About me

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. Currently, I am advised by Dr. Heng Huang. I work on efficient and adaptive deep learning. Prior to joining UMD, I received my B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology.

News

• [Jan 2026] IDIOMoE is accepted at ICLR 2026.
• [Dec 2025] ToMoE is accepted at TMLR 2025.
• [Sep 2025] CSCR is accepted at NeurIPS 2025 as a Spotlight.
• [Sep 2025] Bilevel-ZOFO is accepted at NeurIPS 2025.
• [Jun 2025] ARGUS is accepted at ICCV 2025.
• [Feb 2025] FT-Unlearn is accepted at CVPR 2025.
• [Jan 2025] APTP is accepted at ICLR 2025.

Research Highlights

Catalog-Native LLM: Speaking Item-ID dialect with Less Entanglement for Recommendation

Reza Shirkavand, Xiaokai Wei, Chen Wang, Zheng Hui, Heng Huang, Michelle Gong

Code PDF ICLR 2026

Cost-Aware Contrastive Routing for LLMs

Reza Shirkavand, Shangqian Gao, Peiran Yu, Heng Huang

Code PDF NeurIPS 2025 Spotlight

Bilevel ZOFO: Bridging Parameter-Efficient and Zeroth-Order Techniques for Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning and Meta-Training

Reza Shirkavand, Peiran Yu, Qi He, Heng Huang

Code PDF NeurIPS 2025

ARGUS: Hallucination and Omission Evaluation in Video-LLMs

Ruchit Rawal, Reza Shirkavand, Heng Huang, Gowthami Somepalli, Tom Goldstein

Code PDF ICCV 2025

ToMoE: Converting Dense Large Language Models to Mixture-of-Experts through Dynamic Structural Pruning

Shangqian Gao, Ting Hua, Reza Shirkavand, Chi-Heng Lin, Zhen Tang, Zhengao Li, Longge Yuan, Fangyi Li, Zeyu Zhang, Alireza Ganjdanesh, Lou Qian, Xu Jie, Yen-Chang Hsu

Code PDF TMLR 2025

Efficient Fine-Tuning and Concept Suppression for Pruned Diffusion Models

Reza Shirkavand, Peiran Yu, Shangqian Gao, Gowthami Somepalli, Tom Goldstein, Heng Huang

Code PDF CVPR 2025

Not All Prompts Are Made Equal: Prompt-based Pruning of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Reza Shirkavand*, Alireza Ganjdanesh*, Shangqian Gao, Heng Huang

Code PDF ICLR 2025

From Pixels to Prose: A Large Dataset of Dense Image Captions

Vasu Singla, Kaiyu Yue, Sukriti Paul, Reza Shirkavand, Mayuka Jayawardhana, Alireza Ganjdanesh, Heng Huang, Abhinav Bhatele, Gowthami Somepalli, Tom Goldstein

Code PDF