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 LLMs work; what is easy for them, what is hard, and why. My research approaches this from two angles:

• Interpretability: I use probing and mechanistic tools to understand how neural networks learn to do things.
• Theory: I use tools from formal language theory to study the expressivity and limitations of LLM architectures.

News

• Excited to announce I will be joining Cohere as intern of technical staff in the safety team! 🚀

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]

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