Safety AI Agents Multi-Agent Systems Reinforcement Learning

Publications

Publication List

Research

Recent Projects

The Attacker in the Mirror

arXiv 2026

When users query Large Language Models (LLMs), are the outputs truly safe? Content generation carries inherent risks, prompting researchers to reinforce these models using self-play loops, where a single model acts as both attacker and defender, iteratively hardening its own defenses. However, this approach raises a critical concern: How do we prevent the model from collapsing into localized self-consistency when it plays both sides?
To answer this, we introduce Anchored Bipolicy Self-Play (ABS), a novel framework that disrupts the self-consistency assumption in LLM safety alignment. By training a pair of adversarial policies that specifically exploit the model's internal guardrails, we demonstrate that current alignment techniques remain fundamentally vulnerable to coordinated self-play attacks.

Gabriele La Malfa, Emanuele La Malfa, Saar Cohen, Jie M. Zhang, Michael Luck, Michael Wooldridge, Elizabeth Black

The Attacker in the Mirror diagram

Fairness Aware RL via PPO

AAAI 2026 (Oral)

Orchestrating agents that collectively behave fairly while efficiently pursuing their goals is a critical frontier in fair reinforcement learning (Fair RL). However, a persistent challenge remains: How can we enforce and enhance fairness when certain agents possess sensitive attributes?
To address this, we introduce Fair-PPO, an adaptive, PPO-grounded optimization method designed to dynamically re-orient policy convergence whenever a target fairness metric is violated. Unlike static approaches, Fair-PPO actively accounts for and adjusts gradient convergence by balancing two critical dimensions: historical bias derived from past trajectories, and potential future bias estimated via the value function.

Gabriele La Malfa, Jie M. Zhang, Michael Luck, Elizabeth Black

Fair PPO diagram

LLMs Miss the Multi-Agent Mark

NeurIPS 2025 (Position)

We argue that large language models fundamentally lack the coordination capabilities required for effective multi-agent systems. Through systematic evaluation, we demonstrate critical gaps in strategic reasoning, theory of mind, and emergent communication when LLMs are deployed as autonomous agents.

Gabriele La Malfa, Emanuele La Malfa, Samuele Marro, Jie M. Zhang, Elizabeth Black, Michael Luck, Philip Torr, Michael Wooldridge

LLM Multi-Agent diagram LLM Multi-Agent diagram 2

Experience

Research roles

Oct 2022 – Present · London, UK

PhD Candidate, Safe & Trusted AI CDT

King’s College London & Imperial College London

Fairness in multi-agent systems. Supervisors: Prof. Elizabeth Black, Prof. Michael Luck, Dr. Jie Zhang.

Jul 2025 – Oct 2025 · Cambridge, UK

Visiting Researcher, Social Dynamics Group

Nokia Bell Labs

Working on AI risks and Human-Agent Interactions (Multi-Agent Systems).

Oct 2020 – Aug 2022 · Cambridge, UK

Research Assistant

Centre for Risk Studies, Cambridge Judge Business School

Risk researcher and modeller in business, financial, and cyber risk.

Service & Outreach

Community, conferences, and volunteering

Academic service

  • Organizing Committee, LOD 2020–2025.
  • Student Volunteer, IJCAI 2024.
  • Reviewer, AAAI, NeurIPS.

Projects & volunteering

  • Lead, Lunchtime Dialogues: Identity & Social Justice (2024–2025), King’s College London.
  • Lead, Dialogues about Identity and Privilege (2023–2024), NMES, King’s College London.
  • Interviewer, Ukrainian Global University (2022–2023).
  • Volunteer, Kharkiv and Przemyśl Project (2022) and multiple human rights initiatives.

Projects

Open-source and research code

Fair-PPO

Fairness-aware reinforcement learning via Proximal Policy Optimization.

HospitalSim

Reinforcement learning environment simulating hospital daily routines.