Francesco Capuano
capuano@robots.ox.ac.uk
News ๐๏ธ
[October 2025] I left Paris for the UK and started my PhD ("DPhil") at the University of Oxford!
[September 2025] Our (opinion) paper on VLAs training dynamics has been accepted to NeurIPS 2025 (workshop)! See you in San Diego, CA ๐บ๐ธ!
[August 2025] I am heading to the RLC'25 in Edmonton, Canada. It's my first time in Canada ๐จ๐ฆ! Edit: I met Prof. Richard Sutton in person! We chatted being a libertarian.
[July 2025] I am heading to the ELLIS Summer School on PML in Cambridge, UK. It's my first time in Cambridge ๐ฌ๐ง!
[June 2025] We released a sub-500M VLA trained exclusively on open data. Check out the preprint!
[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 ๐จ๐ฆ!
[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 ๐ซ๐ท.
[August 2024] I am heading to the 20th DLRL Summer School in Toronto. It's my first time in Canada ๐จ๐ฆ!
[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! ๐ฅ๐ต 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 ๐.
[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 ๐จ๐ฟ, to join the ML team at ELI Beamlines, to work on ML methods in Laser-Wakefield Acceleration.
Ciao ๐
Francesco here :) I deal with Deep Learning, with a particular interest in Robot Learning and Deep Reinforcement Learning.
Born and raised in the suburbs of Rome, Italy ๐ฎ๐น I would have never thought Iโd 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 towards my PhD (โDPhilโ) at the University of Oxford, where I am supervised by Ingmar Posner at A2I and Jakob Foerster at FLAIR.
Research Interests
- Main: Robot Learning, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Meta-Reinforcement Learning, Transfer Learning
- Misc: Continual Reinforcement Learning, Hardware-Aware Neural Architecture Search, Machine Learning for Science
Publications
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(W) NeurIPS'25
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RLC'25
Reinforcement Learning Conference, 2025 -
FiO'24
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SPIE'23
SPIE Optics and Optoelectronics, 2023 -
PCaPAC'22
Personal Computers and Particle Accelerator Controls, 2022
