Recent work
All publications.
36 of 36 publications
2026
11 papers
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}
}Political Persuasion and Endorsement in Large Language Models
LLM Agents & Personas
@misc{Antelmi2026persuasion,
title={Political Persuasion and Endorsement in Large Language Models},
author={Antelmi, Alessia and Galdeman, Alessia and La Cava, Lucio and Pera, Arianna and Da San Martino, Giovanni},
howpublished={arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.05961},
year={2026}
}Double Rectified Linear Unit-based Modular Semantics for Quantitative Bipolar Argumentation Framework
Computational Argumentation
@misc{Alfano2026semantics,
title={Double Rectified Linear Unit-based Modular Semantics for Quantitative Bipolar Argumentation Framework},
author={Alfano, Gianvincenzo and Greco, Sergio and La Cava, Lucio and Parisi, Francesco and Trubitsyna, Irina},
howpublished={arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.02551},
year={2026}
}Argument Component Segmentation with Fine-Tuned Large Language Models
Argument Mining
@inproceedings{Caputo2026eacl,
title={Argument Component Segmentation with Fine-Tuned Large Language Models},
author={Caputo, Ettore and Greco, Sergio and La Cava, Lucio},
booktitle={Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026},
year={2026},
doi={10.18653/v1/2026.findings-eacl.272}
}Semantic-aware data imputation in dynamic relational databases via pre-trained language models
Data Imputation
@article{Alfano2026dataimputation,
title={Semantic-aware data imputation in dynamic relational databases via pre-trained language models},
author={Alfano, Gianvincenzo and Greco, Sergio and La Cava, Lucio and Mahmood, Tariq and Trubitsyna, Irina},
journal={Information Fusion},
year={2026},
doi={10.1016/j.inffus.2026.104291}
}LLM-based Argument Mining meets Argumentation and Description Logics: a Unified Framework for Reasoning about Debates
Argument Mining
@misc{Alfano2026llmargminingdl,
title={LLM-based Argument Mining meets Argumentation and Description Logics: a Unified Framework for Reasoning about Debates},
author={Alfano, Gianvincenzo and Greco, Sergio and La Cava, Lucio and Monea, Stefano Francesco and Trubitsyna, Irina},
howpublished={arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.02858},
year={2026}
}Culturally Grounded Personas in Large Language Models: Characterization and Alignment with Socio-Psychological Value Frameworks
LLM Agents & Personas
@misc{Greco2026CulturallyGroundedPersonas,
title={Culturally Grounded Personas in Large Language Models: Characterization and Alignment with Socio-Psychological Value Frameworks},
author={Greco, Candida Maria and La Cava, Lucio and Tagarelli, Andrea},
howpublished={arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.22396},
year={2026}
}ARGUS: Towards End-to-End Argument Mining with Large Language Models
Argument Mining
@inproceedings{Caputo2026Argus,
title={ARGUS: Towards End-to-End Argument Mining with Large Language Models},
author={Caputo, Ettore and Greco, Sergio and La Cava, Lucio},
booktitle={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Demonstration Track)},
year={2026},
doi={10.1609/aaai.v40i48.42335}
}Heuristic-Informed Mixture of Experts for Link Prediction in Multilayer Networks
Graphs & ML
@article{lacava2025mlmoe,
title={Heuristic-Informed Mixture of Experts for Link Prediction in Multilayer Networks},
author={La Cava, Lucio and Mandaglio, Domenico and Zangari, Lorenzo and Tagarelli, Andrea},
journal={Information Sciences},
year={2026},
doi={10.1016/j.ins.2026.123106}
}2025
9 papers
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}
}PersonaGen: A Persona-Driven Open-Ended Machine-Generated Text Dataset
MGT Detection
@inproceedings{Gugliotta2025PersonaGen,
title={PersonaGen: A Persona-Driven Open-Ended Machine-Generated Text Dataset},
author={Gugliotta, Carmelo and La Cava, Lucio and Tagarelli, Andrea},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM ’25)},
year={2025},
doi={10.1145/3746252.3761611}
}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}
}Unveiling User Dynamics in the Evolving Social Debate on Climate Crisis During the Conferences of the Parties
Social Media
@article{Martirano2025pmcn,
title={Unveiling User Dynamics in the Evolving Social Debate on Climate Crisis During the Conferences of the Parties},
author={Martirano, Liliana and La Cava, Lucio and Tagarelli, Andrea},
journal={Pervasive and Mobile Computing},
year={2025},
doi={10.1016/j.pmcj.2025.102077}
}Characterizing Swing Voters in Online Social Media: The Case of the 2022 Italian Elections
Social Media
@article{Antelmi2024swingvoters,
title={Characterizing Swing Voters in Online Social Media: The Case of the 2022 Italian Elections},
author={Antelmi, Alessia and La Cava, Lucio and Pera, Arianna},
journal={Soc. Netw. Anal. Min.},
year={2025},
doi={10.1007/s13278-025-01457-4}
}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}
}Visually Wired NFTs: Exploring the Role of Inspiration in Non-Fungible Tokens
Web3 & NFT
@article{LaCava2025visually,
title={Visually Wired NFTs: Exploring the Role of Inspiration in Non-Fungible Tokens},
author={La Cava, Lucio and Costa, Davide and Tagarelli, Andrea},
journal={ACM Trans. Web},
year={2025},
doi={10.1145/3703411}
}2024
4 papers
Talking the Talk Does Not Entail Walking the Walk: On the Limits of Large Language Models in Lexical Entailment Recognition
LLM Agents & Personas
@inproceedings{greco-etal-2024-talking,
title={Talking the Talk Does Not Entail Walking the Walk: On the Limits of Large Language Models in Lexical Entailment Recognition},
author={Greco, Candida Maria and La Cava, Lucio and Tagarelli, Andrea},
booktitle={Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024},
year={2024},
doi={10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.881}
}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}
}An Exploration of Decentralized Moderation on Mastodon
Social Media
@inproceedings{Bono2024decentralizedmoderation,
title={An Exploration of Decentralized Moderation on Mastodon},
author={Bono, Carlo Alberto and La Cava, Lucio and Luceri, Luca and Pierri, Francesco},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 16th ACM Web Science Conference},
year={2024},
doi={10.1145/3614419.3644016}
}Polarization in Decentralized Online Social Networks
Social Media
@inproceedings{LaCava2024polarization,
title={Polarization in Decentralized Online Social Networks},
author={La Cava, Lucio and Mandaglio, Domenico and Tagarelli, Andrea},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 16th ACM Web Science Conference},
year={2024},
doi={10.1145/3614419.3644013}
}2023
5 papers
Drivers of social influence in the Twitter migration to Mastodon
Social Media
@article{LaCava2023SciRep,
title={Drivers of social influence in the Twitter migration to Mastodon},
author={La Cava, Lucio and Aiello, Luca Maria and Tagarelli, Andrea},
journal={Scientific Reports},
year={2023},
doi={10.1038/s41598-023-48200-7}
}Unraveling the NFT economy: A comprehensive collection of Non-Fungible Token transactions and metadata
Web3 & NFT
@article{Costa2023DiB,
title={Unraveling the NFT economy: A comprehensive collection of Non-Fungible Token transactions and metadata},
author={Davide Costa and Lucio La Cava and Andrea Tagarelli},
journal={Data in Brief},
year={2023},
doi={10.1016/j.dib.2023.109749}
}Evolution of the Social Debate on Climate Crisis: Insights from Twitter During the Conferences of the Parties
Social Media
@inproceedings{ICTDM2023,
title={Evolution of the Social Debate on Climate Crisis: Insights from Twitter During the Conferences of the Parties},
author={Martirano, Liliana and La Cava, Lucio and Tagarelli, Andrea},
booktitle={2023 International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Disaster Management (ICT-DM)},
year={2023},
doi={10.1109/ICT-DM58371.2023.10286927}
}SONAR: Web-Based Tool for Multimodal Exploration of Non-Fungible Token Inspiration Networks
Web3 & NFT
@inproceedings{LaCava2023SIGIR,
title={SONAR: Web-Based Tool for Multimodal Exploration of Non-Fungible Token Inspiration Networks},
author={La Cava, Lucio and Costa, Davide and Tagarelli, Andrea},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval},
year={2023},
doi={10.1145/3539618.3591821}
}Show Me Your NFT and I Tell You How It Will Perform: Multimodal Representation Learning for NFT Selling Price Prediction
Web3 & NFT
@inproceedings{Costa2023WWW,
title={Show Me Your NFT and I Tell You How It Will Perform: Multimodal Representation Learning for NFT Selling Price Prediction},
author={Costa, Davide and La Cava, Lucio and Tagarelli, Andrea},
booktitle={Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023},
year={2023},
doi={10.1145/3543507.3583520}
}2022
5 papers
When Correlation Clustering Meets Fairness Constraints
Graphs & ML
@inproceedings{Gullo2022DS,
title={When Correlation Clustering Meets Fairness Constraints},
author={Gullo, Francesco and La Cava, Lucio and Mandaglio, Domenico and Tagarelli, Andrea},
booktitle={Discovery Science},
year={2022},
doi={10.1007/978-3-031-18840-4_22}
}LawNet-Viz: A Web-Based System to Visually Explore Networks of Law Article References
Legal NLP
@inproceedings{LaCava2022SIGIR,
title={LawNet-Viz: A Web-Based System to Visually Explore Networks of Law Article References},
author={La Cava, Lucio and Simeri, Andrea and Tagarelli, Andrea},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval},
year={2022},
doi={10.1145/3477495.3531668}
}Information consumption and boundary spanning in Decentralized Online Social Networks: The case of Mastodon users
Social Media
@article{LaCava2022OSNEM,
title={Information consumption and boundary spanning in Decentralized Online Social Networks: The case of Mastodon users},
author={Lucio La Cava and Sergio Greco and Andrea Tagarelli},
journal={Online Social Networks and Media},
year={2022},
doi={10.1016/j.osnem.2022.100220}
}Network Analysis of the Information Consumption-Production Dichotomy in Mastodon User Behaviors
Social Media
@inproceedings{LaCava2022ICWSM,
title={Network Analysis of the Information Consumption-Production Dichotomy in Mastodon User Behaviors},
author={La Cava, Lucio and Greco, Sergio and Tagarelli, Andrea},
booktitle={Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media},
year={2022},
doi={10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19391}
}Discovering the Landscape of Decentralized Online Social Networks through Mastodon
Social Media
@inproceedings{LaCava2022SEBD,
title={Discovering the Landscape of Decentralized Online Social Networks through Mastodon},
author={La Cava, Lucio and Greco, Sergio and Tagarelli, Andrea},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 30th Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems, SEBD},
year={2022}
}2021
2 papers
Understanding the growth of the Fediverse through the lens of Mastodon
Social Media
Open-source, Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs) are emerging as alternatives to the popular yet centralized and profit-driven platforms like Facebook or Twitter. In DOSNs, users can set up their own server, or instance, while they can actually interact with users of other instances. Moreover, by adopting the same communication protocol, DOSNs become part of a massive social network, namely the Fediverse. Mastodon is the most relevant platform in the Fediverse to date, and also the one that has attracted attention from the research community. Existing studies are however limited to an analysis of a relatively outdated sample of Mastodon focusing on few aspects at a user level, while several open questions have not been answered yet, especially at the instance level. In this work, we aim at pushing forward our understanding of the Fediverse by leveraging the primary role of Mastodon therein. Our first contribution is the building of an up-to-date and highly representative dataset of Mastodon. Upon this new data, we have defined a network model over Mastodon instances and exploited it to investigate three major aspects: the structural features of the Mastodon network of instances from a macroscopic as well as a mesoscopic perspective, to unveil the distinguishing traits of the underlying federative mechanism; the backbone of the network, to discover the essential interrelations between the instances; and the growth of Mastodon, to understand how the shape of the instance network has evolved during the last few years, also when broading the scope to account for instances belonging to other platforms. Our extensive analysis of the above aspects has provided a number of findings that reveal distinguishing features of Mastodon and that can be used as a starting point for the discovery of all the DOSN Fediverse.
@article{LaCava2021APNS,
title={Understanding the growth of the Fediverse through the lens of Mastodon},
author={La Cava, Lucio and Greco, Sergio and Tagarelli, Andrea},
journal={Applied Network Science},
year={2021},
doi={10.1007/s41109-021-00392-5}
}The Italian Civil Code Network Analysis
Legal NLP
@inproceedings{LaCava2021RELATED,
title={The Italian Civil Code Network Analysis},
author={La Cava, Lucio and Simeri, Andrea and Tagarelli, Andrea},
booktitle={Proceedings of the First International Workshop RELATED - Relations in the Legal Domain Workshop, in conjunction with ICAIL},
year={2021}
}