Mahdi Soltanolkotabi

Full Professor, University of Southern California

Joined

September 2017

Names

Emails

****@gmail.com (Confirmed)

****@usc.edu (Confirmed)

Personal Links

Homepage

Google Scholar

DBLP

Career & Education History

Full Professor

University of Southern California (usc.edu)

2024 – Present

Associate Professor

University of Southern California (usc.edu)

2021 – 2024

Assistant Professor

University of Southern California (usc.edu)

2015 – 2021

Advisors, Relations & Conflicts

Advisor

Emmanuel Candes

2009 – 2014

Expertise

nonconvex optimization

theory of deep learning

AI for science and healthcare

LLMs

data curation

2011 – Present

Publications

CrispEdit: Low-Curvature Projections for Scalable Non-Destructive LLM Editing
Zarif Ikram, Arad Firouzkouhi, Stephen Tu, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi, Paria Rashidinejad
- ICLR 2026 AIWILD
- Readers: Everyone
CrispEdit: Low-Curvature Projections for Scalable Non-Destructive LLM Editing
Zarif Ikram, Arad Firouzkouhi, Stephen Tu, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi, Paria Rashidinejad
- SPOT
- Readers: Everyone
On the Dynamics of Learning Linear Functions with Neural Networks
Berk Tinaz, Changzhi Xie, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi
- Submitted to ICLR 2026
- Readers: Everyone
FoNE: Precise Single-Token Number Embeddings via Fourier Features
Tianyi Zhou, Deqing Fu, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi, Robin Jia, Vatsal Sharan
- ICLR 2026 Poster
- Readers: Everyone
Learning to Recall with Transformers Beyond Orthogonal Embeddings
Nuri Mert Vural, Alberto Bietti, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi, Denny Wu
- ICLR 2026 Poster
- Readers: Everyone
Emergence and Evolution of Interpretable Concepts in Diffusion Models
Berk Tinaz, Zalan Fabian, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi
- NeurIPS 2025 spotlight
- Readers: Everyone
Hyperphantasia: A Benchmark for Evaluating the Mental Visualization Capabilities of Multimodal LLMs
Mohammad Shahab Sepehri, Berk Tinaz, Zalan Fabian, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi
- NeurIPS 2025 Datasets and Benchmarks Track poster
- Readers: Everyone
The Rich and the Simple: On the Implicit Bias of Adam and SGD
Bhavya Vasudeva, Jung Whan Lee, Vatsal Sharan, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi
- NeurIPS 2025 poster
- Readers: Everyone
Emergence and Evolution of Interpretable Concepts in Diffusion Models Through the Lens of Sparse Autoencoders
Berk Tinaz, Zalan Fabian, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi
- VisCon 2025 Poster
- Readers: Everyone
Test-Time Training Provably Improves Transformers as In-context Learners
Halil Alperen Gozeten, Muhammed Emrullah Ildiz, Xuechen Zhang, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi, Marco Mondelli, Samet Oymak
- ICML 2025 poster
- Readers: Everyone

View all 76 publications

Co-Authors

View all 95 co-authors