DUCK Lab logo DUCK Lab

Lab news

Sep 2026

Invited talk at NESYRE 2026 in Berlin

Eleonora will give an invited talk at NESYRE 2026 — Neuro-symbolic AI, Mathematical Reasoning and Agents — at the Weierstrass Institute in Berlin (14–17 September). The speaker line-up looks amazing! ✨

Aug 2026

Tutorial at UAI 2026 in Amsterdam

Mihaela and Eleonora will give a tutorial at UAI 2026 in Amsterdam (17–21 August): Beyond Soft Penalties: Hard Constraints for Neural Networks with Continuous Outputs — how to enforce hard constraints on neural networks with continuous outputs.

Aug 2026

Invited talk at TPM 2026 in Amsterdam

Eleonora will give an invited talk at TPM 2026 — the 9th Workshop on Tractable Probabilistic Modeling — in Amsterdam on 21 August, co-located with UAI 2026. Looking forward to meeting this amazing community! ✨

Jul 2026

Two papers accepted at NeSy 2026!

🎉 We had two papers accepted at NeSy 2026, the International Conference on Neural-Symbolic Learning and Reasoning! Huge congratulations to Eleni and Jacob, who led these projects as MSc students. Jacob completed his MSc at Imperial, co-supervised by Eleonora and Francesco Belardinelli, while Eleni completed her MSc at Oxford, co-supervised by Eleonora, Giuseppe De Giacomo, and Antonio Di Stasio. ✨

Jul 2026

Eleonora on the future of AI panel at Imperial

Eleonora took part in a panel on The future of AI: what’s next and what matters?, organised by the Imperial Policy Forum and chaired by Prof Tom Coates. The discussions were amazing!

Jul 2026

Mihaela awarded an IX-WAI Early Career Grant

🎉 Huge congratulations to Mihaela, who has been awarded one of Imperial College London’s IX-WAI Early Career Grants! ✨

Jul 2026

Joshua at ICML 2026 in Seoul!

☕ Joshua is at ICML 2026 in Seoul presenting Can I Have Your Order? Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Slot Filling Ordering in Diffusion Language Models — using MCTS to decide the order in which diffusion language models fill in slots. If you’d like to grab a coffee with him, let us know!

Jul 2026

Yani joins as AI for Math Summer Fellow!

🎉 A warm welcome to Yani Zhang, who is joining the DUCK Lab as an AI for Math Summer Fellow! Yani is a final-year PhD student at ETH Zurich working on neural network theory and formal many-valued logic — huge congratulations on winning the fellowship from Renaissance Philanthropy! ✨

Jul 2026

Luca delivers AI training across UK Government

Between May and July 2026, Luca delivered AI Fundamentals training to the Cabinet Office (National Security Secretariat), the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government, as part of his Research Fellow role at the Imperial Policy Forum.

Jun 2026

Lohith joins Capstone as intern!

🎉 Huge congratulations to Lohith, who will be starting an internship at Capstone Investment Advisors — a fantastic match for his research on neurosymbolic AI in financial markets! ✨

Jun 2026

Luca featured in the EEE department newsletter

Luca was featured in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering department newsletter at Imperial College London.

Jun 2026

Invited talk at CILC 2026

Eleonora gave an invited talk at CILC 2026, the 41st Italian Conference on Computational Logic.

Jun 2026

Pythagoras-Prover released!

🚀 We are thrilled to announce the release of Pythagoras-Prover — a compute-efficient family of Lean theorem provers! Strong results at just 4B parameters, powered by Augmented Lean Formalisation. The models are now available on Hugging Face 🤗

May 2026

Talk at OxBridge Women in CS Conference

On 9 May, Eleonora spoke at the OxBridge Women in CS Conference — a particularly special one for her, as she was herself an OxWoCS member during her PhD!

May 2026

Luca mentors AI Security Institute Policy Fellow

Since May 2026, Luca has been mentoring Andy Corcoran, Head of National Security Partnering at the AI Security Institute, as part of an ongoing programme on AI for Policy Making — bridging cutting-edge AI research with government practice.

Apr 2026

Luca receives Global Promise Endorsement

🎉 Congratulations to Luca, who has been awarded a Global Promise Endorsement by the Royal Academy of Engineering!

Apr 2026

Paper accepted at ICML 2026

Our paper Can I Have Your Order? Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Slot Filling Ordering in Diffusion Language Models has been accepted at ICML 2026.

Mar 2026

Paper accepted at ACL (Findings)

Our paper PiCSAR: Probabilistic Confidence Selection And Ranking for Reasoning Chains has been accepted at ACL (Findings) 2026.

Mar 2026

Luca trains UK civil servants on AI and data governance

In March 2026, Luca delivered AI Fundamentals training to the Cabinet Office (National Security Secretariat) and an AI and Data Governance session to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, GOV UK.

Mar 2026

Invited talk at the Neurosymbolic AI Workshop

Luca gave an invited talk on Prototypical Neurosymbolic AI at the Neurosymbolic AI Workshop, Imperial College London.

Mar 2026

Invited talk at the Neurosymbolic AI Workshop

Lohith gave an invited talk at the Neurosymbolic AI Workshop on Neurosymbolic AI for safe financial portfolio construction.

Feb 2026

Joshua joins MBZUAI as visiting student

Joshua is joining MBZUAI as a visiting student, where he will be working on Theorem Proving with LLMs. Please contact him if you want to collaborate!

Jan 2026

Luca awarded his PhD in Artificial Intelligence

🎉 Congratulations to Luca, who has been awarded his Italian National PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Sapienza University of Rome, supervised by Prof. Marco Console, on Knowledge Representation!

Jan 2026

Survey published in TMLR

Our survey A Survey on Deep Learning Approaches for Tabular Data Generation has been published in Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR).

Nov 2025

Luca joins the Imperial Policy Forum as Research Fellow in AI

🎉 Luca has joined the Strategic Engagement Division at Imperial College London as a Research Fellow in AI with the Imperial Policy Forum, delivering research and expert-led training on AI directly relevant to government policy.

Nov 2025

Luca begins supervising Master's thesis on neurosymbolic learning

From November 2025 to July 2026, Luca is supervising Lolézio Viora Marquet’s Master’s thesis, Prototype-Augmented Neurosymbolic Learning under Multi-Modal Data Distributions.

Oct 2025

Frontiers in AI invited talk at ECAI 2025

Eleonora gave one of the Frontiers in AI invited talks at ECAI 2025.

Sep 2025

Paper accepted at NeurIPS 2025

Our paper Right for the Right Reasons: Avoiding Reasoning Shortcuts via Prototypical Neurosymbolic AI has been accepted at NeurIPS 2025.

Aug 2025

AI for Math Fund

Constraining LLMs for Theorem Proving: A Neurosymbolic Approach to Guaranteed Autoformalization

Eleonora has been awarded an AI for Math grant. Read more here

Jul 2025

Paper published at ECAI 2025

Eleonora’s paper A Posteriori Verification or a Priori Design? Navigating Requirements-Driven Deep Learning has been published at ECAI 2025.