2026

• 🎉

  Thrilled to receive the SIGIR Early Career Researcher Award (Community Engagement)!

• 📚

  “RAG over Thinking Traces Can Improve Reasoning Tasks” accepted at EMNLP 2026.

  with Wenjie Ma, Sewon Min, Matei Zaharia.

• 📚

  “DeepScholar-Bench: A Live Benchmark and Automated Evaluation for Generative Research Synthesis” accepted at COLM 2026.

  with Liana Patel, Harshit Gupta, Ankita Sundar, Ion Stoica, Matei Zaharia, Carlos Guestrin.

• 🌟

  “MAP: Measuring Agents in Production” selected for an Oral presentation at ICML 2026.

• 🌟

  “MAP: Measuring Agents in Production” accepted at ICML 2026 as a Spotlight (top 2.2%).

• 📚

  Six papers accepted at SIGIR 2026.

  • Can QPP Choose the Right Query Variant? Evaluating Query Variant Selection for RAG Pipelines

    Negar Arabzadeh, Andrew Drozdov, Michael Bendersky, Matei Zaharia

  • Failing Forward: Understanding Query Failure in Retrieval, Judgment, and Generation

    Seyed Mohammad Hosseini, Negar Arabzadeh, Mohammad Hossein Saliminabi, Morteza Zihayat, Dimitrios Androutsos, Ebrahim Bagheri

  • From Doxa to Logos in Scientific Peer Review

    Negar Arabzadeh, Sajad Ebrahimi, Alireza Daqiq, Soroush Sadeghian, Seyed Mohammad Hosseini, Hai Son Le, Mahdi Bashari, Ebrahim Bagheri

  • A Reproducibility Study of LLM-Based Query Reformulation

    Amin Bigdeli, Radin Hamidi Rad, Hai Son Le, Mert Incesu, Negar Arabzadeh, Charles L. A. Clarke, Ebrahim Bagheri

  • Peerispect: Claim Verification in Scientific Peer Reviews

    Ali Ghorbanpour, Soroush Sadeghian, Amir Daghighfarsoodeh, Sajad Ebrahimi, Negar Arabzadeh, Seyed Mohammad Hosseini, Ebrahim Bagheri

  • PeerPrism: Peer Evaluation Expertise vs Review-writing AI

    Soroush Sadeghian, Alireza Daqiq, Roya Cheraghi, Sajad Ebrahimi, Negar Arabzadeh, Ebrahim Bagheri

• 💬

  Joined the panel at the WExIR Workshop, SIGIR 2026.

• 💬

  Joined the panel at the AgentSearch Workshop, SIGIR 2026.

• 📚

  Six papers accepted at CIKM 2026.

  • Seek: Self-Evaluative Exploration for Knowledge Retrieval

    Amin Bigdeli, Radin Hamidi Rad, Negar Arabzadeh, Sajad Ebrahimi, Hai Son Le, Charles L. A. Clarke, Ebrahim Bagheri

  • Judging a Review by its Cover: A Reliability Analysis of LLM-based Peer Review Evaluation Metrics

    Shakiba Amirshahi, Sajad Ebrahimi, Hai Son Le, Negar Arabzadeh, Ebrahim Bagheri

  • Reasoning About Query Difficulty to Predict Retrieval Effectiveness

    Seyed Mohammad Hosseini, Negar Arabzadeh, Morteza Zihayat, Ebrahim Bagheri

  • Reasoning-Aware Utility Estimation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

    Abbas Saleminezhad, Sajad Ebrahimi, Negar Arabzadeh, Ebrahim Bagheri

  • Route Me If You Can: A Benchmark for Query Reformulation Selection

    Hai Son Le, Negar Arabzadeh, Amin Bigdeli, Radin Hamidi Rad, Sajad Ebrahimi, Charles L. A. Clarke, Ebrahim Bagheri

  • Reliable Evaluation of AI Assisted Peer Review

    Negar Arabzadeh, Sajad Ebrahimi, Shakiba Amirshahi, Seyed Mohammad Hosseini, Hai Son Le, Mahdi Bashari, Ebrahim Bagheri

• 📚

  Tutorial accepted at CIKM 2026: “Query Expansion Revisited: From Classical Retrieval to Agentic Search.”

  with Amin Bigdeli, Radin Hamidi Rad, Hai Son Le, Yibin Lei, Andrew Yates, Charles L. A. Clarke, Ebrahim Bagheri.

• 🥇

  3rd Place, Mathematics Doctoral Prize Competition, University of Waterloo.

• 🏆

  Best Paper Award at ECIR 2026 for “ReFormeR: Learning and Applying Explicit Query Reformulation Patterns.”

• 🪑

  Reproducibility Track Chair, SIGIR 2026.

• 🏆

  Best Industry Talk Award at WSDM 2026 for “Can LLMs Uphold Research Integrity? Evaluating the Role of LLMs in Peer Review Quality.”

• 🪑

  Area Chair, NeurIPS 2026.

• 💬

  Joined the panel discussion at the WSDM 2026 Doctoral Symposium.

• 🪑

  Workshop Chair, ECIR 2026.

• 📚

  “QueryGym: A Toolkit for Reproducible LLM-Based Query Reformulation” accepted at The Web Conference 2026.

  with Amin Bigdeli, Radin Hamidi Rad, Mert Incesu, Charles L. A. Clarke, Ebrahim Bagheri.

• 🪑

  Publicity Chair, CHIIR 2026.

• 📚

  “PeeriScope: A Multi-Faceted Framework for Evaluating Peer Review Quality” accepted at The Web Conference 2026.

  with Sajad Ebrahimi, Soroush Sadeghian, Ali Ghorbanpour, Sara Salamat, Seyed Mohammad Hosseini, Hai Son Le, Mahdi Bashari, Ebrahim Bagheri.

• 🪑

  Area Chair, ACL Rolling Review (ARR).

• 🗺️

  Presented T3: Transforming Thinking Trajectories for Reasoning-intensive RAG at the Sky Retreat, Summer 2026.

• 🗺️

  Presented MAP: Measuring Agents in Production at a NICE Talk — insights from a year-long empirical study on real-world agent deployments.

• 🗺️

  Presented MAP: Measuring Agents in Production at Google Sense AI.