News.

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

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

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

“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.

“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.

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.

Runner-up Best Paper Award at SIGIR-AP 2025 for “Adversarial Attacks against Neural Ranking Models via In-Context Learning.”

Attended my first NeurIPS! It was pretty OVERWHELMING.

Presented “Restructuring the Corpus Makes RAG Work for Math” at the Math AI workshop, NeurIPS 2025.

Presented “DeepScholar-Bench: A Live Benchmark and Automated Evaluation for Generative Research Synthesis” at the LLM Evaluation workshop, NeurIPS 2025.

Presented “Towards Automatically Optimizing Retrieval Augmented AI Systems” at the ML for Systems workshop, NeurIPS 2025.

Released MAP: Measuring Agents in Production — a whole-year-long project.

Workshop proposal accepted at NeurIPS 2025: Vision-Language Models: Challenges of Real-World Deployment.

with Mozhgan Nasr Azadani, Yimu Wang, Krzysztof Czarnecki, Richard He Bai, Lukas Schmid.

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

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

Released “QueryGym: A Toolkit for Reproducible LLM-Based Query Reformulation.”

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

Attended CIKM in Seoul, South Korea — presented one applied research paper, one short paper, and an industry talk.

Graduated with my PhD from the University of Waterloo — thesis nominated for the Gold Thesis Award.

Will serve as Reproducibility Track Chair for SIGIR 2026.

“Query Performance Prediction Using Neural Query Space Proximity” accepted at TIST journal.

with Amin Bigdeli, Sajad Ebrahimi, Sara Salamat, Shirin Seyedsalehi, Maryam Khodabakhsh, Fattane Zarrinkalam, Ebrahim Bagheri.

First project release as a postdoc at the Sky Lab: DeepScholar-Bench — A Live Benchmark for Generative Research Synthesis.

Will serve as Workshop Chair for ECIR 2026.

“RottenReviews: Benchmarking Review Quality with Human and LLM-Based Judgments” accepted at CIKM 2025.

with Sajad Ebrahimi, Soroush Sadeghian, Ali Ghorbanpour, Sara Salamat, Muhan Li, Hai Son Le, Mahdi Bashari, Ebrahim Bagheri.

“Building Trustworthy Peer Review Quality Assessment Systems” accepted at CIKM 2025.

with Sajad Ebrahimi, Ali Ghorbanpour, Soroush Sadeghian, Sara Salamat, Muhan Li, Hai Son Le, Mahdi Bashari, Ebrahim Bagheri.

“LLM-as-a-Judge in Entity Retrieval: Assessing Explicit and Implicit Relevance” accepted at CIKM 2025.

with Mohammad Hossein Saliminabi, Seyed Mohammad Hosseini, Dimitrios Androutsos, Morteza Zihayat, Ebrahim Bagheri.

Attended SIGIR in Padua, Italy.

Won the Best Reviewer Award at SIGIR 2025.

Will serve as Publicity Chair for CHIIR 2026.

Honored to receive the SIGIR Student Travel Grant.

Successfully defended my PhD!

Moved to California and officially started my postdoc at UC Berkeley — can't believe this dream is now reality!

“Benchmarking LLM-Based Relevance Judgment Methods” accepted at SIGIR 2025.

with Charles L. A. Clarke.

“VAP³: Variation-Aware Prompt Performance Prediction” accepted at SIGIR 2025.

with Ebrahim Bagheri.

“A Human-AI Comparative Analysis of Prompt Sensitivity in LLM-Based Relevance Judgment” accepted at SIGIR 2025.

with Charles L. A. Clarke.

“IDAT: A Multi-Modal Dataset and Toolkit for Building and Evaluating Interactive Task-Solving Agents” accepted at SIGIR 2025.

with Shrestha Mohanty, Andrea Tupini, Yuxuan Sun, Alexey Skrynnik, Artem Zholus, Marc-Alexandre Côté, Julia Kiseleva.

Attended SIGIR-AP in Tokyo, Japan. Tokyo became my favourite city. Two papers and a tutorial.

Attended ACML in Hanoi, Vietnam — two papers.

“exHarmony: Authorship and Citations for Benchmarking the Reviewer Assignment Problem” accepted at ECIR 2025.

with Sajad Ebrahimi, Sara Salamat, Mahdi Bashari, Ebrahim Bagheri.

“Benchmarking Prompt Sensitivity in Large Language Models” accepted at ECIR 2025.

with Amirhosein Razavi, Mina Soltangheis, Sara Salamat, Morteza Zihayat, Ebrahim Bagheri.

Attended my first EMNLP in Miami, USA. WOW it was huge!

Attended CIKM in Boise, Idaho — gave my first industrial talk about Reviewer.ly.

“Assessing and Verifying Task Utility in LLM-Powered Applications” accepted at EMNLP 2024.

with Siqing Huo, Nikhil Mehta, Qingyun Wu, Chi Wang, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Charles L. A. Clarke, Julia Kiseleva.

“Offline Evaluation of Set-Based Text-to-Image Generation” accepted at SIGIR-AP 2024.

with Fernando Diaz, Junfeng He.

“Evaluating Relative Retrieval Effectiveness with Normalized Residual Gain” accepted at SIGIR-AP 2024.

with Amin Bigdeli, Charles L. A. Clarke, Ebrahim Bagheri.

Tutorial “Query Performance Prediction: Techniques and Applications in Modern Information Retrieval” accepted at SIGIR-AP 2024.

with Chuan Meng, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Ebrahim Bagheri.

“Robust Query Performance Prediction for Dense Retrievers via Adaptive Disturbance Generation” accepted at Machine Learning Journal.

with Abbas Saleminezhad, Soosan Beheshti, Ebrahim Bagheri.

“Gender Disentangled Representation Learning in Neural Rankers” accepted at Machine Learning Journal.

with Shirin Seyedsalehi, Sara Salamat, Morteza Zihayat, Ebrahim Bagheri.

“A Contrastive Neural Disentanglement Approach for Query Performance Prediction” accepted at Machine Learning Journal.

with Sara Salamat, Shirin Seyedsalehi, Amin Bigdeli, Morteza Zihayat, Ebrahim Bagheri.

Industrial talk “Reviewerly: Modeling the Reviewer Assignment Task as an Information Retrieval Problem” accepted at CIKM 2024.

with Sajad Ebrahimi, Sara Salamat, Mahdi Bashari, Ebrahim Bagheri.

“Enhanced Retrieval Effectiveness through Selective Query Generation” accepted at CIKM 2024.

with Mohammad Hosseini, Morteza Zihayat, Ebrahim Bagheri.

Gave a talk at the Sky Computing Lab, UC Berkeley, on Evaluation of Information Access Systems in the Generative Era.

Honored to receive the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS).

Passed my PhD second comprehensive exam — officially a PhD candidate!

Honorable Mention Award at ECIR 2024 for “Context-Aware Query Term Difficulty Estimation for Performance Prediction.”

“Ranked List Truncation: From Retrieval to Re-ranking” accepted at SIGIR 2024.

with Chuan Meng, Arian Askari, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Maarten de Rijke.

Attended ECIR 2024 in Glasgow, Scotland; gave a keynote talk at WOWS2024 and a talk at the Search Futures workshop.

Attended EACL 2024 in Malta.

Started co-organizing the SIGIR Virtual Forum “Lean and Learn” series.

Gave a talk at UCL Web Intelligence Group.

“Fréchet Distance for Offline Evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems with Sparse Labels” accepted at EACL 2024.

with Charles L. A. Clarke.

Finished my internship at Microsoft Research.

“LaQuE: Enabling Entity Search at Scale” accepted at ECIR 2024.

with Amin Bigdeli, Ebrahim Bagheri.

“Adapting Standard Retrieval Benchmarks to Evaluate Generated Answers” accepted at ECIR 2024.

with Amin Bigdeli, Charles L. A. Clarke.

“Context-Aware Query Term Difficulty Estimation for Performance Prediction” accepted at ECIR 2024.

with Abbas Saleminezhad, Ebrahim Bagheri, Soosan Beheshti.

“Estimating Query Performance Through Rich Contextualized Query Representations” accepted at ECIR 2024.

with Sajad Ebrahimi, Maryam Khodabakhsh, Ebrahim Bagheri.

“BertPE: A BERT-Based Pre-retrieval Estimator for Query Performance Prediction” accepted at ECIR 2024.

with Fattane Zarrinkalam, Maryam Khodabakhsh.

“Learning to Jointly Transform and Rank Difficult Queries” accepted at ECIR 2024.

with Amin Bigdeli, Ebrahim Bagheri.

Demo paper “KnowFIRES: A Knowledge-Graph Framework for Interpreting Retrieved Entities from Search” accepted at ECIR 2024.

with Kiarash Golzadeh, Christopher Risi, Charles L. A. Clarke, Jian Zhao.

Tutorial “Query Performance Prediction: From Fundamentals to Advanced Techniques” accepted at ECIR 2024.

with Chuan Meng, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Ebrahim Bagheri.

Gave a talk at the Information Retrieval Group, University of Glasgow.

Joined Microsoft Research Redmond as a Research Intern. Finally doing it in person — first time in the USA!

“A Self-Supervised Language Model Selection Strategy for Biomedical Question Answering” accepted in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics.

with Ebrahim Bagheri.

“Retrieving Supporting Evidence for Generative Question Answering” accepted at SIGIR-AP 2023.

with Siqing Huo, Charles L. A. Clarke.

“Noisy Perturbations for Estimating Query Difficulty in Dense Retrievers” accepted at CIKM 2023.

with Radin Hamidi Rad, Maryam Khodabakhsh, Ebrahim Bagheri.

“Neural Disentanglement of Query Difficulty and Semantics” accepted at CIKM 2023.

with Sara Salamat, Amin Bigdeli, Shirin Seyedsalehi, Morteza Zihayat, Ebrahim Bagheri.

Attended SIGIR 2023 in Taipei, Taiwan.

Won the SIGIR Travel Award to attend SIGIR and ICTIR in Taiwan.

“A is for Adele: An Offline Evaluation Metric for Instant Search” accepted at ICTIR 2023.

with Oleksandra Kmet, Ben Carterette, Charles L. A. Clarke, Claudia Hauff, Praveen Chandar.

Won the AMII Talent Bursary to attend the Upper Bound conference in Edmonton, Alberta.

Won the Cheriton Scholarship for $20,000.

Presented our journal paper “Shallow Pooling for Sparse Labels” at ECIR 2023.

Tutorial “Understanding and Mitigating Gender Bias in Information Retrieval Systems” at ECIR 2023.

Attended ECIR 2023 in Dublin, Ireland.

“Query Performance Prediction: From Ad-Hoc to Conversational Search” accepted at SIGIR 2023.

with Chuan Meng, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Maarten de Rijke.

“A Preference Judgment Tool for Authoritative Assessment” accepted at SIGIR 2023.

with Mahsa Seifikar, Linh Nhi Phan Minh, Mark D. Smucker, Charles L. A. Clarke.

“Quantifying Ranker Coverage of Different Query Subspaces” accepted at SIGIR 2023.

with Amin Bigdeli, Radin Hamidi Rad, Ebrahim Bagheri.

Tutorial “Preference-Based Offline Evaluation” at WSDM 2023.

with Fernando Diaz, Charles L. A. Clarke.

Attended WSDM 2023 in Singapore.

Finished my internship at Google Brain.

“PREME: Preference-Based Meeting Exploration through an Interactive Questionnaire” accepted at EACL 2023 — outcome of my MSR internship.

with Ali Ahmadvand, Julia Kiseleva, Yang Liu, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Ming Zhong, Milad Shokouhi.

Tutorial proposal “Understanding and Mitigating Gender Bias in Information Retrieval Systems” accepted at ECIR 2023.

with Amin Bigdeli, Shirin Seyedsalehi, Morteza Zihayat, Ebrahim Bagheri.

“Learning Query-Space Document Representations for High-Recall Retrieval” accepted at ECIR 2023.

with Sara Salamat, Fattane Zarrinkalam, Morteza Zihayat, Ebrahim Bagheri.

“Don't Raise Your Voice, Improve Your Argument: Learning to Retrieve Convincing Arguments” accepted at ECIR 2023.

with Sara Salamat, Amin Bigdeli, Shirin Seyedsalehi, Morteza Zihayat, Ebrahim Bagheri.

“De-Biasing Relevance Judgements for Fair Ranking” accepted at ECIR 2023.

with Amin Bigdeli, Shirin Seyedsalehi, Morteza Zihayat, Ebrahim Bagheri.

Gave a talk on Gender Bias in Information Retrieval at MILA.

Tutorial proposal “Preference-Based Offline Evaluation” accepted at WSDM 2023.

with Fernando Diaz, Charles L. A. Clarke.

“Collecting Interactive Multi-Modal Datasets for Grounded Language Understanding” accepted at the InterNLP workshop at NeurIPS 2022.

Joined Google Brain as a Student Researcher Intern.

Launched the IGLU competition for NeurIPS 2022 in two RL and NLP tasks.

Finished my internship at Spotify Research.

“Early Stage Sparse Retrieval with Entity Linking” accepted at CIKM 2022.

with Dahlia Shehata, Charles L. A. Clarke.

“Unsupervised Question Clarity Prediction Through Retrieved Item Coherency” accepted at CIKM 2022.

with Mahsa Seifikar, Charles L. A. Clarke.

Tutorial “Gender Bias in Information Retrieval Systems” at SIGIR 2022.

Attended SIGIR 2022 in Madrid — could not be more fun in person after two years!

Attended WebSci 2022 in Barcelona.

“A Light-Weight Strategy for Restraining Gender Biases in Neural Rankers” received the Best Paper Award at ECIR 2022.

with Amin Bigdeli, Shirin Seyedsalehi, Morteza Zihayat, Ebrahim Bagheri.

Started an internship at Spotify on podcasts' offline evaluation.

Visiting my family in Iran for the holidays :)

“A Light-Weight Strategy for Restraining Gender Biases in Neural Rankers” accepted at ECIR 2022.

with Amin Bigdeli, Shirin Seyedsalehi, Morteza Zihayat, Ebrahim Bagheri.

“BERT-QPP: Contextualized Pre-trained Transformers for Query Performance Prediction” accepted at CIKM 2021.

with Maryam Khodabakhsh, Ebrahim Bagheri.

“Predicting Efficiency / Effectiveness Trade-offs for Sparse vs. Dense Retrieval Strategy Selection” accepted at CIKM 2021.

with Charles L. A. Clarke, Xinyi Yan.

“MS MARCO Chameleons: Challenging the MS MARCO Leaderboard with Extremely Obstinate Queries” accepted at CIKM 2021.

with Bhaskar Mitra, Ebrahim Bagheri.

“Matches Made in Heaven: Toolkit and Large-Scale Datasets for Supervised Query Reformulation” accepted at CIKM 2021.

with Amin Bigdeli, Shirin Seyedsalehi, Morteza Zihayat, Ebrahim Bagheri.

Finished my internship at Spotify Research.

Started an internship at Microsoft Research.