Ilia Mahrooghi

PhD Student, AI Researcher

Ilia Mahrooghi

I am a second year PhD student in Computer Science at EPFL, advised by Emmanuel Abbe and Antoine Bosselut. I am also an independent contractor at Apple MLR team in Lausanne, Switzerland.

My research is about reasoning in language models: how to strengthen it with reinforcement learning, how it extends to agentic settings where models reason over many steps and call external tools, and how to tell genuine reasoning apart from memorization through the lens of data contamination.

Before EPFL, I received my B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology. Before that, I competed in mathematical olympiads, winning a bronze medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO 2021).

Reasoning in LLMs RL for Reasoning Agentic Reasoning Data Contamination

Affiliations

EPFL PhD Student, Computer Science 2025 – present
Apple Independent Contractor Oct 2026 – present

News

Last updated: October 17, 2026
Oct 2026Started as an independent contractor at Apple MLR team.
Feb 2026Goldilocks RL is out on arXiv.
Sep 2025Started my PhD at EPFL with the EDIC Doctoral Fellowship.
May 2025Multi-armed Bandits with Missing Outcome accepted at UAI 2025.
Aug 2024Attended the CMMRS pre-doctoral research school in Saarbrücken.