About me
I am an Assistant Professor in the Data Science department of EURECOM. I build probabilistic methods that let machines perceive and reason about the world under uncertainty, at the meeting point of generative modelling and information theory. My work spans continuous-time, functional and infinite-dimensional diffusion processes — introduced with Continuous-Time Functional Diffusion Processes (NeurIPS 2023) and surveyed in Generative Diffusion Models in Infinite Dimensions (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 2025) — as well as multimodal and discrete generative models.
My group develops diffusion-based estimators that make classically intractable information-theoretic quantities measurable at scale:
- MINDE set the state of the art for neural mutual-information estimation (ICLR 2024)
- SΩI was the first scalable estimator of O-information beyond Gaussian systems (ICML 2024, oral)
- TENDE set the state of the art for transfer entropy (AISTATS 2026)
- INFO-SEDD extends the approach to discrete data with continuous-time Markov chains, outperforming embedding-based neural estimators (ICLR 2026)
- DIPHINE is the first neural estimator of integrated information decomposition (Φ-ID)
My current focus is trajectory inference — recovering latent dynamics from snapshot data, where our functional relative-entropy estimator appeared at ICML 2026 — and, more recently, foundation models for it.
I publish regularly in the main tracks of ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS and AISTATS. I am P.I. (EURECOM) of the ANR project Gen-T, co-P.I. of P-AI-LOT (industrial chair on agentic LLMs, with Amadeus) and of European and industrial projects on machine perception with partners including Huawei Technologies; industrial patents filed with Renault. ELLIS member.
I received my M.Sc. (2016) and Ph.D. (2021) from Politecnico di Torino in Electronic and Telecommunications Engineering. Before EURECOM I worked on statistical signal processing for satellite navigation systems.
Contact
giulio.franzese[AT]eurecom.fr · +33 (0)4 93 00 81 45
EURECOM, Campus SophiaTech, 450 route des Chappes, 06410 Biot, France
