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photo credit: Thanh Pham
Siamak Ravanbakhsh
Associate Professor, School of Computer Science, McGill University
Canada CIFAR AI Chair, Mila
Address:   3480 University Street,
McConnell Engineering Building,
Room 318, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 0E9
McGill Office:  ENGMC 325, Mila Office:  I.9
E-mail:  siamak-ravanbakhsh@mcgill.ca with dot instead of dash
Phone:  +1 (514) 398-7076

Research

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.

Group

Prospective students and postdoctoral fellows, please read this.

Ph.D. Students and Postdoctoral Fellow

Mohammad Pedramfar, Postdoctoral Fellow 2024
Daniel Levy, Ph.D. 2022 (M.Sc., 2020-2022)
Mehran Shakerinava, Ph.D. 2021 (M.Sc. 2020-2021)
Seku-Oumar Kaba, Ph.D. 2021 (M.Sc. 2020-2021)
Tara Akhoundsadegh, Ph.D. W2021 (M.Sc. 2020-2021; co-supervised w/ Laurence Perreault Levasseur)
Vineet Jain, Ph.D. 2021
Xiusi Li, Ph.D. 2024 (M.Sc. 2023-2024)
Khang NgoPh.D. 2025 (M.Sc. 2024-2025)

M.Sc. Students

Kusha Sareen, M.Sc. 2024
Jun-Kai Liao, M.Sc. 2025
Noah El Rimawi-Fine, M.Sc. 2025; co-supervised w/ Mathieu Blanchette
Qianyi Gao, M.Sc. 2025

Alumni

Christopher Morris, Postdoctoral Scholar 2021-2022
Arnab Kumar Mondal, Ph.D., 2020-2024 (co-supervised w/ Kaleem Siddiqi)
Mahsa Massoud, M.Sc. W2023-S2025
Victor Livernoche, M.Sc. 2022-2024
Siba Smarak Panigrahi , M.Sc. 2022-2024
Cleo Sonnery , Ph.D. 2021-2023
Jikael Gagnon , B.Sc. Intern, W/S2024
Fabrício Dos Santos , B.Sc. Intern, S/F2023
Mary Letey , M.Sc. Intern, S2023
Marjan Albooyeh , M.Sc., 2018 (UBC)
Devon Graham, M.Sc., 2017-2018 (UBC)
Vaden Masrani, Ph.D., 2018 (UBC)

Teaching

COMP 588: Probabilistic Graphical Models (Winter 2026)
COMP 551: Applied Machine Learning (Winter 2026)
COMP 451: Fundamentals of Machine Learning (Fall 2024)

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)


Select Publications (see all)


Inverting Data Transformations via Diffusion Sampling Jinwoo Kim, Sékou-Oumar Kaba, Jiyun Park, Seunghoon Hong, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning, 2026
Multi-Armed Sampling Problem and the End of Exploration Mohammad Pedramfar, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
The 29th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 2026
Scaling laws and symmetry, evidence from neural force fields Khang Ngo, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2026
Diffusion Tree Sampling: Scalable inference-time alignment of diffusion models Vineet Jain, Kusha Sareen, Mohammad Pedramfar, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025
Energy Loss Functions for Physical Systems Oumar Kaba, Kusha Sareen, Daniel Levy, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025
On the Identifiability of Causal Abstractions Xiusi Li, Sékou-Oumar Kaba, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
The 28th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 2025
SymmCD: Symmetry-Preserving Crystal Generation with Diffusion Models Daniel Levy, Siba Smarak Panigrahi, Sékou-Oumar Kaba, Qiang Zhu, Kin Long Kelvin Lee, Mikhail Galkin, Santiago Miret, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2025
Efficient Dynamics Modeling in Interactive Environments with Koopman Theory Arnab Kumar Mondal, Siba Smarak Panigrahi, Sai Rajeswar, Kaleem Siddiqi, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2024
Learning to Reach Goals via Diffusion Vineet Jain, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
Forty-first International Conference on Machine Learning, 2024
On Diffusion Modeling for Anomaly Detection Victor Livernoche, Vineet Jain, Yashar Hezaveh, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2024
Equivariance with Learned Canonicalization Functions Sékou-Oumar Kaba, Arnab Kumar Mondal, Yan Zhang, Yoshua Bengio, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning, 2023
Equivariant Adaptation of Large Pretrained Models Arnab Kumar Mondal, Siba Smarak Panigrahi, Sékou-Oumar Kaba, Sai Rajeswar, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
Thirty-seventh Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2023
Lie Point Symmetry and Physics Informed Networks Tara Akhound-Sadegh, Laurence Perreault-Levasseur, Johannes Brandstetter, Max Welling, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
Thirty-seventh Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2023
EqR: Equivariant Representations for Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning Arnab Kumar Mondal, Vineet Jain, Kaleem Siddiqi, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
International Conference on Machine Learning, 2022
Equivariant Networks for Crystal Structures Oumar Kaba, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2022
SpeqNets: Sparsity-aware permutation-equivariant graph networks Christopher Morris, Gaurav Rattan, Sandra Kiefer, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Machine Learning, 2022
Structuring Representations Using Group Invariants Mehran Shakerinava, Arnab Kumar Mondal, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2022
Utility Theory for Sequential Decision Making Mehran Shakerinava, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
International Conference on Machine Learning, 2022
Equivariant Networks for Pixelized Spheres Mehran Shakerinava, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning, 2021
Equivariant Entity-Relationship Networks Devon Graham, Junhao Wang, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
arXiv preprint arXiv:1903.09033, 2020
Equivariant Networks for Hierarchical Structures Renhao Wang, Marjan Albooyeh, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2020
Universal Equivariant Multilayer Perceptrons Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning, 2020
Deep Models of Interactions Across Sets Jason Hartford, Devon Graham, Kevin Leyton-Brown, and Siamak Ravanbakhsh.
Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Machine Learning, 2018
Deep Sets Manzil Zaheer, Satwik Kottur, Siamak Ravanbakhsh, Barnabas Poczos, Ruslan R Salakhutdinov, and Alexander J Smola.
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30, 2017
Equivariance Through Parameter-Sharing Siamak Ravanbakhsh, Jeff Schneider, and Barnabas Poczos.
Proceedings of International Conference on Machine Learning, 2017
Boolean Matrix Factorization and Noisy Completion via Message Passing Siamak Ravanbakhsh, Barnabás Póczos, and Russell Greiner.
Proceedings of The 33rd International Conference on Machine Learning, 2016
Stochastic Neural Networks with Monotonic Activation Functions Siamak Ravanbakhsh, Barnabas Poczos, Jeff Schneider, Dale Schuurmans, and Russell Greiner.
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 2016