Pietro Lesci
I am a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge advised by Andreas Vlachos.
I am interested in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. I am passionate about the science of language models: developing and applying causal methods—drawing from econometrics—to study the effect of training choices on models’ behaviour, including memorisation, shortcut learning, and tokenisation.
3+ years experience across research labs, consulting firms, and international institutions training custom models and developing data science solutions. Find my cv here .
news
| Oct 1, 2024 | 🔬 Our work studying the challenges of training small language models has been accepted at EMNLP 2024 (Findings)! Joint work with @richarddm1 and Paula Buttery. |
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| Aug 15, 2024 | 🚀 Our work on estimating memorisation in language models from only observational data, Causal Estimation of Memorisation Profiles, has won the Best Paper Award at ACL 2024 (main)! Joint work with @clara__meister, Thomas Hofmann, @vlachos_nlp, and @tpimentelms. Details in post. |
| Mar 15, 2024 | 📚 Happy to share that our work AnchorAL: Computationally Efficient Active Learning for Large and Imbalanced Datasets has been accepted to NAACL 2024 (main)! Joint work with my supervisor @vlachos_nlp. Details in post. |
| Jun 15, 2023 | I am happy to share that my internship work and first-ever paper, Diable: Efficient Dialogue State Tracking as Operations on Tables has been accepted at ACL 2023 (Findings)!  |
| Sep 12, 2022 | Happy to join Amazon AWS AI Labs in Barcelona, working on efficient dialogue state tracking with Lluis Marquez, Yoshinari Fujinuma, and the fantastic AWS team in Barcelona, NYC, and Seattle! |
| Jan 4, 2022 | Wordify 2.0 is out!  |
| Oct 1, 2021 | I joined Cambridge University as a PhD student in Computer Science |