About Me
My name is Kia Rahmani, and I am a computer scientist passionate about designing generalizable, interpretable, and reliable machine learning algorithms using the theory of programming languages.
I currently serve as a postdoctoral fellow at the Computer Science Department of the University of Texas at Austin, under the supervision of Prof. Işil Dillig and Prof. Joydeep Biswas.
The current focus of my research is on neuro-symbolic algorithms for sequential decision making. My ultimate scientific goal is to train intelligent agents that can provide formal explanation and guarantees about their behaviors.
Prior to joining UT, I obtained my PhD from Purdue University under the supervision of Prof. S. Jagannathan and Prof. B. Delaware. I also did an internship with Microsoft where I developed a new program synthesis algorithm using large language models, under the supervision of Dr. S. Gulwani and Dr. M. Raza.
Publications & Patents
- Programmatic Imitation Learning from Unlabeled and Noisy Demonstrations
(Jimmy Xin*, Linus Zheng*, Kia Rahmani, Jiayi Wei, Jarrett Holtz, Isil Dillig, Joydeep Biswas)
[IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters] [Project Website] [pre-print]
- Programming-by-Demonstration for Long-Horizon Robot Tasks
(Noah Patton, Kia Rahmani, Meghana Missula, Joydeep Biswas, Isil Dillig)
[POPL'24: 51st ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages] [pre-print]
- Multi-modal Program Inference (US20230176829A1)
(Kia Rahmani, Mohammad Raza, Sumit Gulwani, Vu Le, Daniel Morris, Arjun Radhakrishna, Gustavo Soares, Ashish Tiwari)
[United States Patent Application]
- Symbolic Analysis of Weak Concurrency Semantics in Modern Database Programs
(Kia Rahmani)
[PhD Thesis, Purdue University, August 2022] [Slides]
- Multi-modal Program Inference: a Marriage of Pre-trained Language Models and Component-based Synthesis
(Kia Rahmani, Mohammad Raza, Sumit Gulwani, Vu Le, Daniel Morris, Arjun Radhakrishna, Gustavo Soares, Ashish Tiwari)
[OOPSLA'21: ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Languages, Systems, and Applications]
[pre-print] [Pdf] [15min-talk] [Slides]
- Repairing Serializability Bugs in Distributed Database Programs via Automated Schema Refactoring
(Kia Rahmani, Kartik Nagar, Benjamin Delaware and Suresh Jagannathan)
[PLDI'21: ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation]
[pdf]
- CLOTHO: Directed Test Generation for Weakly Consistent Database Systems
(Kia Rahmani, Kartik Nagar, Benjamin Delaware and Suresh Jagannathan)
[OOPSLA'19: ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Languages, Systems, and Applications]
[Tech Report] [Talk @OOPSLA] [Talk @Midwest PL Summit] [Slides]
- Fine-grained Distributed Consistency Guarantees with Effect Orchestration
(Kia Rahmani, Gowtham Kaki and Suresh Jagannathan)
[PaPoC'18: Workshop on the Principles and Practice of Consistency for Distributed Data]
[Tech Report] [Slides]
Service
- 2023: Reviewed for IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
- 2021: Reviewed for AIPLANS workshop at NeurIPS 2021