Parshin Shojaee

About Me

I’m a final-year CS PhD student at Virginia Tech, advised by Prof. Chandan Reddy. My primary research topic is AI for symbolic generation (code, math, reasoning) and its potential for scientific discovery. I mostly focus on developing better algorithms for language models to handle symbolic reasoning and scientific discovery tasks, while studying their current limitations. During my PhD, I have also pursued research internships at Apple (2025) and Adobe (2024). Prior to starting my PhD, I completed my MS in Operations Research at Virginia Tech, and obtained my BS from Sharif University of Technology.

If you’re interested in my research on open-ended reasoning and discovery with LLMs, would like to discuss relevant topics, or explore potential collaborations, please feel free to get in touch :) - I am best reached by email at parshinshojaee@vt.edu

News

• [Sep 2025] Our paper The Illusion of Thinking is accepted to NeurIPS 2025 main track! See you in San Diego!
• [June 2025] My Apple internship project The Illusion of Thinking? Understanding Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity is now on arxiv.
• [May 2025] Our paper LLM-SRBench is accepted to ICML 2025 as Oral!
• [Apr 2025] Preprint of LLM-SRBench, our new benchmark targetting memorization issue in LLM-based scientific disocvery, is now on arxiv.
• [Feb 2025] Excited to start my research internship at Apple!
• [Feb 2025] I’ll be presenting our tutorial of “Towards Interpretability and Automated Scientific Discovery” at AAAI 2025. See you in Philadelphia!
• [Jan 2025] Our LLM-SR paper on LLM agents + evolutionary search for scientific discovery is accepted to ICLR 2025 as Oral!
• [Dec 2024] My Adobe internship project Federated RAG for Multi-Source QA is now on arxiv.
• [Nov 2024] Our position paper on the potentials and challenges of AI for Scientific Discovery is accepted to AAAI 2025!
• [May. 2024] I’m excited to start my internship at Adobe in this summer!
• [Jan. 2024] Our SNIP (Symbolic-Numeric Pretraining) paper on mathematical discovery with multi-modal latent reasoning is accepted to ICLR 2024 as Spotlight!
• [Dec. 2023] I will be at NeurIPS 2023 in New Orleans, presenting our TPSR paper. Please reach out if you want to chat!
• [Sep. 2023] Our paper TPSR on mathematical discovery with language model + MCTS lookahead planning is accepted to NeurIPS 2023!
• [Jul. 2023] Our paper PPOCoder on reinforcement learning for program synthesis is accepted to TMLR!

Selected Publications

Services

Conference Reviewer: ICLR 2026, NeurIPS 2025 (Top Reviewer), ICML 2025, AISTAT 2025, ICLR 2025, NeurIPS 2024 (Top Reviewer both Main & DB Tracks)

Journal Reviewer: Nature, Nature Machine Intelligence, TMLR

Workshop Reviewer: NeurIPS 2025 Math-AI, NeurIPS 2025 AI for Science, NeurIPS 2024 Math-AI, ICML 2024 AI for Science

A little more about me

When I’m not into AI research, I enjoy exploring all kinds of music and playing Tar and Setar instruments (Persian guitars with their own unique twist). Recently, I’m also into hiking new trails, and trying to be good at gardening :D

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