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 reasoning in language models, specifically:
- How it is acquired: I study toy models of LLMs to understand the learning dynamics and inductive biases that enable generalization
- How to evaluate it: I aim to develop principled methods to assess reasoning in large pretrained models, using tools from interpretability and carefully designed experiments.
- How to improve it: I explore how RL finetuning and objective function design affect reasoning capabilities.
News
- My first author work "Benefits and Limitations of Communication in Multi-Agent Reasoning" has been accepted to ICLR 2026! See you in Rio 🇧🇷
- Second author work "On the Role of Depth in the Expressivity of RNNs" accepted as spotlight to AISTATS 2026
Selected Publications
- Rizvi-Martel, M., Bhattamishra, S., Rathi, N., Rabusseau, G., & Hahn, M. Benefits and Limitations of Communication in Multi-Agent Reasoning. In The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026).
- Lizaire, M., Rizvi-Martel, M., Dupuis, É., & Rabusseau, G. On the Role of Depth in the Expressivity of RNNs. In The 29th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS 2026). (Spotlight)
- Lizaire, M., Rizvi-Martel, M., Gamal, M., & Rabusseau, G. A Tensor Decomposition Perspective on Second-order RNNs. In Forty-first International Conference on Machine Learning. (Spotlight!)
- Rizvi-Martel, M., Lizaire, M., Lacroce, C., & Rabusseau, G. (2024, April). Simulating weighted automata over sequences and trees with transformers. In International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (pp. 2368-2376). PMLR.
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]
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
