Curriculum Vitae

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Education

• Ph.D. in Computer Science — The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA Jan 2022 – 2026 · Advisor: Prof. Rajiv Ramnath
  Focus: efficient and controllable diffusion-based generative modeling across continuous and discrete spaces, and the representations that support it.
• M.Sc. in Computer Engineering (Software) — Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran Sep 2015 – Sep 2017 · Advisor: Prof. H. Haghighi
  Thesis: An Approach for Automatic Software Test Data Generation Using Machine Learning and Program Static Structure
• B.Sc. in Computer Engineering (Hardware) — Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran Sep 2011 – Sep 2015 · Advisor: Prof. M. Abdoos
  Thesis: Applying Reinforcement Learning on Multi-Agent Environments

Professional Experience

• Machine Learning Researcher — Apple, MIND Team
  Sep 2026 – present · Seattle, WA
  • Research on the efficiency of large-scale generative models — diffusion and autoregressive.
• ML Research Intern — Apple, MIND Team
  May 2025 – Sep 2026 · Seattle, WA
  • Apple MIND team — fast and principled generative modeling with discrete diffusion and flow matching.
  • FS-DFM: step-aware discrete flow matching that reaches 1024-step diffusion quality in 8 steps (128× speedup), outperforming LLaDA-8B and Dream-7B at 40× smaller scale. [ICLR 2026]
  • TS-DFM: trajectory shaping for discrete flow distillation — energy-guided navigation lets the distilled 8-step student surpass its 1024-step teacher. [NeurIPS 2026]
  • DACA-GRPO: reinforcement learning for diffusion language models with per-step credit assignment and stratified likelihood estimation; gains on MATH-500, GSM8K, and Sudoku at zero extra inference cost. [NeurIPS 2026]
• Machine Learning Intern — Higharc
  May 2024 – Aug 2024 · Remote (Durham, NC)
  • Research on semantic and panoptic segmentation; self-supervised pre-training of a DETR-based model on unlabeled data.
  • Domain-adaptation strategies for cross-dataset generalization.
• Senior Machine Learning Engineer — JIBB
  Dec 2020 – Dec 2021 · Remote (San Francisco, CA)
  • Object detection and content enhancement pipelines for images and video.
  • U-Net variants for fast, accurate real-time image and video processing.
• CTO — BlueBitSoft
  Dec 2018 – Dec 2021 · Tehran, Iran
  • Designed the high-level architecture for pharmacy software solutions — scalability, reliability, efficiency.
  • Led the engineering team with agile practices and CI/CD pipelines; drove performance, security, and compliance work.
• Senior Data Scientist & Back-End Developer — TAPSI
  Mar 2018 – Dec 2020 · Tehran, Iran
  • Microservices for dynamic pricing, GPS fraud detection, and ETA prediction.
  • Demand forecasting and smart map generation from driver GPS traces; published the ETA method.

Teaching

• AI for Non-Majors — The Ohio State University Teaching Assistant, 2 semesters · Spring 2025 (Ali Alilooee), Fall 2026 (Mike Green)
• Computer Vision for Human–Computer Interaction — The Ohio State University Teaching Assistant, Spring 2025 · Dr. Wei-Lun (Harry) Chao
• Modeling and Problem Solving with Spreadsheets and Databases — The Ohio State University Teaching Assistant, 5 semesters · Fall 2022 / 2023 / 2025, Spring 2023 / 2024
• Discrete Mathematics · Artificial Intelligence · Data Structures · Algorithms · Introduction to Programming — Shahid Beheshti University Teaching Assistant, 14 semesters · 2012 – 2018

Selected Publications

• WACV 2027 DiReCT: Disentangled Regularization of Contrastive Trajectories for Physics-Refined Video Generation
• NeurIPS 2026 Trajectory as the Teacher: Few-Step Discrete Flow Matching via Energy-Navigated Distillation
• NeurIPS 2026 DACA-GRPO: Denoising-Aware Credit Assignment for Reinforcement Learning in Diffusion Language Models
• NeurIPS 2026 TaxaAdapter: Scaling Fine-Grained Species Image Generation to the Tree of Life
• ICLR 2026 FS-DFM: Fast and Accurate Long Text Generation with Few-Step Diffusion Language Models
• BOE 2025 ISOSNet: Cone Photoreceptor Detection and IS/OS Length Measurement from AO-OCT B-Scans
• ICCV 2025 TaxaDiffusion: Progressively Trained Diffusion Model for Fine-Grained Species Generation
• ICLR 2025 Frequency-Guided Masking for Enhanced Vision Self-Supervised Learning
• CVPR-W 2025 KnobGen: Controlling the Sophistication of Artwork in Sketch-Based Diffusion Models
• KDD 2024 Masked LoGoNet: Fast and Accurate 3D Image Analysis for Medical Domain
• DCN 2023 Smart and Collaborative Industrial IoT: A Federated Learning and Data Space Approach

Complete list on the publications page.

Academic Service

Organizing

• DiffuLM — Diffusion Language Models: Foundations, Efficiency, and Reasoning Workshop organizer · NeurIPS 2026 · Sydney, Australia · 12 December 2026

Reviewing

Honors & Awards

• 2025–26 Graduate Research Award, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University.
• 2026 Top Reviewer, NeurIPS 2026.
• 2026 Silver Reviewer, ICML 2026.
• 2025 Outstanding Reviewer (top 10%) and Excellent Reviewer (top 20%), ACM SIGKDD.
• 2022 Student Travel Award, 30th ACM SIGSPATIAL Conference.
• 2011 Top 1% in the B.Sc. National Entrance Exam in Mathematics, Iran (256,000+ candidates).
• 2009 Bronze Medal, University of Waterloo Mathematics Olympiad.

ACM-ICPC

• Coach & Team Lead Apr 2018 — 42nd Annual World Finals, Beijing, China
  Oct 2017 — 1st-place teams, Regional and Online Programming Contests, Kabul, Afghanistan
  Dec 2017 — 7th and 17th teams, Regional Contest, Tehran, Iran · Nov 2017 — 10th and 16th teams, Internet Programming Contest, Tehran, Iran
  2014 – 2015 — Coached teams at Iran Internet Programming Contests, Tehran, Iran
• Contestant Asia Regional Contest, Tehran: 10th (2014), 3rd (2013), 25th (2012)
  1st place, Qualification Contest, Shahid Beheshti University (2013) · 2nd place (2012, 2014)
  5th place, 5th ACM National Collegiate Programming Contest, University of Kashan (2013)

Technical Skills