activity
20202026
most citedHAGRID: A Human-LLM Collaborative Dataset for Generative Information-Seeking with Attribution

29 citations · 36 across the 14 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

15 papers

cs.LG2026

Long-Context Drafting Does Not Require Long-Context Drafters

Aref Jafari, Vansh Bhatia, Matt Qin +5

Speculative decoding pairs a cheap drafter with parallel verification against the target. At ultra-long context it stops paying, because a drafter that attends over the full prefix…

cs.NE2026

Large Language Models with At Most One Spike per Neuron

Zhuoya Zhao, Parsa Omidi, Aref Jafari +1

Leveraging their inherent sparse event-driven computation, spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising path toward energy-efficient large language models (LLMs). Time-to-first…

cs.CL2026

Long-Context Aware Upcycling: A New Frontier for Hybrid LLM Scaling

Parsa Ashrafi Fashi, Utkarsh Saxena, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh +7

Hybrid sequence models that combine efficient Transformer components with linear sequence modeling blocks are a promising alternative to pure Transformers, but most are still pretr…

cs.LG2025

SCOUT: Toward Sub-Quadratic Attention via Segment Compression for Optimized Utility in Transformers

Aref Jafari, Yuhe Fan, Benyamin Jamialahmadi +3

Transformers have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of sequence modeling tasks, but their quadratic attention complexity limits scalability to long sequences. Lin…

cs.LG2025

DTRNet: Dynamic Token Routing Network to Reduce Quadratic Costs in Transformers

Aman Sharma, Saeed Najafi, Parsa Farinneya +6

Transformers achieve state-of-the-art results across many tasks, but their uniform application of quadratic self-attention to every token at every layer makes them computationally…

cs.CL2025

Balcony: A Lightweight Approach to Dynamic Inference of Generative Language Models

Benyamin Jamialahmadi, Parsa Kavehzadeh, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh +5

Deploying large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications is often hindered by strict computational and latency constraints. While dynamic inference offers the flexibility…

cs.CL2024

EchoAtt: Attend, Copy, then Adjust for More Efficient Large Language Models

Hossein Rajabzadeh, Aref Jafari, Aman Sharma +5

Large Language Models (LLMs), with their increasing depth and number of parameters, have demonstrated outstanding performance across a variety of natural language processing tasks.…

cs.CL2023★ 29 cited

HAGRID: A Human-LLM Collaborative Dataset for Generative Information-Seeking with Attribution

Ehsan Kamalloo, Aref Jafari, Xinyu Zhang +2

The rise of large language models (LLMs) had a transformative impact on search, ushering in a new era of search engines that are capable of generating search results in natural lan…

cs.LG2023

Improved knowledge distillation by utilizing backward pass knowledge in neural networks

Aref Jafari, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Ali Ghodsi

Knowledge distillation (KD) is one of the prominent techniques for model compression. In this method, the knowledge of a large network (teacher) is distilled into a model (student)…

cs.LG2022★ 1 cited

Continuation KD: Improved Knowledge Distillation through the Lens of Continuation Optimization

Aref Jafari, Ivan Kobyzev, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh +2

Knowledge Distillation (KD) has been extensively used for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks to improve a small model's (a student) generalization by transferring the knowl…

cs.LG2022★ 1 cited

Do we need Label Regularization to Fine-tune Pre-trained Language Models?

Ivan Kobyzev, Aref Jafari, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh +5

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a prominent neural model compression technique that heavily relies on teacher network predictions to guide the training of a student model. Consideri…

cs.CL2021★ 2 cited

Pro-KD: Progressive Distillation by Following the Footsteps of the Teacher

Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Aref Jafari, Puneeth Salad +3

With ever growing scale of neural models, knowledge distillation (KD) attracts more attention as a prominent tool for neural model compression. However, there are counter intuitive…

cs.CL2021★ 3 cited

How to Select One Among All? An Extensive Empirical Study Towards the Robustness of Knowledge Distillation in Natural Language Understanding

Tianda Li, Ahmad Rashid, Aref Jafari +3

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a model compression algorithm that helps transfer the knowledge of a large neural network into a smaller one. Even though KD has shown promise on a w…

cs.CL2021

Annealing Knowledge Distillation

Aref Jafari, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Pranav Sharma +1

Significant memory and computational requirements of large deep neural networks restrict their application on edge devices. Knowledge distillation (KD) is a prominent model compres…

cs.CL2020

Segmentation Approach for Coreference Resolution Task

Aref Jafari, Ali Ghodsi

In coreference resolution, it is important to consider all members of a coreference cluster and decide about all of them at once. This technique can help to avoid losing precision…