About me
I’m a 3rd-year PhD student at the Computer Science department of UC Riverside, where I am very fortunate to be advised by Prof. Nael Abu-Ghazaleh and Prof. Yue Dong.
My research lies at the intersection of Generative AI and trustworthiness, particularly focusing on Multi-Modal Large Language Models (LLMs & MLLMs) with an emphasis on Safety, Alignment, Adversarial Robustness, Ethics, Bias, Fairness, Sociotechnical challenges, and Security/Privacy. Additionally, I am deeply interested in advancing Multimodal Understanding, Reasoning, and Retrieval, as well as Expert Specialization, Personalization, Multilingual MLLMs, and AI Agent development. My work also involves exploring Evaluation methods and Reward Modeling to ensure more adaptive, steerable, and contextually aligned AI systems. I have been also working on integrating AR/VR and Mixed Reality (MR) with AI Agents.
Honestly, the Dark Side of AI 😈 has always been very attractive to me, that’s why I enjoy attacking these models from an adversarial perspective (Dopamine Rush 🌊🧨) to find the vulnerabilities of current alignment and defense startegies with the goal of developing more robust systems.
In Summer 2024, I had a great experience as a Research Intern at Microsoft Research 
working with Javier Hernandez and Jina Suh. There, I had to pause my adversarial mindset and focus on being the “good guy,” LoL 😈->😇. I worked on Evaluation and Measurment methods of Empathy/User Satisfaction in LLM Chatbots as well as Training Context-Specific Expert Adapters to Steer empathy based on user’s need!
News ⬇️ (Scroll down)
- Oct 2024: I will serve as a reviewer for ICLR 2025.
- Sep 2024: Our paper (Co-First Authored) on "Textual Unlearning" to solve "Cross-Modality Safety Alignment" was Accepted at EMNLP 2024 Findings - See y'all in Florida 🐊🌊🌴 [Paper]
- Sep 2024: I successfully concluded my internship at Microsoft Research ; The best experience I could imagine and thankful to my whole team! Stay tuned for the research paper and the models (Cooking ... 👨🏻🍳🍳🔥)
- Sep 2024: My work was cited in the "International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI". [Report]
- Aug 2024: 👨🏻🎓 We gave a 3-hour tutorial on "AI Safety and Adversarial Attacks" at ACL 2024. [Material] [Paper]
- July 2024: I gave a talk on AI Safety and AR/VR Security with implications on Human-Computer Interaction at MSR . [Slides]
- July 2024: I presented my works on "Unlearning" and "Cross-Modality Safety Alignment" at McGill NLP group
. [Site] - Summer 2024: I will be doing an internship at Microsoft Research in Summer 2024! (Thrilled 💥👨🏻💻)
- June 2024: I'm honored to serve as a reviewer for NextGenAISafety 2024 at ICML! [ICML2024]
- June 2024: 🏅🏆 I won the "Outstanding Teaching Award" of the CS department of UCR! (Grateful 🤗) [Award]
- Mar 2024: My work on Cross-Modal Vulnerability Alignment in Vision-Language Models was accepted for a presentation at SuperAGI Leap Summit 2024! [Video] [SuperAGI]
- Mar 2024: Our paper "That Doesn't Go There: Attacks on Shared State in Multi-User Augmented Reality Applications" has been accepted to USENIX SECURITY 2024! [paper]
- Feb 2024: Gave a lightning talk on my AI Safety work at Cohere For AI! [Slides]
- Jan 2024: 🎖🔥 Our paper "Jailbreak in Pieces: Compositional Adversarial Attacks on Multi-Modal Language Models" was accepted for "Spotlight presentation(top 5% of 7262 submissions) at ICLR2024! [OpenReview] [SlidesLive-Video] [YoutubeAInews]
- Nov 2023: 🏆 Our paper "Jailbreak in Pieces: Compositional Adversarial Attacks on Multi-Modal Language Models" won the "Best Paper Award" at SoCal NLP 2023! [paper] [Award] [News1] [News2] [News3]
- Sep 2023: Our paper "Vulnerabilities of Large Language Models to Adversarial Attacks" has been accepted for a tutorial to ACL2024! [paper]
- Jul 2023: Yay! I did my own first paper :D! "Plug and Pray: Exploiting off-the-shelf components of Multi-Modal Models" [paper]
- Apr 2023: I will be serving as the moderator & evaluator of student presentations at UGRS2023! [paper]
Education
Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of California, Riverside (Sep2022-Present)
B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at Sharif University of Technology (2017-2022)
Ranked 68th among 150,000 participants in Iran Nationwide University Entrance Exam (Konkur)