Vahid Balazadeh

I’m a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Toronto and the Vector Institute, supervised by Rahul G. Krishnan, with Vasilis Syrgkanis from Stanford University as my external advisor. I’m currently a Student Researcher at Google DeepMind, where I work with Valentin Liévin on enhancing clinical reasoning in LLMs via realistic patient simulators. Before starting my Ph.D., I was a research intern at MPI-SWS, where I worked with Manuel Gomez Rodriguez on human-machine collaboration in reinforcement learning. I hold a double-major B.Sc. in Computer Engineering and Mathematics from the Sharif University of Technology.

My research focus lies in understanding the concepts and mechanisms for better decision-making, particularly in applications where running experiments are costly or infeasible, such as healthcare. To this end, I’m working on causal inference from observational data and its intersection with machine learning, as well as imitation learning and reinforcement learning from offline observations. For more information, please see my Research section.