PhD in Computer Science
University of Trento
Ciao, I’m Leonardo! I’m a PhD student in Information Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Trento, supervised by Prof. Raffaella Bernardi and co-supervised by Prof. Barbara Plank.
My research lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive science, focusing on the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). More broadly, I am interested in understanding how these models solve reasoning problems, examining the mechanisms that drive their decisions, and comparing them to formal systems and human reasoning.
If you have questions about my research or are interested in collaborating, please reach out!
News
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Mechanistic Interpretability Lab at AILC Lectures 2026!I will lead the Mechanistic Interpretability lab at the AILC Lectures on Computational Linguistics 2026 in Bolzano. The lab materials are available on GitHub.
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New preprint!Our new preprint is now available: FALSIFYBENCH: Evaluating Inductive Reasoning in LLMs with Rule Discovery Games.
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New paper accepted at ACL ‘26 Findings!Our paper How Language Models Conflate Logical Validity with Plausibility: A Representational Analysis of Content Effects has been accepted at ACL ‘26 Findings.
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Internship at Booking.com!I will join Booking.com as a PhD Machine Learning Research Intern for a three-month internship beginning in August 2026 at the Amsterdam office.
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New paper accepted at EACL ‘26!Our paper Teaching Small Language Models to Learn Logic through Meta-Learning has been accepted at EACL ‘26.
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New preprint!Our preprint How Language Models Conflate Logical Validity with Plausibility: A Representational Analysis of Content Effects became available.
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Visiting UvA!I joined the ILLC at the University of Amsterdam as a visiting researcher to work with Prof. Sandro Pezzelle.
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New paper accepted at EMNLP ‘25!Our work The Validation Gap: A Mechanistic Analysis of How Language Models Compute Arithmetic but Fail to Validate It was accepted at EMNLP ‘25.
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New preprint!Our preprint Teaching Small Language Models to Learn Logic through Meta-Learning became available.
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New paper accepted at ACL ‘25!Our paper LLMs instead of Human Judges? A Large Scale Empirical Study across 20 NLP Evaluation Tasks was accepted at ACL ‘25.
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New preprint!Our preprint The Validation Gap: A Mechanistic Analysis of How Language Models Compute Arithmetic but Fail to Validate It became available.
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New paper accepted at EMNLP ‘24!Our paper A Systematic Analysis of Large Language Models as Soft Reasoners: The Case of Syllogistic Inferences was accepted at EMNLP ‘24.
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Starting my PhD!I started my PhD in Information Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Trento.
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Master’s degree in Cognitive Science!I received my master’s degree in Cognitive Science from CIMeC, University of Trento.
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Best Paper Award: Evaluation!Our paper ChatGPT’s Information Seeking Strategy: Insights from the 20-Questions Game received the Best Paper Award in the Evaluation category at INLG 2023.
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New paper accepted at INLG 2023!Our work ChatGPT’s Information Seeking Strategy: Insights from the 20-Questions Game was accepted at INLG 2023.
Experience
PhD Machine Learning Research Intern
Booking.com · Amsterdam
Visiting Researcher
University of Amsterdam · ILLC
MSc in Cognitive Science
University of Trento
BA in Philosophy
University of Trento
Publications
See also on Google Scholar
2026arXiv
FALSIFYBENCH: Evaluating Inductive Reasoning in LLMs with Rule Discovery Games
2026ACL
How Language Models Conflate Logical Validity with Plausibility: A Representational Analysis of Content Effects
2026EACL
Teaching Small Language Models to Learn Logic through Meta-Learning
2025EMNLP
The Validation Gap: A Mechanistic Analysis of How Language Models Compute Arithmetic but Fail to Validate It
Show earlier work
2025ACL
LLMs instead of Human Judges? A Large Scale Empirical Study across 20 NLP Evaluation Tasks
2024EMNLP
A Systematic Analysis of Large Language Models as Soft Reasoners: The Case of Syllogistic Inferences
2023INLG
ChatGPT’s Information Seeking Strategy: Insights from the 20-Questions Game ★ Best Paper Award