CLMar 18
EngGPT2: Sovereign, Efficient and Open IntelligenceG. Ciarfaglia, A. Rosanova, S. Cipolla et al.
EngGPT2-16B-A3B is the latest iteration of Engineering Group's Italian LLM and it's built to be a Sovereign, Efficient and Open model. EngGPT2 is trained on 2.5 trillion tokens - less than Qwen3's 36T or Llama3's 15T - and delivers performance on key benchmarks, including MMLU-Pro, GSM8K, IFEval and HumanEval, comparable to dense models in the 8B-16B range, while requiring one-fifth to half of the inference power, and between one-tenth to one-sixth of the training data and consequent needed training power. Designed as a trained-from-scratch Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, EngGPT2 features 16 billion parameters with 3 billion active per inference, with expert sizes positioned between those used in GPT-OSS and Qwen3. Approximately 25% of its training corpus consists of Italian-language data, to deliver strong capabilities for European and Italian NLP tasks among models of similar scale. This efficiency aims to position EngGPT2 as a key contributor to the growing portfolio of open-weight European models, combining performance and efficiency with full alignment to the EU AI Act. EngGPT2 is also a single model capable of multiple reasoning modes: non-reasoning, reasoning in Italian or English, and turbo-reasoning (a concise, bullet-point style reasoning available in both languages designed for real-time reasoning use cases). EngGPT2 aims to set a new standard for resource-conscious, high-performance LLMs tailored to European and Italian contexts.
QUANT-PHDec 11, 2025
Quantum Approaches to Urban Logistics: From Core QAOA to Clustered ScalabilityF. Picariello, G. Turati, R. Antonelli et al.
The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a fundamental challenge in combinatorial optimization, widely applied in logistics and transportation. As the size of TSP instances grows, traditional algorithms often struggle to produce high-quality solutions within reasonable timeframes. This study investigates the potential of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), a hybrid quantum-classical method, to solve TSP under realistic constraints. We adopt a QUBO-based formulation of TSP that integrates real-world logistical constraints reflecting operational conditions, such as vehicle capacity, road accessibility, and time windows, while ensuring compatibility with the limitations of current quantum hardware. Our experiments are conducted in a simulated environment using high-performance computing (HPC) resources to assess QAOA's performance across different problem sizes and quantum circuit depths. In order to improve scalability, we propose clustering QAOA (Cl-QAOA), a hybrid approach combining classical machine learning with QAOA. This method decomposes large TSP instances into smaller sub-problems, making quantum optimization feasible even on devices with a limited number of qubits. The results offer a comprehensive evaluation of QAOA's strengths and limitations in solving constrained TSP scenarios. This study advances quantum optimization and lays groundwork for future large-scale applications.
CVNov 5, 2025
Case Study: Transformer-Based Solution for the Automatic Digitization of Gas PlantsI. Bailo, F. Buonora, G. Ciarfaglia et al.
The energy transition is a key theme of the last decades to determine a future of eco-sustainability, and an area of such importance cannot disregard digitization, innovation and the new technological tools available. This is the context in which the Generative Artificial Intelligence models described in this paper are positioned, developed by Engineering Ingegneria Informatica SpA in order to automate the plant structures acquisition of SNAM energy infrastructure, a leading gas transportation company in Italy and Europe. The digitization of a gas plant consists in registering all its relevant information through the interpretation of the related documentation. The aim of this work is therefore to design an effective solution based on Artificial Intelligence techniques to automate the extraction of the information necessary for the digitization of a plant, in order to streamline the daily work of MGM users. The solution received the P&ID of the plant as input, each one in pdf format, and uses OCR, Vision LLM, Object Detection, Relational Reasoning and optimization algorithms to return an output consisting of two sets of information: a structured overview of the relevant design data and the hierarchical framework of the plant. To achieve convincing results, we extend a state-of-the-art model for Scene Graph Generation introducing a brand new Transformer architecture with the aim of deepening the analysis of the complex relations between the plant's components. The synergistic use of the listed AI-based technologies allowed to overcome many obstacles arising from the high variety of data, due to the lack of standardization. An accuracy of 91\% has been achieved in the extraction of textual information relating to design data. Regarding the plants topology, 93\% of components are correctly identified and the hierarchical structure is extracted with an accuracy around 80\%.