Mahdi Erfanian

I’m Mahdi Erfanian, a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago, where I am a member of the IndexLab under the supervision of Dr. Abolfazl Asudeh. I received my M.S. in Computer Science from UIC (awarded en route to Ph.D.) and my B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology. I am currently a Research Intern at Microsoft (CodeAI team), working on mitigating hallucination in LLMs and GenAI code agents. My research spans LLMs, Multimodal Data Management, Generative AI, Algorithmic Fairness, and Foundation Models.

I am particularly interested in employing foundation models, including large language models, to address different challenges in data management—such as mitigating bias in training data and enhancing multi-modal data retrieval through synthetic data generation. My work has been published in top-tier venues including VLDB, ICML, and Data Engineering Bulletin, with systems that outperform state-of-the-art baselines like OpenAI’s CLIP by 200% in mean average precision on complex natural language queries. Additionally, I am passionate about Algorithm Design, with a focus on optimizing both fairness and efficiency in data-driven systems.