Michael Rizvi-Martel

Hi! I'm Michael, a PhD student in Computer Science at Mila and Université de Montréal. I am co-supervised by Guillaume Rabusseau (UdeM & Mila) and Adam Oberman (McGill & LawZero). I am also fortunate to be mentored by Michael Hahn. My research is generously funded by an NSERC Canada Graduate Research Scholarship.

I am broadly interested in understanding how structure emerges from learning and how this ties into to our general conception of intelligence. My research focuses on interpretability of LLMs (what models learn) and expressivity theory (what they can/can't do in principle).

News

• Thrilled to share that "The Illusion of Superposition" has been accepted to COLM 2026! See you in SF 🌉
• Excited to announce I will be joining Cohere as intern of technical staff in the safety team! 🚀

Selected Publications

• Rizvi-Martel, M., Rabusseau, G., & Mosbach, M. The Illusion of Superposition. In The Conference on Language Modeling (COLM 2026). [paper]
• Rizvi-Martel, M., Bhattamishra, S., Rathi, N., Rabusseau, G., & Hahn, M. Benefits and Limitations of Communication in Multi-Agent Reasoning. In The International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026). [paper]
• Lizaire, M., Rizvi-Martel, M., Dupuis, É., & Rabusseau, G. On the Role of Depth in the Expressivity of RNNs. In The International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS 2026). (Spotlight) [paper]
• Lizaire, M., Rizvi-Martel, M., Gamal, M., & Rabusseau, G. A Tensor Decomposition Perspective on Second-order RNNs. In The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2024). (Spotlight) [paper]
• Rizvi-Martel, M., Lizaire, M., Lacroce, C., & Rabusseau, G. Simulating Weighted Automata over Sequences and Trees with Transformers. In The International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS 2024). [paper]

Talks

• "Simulating Weighted Automata over Sequences and Trees with Transformers" - FLaNN Seminar Series, May 2024. [video]
• "LLMs and How to Use Them" - Seminar at the Center for Advanced Research in Sleep Medicine, February 2024. [slides]

Blog

• Agentic Coding: A New Abstraction Layer in the Programming Stack — February 2026

CV

Download my CV here.

Fun

When I am not doing research, you can find me rock climbing, hiking or canoe camping! I am also an avid guitar player and love discovering new (and old) restaurants in the Montréal area. I even made a list for anyone that may be travelling to Montreal. Oh, and I have a cat.

Contact

You can reach me at michael [dot] rizvi-martel [at] mila [dot] quebec