Francesco Ortu

Francesco Ortu

Github| Scholar| LinkedIn
BlueSky| X

Publications
CV

Hello, I'm Francesco, a first-year PhD student at University of Trieste and at Laboratory of Data Engineering (LADE) at AREA Science Park, under the supervision of Alberto Cazzaniga.

I'm currently working on Mechanistic Interpretability and AI Safety, where I'm mostly interested in the intersection between geometrical and causal tools for interpretability. Previusly I was an intern at Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, in the Empirical Inference department (Director Prof. Bernhard Schölkopf), working under the supervision of Zhijing Jin, where I wrote part of my master thesis.

I’m also a sailor and recently I started to learn climbing. I grew up in a small town in the center of Italy, but I’m currently living in Trieste, a beautiful city on the sea in the north-east of Italy.

My email is francesco.ortu[at]phd.units.it.

News

Sept 2025 - I'll present two paper at NeurIPS 2025: one at main conference and one at the Mechanistic Interpretability workshop!! 🎉
Feb 2024 - Our paper "Competition of Mechanisms: Tracing How Language Models Handle Facts and Counterfactuals" has been accepted at ACL 2024! 🎉

Selected Publications