Giorgio Strano

CS PhD student at Sapienza University

./whoami

Hi! I’m Giorgio. I am a second year PhD student at Sapienza, in Rome, at the Gladia lab under supervision of prof. Emanuele Rodolà.

After dark, I am a passionate music maker and listener, lover of photogaraphy and experimental art.

I love logic a bit too much, reverse engineering, solving problems and putting my skills to the test whenever I can.

~/research

At the moment, my research is focused on:

  • Audio generative models, with special focus on controllability, conditioning sources and strategies, and representation learning for audio;
  • Optimization and training dynamics of large models in continual learning;
  • Quantization of transformer models.

~/publications

STAGE: Stemmed Accompaniment Generation through Prefix-Based Conditioning

G. Strano, C. Ballanti, D. Crisostomi, M. Mancusi, L. Cosmo, E. Rodolà.

LoopGen: Training-Free Loopable Music Generation

D. Marincione, G. Strano, D. Crisostomi, R. Ribuoli, E. Rodolà.

GenProCC, AI4Music @ NeurIPS 2025.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09654

Membership and Dataset Inference Attacks on Large Audio Generative Models

Jakub Proboszcz, Paweł Kochanski, Karol Korszun, Donato Crisostomi, Giorgio Strano, Emanuele Rodolà, Kamil Deja, Jan Dubinski.

Under Review at ICLR 2026 - Blogpost Track.

not yet published

The dynamics of forgetting

G. Strano, F. Pappone, D. Crisostomi, E. Rodolà.

Under review at ICASSP 2026.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04479

Activation Patching for Interpretable Steering in Music Generation

S. Facchiano, G. Strano, D. Crisostomi, I. Tallini, T. Mencattini, F. Galasso, E. Rodolà.

~/fun

Tripod is a small and portable, fully-convolutional deep learning model to sharpen and correct the focus of real-world photographs.

A physically based volumetric path tracer written in Julia from scratch with my friend and colleague Antonio Gargiulo. It is inspired from Yocto/GL, the rendering engine developed by our professor, Fabio Pellacini. It renders complex 3D scenes accurately, with almost negligible slowdown compared to a fairly optimized equivalently capable C++ implementation.

This is a re-implementation, with more experiments, and extended to different videogame environments of the paper World Models.

During my NLP course, held by Roberto Navigli, I tackled the challenge of GAP-coreference, achieving results very close to state-of-the-art with a distilled transformer that could fit in 8GB of VRAM.

A transformer-free approach to named entity resolution, using bidirectional LSTMs on different type of non-contextualized embeddings (W2V, Glove), improved with character embedding and a Conditional Random Field (CRF).

An implementation from scratch (…meaning from vanilla pytorch) of the Double Deep Q Learning algorithm, applied to the classic first ever Super Mario Bros videogame for the NES.