Francesco Croce

I am an Assistant Professor (Tenure-Track) at Aalto University, PS Fellow, and PI at the ELLIS Institute Finland. Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL in the TML Laboratory led by Prof. Nicolas Flammarion. I completed my PhD in Computer Science in 2023 in the Machine Learning Group at the University of Tübingen, supervised by Prof. Matthias Hein. I received my BSc and MSc in Mathematics from the University of Torino. I also interned at DeepMind London in 2022, hosted by Sven Gowal.

During my PhD I worked mostly on adversarial robustness in vision tasks, developing AutoAttack and RobustBench. My current research focuses on multimodal foundation models. I investigate their adversarial robustness (jailbreaks, backdoors, etc.), especially for safe AI systems. Also, I am exploring their ability to capture different aspects of human perception, e.g., visual and semantic similarity. Overall, I want to better understand and improve the interaction among multiple data modalities.

I'll recruit students through the ELLIS PhD Program. If you're interested in multimodal learning, robustness, visual reasoning (and more), feel free to reach out!