Malio Li

Lanpei Li, Massimo Coppola, Malio Li et al.

We present a framework for dynamic management of structured parallel processing skeletons on serverless platforms. Our goal is to bring HPC-like performance and resilience to serverless and continuum environments while preserving the programmability benefits of skeletons. As a first step, we focus on the well known Farm pattern and its implementation on the open-source OpenFaaS platform, treating autoscaling of the worker pool as a QoS-aware resource management problem. The framework couples a reusable farm template with a Gymnasium-based monitoring and control layer that exposes queue, timing, and QoS metrics to both reactive and learning-based controllers. We investigate the effectiveness of AI-driven dynamic scaling for managing the farm's degree of parallelism via the scalability of serverless functions on OpenFaaS. In particular, we discuss the autoscaling model and its training, and evaluate two reinforcement learning (RL) policies against a baseline of reactive management derived from a simple farm performance model. Our results show that AI-based management can better accommodate platform-specific limitations than purely model-based performance steering, improving QoS while maintaining efficient resource usage and stable scaling behaviour.

Elia Piccoli, Malio Li, Giacomo Carfì et al.

The recent focus and release of pre-trained models have been a key components to several advancements in many fields (e.g. Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision), as a matter of fact, pre-trained models learn disparate latent embeddings sharing insightful representations. On the other hand, Reinforcement Learning (RL) focuses on maximizing the cumulative reward obtained via agent's interaction with the environment. RL agents do not have any prior knowledge about the world, and they either learn from scratch an end-to-end mapping between the observation and action spaces or, in more recent works, are paired with monolithic and computationally expensive Foundational Models. How to effectively combine and leverage the hidden information of different pre-trained models simultaneously in RL is still an open and understudied question. In this work, we propose Weight Sharing Attention (WSA), a new architecture to combine embeddings of multiple pre-trained models to shape an enriched state representation, balancing the tradeoff between efficiency and performance. We run an extensive comparison between several combination modes showing that WSA obtains comparable performance on multiple Atari games compared to end-to-end models. Furthermore, we study the generalization capabilities of this approach and analyze how scaling the number of models influences agents' performance during and after training.

Jack Bell, Luigi Quarantiello, Eric Nuertey Coleman et al.

Continual learning--the ability to acquire, retain, and refine knowledge over time--has always been fundamental to intelligence, both human and artificial. Historically, different AI paradigms have acknowledged this need, albeit with varying priorities: early expert and production systems focused on incremental knowledge consolidation, while reinforcement learning emphasised dynamic adaptation. With the rise of deep learning, deep continual learning has primarily focused on learning robust and reusable representations over time to solve sequences of increasingly complex tasks. However, the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and foundation models has raised the question: Do we still need continual learning when centralised, monolithic models can tackle diverse tasks with access to internet-scale knowledge? We argue that continual learning remains essential for three key reasons: (i) continual pre-training is still necessary to ensure foundation models remain up to date, mitigating knowledge staleness and distribution shifts while integrating new information; (ii) continual fine-tuning enables models to specialise and personalise, adapting to domain-specific tasks, user preferences, and real-world constraints without full retraining, avoiding the need for computationally expensive long context-windows; (iii) continual compositionality offers a scalable and modular approach to intelligence, enabling the orchestration of foundation models and agents to be dynamically composed, recombined, and adapted. While continual pre-training and fine-tuning are explored as niche research directions, we argue it is continual compositionality that will mark the rebirth of continual learning. The future of AI will not be defined by a single static model but by an ecosystem of continually evolving and interacting models, making continual learning more relevant than ever.

Luigi Quarantiello, Elia Piccoli, Jack Bell et al.

The birth of Foundation Models brought unprecedented results in a wide range of tasks, from language to vision, to robotic control. These models are able to process huge quantities of data, and can extract and develop rich representations, which can be employed across different domains and modalities. However, they still have issues in adapting to dynamic, real-world scenarios without retraining the entire model from scratch. In this work, we propose the application of Continual Learning and Compositionality principles to foster the development of more flexible, efficient and smart AI solutions.

Malio Li, Elia Piccoli, Vincenzo Lomonaco et al.

Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning aims at developing agents that are able to continually evolve and adapt to new scenarios. However, this goal is challenging to achieve due to the phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting and the high demand of computational resources. Learning from scratch for each new task is not a viable or sustainable option, and thus agents should be able to collect and exploit prior knowledge while facing new problems. While several methodologies have attempted to address the problem from different perspectives, they lack a common structure. In this work, we propose a new framework, I Know How (IKH), which provides a common formalization. Our methodology focuses on modularity and compositionality of knowledge in order to achieve and enhance agent's ability to learn and adapt efficiently to dynamic environments. To support our framework definition, we present a simple application of it in a simulated driving environment and compare its performance with that of state-of-the-art approaches.