Welcome to my homepage! I’m Mahdi, a graduate student studying at the University of Toronto. Currently, I’m actively involved in the fascinating fields of Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval as a member of D3M lab at UofT. Specifically, I am passionate about controllable text generation, language-based item retrieval, dialogue systems, and ensuring the safety and minimizing toxicity in language models. Feel free to explore my research and delve into these exciting topics!

Research and Work Experience

• Research Assistant - D3M Lab, University of Toronto (UofT) - Working on IR and NLP (Jan 2022 — Present)
  • Expected graduation date: Dec 2023
  • Main research:
    • Multi-objective Text Decoding (under progress)
    • Self-supervised contrastive learning for item retrieval based on user reviews published ECIR2023
  • Collaboration:
    • Text Detoxification with Diffusion Seq2SeqModels published ACL2023
    • Commonsense Reasoning for food recipe Question Answering published SIGIR2023
  • Under the supervision of Prof. Sanner.
• Research Intern, at National University of Singapore (NUS), Systems Security Lab - On Adversarial Machine Learning (Jul 2019 — Sep 2019)
  • Performing an adversarial attack on facial recognition by using projected gradient descent with momentum on faces in latent space (JavaScript, Python, Tensorflow)
  • Attacking face detection with PGD (JavaScript, Tensorflow).
  • A brief report can be found here. Outputs can be found here.
  • Under the supervision of Prof. Shokri.
• Bachelor’s Thesis, at Amirkabir University of Technology (AUT), NLP Lab (Feb 2018 — Sep 2020)
  • Developing a Persian Natural Language Processing Toolkit
  • Using Transformer based Language models for NER, POS, Text Chunking and Argument Mining, Comparative study on contextual embeddings and sequence tagging models.
  • Under the supervision of Prof. Momtazi

• Research Assistant (Oct 2020 — May 2021)

  • Active transfer learning for low resource Rumour Detection on Tweets, Paper (Python, Pytorch, Sk-learn) published EMNLP2021
  • Under supervision of Dr. Sardar Hamidian at George Washington University
• Research and Development Intern in NLP, Tehran, at Diaalog (Jun 2018 — Dec 2018)
  • Developing Persian chatbot system using Deep Encoder-Decoder with LSTM layers and attention mechanism, code (Python, TF)
  • Question Answering system based on clustering methods, code (Python, Sk-learn)

Education

• MASc of Information Engineering (2022–Present)

  University of Toronto (UofT), Toronto

• B.Sc. of Computer Engineering (2016–2020)

  Amirkabir University of Tech. (AUT), Tehran