Assistant Professor (RTD-A)
Lucio La Cava.
He is an Assistant Professor (RTD-A) at the DIMES Department of the University of Calabria, Italy. Previously, he earned a Ph.D. cum laude in ICT at DIMES with a thesis on Graph Mining and Multimodal Representation Learning for Decentralized Socio-Economic Domains. He was a visiting researcher at the IT University of Copenhagen, and is a member of the ML, NLP and Network Science team at the AI & Data Science Lab @DIMES.
01 / 04
Research
Research interests.
/01
Machine-generated text detection
Stylometric, statistical, and representation-level forensics for synthetic text in the wild.
/02
LLM interpretability
Probing residual streams to surface concepts, intent, and the geometry of model thought.
/03
Representation engineering
Steering vectors and contrastive directions as a control surface for behaviour.
02 / 04
Updates
Latest news.
May 1, 2026
🥳 Paper accepted to IJCAI 2026!
Mar 24, 2026
✈️ Flying to Morocco 🇲🇦 for presenting our EACL 2026 Findings paper!
Mar 6, 2026
🥳 Paper accepted with Information Fusion!
Mar 3, 2026
📝 New preprint out on LLM-based Argument Mining and its integration with Argumentation and Description Logics
03 / 04
Recent work
Selected publications.
2026
Luminol-AIDetect: Fast Zero-shot Machine-Generated Text Detection based on Perplexity under Text Shuffling
MGT Detection
@misc{LaCava2025luminolaidetect,
title={Luminol-AIDetect: Fast Zero-shot Machine-Generated Text Detection based on Perplexity under Text Shuffling},
author={La Cava, Lucio and Tagarelli, Andrea},
howpublished={arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.25860},
year={2026}
}Toward Preference-aligned Large Language Models via Residual-based Model Steering
Interpretability & Steering
@inproceedings{LaCava2025palrs,
title={Toward Preference-aligned Large Language Models via Residual-based Model Steering},
author={La Cava, Lucio and Tagarelli, Andrea},
booktitle={IJCAI 2026},
year={2026}
}Authorship Attribution in Multilingual Machine-Generated Texts
MGT Detection
@inproceedings{LaCava2025mAA,
title={Authorship Attribution in Multilingual Machine-Generated Texts},
author={La Cava, Lucio and Macko, Dominik and Móro, Róbert and Srba, Ivan and Tagarelli, Andrea},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) [To Appear]},
year={2026}
}2025
OpenTuringBench: An Open-Model-based Benchmark and Framework for Machine-Generated Text Detection and Attribution
MGT Detection
@inproceedings{LaCava2025otb,
title={OpenTuringBench: An Open-Model-based Benchmark and Framework for Machine-Generated Text Detection and Attribution},
author={La Cava, Lucio and Tagarelli, Andrea},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
year={2025},
doi={10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1354}
}Machines in the Crowd? Measuring the Footprint of Machine-Generated Text on Reddit
MGT Detection
@misc{LaCava2025mgtreddit,
title={Machines in the Crowd? Measuring the Footprint of Machine-Generated Text on Reddit},
author={La Cava, Lucio and Aiello, Luca Maria and Tagarelli, Andrea},
howpublished={arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.07226},
year={2025}
}Exploring LLMs’ Ability to Spontaneously and Conditionally Modify Moral Expressions through Text Manipulation
LLM Agents & Personas
@inproceedings{Greco2025morality,
title={Exploring LLMs’ Ability to Spontaneously and Conditionally Modify Moral Expressions through Text Manipulation},
author={Greco, Candida Maria and La Cava, Lucio and Zangari, Lorenzo and Tagarelli, Andrea},
booktitle={ACL 2025 (Main Conference)},
year={2025},
doi={10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.883}
}Safeguarding Decentralized Social Media: LLM Agents for Automating Community Rule Compliance
Social Media
@article{LaCava2024safeguarding,
title={Safeguarding Decentralized Social Media: LLM Agents for Automating Community Rule Compliance},
author={La Cava, Lucio and Tagarelli, Andrea},
journal={Online Social Networks and Media},
year={2025},
doi={10.1016/j.osnem.2025.100319}
}Open Models, Closed Minds? On Agents Capabilities in Mimicking Human Personalities through Open Large Language Models
LLM Agents & Personas
@inproceedings{LaCava2024agentspersonalities,
title={Open Models, Closed Minds? On Agents Capabilities in Mimicking Human Personalities through Open Large Language Models},
author={La Cava, Lucio and Tagarelli, Andrea},
booktitle={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
year={2025},
doi={10.1609/aaai.v39i2.32125}
}2024
Is Contrasting All You Need? Contrastive Learning for the Detection and Attribution of AI-generated Text
MGT Detection
@inproceedings{LaCava2024AIdetection,
title={Is Contrasting All You Need? Contrastive Learning for the Detection and Attribution of AI-generated Text},
author={La Cava, Lucio and Costa, Davide and Tagarelli, Andrea},
booktitle={27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2024)},
year={2024},
doi={10.3233/FAIA240862}
}04 / 04
Contact
Let's connect.
Open to collaboration,
and good conversation.
lucio.lacava@dimes.unical.it
↗
and good conversation.
Find me elsewhere