About me
I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, working with Prof. Scott Sanner on LLM post-training (reinforcement learning, test-time learning, reasoning) and memory-based agentic AI.
I completed my Ph.D. in the ECE Department at the University of Toronto in 2025, advised by Prof. Ben Liang and Prof. Min Dong, on differentially private machine learning systems and optimization algorithms for distributed learning systems. Before that, I received my M.Sc. (2021) and B.Sc. (2018) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tehran.
Research interests
- Large Language Models (LLMs)
- LLM post-training
- Agentic AI
- Distributed learning
- Differential privacy
News
| April 2026 | Our paper "CommonWhy: A Dataset for Evaluating Entity-Based Causal Commonsense Reasoning in Large Language Models" was accepted to appear at SIGIR 2026. |
| January 2026 | Our paper "Privacy Enhancement in Over-the-Air Federated Learning via Adaptive Receive Scaling" was accepted to appear at IEEE INFOCOM 2026. |
| December 2025 | Started as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the CS Department at the University of Toronto, working with Prof. Scott Sanner. |
| November 2025 | Received the Doctoral Completion Award, University of Toronto. |
| September 2025 | Our paper "Adaptive Sigmoid Clipping for Balancing the Direction–Magnitude Mismatch Trade-off in Differentially Private Learning" was accepted at NeurIPS 2025. |
| July 2025 | Our paper "Adaptive Sparsification for Communication-Efficient Distributed Learning" was accepted at ACM MobiHoc 2025. |
Selected awards
- NeurIPS Travel Grant (2025)
- Doctoral Completion Award, University of Toronto (2025)
- Edward S. Rogers Sr. Graduate Scholarship, University of Toronto (2021)
- Exemption from the national M.Sc. entrance exam for exceptional academic performance, University of Tehran (2018)