About me

Greetings! I’m Amir, short for Amirhossein Abaskohi (امیرحسین عباسکوهی). Feel free to call me Amir 😄.

I am currently embarking on my journey as a first-year PhD student at the University of British Columbia, under the supervision of Prof. Giuseppe Carenini and Prof. Peter West. I am part of the UBC Natural Language Processing Group.

I earned my Master of Science in Computer Science from UBC with distinction (A+), supervised by Prof. Giuseppe Carenini and Prof. Issam H. Laradji. My research centered on reasoning over long, multimodal documents, spanning both how such documents are represented and how they are queried. My thesis, Multimodal Understanding of Long Documents: From Topic Modeling to Question Answering, develops this in two directions: CEMTM, a topic modeling technique for long documents that combines contextual embeddings with cross-modal alignment, and FM²DS, a synthetic-data-generation pipeline for multimodal, multi-hop question answering in low-resource settings.

Prior to that, I earned my BSc in Computer Engineering from the University of Tehran. During my undergraduate studies, I had the privilege of collaborating with Prof. Azadeh Shakeri, Prof. Yadollah Yaghoobzadeh, and Prof. Behnam Bahrak, enriching my academic experience.

My research centers on agentic design, particularly for deep research and computer-use agents. I work across several domains on both the efficiency and the performance of these agents. Recent work includes better benchmarking of deep research agents (DRBench), efficient retrieval-augmented generation systems (MCompassRAG and SproutRAG), and characterizing the unpredictability and randomness of different agents (UnpredictaBench). More broadly, I remain interested in natural language inference and reasoning, long multimodal document reasoning, controlled generation, and information retrieval.

Throughout this journey, I have completed internships at Microsoft Research, Huawei Research, and ServiceNow Research, and collaborated with researchers at Google, Meta AI, and Salesforce AI. These experiences have enriched my research perspective and broadened my understanding of cutting-edge developments in natural language processing.

Beyond academia, I am enthusiastic about knowledge dissemination and community engagement. I share insights and discoveries through Medium and YouTube, fostering dialogue and knowledge exchange. I have also honed my software engineering skills through practical work, contributing to back-end development at System Group in Summer 2022 and MateMachine for a year starting November 2022.

When I’m not working or studying, I love getting lost in the world of novels and comics 📚. They spark my imagination and give me a fun break from my busy life 🌟. I don’t spend a lot of time outdoors, but I really enjoy it when I do. Living in Vancouver, with its amazing natural beauty, gives me plenty of chances to explore. Whether it’s a quiet hike in the forest, a walk along the beach, or watching a colorful sunset, being in nature always makes me feel calm and refreshed. Even though life can be hectic, these little moments in nature remind me to slow down and appreciate the world around me. 🌿✨

I am happy to answer any questions and chat about research/collboration! Reach me at aabaskoh@cs.ubc.ca.

News

2026.04: Our paper Improving Topic Modeling by Distilling Soft Labels from Language Models was accepted to ICML 2026.
2026.04: I will be attending ICLR 2026 in Rio and would be delighted to meet and connect with you there!
2026.01: Our paper DRBench: A Realistic Benchmark for Enterprise Deep Research was accepted to ICLR 2026.
2026.01: Our paper StarFlow: Generating Structured Workflow Outputs From Sketch Images was accepted to EACL 2026.
2025.11: I will be attending EMNLP 2025 in Suzhou and would be delighted to meet and connect with you there!
2025.08: I graduated with a Master’s degree in Computer Science from UBC 🥳🥳. I will start my PhD at UBC starting September 2025.
2025.08: Three papers accepted to EMNLP 2025: CEMTM and ChartGaze (main proceedings), and FM²DS (Findings).
2025.08: Our paper AgentAda: Skill-Adaptive Data Analytics for Tailored Insight Discovery received the Outstanding Paper Award at REALM@ACL 2025.
2025.07: I will be attending ICML 2025 in Vancouver and would be delighted to meet and connect with you there!
2025.05: AgentAda: Skill-Adaptive Data Analytics for Tailored Insight Discovery accepted to REALM@ACL 2025 with an oral presentation.
2025.04: I will be attending ICLR 2025 in Singapore and would be delighted to meet and connect with you there!
2025.01: 2/2 of my papers: BigDocs and InsightBench were accepted for ICLR 2025.
2024.11: I will be attending NeurIPS 2024 in Vancouver and would be delighted to meet and connect with you there!
2024.10: I’m excited to serve as a publicity chair for the Future of NLP Workshop, where I’ll also present my recent research. I look forward to sharing it with you!
2024.10: Our paper entitled “BigDocs: An Open and Permissively-Licensed Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks” has been accepted by RBFM@NeurIPS2024.
2024.03: Our paper entitled “BCAmirs at SemEval-2024 Task 4: Beyond Words: A Multimodal and Multilingual Exploration of Persuasion in Memes” has been accepted by SemEval@NAACL2024.
2024.03: Our paper entitled “uTeBC-NLP at SemEval-2024 Task 9: Can LLMs be Lateral Thinkers?” has been accepted by SemEval@NAACL2024.
2024.02: Our paper titled Benchmarking Large Language Models for Persian: A Preliminary Study Focusing on ChatGPT has been accepted for presentation at LREC-CoLing 2024.
2023.09: I started my Master’s degree at UBC’s CS Department 🥳🥳.
2023.05: Our paper with the title LM-CPPF: Paraphrasing-Guided Data Augmentation for Contrastive Prompt-Based Few-Shot Fine-Tuning has been accepted for ACL 2023.

Misc

My path into natural language processing began with a broader fascination: the origins of human language and how tongues have formed, spread, and transformed across history. That curiosity still shapes how I approach NLP, which sits at the intersection of linguistics, computer science, and AI. Two books capture this interest especially well for me, Guy Deutscher’s The Unfolding of Language, on how grammatical structure emerges and evolves over time, and Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word, a sweeping history of how languages have risen and spread across civilizations.
In my free time, I enjoy cooking. I am far from an expert, but I love experimenting in the kitchen and playing with flavors until something turns out just right.
Whenever I get the chance to step outside, I take it. Vancouver’s landscapes make that easy, and a bit of time in the forest or by the water is usually all I need to reset and slow down. 🌿
I am a devoted horror fan, most of all in fiction. I have made my way through nearly all of Stephen King’s books, and I am always happy to talk shop about them 📚. I am also deep into the Marvel universe, following it across both the films and the comics.
I am a big fan of gaming, especially story-driven titles that pull you into a rich narrative. Survival horror is my particular soft spot, where the tension and puzzles keep me hooked. If you are a gamer too, feel free to check out my Steam profile!