About Me

I am Zahra Sodagar, a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, advised by Prof. Soheil Feizi, and collaborating with Prof. Sarah Wiegreffe. I graduated with a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Applied Mathematics, from Sharif University of Technology.

My research mostly focuses on studying the emergence of reasoning and planning behaviours in generative models, aiming to systematically improve them through scalable methods for adaptation, moving towards solving “Intelligence”.

I approach this from a principled perspective, grounded in statistics and information theory, while drawing on ideas from psychology and cognitive science to guide how we model and refine intelligent behavior. Rather than treating reasoning as a byproduct, I view it as a process that can be explicitly analyzed, improved, and engineered. More broadly, my goal is to move from scaling behavior to understanding and improving these reasoning processes, toward models that are interpretable, controllable, generalizable and dynamic, yet robust and reliable.

In my non-academic life, I enjoy photography, playing the setar, reading, and spending time with poetry and music. I also enjoy traveling and exploring different places, cultures, and stories.

Research Interests

• Generative Models — large language models, large reasoning models, transformers, diffusion models, and emerging language/text diffusion models
• Reasoning and Planning in Systems — emergence, refinement, and reliable execution of multi-step reasoning
• Multimodal Learning and Cross-Modal Reasoning — language, vision, and other modalities
• Interpretability and Mechanistic Analysis
• Model Adaptation and Control — steering, alignment, and test-time adaptation
• Linguistic Structure and Representations — structure, compositionality, roots, and vocalic patterns
• Cognitive and Psychological Perspectives on Intelligence
• Generalization, Privacy, and Fairness in Machine Learning
• High Dimentional Probability & Statistics, and Information-Theoretic Foundations of Learning

Education

University of Maryland, College Park Jan 2025 – Present

Ph.D. in Computer Science
_{Advisor: Soheil Feizi}

Sharif University of Technology Sep 2019 – Jun 2024

B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering
_{Concentration: Communication Systems · Minor: Applied Mathematics
Advisor: Mohammad Hossein Yassaee}

Manzoumeh Kherad Institute Sep 2007 – Jun 2019

Diploma in Mathematics and Physics

Research & Teaching Experience

University of Maryland, College Park Jan 2025 – Present

Research Assistant · Soheil Feizi, Sarah Wiegreffe

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Department of Information Engineering Jul 2023 – Oct 2023

Research Assistant · Farzan Farnia

Sharif University of Technology Spring 2021 – Jan 2025

• Undergraduate Research & Thesis · Mohammad Hossein Yassaee, Sajjad Amini · Dec 2022 – Jan 2025
• Research Intern, Speech and Language Processing Lab · Hossein Sameti · Jan 2024 – Sep 2024
• Teaching Assistant · Deep Generative Models (Fall 2024); Data Privacy in Statistics & ML (Fall 2023); Convex Optimization (Spring 2023); Machine Learning (Fall 2022); Probability & Statistics (Fall 2022); Signals & Systems (Spring 2022); Electrical Circuits & Lab (Fall 2021, Spring 2022); Engineering Mathematics (Fall 2021); Advanced Programming (Spring 2021, Spring 2022)

EPFL, Visual Intelligence and Learning Lab Jul 2022 – Nov 2022

Research Intern · Amir Zamir

Awards & Honors

• Top 3 Outstanding Students Scholarship, Electrical Engineering Department (2023)
  _{Consistently ranked among the top students of the cohort}

• ITCSC Summer Research Program, CUHK (2023)
  _{Fully funded, on-site research program · selective international cohort}

• Summer@EPFL Research Internship (2022)
  _{Fully funded, on-site · selected among top 1% of applicants}

• Iran National University Entrance Exam (2019)
  _{Ranked 75th nationwide (45th in Region 1) among 160,000+ students}

• Most Innovative Research Award, ISSF (2017)

• High Distinction, Australian Mathematics Competition (2015, 2016)