I am broadly interested in the problems of representation and cognition. My group's focus is on probabilistic reasoning, generative modelling and sequential decision making. Several of our past research is at the intersection these areas with symmetry and geometry, which in turn creates a natural playground for applications of AI in physical sciences.
A formal bio is here.
COMP 451: Fundamentals of Machine Learning (Fall 2022, 2023)
COMP 588: Probabilistic Graphical Models (Fall 2019, Winter 2021, 2022, 2023, 2025)
COMP 551: Applied Machine Learning (Winter 2020, Fall 2020, 2021)
CPSC 532R (at UBC) : Advanced Topics in AI: Graphical Models (Winter 2018)
@inproceedings{kim2026inverting,
title = {Inverting Data Transformations via Diffusion Sampling},
author = {Kim, Jinwoo and Kaba, S{\'e}kou-Oumar and Park, Jiyun and Hong, Seunghoon and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
booktitle = {Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning},
year = {2026}
}@inproceedings{pedramfarmulti,
title = {Multi-Armed Sampling Problem and the End of Exploration},
author = {Pedramfar, Mohammad and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
booktitle = {The 29th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics},
year = {2026},
organization = {PMLR},
url_arxiv = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10797}
}@inproceedings{ngo2025scaling,
title = {Scaling laws and symmetry, evidence from neural force fields},
author = {Ngo, Khang and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
booktitle = {The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year = {2026},
url_arxiv = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09768}
}@article{jain2026diffusion,
title = {Diffusion Tree Sampling: Scalable inference-time alignment of diffusion models},
author = {Jain, Vineet and Sareen, Kusha and Pedramfar, Mohammad and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
journal = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
volume = {38},
pages = {145576--145615},
year = {2025},
url_paper = {https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2025/file/d6484394c4cb5e1f4ecad8d90b912025-Paper-Conference.pdf}
}@article{kaba2026energy,
title = {Energy Loss Functions for Physical Systems},
author = {Kaba, Oumar and Sareen, Kusha and Levy, Daniel and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
journal = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
volume = {38},
pages = {163916--163947},
year = {2025},
url_paper = {https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2025/file/efd3901eeda94e200f0634f3a27298b8-Paper-Conference.pdf}
}@article{li2025identifiability,
title = {On the Identifiability of Causal Abstractions},
author = {Li, Xiusi and Kaba, S{\'e}kou-Oumar and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
journal = {The 28th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics},
year = {2025},
organization = {PMLR},
url_arxiv = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10834},
url_paper = {https://openreview.net/attachment?id=RKiOGRrABL&name=pdf}
}@inproceedings{levysymmcd,
title = {SymmCD: Symmetry-Preserving Crystal Generation with Diffusion Models},
author = {Levy, Daniel and Panigrahi, Siba Smarak and Kaba, S{\'e}kou-Oumar and Zhu, Qiang and Lee, Kin Long Kelvin and Galkin, Mikhail and Miret, Santiago and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
booktitle = {The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year = {2025},
url_paper = {https://openreview.net/pdf?id=xnssGv9rpW},
url_arxiv = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03638}
}@inproceedings{mondalefficient,
title = {Efficient Dynamics Modeling in Interactive Environments with Koopman Theory},
author = {Mondal, Arnab Kumar and Panigrahi, Siba Smarak and Rajeswar, Sai and Siddiqi, Kaleem and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
booktitle = {The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year = {2024},
url_arxiv = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11941},
url_paper = {https://openreview.net/pdf?id=fkrYDQaHOJ}
}@inproceedings{jainlearning,
title = {Learning to Reach Goals via Diffusion},
author = {Jain, Vineet and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
booktitle = {Forty-first International Conference on Machine Learning},
year = {2024},
url_paper = {https://openreview.net/pdf?id=3JhmHCVPa8},
url_arxiv = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02505}
}@inproceedings{livernochediffusion,
title = {On Diffusion Modeling for Anomaly Detection},
author = {Livernoche, Victor and Jain, Vineet and Hezaveh, Yashar and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
booktitle = {The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year = {2024},
url_paper = {https://openreview.net/pdf?id=lR3rk7ysXz},
url_arxiv = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18593}
}@inproceedings{pmlr-v202-kaba23a,
title = {Equivariance with Learned Canonicalization Functions},
author = {Kaba, S\'{e}kou-Oumar and Mondal, Arnab Kumar and Zhang, Yan and Bengio, Yoshua and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages = {15546--15566},
year = {2023},
editor = {Krause, Andreas and Brunskill, Emma and Cho, Kyunghyun and Engelhardt, Barbara and Sabato, Sivan and Scarlett, Jonathan},
volume = {202},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
month = {23--29 Jul},
publisher = {PMLR},
url_pdf = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v202/kaba23a/kaba23a.pdf},
url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v202/kaba23a.html}
}@inproceedings{mondal2023equivariant,
title = {Equivariant Adaptation of Large Pretrained Models},
author = {Mondal, Arnab Kumar and Panigrahi, Siba Smarak and Kaba, S{\'e}kou-Oumar and Rajeswar, Sai and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
booktitle = {Thirty-seventh Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
year = {2023},
url_pdf = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01647}
}@inproceedings{akhound2023lieneurips,
title = {Lie Point Symmetry and Physics Informed Networks},
author = {Akhound-Sadegh, Tara and Perreault-Levasseur, Laurence and Brandstetter, Johannes and Welling, Max and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
booktitle = {Thirty-seventh Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
year = {2023},
url_pdf = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.04293}
}@inproceedings{mondal2022eqr,
title = {EqR: Equivariant Representations for Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning},
author = {Mondal, Arnab Kumar and Jain, Vineet and Siddiqi, Kaleem and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
booktitle = {International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages = {15908--15926},
year = {2022},
organization = {PMLR},
url_pdf = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v162/mondal22a/mondal22a.pdf},
url_code = {https://github.com/arnab39/Symmetry-RL}
}@inproceedings{NEURIPS2022_1abed6ee,
author = {Kaba, Oumar and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
editor = {S. Koyejo and S. Mohamed and A. Agarwal and D. Belgrave and K. Cho and A. Oh},
pages = {4150--4164},
publisher = {Curran Associates, Inc.},
title = {Equivariant Networks for Crystal Structures},
url_pdf = {https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2022/file/1abed6ee581b9ceb4e2ddf37822c7fcb-Paper-Conference.pdf},
volume = {35},
year = {2022}
}@inproceedings{pmlr-v162-morris22a,
title = {{S}peq{N}ets: Sparsity-aware permutation-equivariant graph networks},
author = {Morris, Christopher and Rattan, Gaurav and Kiefer, Sandra and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages = {16017--16042},
year = {2022},
editor = {Chaudhuri, Kamalika and Jegelka, Stefanie and Song, Le and Szepesvari, Csaba and Niu, Gang and Sabato, Sivan},
volume = {162},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
month = {17--23 Jul},
publisher = {PMLR},
url_pdf = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v162/morris22a/morris22a.pdf}
}@inproceedings{NEURIPS2022_dcd29769,
author = {Shakerinava, Mehran and Mondal, Arnab Kumar and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
editor = {S. Koyejo and S. Mohamed and A. Agarwal and D. Belgrave and K. Cho and A. Oh},
pages = {34162--34174},
publisher = {Curran Associates, Inc.},
title = {Structuring Representations Using Group Invariants},
url_pdf = {https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2022/file/dcd297696d0bb304ba426b3c5a679c37-Paper-Conference.pdf},
volume = {35},
year = {2022}
}@inproceedings{shakerinava2022utility,
title = {Utility Theory for Sequential Decision Making},
author = {Shakerinava, Mehran and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
booktitle = {International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages = {19616--19625},
year = {2022},
organization = {PMLR},
url_pdf = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v162/shakerinava22a/shakerinava22a.pdf}
}@inproceedings{pmlr-v139-shakerinava21a,
title = {Equivariant Networks for Pixelized Spheres},
author = {Shakerinava, Mehran and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages = {9477--9488},
year = {2021},
editor = {Meila, Marina and Zhang, Tong},
volume = {139},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
month = {18--24 Jul},
publisher = {PMLR},
url_pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v139/shakerinava21a/shakerinava21a.pdf},
url_code = {https://github.com/mshakerinava/Equivariant-Networks-for-Pixelized-Spheres}
}@article{graham2020deep,
title = {Equivariant Entity-Relationship Networks},
author = {Graham, Devon and Wang, Junhao and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.09033},
url_arxiv = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.09033},
url_code = {https://github.com/drgrhm/exch_model},
year = {2020}
}@inproceedings{wang2020equivariant,
author = {Wang, Renhao and Albooyeh, Marjan and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
editor = {H. Larochelle and M. Ranzato and R. Hadsell and M. F. Balcan and H. Lin},
pages = {13806--13817},
publisher = {Curran Associates, Inc.},
title = {Equivariant Networks for Hierarchical Structures},
url_pdf = {https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper/2020/file/9efb1a59d7b58e69996cf0e32cb71098-Paper.pdf},
url_arxiv = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/ravanbakhsh20a/ravanbakhsh20a.pdf},
url_code = {https://github.com/rw435/wreathProdNet},
volume = {33},
year = {2020}
}@inproceedings{pmlr-v119-ravanbakhsh20a,
title = {Universal Equivariant Multilayer Perceptrons},
author = {Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages = {7996--8006},
year = {2020},
editor = {Hal Daumé III and Aarti Singh},
volume = {119},
series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
address = {Virtual},
month = {13--18 Jul},
publisher = {PMLR},
url_pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/ravanbakhsh20a/ravanbakhsh20a.pdf}
}@inproceedings{pmlr-v80-hartford18a,
title = {Deep Models of Interactions Across Sets},
author = {Hartford, Jason and Graham, Devon and Leyton-Brown, Kevin and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Machine Learning},
pages = {1909--1918},
year = {2018},
volume = {80},
series = {PMLR},
month = {Jul},
publisher = {PMLR},
url_pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v80/hartford18a/hartford18a-supp.pdf},
url_arxiv = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.02879}
}@inproceedings{NIPS2017_6931,
title = {Deep Sets},
author = {Zaheer, Manzil and Kottur, Satwik and Ravanbakhsh, Siamak and Poczos, Barnabas and Salakhutdinov, Ruslan R and Smola, Alexander J},
booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30},
pages = {3391--3401},
year = {2017},
publisher = {Curran Associates, Inc.},
url_pdf = {http://papers.nips.cc/paper/6931-deep-sets.pdf},
url_arxiv = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.06114},
url_code = {https://github.com/manzilzaheer/DeepSets}
}@inproceedings{ravanbakhsh_equivariance,
author = {Ravanbakhsh, Siamak and Schneider, Jeff and Poczos, Barnabas},
title = {Equivariance Through Parameter-Sharing},
booktitle = {Proceedings of International Conference on Machine Learning},
series = {JMLR: W&CP},
volume = {70},
year = {2017},
month = {August},
url_arxiv = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.08389},
url_pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v70/ravanbakhsh17a/ravanbakhsh17a-supp.pdf}
}@inproceedings{ravanbakhsh_boolean,
title = {Boolean Matrix Factorization and Noisy Completion via Message Passing},
author = {Ravanbakhsh, Siamak and P{\'o}czos, Barnab{\'a}s and Greiner, Russell},
booktitle = {Proceedings of The 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning},
series = {JMLR: W&CP},
volume = {48},
year = {2016},
url_pdf = {http://jmlr.org/proceedings/papers/v48/ravanbakhsha16.pdf},
url_code = {https://github.com/mravanba/BooleanFactorization}
}@inproceedings{ravanbakhsh_exprbm,
author = {Ravanbakhsh, Siamak and Poczos, Barnabas and Schneider, Jeff and Schuurmans, Dale and Greiner, Russell},
title = {Stochastic Neural Networks with Monotonic Activation Functions},
booktitle = {International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics},
series = {JMLR: W&CP},
volume = {51},
pages = {809–818},
year = {2016},
url_pdf = {http://www.jmlr.org/proceedings/papers/v51/ravanbakhsh16.pdf}
}