Hadi Askari
About Me
I'm a graduate student in Computer Science at the University of California, Davis advised by Professor Muhao Chen. My research is focused on (1) Using data-driven approaches to increase Large Language Model performance and interpretability in various use cases; (2) Augmenting Large Language Model robustness, fairness and security; (3) Using Large Language Models for social good. Aside from my PhD I have been a summer Machine Learning intern at Comcast (twice), Pinterest and Nvidia.
News
| 2025 | Sep | LayerIF: Estimating Layer Quality for Large Language Models using Influence Functions was accepted at Neurips'25. |
| 2025 | Jun | Started a 3 month internship at Nvidia, working on Nvidia's Deep Research Agent to generate detailed reports from multiple tools connected to their internal bug databases. |
| 2025 | Jan | Test-time backdoor mitigation for black-box large language models with defensive demonstrations was accepted at NAACL-Findings'25. |
| 2025 | Jan | Assessing LLMs for Zero-shot Abstractive Summarization Through the Lens of Relevance Paraphrasing was accepted at NAACL-Findings'25. |
| 2024 | Sep | Presented Incentivizing news consumption on social media platforms using large language models and realistic bot accounts at the Trust & Safety Research Conference at Stanford University. |
| 2024 | Aug | Incentivizing news consumption on social media platforms using large language models and realistic bot accounts was accepted at PNAS Nexus. |
| 2024 | June | Started 3 Month Internship as a Machine Learning Research Intern at Pinterest Research Labs. |
| 2024 | Mar | Revisiting Zero-Shot Abstractive Summarization in the Era of Large Language Models from the Perspective of Position Bias was accepted at NAACL'24. |
| 2023 | June | Started 3 Month Internship as a Machine Learning Intern at the Comcast Media Analytics Team. |
| 2023 | May | A Utility-Preserving Obfuscation Approach for YouTube Recommendations was accepted at PETS'23. |
| 2022 | Dec | Attended the second annual ProperData Symposium at UC Irvine. |
| 2022 | Nov | Attended the UC Noyce Initiative Symposium '22 at UC Santa Barbara. |
| 2022 | Oct | Presented at the UC Davis Noyce Workshop. |
| 2022 | June | Started 3 Month Internship as a Machine Learning Intern at the Comcast Media Analytics Team. |
| 2021 | Nov | Attended the ProperData Symposium at UC Irvine. |
| 2021 | Sep | Joined the PhD program at UC Davis. |