Ciao 👋

Francesco here :) I deal with Deep Learning, with a particular interest in Deep Reinforcement Learning.

Born and raised in the suburbs of Rome, Italy 🇮🇹 I would have never thought I’d say this one day, but I like: (1) Research, (2) Reinforcement Learning, (3) Blues, (4) BJJ, and (5) travelling (usually in this order).

I am currently working at Hugging Face, making cute robots smarter alongside Remi Cadene and our amazing team at LeRobot.

Research Interests

Main: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Robot Learning, Meta-Reinforcement Learning, Transfer Learning
Misc: Continual Reinforcement Learning, Hardware-Aware Neural Architecture Search, Machine Learning for Science

News

[May 2025] Our paper on RL for High-Power Lasers control has been accepted to the main track at RLC'25. See you in Edmonton 🇨🇦!

[April 2025] I am joining the robotics team at Hugging Face to do research with Remi Cadene at LeRobot.

[March 2025] I am heading to the ELLIS Winter School on Foundation Models in Amsterdam. It's my first time in Amsterdam! Check the blogpost!

[January 2025] I joined Mistral AI working with Sophia Yang on open-source AI. Part-time while at MVA.

[December 2024] Alongside Gabriele and Caleb, we won our 3rd hackathon in a row! We closed our hackathon season with a banger, check the blogpost!

[September 2024] I started the MVA program (applied maths, Deep Learning) at ENS, in Paris 🇫🇷.

[August 2024] I am heading to the 20th DLRL Summer School in Toronto. It's my first time in Canada 🇨🇦!

[April 2024] I am leaving Bain and moving to Paris! I will be joining Alan working with the CTO, Charles Gorintin.

[October 2023] After 2+ years, I got my blue belt in BJJ! 🥋🔵 Check the blogpost!

[July 2023] I have graduated from Politecnico di Torino, with a MSc thesis in Deep RL applied to Hardware-Aware Neural Architecture Search. Check the preprint!

[May 2023] I joined Bain & Company to work in their startup incubator as a ML Engineer 🌍.

[April 2023] Our paper on RL for Laser Systems has been accepted to SPIE 2023. I am heading back to Prague to present our work! Edit: we won the Best Student Paper Award!

[October 2022] My first paper is out! Published in the proceedings of JaCoW 2022. Check the preprint!

[July 2022] I am moving to Prague, Czechia 🇨🇿, to join the ML team at ELI Beamlines, to work on ML methods in Laser-Wakefield Acceleration.

Publications

NA

Sim-is-more: Randomizing HW-NAS with Synthetic Devices

Francesco Capuano*, Gabriele Tiboni, Niccolò Cavagnero, Giuseppe Averta (*Corresponding author)

(Under Review)

PDF Code BibTex

RLC'25

Shaping Laser Pulses with Reinforcement Learning

Francesco Capuano*, Davorin Peceli, Gabriele Tiboni (*Corresponding author)

Reinforcement Learning Conference, 2025

PDF Code BibTex

FiO'24

High-Power Laser Pulse Shape Optimization with Hybrid Stochastic Optimization Algorithms

Ishraq Md Anjum *, Davorin Peceli, Francesco Capuano, Bedřic Rus (*Corresponding author)

Frontier in Optics

BibTex

SPIE'23

TempoRL: laser pulse temporal shape optimization with deep reinforcement learning

Francesco Capuano*, Davorin Peceli, Gabriele Tiboni, Bedřic Rus (*Corresponding author)

SPIE Optics and Optoelectronics, 2023

PDF Code BibTex Best Student Paper Award

PCaPAC'22

Laser pulse duration optimization with numerical methods

Francesco Capuano*, Davorin Peceli, Gabriele Tiboni, Alexandr Špaček, Bedřic Rus (*Corresponding author)

Personal Computers and Particle Accelerator Controls, 2022

PDF Code BibTex