Ali Nafisi
I recently completed my MS in AI at Bu-Ali Sina University. I earned my BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Kurdistan in 2023.
My research experience is rooted in Deep Learning, specifically Natural Language Processing, Multimodal Models, and AI Safety. I am now aiming to expand my research scope to explore Neuro-Symbolic AI and Reinforcement Learning.
News
November 2025
Ranked π₯ 1st in the Rayan International AI Contest! The technical report of our solutions is available on arXiv.
Master's Thesis
Publications
Expert Systems with Applications, 2024
Elastic deep autoencoder for text embedding clustering by an improved graph regularization
Experience
Graduate Research Assistant
Robot Intelligence & Vision Lab
Mar 2026 - Sep 2026
Developed my master's thesis on mitigating spurious correlations in image datasets via counterfactual image augmentation, under the supervision of Prof. Hassan Khotanlou.

Research Assistant
Machine Learning Lab
Nov 2025 - Feb 2026
Research on mechanistic interpretability of LLMs, resulting in a publication at ACL 2026, under the supervision of Dr. Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah.

AI Engineer
Matina
Part-time
Apr 2024 - Jan 2025
Investigated and implemented culturally-aligned LLM post-training approaches by creating specialized datasets and leveraging Multiple LoRA Experts, resulting in the model Matina and a published paper at ACL 2025.
Honors & Achievements
Nov 2025
1st place in the Rayan International AI Contest
May 2025
3rd place in the LLM Agents Hackathon
March 2024
2nd Place in the Quera Large Language Model Hackathon
June 2023
3rd Place in the 28th Computer Engineering regional Olympiad (Region 5)
Presentations
