arXiv subjects

Luca Bortolussi

Publications and source records attributed to Luca Bortolussi.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Demystifying Entropy-based Selection for Chain-of-Thought Compression in Large Reasoning Models

Entropy-based pruning has been proposed as an effective method for compressing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with negligible accuracy loss. We test the robustness of low- and high-entropy CoT step selection methods across various models and reasoning tasks, showing that entropy offers no advantage over random pruning in any evaluated setting. Moving from sentences to tokens, we then show that retaining low-entropy tokens seems effective only on mathematical benchmarks. We find this is due to the inherently low-entropy nature of numeric tokens, which also convey semantic content in such problems. Finally, we demonstrate that patching a subset of a few CoT tokens with their original activations recovers near-perfect full-trace performance, providing causal evidence that task information is not concentrated in a small set of CoT tokens identifiable by heuristics, but rather distributed across the full reasoning chain.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

A Sobering Look at Tabular Data Generation via Probabilistic Circuits

Tabular data is more challenging to generate than text and images, due to its heterogeneous features and much lower sample sizes. On this task, diffusion-based models are the current state-of-the-art (SotA) model class, achieving almost perfect performance on commonly used benchmarks. In this paper, we question the perception of progress for tabular data generation. First, we highlight the limitations of current protocols to evaluate the fidelity of generated data, and advocate for alternative ones. Next, we revisit a simple baseline -- hierarchical mixture models in the form of deep probabilistic circuits (PCs) -- which delivers competitive or superior performance to SotA models for a fraction of the cost. PCs are the generative counterpart of decision forests, and as such can natively handle heterogeneous data as well as deliver tractable probabilistic generation and inference. Finally, in a rigorous empirical analysis we show that the apparent saturation of progress for SotA models is largely due to the use of inadequate metrics. As such, we highlight that there is still much to be done to generate realistic tabular data. Code available at https://github.com/april-tools/tabpc.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Localized Anomaly Detection via Differentiable D-vine Copulas

Vine copulas provide a flexible framework for modeling complex multivariate distributions through a hierarchical decomposition into bivariate pair-copulas. Fitting a D-vine requires selecting a copula family and parameter configuration for each pair-copula from a set of candidates encoding different dependence patterns. As the number of variables and candidate families increases, the number of possible configurations grows combinatorially. Existing fitting procedures address this challenge through sequential greedy decisions, committing to a single locally optimal family at each step and potentially discarding configurations that would yield a better global fit. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel estimation framework that combines gradient-based maximum likelihood estimation, enabled by our fully differentiable implementation, with a beam-search strategy that maintains multiple competing D-vine configurations throughout the fitting process. This allows a broader exploration of the configuration space while remaining computationally tractable. Building on the fitted D-vine, we introduce a localized anomaly detection framework that exploits the hierarchical decomposition to produce both global anomaly scores and edge-level explanations. Statistical guarantees are provided through Mondrian conformal prediction, while the pair-copula structure enables the localization of anomalies to specific variable relationships. We evaluate the proposed framework on both benchmark and real-world datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness for interpretable anomaly detection with uncertainty quantification.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

RogueAI: A Reverse Turing Test for Detecting Licensed AI Deception in Dialogue

The original Turing Test asks a human judge to distinguish a machine from a person through dialogue. Three quarters of a century later, conversational systems pass this test in casual settings; the interesting epistemological question has shifted. We argue that the relevant modern variant asks not whether a dialogue partner is artificial, but whether it can be trusted. We present RogueAI, an interactive webapp that operationalizes this revisited test as a one-on-two interrogation game: a human player questions two indistinguishable Large Language Model agents, knowing that exactly one of them has been licensed to deceive within a shared fictional scenario. The player's task is to identify the deceptive agent and "shut it off" before a turn budget is exhausted. We further introduce AutoRogueAI, a procedural extension in which players co-design a custom scenario with a narrator agent that secretly chooses its own deception strategy. We describe the framing, sketch the abstract architecture and gameplay loop, and situate the artifact within recent work on LLM deception, social-deduction benchmarks, and scalable oversight via debate. A three-day pilot deployment (467 initiated sessions, 415 completed, 1876 interaction turns in Italian) provides early feasibility evidence and surfaces a concrete tension: the deceptive agent carries a reliable, locally-present linguistic signature - differential helpfulness, brevity, hedging - that a simple heuristic exploits at 75.6% accuracy, yet human players achieved only 56.6%, consistent with ignoring the most diagnostic signal entirely. We discuss what this gap implies for the artifact's use as a data-collection vehicle, a teaching tool, and an evaluation harness for honesty-trained models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Beyond the Commitment Boundary: Probing Epiphenomenal Chain-of-Thought in Large Reasoning Models

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is the dominant paradigm for inference-time scaling in language models, yet the causal influence of individual steps on the final answer poorly understood. We estimate each step's causal importance via early exit and use this measure to study how answers form across the reasoning traces of several model families. Across diverse tasks, we find that reasoning typically crosses a \emph{commitment boundary} -- a sharp transition from transient intermediate guesses to a stable, high-confidence answer. This transition often happens in a single step, well before the model's reasoning block ends, and is followed by \emph{epiphenomenal} CoT steps that leave the final answer probability unaltered. Using attention probes, we show that answer-formation stages can be linearly decoded from intermediate reasoning steps with high accuracy and generalize robustly to unseen reasoning tasks. We exploit this signal to early-exit reasoning blocks at the commitment boundary, reducing the length of CoTs up to 55\% on average with negligible impact on model performance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Guiding Neuro-Symbolic Scenario Generation with Spatio-Temporal Logic

The rapid advancement of autonomous driving (AD) technologies has outpaced the development of robust safety evaluation methods. Conventional testing relies on exposing AD systems to vast numbers of real-world traffic scenes -- a brute-force approach that is prohibitively expensive and statistically ineffective at capturing the rare, safety-critical edge cases essential for validating real-world robustness. To address this fundamental limitation, we introduce STRELGen, a scalable framework for the targeted generation of safety-critical driving scenarios. STRELGen synergistically combines a multi-agent trajectory-generation diffusion model (DM) with Spatio-Temporal Logic (STREL) specifications that encode complex safety and realism properties through a highly interpretable formalism. Crucially, monitoring satisfaction levels of these specifications is differentiable, enabling gradient-based search. At inference time, we optimize directly over the DM latent space to maximize STREL formula satisfaction. The result is efficient generation of highly plausible yet safety-critical multi-agent scenarios that lie within the learned data distribution. STRELGen thus provides a flexible, interpretable, and powerful tool for stress-testing autonomous driving systems, moving beyond the limitations of brute-force data collection.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Empirical Evaluation of Structured Synthetic Data Privacy Metrics: Novel experimental framework

Synthetic data generation is gaining traction as a privacy enhancing technology (PET). When properly generated, synthetic data preserve the analytic utility of real data while avoiding the retention of information that would allow the identification of specific individuals. However, the concept of data privacy remains elusive, making it challenging for practitioners to evaluate and benchmark the degree of privacy protection offered by synthetic data. In this paper, we propose a framework to empirically assess the efficacy of tabular synthetic data privacy quantification methods through controlled, deliberate risk insertion. To demonstrate this framework, we survey existing approaches to synthetic data privacy quantification and the related legal theory. We then apply the framework to the main privacy quantification methods with no-box threat models on publicly available datasets.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Distilling Formal Logic into Neural Spaces: A Kernel Alignment Approach for Signal Temporal Logic

We introduce a framework for learning continuous neural representations of formal specifications by distilling the geometry of their semantics into a latent space. Existing approaches rely either on symbolic kernels -- which preserve behavioural semantics but are computationally prohibitive, anchor-dependent, and non-invertible -- or on syntax-based neural embeddings that fail to capture underlying structures. Our method bridges this gap: using a teacher-student setup, we distill a symbolic robustness kernel into a Transformer encoder. Unlike standard contrastive methods, we supervise the model with a continuous, kernel-weighted geometric alignment objective that penalizes errors in proportion to their semantic discrepancies. Once trained, the encoder produces embeddings in a single forward pass, effectively mimicking the kernel's logic at a fraction of its computational cost. We apply our framework to Signal Temporal Logic (STL), demonstrating that the resulting neural representations faithfully preserve the semantic similarity of STL formulae, accurately predict robustness and constraint satisfaction, and remain intrinsically invertible. Our proposed approach enables highly efficient, scalable neuro-symbolic reasoning and formula reconstruction without repeated kernel computation at runtime.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

DeGAS: Gradient-Based Optimization of Probabilistic Programs without Sampling

We present DeGAS, a differentiable Gaussian approximate semantics for loopless probabilistic programs that enables sample-free, gradient-based optimization in models with both continuous and discrete components. DeGAS evaluates programs under a Gaussian-mixture semantics and replaces measure-zero predicates and discrete branches with a vanishing smoothing, yielding closed-form expressions for posterior and path probabilities. We prove differentiability of these quantities with respect to program parameters, enabling end-to-end optimization via standard automatic differentiation, without Monte Carlo estimators. On thirteen benchmark programs, DeGAS achieves accuracy and runtime competitive with variational inference and MCMC. Importantly, it reliably tackles optimization problems where sampling-based baselines fail to converge due to conditioning involving continuous variables.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2025

Graph-Conditional Flow Matching for Relational Data Generation

Data synthesis is gaining momentum as a privacy-enhancing technology. While single-table tabular data generation has seen considerable progress, current methods for multi-table data often lack the flexibility and expressiveness needed to capture complex relational structures. In particular, they struggle with long-range dependencies and complex foreign-key relationships, such as tables with multiple parent tables or multiple types of links between the same pair of tables. We propose a generative model for relational data that generates the content of a relational dataset given the graph formed by the foreign-key relationships. We do this by learning a deep generative model of the content of the whole relational database by flow matching, where the neural network trained to denoise records leverages a graph neural network to obtain information from connected records. Our method is flexible, as it can support relational datasets with complex structures, and expressive, as the generation of each record can be influenced by any other record within the same connected component. We evaluate our method on several benchmark datasets and show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of synthetic data fidelity.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Guided by Stars: Interpretable Concept Learning Over Time Series via Temporal Logic Semantics

Time series classification is a task of paramount importance, as this kind of data often arises in safety-critical applications. However, it is typically tackled with black-box deep learning methods, making it hard for humans to understand the rationale behind their output. To take on this challenge, we propose a novel approach, STELLE (Signal Temporal logic Embedding for Logically-grounded Learning and Explanation), a neuro-symbolic framework that unifies classification and explanation through direct embedding of trajectories into a space of temporal logic concepts. By introducing a novel STL-inspired kernel that maps raw time series to their alignment with predefined STL formulae, our model jointly optimises accuracy and interpretability, as each prediction is accompanied by the most relevant logical concepts that characterise it. This yields (i) local explanations as human-readable STL conditions justifying individual predictions, and (ii) global explanations as class-characterising formulae. Experiments demonstrate that STELLE achieves competitive accuracy while providing logically faithful explanations, validated on diverse real-world benchmarks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Advancing Routing-Awareness in Analog ICs Floorplanning

The adoption of machine learning-based techniques for analog integrated circuit layout, unlike its digital counterpart, has been limited by the stringent requirements imposed by electric and problem-specific constraints, along with the interdependence of floorplanning and routing steps. In this work, we address a prevalent concern among layout engineers regarding the need for readily available routing-aware floorplanning solutions. To this extent, we develop an automatic floorplanning engine based on reinforcement learning and relational graph convolutional neural network specifically tailored to condition the floorplan generation towards more routable outcomes. A combination of increased grid resolution and precise pin information integration, along with a dynamic routing resource estimation technique, allows balancing routing and area efficiency, eventually meeting industrial standards. When analyzing the place and route effectiveness in a simulated environment, the proposed approach achieves a 13.8% reduction in dead space, a 40.6% reduction in wirelength and a 73.4% increase in routing success when compared to past learning-based state-of-the-art techniques.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Beyond single-model XAI: aggregating multi-model explanations for enhanced trustworthiness

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models in real-world and high-risk applications has intensified the discussion about their trustworthiness and ethical usage, from both a technical and a legislative perspective. The field of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) addresses this challenge by proposing explanations that bring to light the decision-making processes of complex black-box models. Despite being an essential property, the robustness of explanations is often an overlooked aspect during development: only robust explanation methods can increase the trust in the system as a whole. This paper investigates the role of robustness through the usage of a feature importance aggregation derived from multiple models ($k$-nearest neighbours, random forest and neural networks). Preliminary results showcase the potential in increasing the trustworthiness of the application, while leveraging multiple model's predictive power.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Blending adversarial training and representation-conditional purification via aggregation improves adversarial robustness

In this work, we propose a novel adversarial defence mechanism for image classification - CARSO - blending the paradigms of adversarial training and adversarial purification in a synergistic robustness-enhancing way. The method builds upon an adversarially-trained classifier, and learns to map its internal representation associated with a potentially perturbed input onto a distribution of tentative clean reconstructions. Multiple samples from such distribution are classified by the same adversarially-trained model, and a carefully chosen aggregation of its outputs finally constitutes the robust prediction of interest. Experimental evaluation by a well-established benchmark of strong adaptive attacks, across different image datasets, shows that CARSO is able to defend itself against adaptive end-to-end white-box attacks devised for stochastic defences. Paying a modest clean accuracy toll, our method improves by a significant margin the state-of-the-art for Cifar-10, Cifar-100, and TinyImageNet-200 $\ell_\infty$ robust classification accuracy against AutoAttack. Code, and instructions to obtain pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/emaballarin/CARSO .

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Conformal Predictive Monitoring for Multi-Modal Scenarios

We consider the problem of quantitative predictive monitoring (QPM) of stochastic systems, i.e., predicting at runtime the degree of satisfaction of a desired temporal logic property from the current state of the system. Since computational efficiency is key to enable timely intervention against predicted violations, several state-of-the-art QPM approaches rely on fast machine-learning surrogates to provide prediction intervals for the satisfaction values, using conformal inference to offer statistical guarantees. However, these QPM methods suffer when the monitored agent exhibits multi-modal dynamics, whereby certain modes may yield high satisfaction values while others critically violate the property. Existing QPM methods are mode-agnostic and so would yield overly conservative and uninformative intervals that lack meaningful mode-specific satisfaction information. To address this problem, we present GenQPM, a method that leverages deep generative models, specifically score-based diffusion models, to reliably approximate the probabilistic and multi-modal system dynamics without requiring explicit model access. GenQPM employs a mode classifier to partition the predicted trajectories by dynamical mode. For each mode, we then apply conformal inference to produce statistically valid, mode-specific prediction intervals. We demonstrate the effectiveness of GenQPM on a benchmark of agent navigation and autonomous driving tasks, resulting in prediction intervals that are significantly more informative (less conservative) than mode-agnostic baselines.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Towards Interpretable Concept Learning over Time Series via Temporal Logic Semantics

Time series classification is a task of paramount importance, as this kind of data often arises in safety-critical applications. However, it is typically tackled with black-box deep learning methods, making it hard for humans to understand the rationale behind their output. To take on this challenge, we propose a neuro-symbolic framework that unifies classification and explanation through direct embedding of trajectories into a space of Signal Temporal Logic (STL) concepts. By introducing a novel STL-inspired kernel that maps raw time series to their alignment with predefined STL formulae, our model jointly optimises for accuracy and interpretability, as each prediction is accompanied by the most relevant logical concepts that characterise it. This enables classification grounded in human-interpretable temporal patterns and produces both local and global symbolic explanations. Early results show competitive performance while offering high-quality logical justifications for model decisions.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

CoCAI: Copula-based Conformal Anomaly Identification for Multivariate Time-Series

We propose a novel framework that harnesses the power of generative artificial intelligence and copula-based modeling to address two critical challenges in multivariate time-series analysis: delivering accurate predictions and enabling robust anomaly detection. Our method, Copula-based Conformal Anomaly Identification for Multivariate Time-Series (CoCAI), leverages a diffusion-based model to capture complex dependencies within the data, enabling high quality forecasting. The model's outputs are further calibrated using a conformal prediction technique, yielding predictive regions which are statistically valid, i.e., cover the true target values with a desired confidence level. Starting from these calibrated forecasts, robust outlier detection is performed by combining dimensionality reduction techniques with copula-based modeling, providing a statistically grounded anomaly score. CoCAI benefits from an offline calibration phase that allows for minimal overhead during deployment and delivers actionable results rooted in established theoretical foundations. Empirical tests conducted on real operational data derived from water distribution and sewerage systems confirm CoCAI's effectiveness in accurately forecasting target sequences of data and in identifying anomalous segments within them.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Assessing reliability of explanations in unbalanced datasets: a use-case on the occurrence of frost events

The usage of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods has become essential in practical applications, given the increasing deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models and the legislative requirements put forward in the latest years. A fundamental but often underestimated aspect of the explanations is their robustness, a key property that should be satisfied in order to trust the explanations. In this study, we provide some preliminary insights on evaluating the reliability of explanations in the specific case of unbalanced datasets, which are very frequent in high-risk use-cases, but at the same time considerably challenging for both AI models and XAI methods. We propose a simple evaluation focused on the minority class (i.e. the less frequent one) that leverages on-manifold generation of neighbours, explanation aggregation and a metric to test explanation consistency. We present a use-case based on a tabular dataset with numerical features focusing on the occurrence of frost events.

cs.LG↗