About me
I am an M.S. student at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. My work focuses on large language models, LLM memory, and systems that can preserve, retrieve, and reason over useful context across long interactions.
I am especially interested in memory-augmented LLMs: how models can maintain persistent knowledge, decide what to remember, recover relevant experiences, and use memory to support more reliable reasoning.
News
- 2026: Awarded a Departmental Fellowship Award.
- 2026: Received the CTS TRB Reimbursement Award to present research at TRB 2026.
- 2025: Paper on self-reflective vision-language models accepted for presentation at TRB 2026.
Publications
Video-based Vehicle Surveillance in the Wild: License Plate, Make, and Model Recognition with Self-Reflective Vision-Language Models
Pouya Parsa, Keya Li, Kara M. Kockelman, and Seongjin Choi. arXiv:2508.01387. Accepted for presentation at TRB 2026.
- Designed and implemented a self-reflective vision-language model framework.
- Achieved a 20% performance improvement over CNN-based baselines on license plate, make, and model recognition tasks.
Where2Start: Leveraging Initial States for Robust and Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning
Pouya Parsa, Raoof Zare Moayedi, Mohammad Bornosi, and Mohammad Mahdi Bejani. arXiv:2311.15089.
- Proposed and implemented the Where2Start algorithm to select informative initial states.
- Achieved up to 8x improvement in sample efficiency compared to baseline reinforcement learning methods.
Awards
Departmental Fellowship Award
2026
Awarded a competitive fellowship in recognition of academic excellence and research potential.
CTS TRB Reimbursement Award
2026
Received competitive travel reimbursement to present research at TRB 2026.
Education
University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Master of Science, 2024-2026
GPA: 3.7/4.00. Selected courses: Computer Vision and Generative AI.
Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic)
Bachelor of Science, 2018-2022
GPA: 3.72/4.00. Thesis: Transformer-Based Deep Learning Method for Portfolio Optimization.
Experience
Research Assistant, University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, USA · Aug 2024-Present
Advisor: Dr. Seongjin Choi. Conducting research in machine learning with a focus on computer vision and generative AI.
Project Manager, XTON
Remote (Dubai) · Apr 2024-Jul 2024
- Managed infrastructure for a high-availability crypto clicker app serving 500k+ users.
- Implemented serverless architecture leveraging AWS Lambda and auto-scaling.
- Facilitated stakeholder communication to align expectations.
Machine Learning Engineer, ZebraCat.ai
Remote (Germany) · Sep 2022-Mar 2023
- Developed an embedding-based algorithm for efficient video retrieval.
- Developed a model to divide videos into semantic sections.
- Scraped more than 1M advertisement videos.
Data Science Intern, MCI (Hamrahe Aval)
Tehran, Iran · Jul 2022-Sep 2022
- Contributed to recommender systems at Iran's largest mobile operator.
- Built a fault-tolerant ETL pipeline for recommender data preparation.
- Implemented collaborative filtering delivering posts with less than 10 ms latency.
Machine Learning Engineer Intern, University of Zurich
Zurich, Switzerland · Jan 2022-Mar 2022
Developed software interfaces for data ingestion, preprocessing, machine learning, visualization, and report generation.