I am a Computer Engineering graduate from Isfahan University of Technology (IUT), ranked 1st in Software Engineering Specialization and 3rd among all Computer Engineering peers. I have been fortunate to work with leading research groups, including the Trustworthy Machine Learning and Reasoning (TMLR) Group at Hong Kong Baptist University under Prof. Bo Han and Dr. Qizhou Wang, the Structured Machine Learning Lab at Simon Fraser University under Prof. Oliver Schulte, and a Research Intern at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS) working with Prof. Sadegh Soudjani and closely collaborating with Prof. Ashutosh Trivedi. Since July 2026, I have joined Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, as a Research Assistant in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE), under the supervision of Prof. Wanhua Li.

Research Interests

Trustworthy Machine Learning, Agentic AI, Safety AI, Cyber-Physical Systems, Formal Methods, Formal Verification

Honors and Awards

  • J2C Certification - Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) - 2026
  • B.Sc. Rank: 1st/20 in Software Engineering Specialization, 3rd/89 among all CE students - 2025
  • Highest Grade for Undergraduate Thesis Project - Isfahan University of Technology, 2025
  • 1st Place in ICPC - Isfahan University of Technology, 2023
  • 10th Place in the 46th ICPC West Asia Regional Contest - 2023
  • 3rd Place in National Machine Learning Competition - 2022
  • 1st Place in ICPC - Isfahan University of Technology, 2022

Bachelor of Computer Engineering [2021–2025]

Isfahan University of Technology (IUT)
GPA: 18.63/20, Ranked 1st in Software Engineering Specialization and 3rd overall

Probabilistic Verification of STL Specifications Using Barrier Certificates
Under the supervision of Professor Sadegh Soudjani (ongoing)
Multi-label Event Detection via NeSy-Constrained Graph Learning
Supervised by Dr. Oliver Schulte
In preparation for submission to ECCV 2026
BarrierBench: Evaluating Large Language Models for Safety Verification in Dynamical Systems
Ali Taheri, Alireza Taban, Sadegh Soudjani, Ashutosh Trivedi
8th Annual Learning for Dynamics & Control Conference (L4DC) 2026
Forgetting: A New Mechanism Towards Better Large Language Model Fine-tuning
Ali Taheri, Alireza Taban, Qizhou Wang, Shanshan Ye, Tongliang Liu, Bo Han
Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) 2026   J2C Certification

Research Experience

Research Assistant - Nanyang Technological University (NTU)
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) (Under supervision of Prof. Wanhua Li)
Jul 2026 - Present
Research Internship - Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS)
HyCoDeV (Under supervision of Prof. Sadegh Soudjani)
Jul 2025 - Jun 2026

Developed LLM-guided agentic frameworks and benchmarks for barrier certificate synthesis in the safety verification of dynamical systems, and contributed to other work on formal methods and temporal logic.

Research Assistant - Simon Fraser University (SFU)
Structured Machine Learning Lab (Under supervision of Prof. Oliver Schulte)
Jun 2024 - Jul 2025

Working on multi-label event detection for the ROAD-R autonomous driving dataset, focusing on improving label relationship modeling through graph-based correlation learning

Research Assistant - Hong Kong Baptist University
Trustworthy Machine Learning and Reasoning (TMLR) Group (Under supervision of Dr. Qizhou Wang and Prof. Bo Han)
Feb 2025 - May 2025

Proposed a forgetting mechanism for LLM fine-tuning that categorizes tokens into positive/negative sets via influence scores, learning from positive while unlearning negative tokens to improve generalization

Research Intern - Hong Kong Baptist University
Trustworthy Machine Learning and Reasoning (TMLR) Group (Under supervision of Dr. Qizhou Wang and Prof. Bo Han)
Sep 2023 - Apr 2024

Exploring and analyzing the capabilities and challenges of both Large Language Models and Vision-Language Models. The work contributed to understanding how these models can be improved for trustworthy and reliable AI applications