Giovanni Briglia

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đź‘‹ Hi there!

I’m Giovanni Briglia. Since November 2024, I’ve been a PhD student in the National PhD in AI, supervised by Franco Zambonelli and Stefano Mariani.


🎯 Research Overview

My work focuses on Causality-Driven Reinforcement Learning across both single- and multi-agent domains, investigating how causal reasoning can be efficiently represented and integrated into RL to enhance generalization, sample efficiency, and the interpretability of decision-making processes.


🔍 Research Questions

  • Representation — What form of representation (possibly learned and continuously updated in real time) best captures and infers transition dynamics and mechanisms both effectively and explainably? How can such representations be reused across environments, tasks, and policies?

  • Integration — To what extent, and through which mechanisms, can causal knowledge be integrated into RL so that it becomes an active component of policy optimization and value estimation? At which stage(s) of the RL process is this integration most effective?

  • Multi-Agent — How can causality-driven RL methods be extended to multi-agent settings, where cooperation and competition introduce additional layers of complexity and interdependence?


đź§  Main Interests

(Multi-Agent) Reinforcement Learning · Causal Reasoning · Probabilistic Knowledge Representation


đź“„ CV

For more details, check my CV and my Master’s Degree Transcript unfortunately only in Italian language.

news

Jun 01, 2026 I presented my PhD Thesis outline “Causal Learning and Reasoning in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning” at the AAMAS 2026 Doctoral Consortium. Poster here. I was also a pleasure to have had Christopher Amato as a mentor.
Jun 01, 2026 I presented our work “Scaling Multi-Agent Epistemic Planning through GNN-Derived Heuristics” at AAMAS Conference 2026, in the Planning and Learning track. Slides here.
May 01, 2026 I am excited to announce that, starting on September 1st, I will begin a PhD Visiting Research period at the University of Oxford, where I will be hosted by Alessandro Abate and Francesco Fabiano!!
Jan 20, 2026 Our paper Causal Models Improve Reinforcement Learning for Pervasive and Robotic Tasks has been accepted at the CoMoRe-AI 2026 Workshop, within the IEEE PerCom Conference. Check out the presentation slides here.
Dec 22, 2025 Our paper “Scaling Multi-Agent Epistemic Planning through GNN-Derived Heuristics” has been accepted as a full paper at AAMAS 2026, with an oral presentation!! 🚀🚀

latest posts

selected publications

  1. prima_maze.gif
    Improving Reinforcement Learning-Based Autonomous Agents with Causal Models
    Giovanni Briglia, Marco Lippi, Stefano Mariani, and Franco Zambonelli
    In International Conference on Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems, 2024
  2. GNNxEpistemic.png
    Scaling Multi-Agent Epistemic Planning through GNN-Derived Heuristics
    Giovanni Briglia, Francesco Fabiano, and Stefano Mariani
    In The 25th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 2026