Amirabbas Afzali

Hi there! I’m Amirabbas Afzali, an undergraduate student in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Mathematics at Sharif University of Technology. Over the past few years, I’ve developed a strong passion for the theory and practice of machine learning, especially at the intersection of optimization, reinforcement learning, and human-AI alignment.

My recent work spans a variety of exciting research areas, including:

Trustworthy AI & Adversarial Machine Learning
LLM Alignment and Preference Optimization
Offline & Robust Reinforcement Learning
Theory of Optimization and Machine Learning

selected publications

NeurIPS

LORE: Lagrangian-Optimized Robust Embeddings for Visual Encoders

Borna Khodabandeh, Amirabbas Afzali, Amirhossein Afsharrad, and 4 more authors

2025

arXiv Bib

@misc{khodabandeh2025lorelagrangianoptimizedrobustembeddings,
  title = {LORE: Lagrangian-Optimized Robust Embeddings for Visual Encoders},
  author = {Khodabandeh, Borna and Afzali, Amirabbas and Afsharrad, Amirhossein and Mousavi, Seyed Shahabeddin and Lall, Sanjay and Amini, Sajjad and Moosavi-Dezfooli, Seyed-Mohsen},
  year = {2025},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.LG},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.18884},
  equal_contribution = {Borna Khodabandeh and Amirabbas Afzali},
}

ICLR

Aligning Visual Contrastive learning models via Preference Optimization

Amirabbas Afzali^*, Borna Khodabandeh^*, Ali Rasekh, and 3 more authors

International Conference on Learning Representations, 2025

arXiv Bib

@article{afzali2025aligningvisualcontrastivelearning,
  title = {Aligning Visual Contrastive learning models via Preference Optimization},
  author = {Afzali, Amirabbas and Khodabandeh, Borna and Rasekh, Ali and JafariNodeh, Mahyar and kazemi, Sepehr and Gottschalk, Simon},
  year = {2025},
  journal = {International Conference on Learning Representations},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.CV},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.08923},
  equal_contribution = {Amirabbas Afzali and Borna Khodabandeh},
}

RLC

One Goal, Many Challenges: Robust Preference Optimization Amid Content-Aware and Multi-Source Noise

Amirabbas Afzali, Amirhossein Afsharrad, Seyed Shahabeddin Mousavi, and 1 more author

Reinforcement Learning Conference, 2025

arXiv Bib

@article{afzali2025goalchallengesrobustpreference,
  title = {One Goal, Many Challenges: Robust Preference Optimization Amid Content-Aware and Multi-Source Noise},
  author = {Afzali, Amirabbas and Afsharrad, Amirhossein and Mousavi, Seyed Shahabeddin and Lall, Sanjay},
  year = {2025},
  journal = {Reinforcement Learning Conference},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.LG},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.12301},
}