Amir Saeidi

I am a fourth year PhD student in CS at Arizona State University, advised by Chitta Baral in the Cognition and Intelligence Lab. I am also a Research Intern at Microsoft Research, where I work on automating synthetic data generation pipelines to build capable LLM agents.

My research focuses on post-training and alignment of large language models, building reliable agentic systems, and scaling synthetic data generation for agent learning. I am also broadly interested in evaluating and improving the robustness of LLM agents in complex, dynamic environments.

I am actively looking for industry research positions focused on agentic systems, LLM post-training, and synthetic data generation. Feel free to reach out!

News

May, 2026 - Returning to Microsoft Research as Research Intern, Summer 2026.
May, 2026 - Honored to contribute to Microsoft's MageticLite — a full-stack agentic experience powered by small models — and Aion 1.0 Instinct, expanding on-device AI in Microsoft Edge.
May, 2026 - VULCAN presented at MSR Forum.
April, 2026 - TPO added to HuggingFace TRL.
April, 2026 - FAMA accepted to ACL 2026 Findings.
March, 2026 - VULCAN accepted to DATA-FM @ ICLR 2026.
November, 2025 - TPO accepted to TMLR.
October, 2025 - Continuing at Microsoft Research as part-time Research Intern through Fall 2025 and Spring 2026.
September, 2025 - 2 papers accepted to NeurIPS 2025 workshops.
September, 2025 - DCPO accepted to TMLR.
August, 2025 - IRMA accepted to EMNLP 2025 Findings.
May, 2025 - UnSeenTimeQA accepted to ACL 2025 main.
January, 2025 - Joining Microsoft Research as Research Intern, Spring and Summer 2025.
April, 2024 - 1 paper accepted to CVPR 2024 workshop.
October, 2023 - Joined Mayo Clinic as Research Fellow.
January, 2023 - Started PhD at ASU.

Research

VULCAN: Where Agents Learn by Living in Simulated Tool Environments

Amir Saeidi, Chitta Baral, Ahmed Awadallah, Harkirat Behl

DATA-FM Workshop at ICLR 2026

Paper/ Project/ Code

FAMA: Failure-Aware Meta-Agentic Framework for Open-Source LLMs in Interactive Tool Use Environments

Amir Saeidi*, Venkatesh Mishra*, Souradeep Mukhopadhyay, Gaowen Liu, Ali Payani, Jayanth Srinivasa, Chitta Baral

ACL 2026 Findings

Paper

How Can Input Reformulation Improve Tool Usage Accuracy in a Complex Dynamic Environment? A Study on τ-bench

Venkatesh Mishra*, Amir Saeidi*, Satyam Raj, Mutsumi Nakamura, Jayanth Srinivasa, Gaowen Liu, Ali Payani, Chitta Baral

EMNLP 2025 Findings · MTI-LLM Workshop at NeurIPS 2025

Paper

Triple Preference Optimization: Achieving Better Alignment using a Single Step Optimization

Amir Saeidi, Shivanshu Verma, Kashif Rasul, Aswin RRV, Chitta Baral

TMLR

Paper/ Project/ Code/ TRL

Dual Caption Preference Optimization for Diffusion Models

Amir Saeidi*, Yiran Luo*, Agneet Chatterjee, Shamanthak Hegde, Bimsara Pathiraja, Yezhou Yang, Chitta Baral

TMLR

Paper/ Project/ Code

When "Competency" in Reasoning Opens the Door to Vulnerability: Jailbreaking LLMs via Novel Complex Ciphers

Divij Handa, Zehua Zhang, Amir Saeidi, Shrinidhi Kumbhar, Md Nayem Uddin, Aswin RRV, Chitta Baral

Reliable ML Workshop at NeurIPS 2025

Paper

UnSeenTimeQA: Time-Sensitive Question-Answering Beyond LLMs' Memorization

Md Nayem Uddin, Amir Saeidi, Divij Handa, Agastya Seth, Tran Cao Son, Eduardo Blanco, Steven R. Corman, Chitta Baral

ACL 2025

Paper/ Code

Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models Across Distribution Shifts and Augmentations

Aayush Atul Verma*, Amir Saeidi*, Shamanthak Hegde*, Ajay Therala*, Fenil Denish Bardoliya*, Nagaraju Machavarapu*, Shri Ajay Kumar Ravindhiran*, Srija Malyala*, Agneet Chatterjee*, Yezhou Yang, Chitta Baral

EVGENFM Workshop at CVPR 2024

Paper

Investigating and Addressing Hallucinations of LLMs in Tasks Involving Negation

Neeraj Varshney, Satyam Raj, Venkatesh Mishra, Agneet Chatterjee, Amir Saeidi, Ritika Sarkar, Chitta Baral

TrustNLP Workshop at NAACL 2025

Paper

Insights into Alignment: Evaluating DPO and its Variants Across Multiple Tasks

Amir Saeidi, Sivanshu Verma, Md Nayem Uddin, Chitta Baral

SRW Workshop at ACL 2025

Paper