Maximo Rulli

Researcher at Sapienza Università di Roma

Bio

I am a bachelor's student at Sapienza Università di Roma. I work under Simone Scardapane's and Alessio Devoto's supervision on: generative modelling, Diffusion Language Models, and interpretability. I'm interested in how we can better understand the stochastic processes generative models approximate, and in measuring how much the theoretical frameworks are really contributing to the dynamics of networks' learning process. I'm also concerned with developing scalable techniques for interpreting models; as network complexity has scaled so rapidly, I'm keen on complexity-friendly techniques that can generalise to broad classes of models, ideally without hand-crafting them case by case: using the complexity of networks to understand the complexity of networks.

Research

Subliminal Clocks: Latent Time Modelling in Diffusion Language Models

M. Rulli, T. Fontanari*, S. Petruzzi*, F. Alvetreti, G. Strano, D. Crisostomi, G. Nikolaou, T. Mencattini, A. Santilli, E. Rodolà, S. Scardapane, A. Devoto

2026

We show that Diffusion Language Models internally encode denoising progress, and that this signal can be probed, steered, and geometrically characterised.

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Experience
  • 2025 – Present
    Sapienza Università di Roma
    Student Researcher

    Working on Diffusion Language Models, interpretability, and generative modelling at SNAIL. Supervised by Simone Scardapane and Alessio Devoto.

  • 2024
    MecanTronic
    Machine Learning Engineer

    End-to-end system development: From data collection and labeling to model fine-tuning, I contributed to all stages of building a TTS system.

  • 2023
    Escuela Técnica Roberto Rocca
    Machine Learning Course Instructor

    Designed and taught a comprehensive Machine Learning course oriented towards upper-secondary students. Lectures are available in Spanish here.

Others
Academic Service
  • Organiser of the weekly reading group, an interdisciplinary meeting of researchers across the university

  • Assisted in the organisation of the lab's internal processes

Distinctions
Blogs

Latest research notes and blogs.

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