Organizer of 1st (2022) and 2nd (2023) REST-CL (REtreat for STudents in Computational Linguistics) workshop in Barcelona
  • Student volunteer at ACL 2019 in Florence

Supervision

  • Apr-Jun 2023: BSc thesis supervisor of Krijn Dignum at University of Amsterdam. Joint supervision with Eleonora Gualdoni and Mario Giulianelli
  • Jan-Jun 2023: Industry mentor for UMass COMPSCI 696DS at UMass Amherst: 3 MSc students supervised for a semester long research project. Joint supervision with Adina Williams, Jack Lanchantin, Koustuv Sinha, Shubham Toshniwal
  • Davide Locateli: MSc thesis at UPF, 2022
  • Jan-June 2022: Industry mentor for UMass COMPSCI 696DS at UMass Amherst: 4 MSc students supervised for a semester long research project. Joint supervision with Marco Baroni

Scholarships

  • Doctorato Industrial sponsored by the Government of Catalonia for a joint PhD program between FacebookAI and UPF
  • CIMeC-SISSA scholarship

Scientific communication

  • Speaker at Pint of Science 2019 in Trieste. ”Language and AI: will we eve be able to talk with machines?”

Other

  • November 2023: talk at the Data Science and AI seminar at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg
  • July 2023: talk at the SARDINE lab at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon
  • July 2023: Monitor (person responsible of holding daily labs) at the 2023 LxMLS summer school (Lisbon)
  • June 2023: talk at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) at the University of Amsterdam
  • June 2023: talk at The Berkeley NLP Group
  • Presenting an overview or Emergent Communication at the second CETI workshop on Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley
  • June 2023: talk at the Instituto Superior Técnico/Unbabel weekly seminar
  • May 2023: talk at the GLADIA research lab at the University of Rome La Sapienza
  • April 2023: talk at the Gaspard-Monge Computer Science lab (LIGM) of Ecole des Ponts ParisTech
  • March 2023: talk at the Cognitive Science weekly seminar of Queen Mary University
  • June 2022: talk at the Reinforcement Learning Symposium at the University of Bristol
  • Maintainer of EGG: Emergence of lanGuage in Games (250+ stars), the main public repository for running language emergence experiments.
Roberto Dessì