Education

• Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence, University of Milano-Bicocca, 2023–2028 (expected: March 2028)
  • Curriculum: Big Data & Analytics for Business · Supervisor: Fabio Mercorio
  • Visiting PhD student, Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore, May–Dec 2026 (host: Erik Cambria)
• M.Sc. in Data Science, University of Milano-Bicocca, 2021–2023
• B.Sc. in Computer Science, University of Milano-Bicocca, 2018–2021

Research interests

• Mechanistic interpretability: activation steering, role vectors, sparse autoencoders
• Evaluation of LLMs and of interpretability methods
• Deception, fragility and safety of LLMs

Experience

• 2023–present: PhD researcher, University of Milano-Bicocca (CRISP research centre)
• 2019–2023: Freelance software developer (Go, Java, C++, Python)

Skills

• Python, PyTorch, Hugging Face; large-scale experiments on HPC (Leonardo, CINECA/EuroHPC)
• Go, Java, C++
• Languages: Italian (native), English

Publications

• Diagnosing LLM Fragility: An Empirical Study on Reasoning Entropy and Malicious Outputs
  Daniele Potertì, et al. · Proceedings of EMNLP 2026 (Main Conference), 2026
• Challenging the Abilities of Large Language Models in Italian: a Community Initiative
  Malvina Nissim, Danilo Croce, Viviana Patti, et al. (incl. Daniele Potertì) · Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics (IJCoL), 2026
• Can Role Vectors Affect LLM Behaviour?
  Daniele Potertì, Andrea Seveso, Fabio Mercorio · Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, 2025
• SFAL: Semantic-Functional Alignment Scores for Distributional Evaluation of Auto-Interpretability in Sparse Autoencoders
  Fabio Mercorio, Filippo Pallucchini, Daniele Potertì, Antonio Serino, Andrea Seveso · Proceedings of EMNLP 2025: Industry Track, 2025
  Authors in alphabetical order; I contributed to the technical work.
• A Benchmark to Evaluate LLMs' Proficiency on Italian Student Competencies
  Fabio Mercorio, Mario Mezzanzanica, Daniele Potertì, Antonio Serino, Andrea Seveso · ECML PKDD 2025, 2025
  Authors in alphabetical order; I contributed to the technical work.
• ITALIC: An Italian Culture-Aware Natural Language Benchmark
  Andrea Seveso, Daniele Potertì, Edoardo Federici, Mario Mezzanzanica, Fabio Mercorio · Proceedings of NAACL 2025 (Long Papers), 2025
• Designing Role Vectors to Improve LLM Inference Behaviour
  Daniele Potertì, Andrea Seveso, Fabio Mercorio · arXiv preprint, 2025
• BEEP - BEst DrivEr’s License Performer: A CALAMITA Challenge
  Fabio Mercorio, Daniele Potertì, Antonio Serino, Andrea Seveso · Proceedings of CLiC-it 2024, 2024
  Authors in alphabetical order; I contributed to the technical work.
• Augmenting XAI with LLMs: A Case Study in Banking Marketing Recommendation
  Alessandro Castelnovo, Roberto Depalmas, Fabio Mercorio, Nicolò Mombelli, Daniele Potertì, Antonio Serino, Andrea Seveso, Salvatore Sorrentino, Laura Viola · World Conference on Explainable Artificial Intelligence (xAI 2024), 2024
  Authors in alphabetical order; I contributed to the technical work.
• Disce aut Deficere: Evaluating LLMs Proficiency on the INVALSI Italian Benchmark
  Fabio Mercorio, Mario Mezzanzanica, Daniele Potertì, Antonio Serino, Andrea Seveso · arXiv preprint, 2024
  Authors in alphabetical order; I contributed to the technical work.
• Marrying LLMs with Domain Expert Validation for Causal Graph Generation
  Alessandro Castelnovo, Riccardo Crupi, Fabio Mercorio, Mario Mezzanzanica, Daniele Potertì, Daniele Regoli · AIABI Workshop @ AI*IA 2023, 2023
  Authors in alphabetical order; I contributed to the technical work.
• Bridging Causal Theory and LLMs: A User Centric Approach to Causal Graph Generation
  Daniele Potertì · Doctoral Consortium @ AI*IA 2023, 2023