Arya Akhavan

Welcome! I’m Arya Akhavan, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, working with Patrick Rebeschini. My current research explores how memory can enhance reasoning and support self-improvement in large language models and reinforcement learning agents. This interest grew out of my visit to Csaba Szepesvári at the University of Alberta in March 2026. I am particularly interested in how agents can accumulate, retrieve, and build on past experience to improve their reasoning and decision-making without updating their model parameters.

Together with Csaba and Patrick, I investigate the capabilities of memory-augmented systems, with a focus on enhancing reasoning and advancing AI safety. Within this research direction, I also collaborate with Murat A. Erdogdu on how memory can help make AI systems safer and more reliable. This collaboration began during my visit to the Vector Institute.

Previously, I spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at École Polytechnique, working at the intersection of online learning and optimization. I completed my PhD at Institut Polytechnique de Paris and the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) in Genoa, where I was fortunate to be advised by Alexandre B. Tsybakov and Massimiliano Pontil.

Work Experience

  • University of Oxford

    Postdoctoral Researcher, September 2024 – Present

    Working with Patrick Rebeschini

  • University of Alberta

    Visiting Researcher, March 2026 – May 2026

    Working with Csaba Szepesvári

  • Vector Institute and University of Toronto

    Visiting Researcher, May 2026

    Working with Murat A. Erdogdu

  • École Polytechnique de Paris

    Postdoctoral Researcher, March 2023 – July 2024

    Working with Karim Lounici and El Mahdi El Mhamdi

Education

  • PhD Candidate, Theoretical Statistics

    ENSAE IP, Paris, and Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia-Genova (IIT), September 2019 – February 2023

    Supervisors: Alexandre B. Tsybakov and Massimiliano Pontil

  • Master M2 MASH Learning and Applications

    Paris Dauphine University and École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay,   Fall 2017 – December 2018

  • First year of Master in Mathematics

    Sharif University of Technology,   2016 – 2017

  • B.Sc. in Mathematics

    Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Sciences, University of Tehran,   2011 – 2016

Arya Akhavan by the lake in St James's Park, London

Work in Progress

  • External memory for reliable long-horizon reasoning and state tracking

    A. Akhavan, D. Janz, P. Rebeschini, and C. Szepesvári

    Final stages.

  • Learning when to ask: Adaptive expert queries for reasoning through imitation learning

    A. Masoumian, A. Akhavan, and C. Szepesvári

    Final stages.

  • Memory-augmented AI safety: Learning when and how to intervene in language model reasoning

    A. Akhavan, M. A. Erdogdu, and C. Szepesvári

    Experimental design in progress.

  • From past solutions to future plans: Reasoning across tasks with growing memory

    A. Akhavan, D. Gomez, and C. Szepesvári

    Experimental design in progress.

Publications and Preprints