Francesco Locatello

Francesco Locatello is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), leading the Causal Learning and Artificial Intelligence lab. He is also an AI Resident at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. He holds a PhD from ETH Zürich, co-advised by Gunnar Rätsch and Bernhard Schölkopf. His research focuses on causal representation learning, score matching, and object-centric learning, with applications in machine learning and AI. His work has been recognized with prestigious awards, including the ICML 2019 Best Paper Award and the Hector Foundation Award (2023).

Education:

• PhD in Machine Learning, ETH Zürich (advisors: Gunnar Rätsch, Bernhard Schölkopf)

Research Interests: Causal Learning, Causal Representation Discovery, Score Matching Algorithms, Object-Centric Learning, Robust Generalization in AI, and Applications in Vision and Reinforcement Learning.

Recent Work Trends: His publications emphasize causal mechanisms in neural representations, scalable causal discovery methods, and improving model generalization through latent space analysis. Recent studies explore geometric representations, mechanistic neural networks, and OOD detection using relative angles.

Awards:

• ICML 2019 Best Paper Award
• Hector Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievements in Machine Learning (2023)
• Google Research Scholar Award (2024)

Advising & Teams: Supervises a dynamic lab with students and postdocs across ISTA, ELLIS, and partner institutions. Notable advisees include Dingling Yao (ISTA), Riccardo Cadei (co-advised with Cordelia Schmid), and Marco Fumero (now a postdoc at ISTA). Collaborates with leading researchers like Arthur Gretton, Max Welling, and Volkan Cevher.

Labs & Initiatives: Leads the Causal Learning and AI lab at ISTA, contributing to ELLIS programs and fostering interdisciplinary collaborations in causal AI.