Photo taken by my beloved wife, Fatemeh.
Saeed Masiha
I develop theory and algorithms for optimization and machine learning, with a focus on efficient learning, decisions under uncertainty, and understanding how models perform when data are limited or differ from those used in training.
My research brings together nonconvex, stochastic, and bilevel optimization with applications in large language model (LLM) training, reinforcement learning (RL), and risk-aware learning.
I’m now a fifth-year PhD student at EPFL, advised by Negar Kiyavash and Patrick Thiran. Most of my doctoral work has been in close collaboration with Niao He; since 2024, Niao, Zebang Shen, and I have worked together on bilevel optimization.
Explore my publications or read more about my research and background.
News
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A visual explanation of why choosing among training solutions matters, and how we use this idea in LLM fine-tuning.
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Select-then-differentiate and Zeroth-Order Stackelberg Control have been accepted at NeurIPS 2026.
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New preprint on sharp first-order lower bounds under sublevel Polyak–Łojasiewicz conditions.