News

* = equal contribution.

• July 2026 — Awarded an IAAI Research Program grant (PI, 500,000 USD over 24 months) for "Trustworthy Agronomic Reasoning for Smallholder Advisory" - Co-PIs: Martin Takáč and Nils Lukas.
• June 2026 — Keynote "A Gentle Introduction to LLM Reasoning" at NETYS 2026, Agadir, Morocco.
• June 2026 — Invited talk "Mitigating Societal Cognitive Overload in the Age of AI" at SKEMA Business School, France.
• June 2026 — Paper accepted at Information Sciences:
  • Expert-Aided Causal Discovery of Ancestral Graphs
    Tiago da Silva, Bruna Bazaluk, Eliezer de Souza da Silva, António Góis, Salem Lahlou, Dominik Heider, Samuel Kaski, Diego Mesquita, Adèle Helena Ribeiro
• June 2026 — Paper accepted at UAI 2026:
  • Particle GFlowNets: Rethinking Generative Marginalization Models
    Tiago Silva, Diego Mesquita, Salem Lahlou
• May 2026 — 7 Papers accepted at ICML 2026:
  • Zero-Shot Off-Policy Learning
    Arip Asadulaev, Maksim Bobrin, Salem Lahlou, Dmitry V. Dylov, Fakhri Karray, Martin Takáč
  • Bayesian Rain Field Reconstruction using Commercial Microwave Links and Diffusion Model Priors
    Badr Moufad, Albina Ilina, Hai Victor Habi, Salem Lahlou, Yazid Janati, Hagit Messer, Eric Moulines
  • Path-dependent Discrete Amortized Inference (Oral)
    Tiago Silva, Nikolay Malkin, Salem Lahlou
  • Avoid What You Know: Divergent Trajectory Balance for GFlowNets
    Pedro Dall'Antonia, Tiago Silva, Daniel Csillag, Salem Lahlou, Diego Mesquita
  • Noise-Corrected GRPO: From Noisy Rewards to Unbiased Gradients
    Omar El Mansouri, Fathinah Asma Izzati, Mohamed El Amine Seddik, Salem Lahlou
  • CoRe: Collaborative Reasoning via Cross Teaching
    Kshitij Mishra, Mirat Aubakirov, Martin Takáč, Nils Lukas, Salem Lahlou
  • Position: Agentic AI Systems Should Be Making Bayes-Consistent Decisions
    Theodore Papamarkou, Pierre Alquier, Matthias Bauer, Wray Buntine, Andrew J. Davison, Gintare Karolina Dziugaite, Maurizio Filippone, Andrew Y. K. Foong, Vincent Fortuin, Dimitris Fouskakis, Jes Frellsen, Eyke Hüllermeier, Theofanis Karaletsos, Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan, Nikita Kotelevskii, Salem Lahlou, Yingzhen Li, Fang Liu, Clare Lyle, Thomas Möllenhoff, Konstantina Palla, Maxim Panov, Yusuf Sale, Kajetan Schweighofer, Artem Shelmanov, Siddharth Swaroop, Martin Trapp, Willem Waegeman, Andrew Gordon Wilson, Alexey Zaytsev
• April 2026 — Awarded an MBZUAI research grant (PI) for advancing GFlowNet research - Co-PI: Nils Lukas.
• April 2026 — Accepted invitation to serve as Program Committee Co-Chair for the Frontier AI Systems Workshop (FAISys), Xiamen, China, December 2026.
• April 2026 — Accepted invitation to serve as Member, Host Scientific Committee for the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence (IOAI) 2026, and developed a task for the Main Contest.
• April 2026 — 2 Papers accepted at ACL 2026:
  • FinChain: A Symbolic Benchmark for Verifiable Chain-of-Thought Financial Reasoning
    Zhuohan Xie, Dhruv Sahnan, Debopriyo Banerjee, Georgi Georgiev, Rushil Thareja, Hachem Madmoun, Jinyan Su, Aaryamonvikram Singh, Yuxia Wang, Rui Xing, Fajri Koto, Haonan Li, Ivan Koychev, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Salem Lahlou, Veselin Stoyanov, Preslav Nakov
  • SAHM: Arabic Financial Instruction-Tuning Dataset and Models
    Rania Elbadry, Sarfraz Ahmad*, Dani Bouch*, Momina Ahsan, Xueqing Peng, Jimin Huang, Muhra AlMahri, Marwa Elsaid Khalil, Yuxia Wang, Salem Lahlou, Veselin Stoyanov, Sophia Ananiadou, Preslav Nakov, Zhuohan Xie
• April 2026 — Paper accepted at Findings of ACL 2026:
  • Temporal Contrastive Decoding: A Training-Free Method for Large Audio-Language Models
    Yanda Li, Yuhan Liu, Zirui Song, Yunchao Wei, Martin Takáč, Salem Lahlou
• April 2026 — Paper accepted at NETYS 2026:
  • Byzantine Cheap Talk: Adversarial Resilience and Topology Effects in LLM Coordination Games
    Aya El Mir, Martin Takáč, Salem Lahlou
• March 2026 — Invited Area Chair for NeurIPS 2026.
• February 2026 — Organized the MBZUAI ML Winter School 2026.
• January 2026 — Invited talks at the MenaML Winter School 2026 (KAUST) and the AI for Science Symposium (HBKU, Doha).
• January 2026 — Paper accepted at EACL 2026 (Oral):
  • Communication Enables Cooperation in LLM Agents: A Comparison with Curriculum-Based Approaches
    Hachem Madmoun, Salem Lahlou
• January 2026 — Paper accepted at Findings of EACL 2026:
  • SD-E2: Semantic Exploration for Reasoning Under Token Budgets
    Kshitij Mishra, Nils Lukas, Salem Lahlou
• December 2025 — Received the Best Presentation Award at ICoIAS 2025 and the Top Reviewer Award at NeurIPS 2025.
• December 2025 — Paper accepted at AAAI 2026:
  • Loss-guided Auxiliary Agents for Overcoming Mode Collapse in GFlowNets
    Idriss Malek, Aya Laajil, Abhijith Sharma, Eric Moulines, Salem Lahlou
• November 2025 — Invited talk at HSE University's HDI Lab (online).
• October 2025 — Co-organized the "Bayesianism in the Age of Modern AI" workshop at MBZUAI.
• October 2025 — Paper accepted at JMLR 2026:
  • TorchGFN: A PyTorch GFlowNet Library
    Joseph D. Viviano*, Omar G. Younis*, Sanghyeok Choi*, Victor Schmidt, Yoshua Bengio, Salem Lahlou
• September 2025 — Invited talk at Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi.
• September 2025 — Invited Area Chair for ICML 2026.
• September 2025 — Paper accepted at NeurIPS 2025:
  • SVRPBench: A Realistic Benchmark for Stochastic Vehicle Routing Problem
    Ahmed Heakl*, Yahia Salaheldin Shaaban*, Martin Takac, Salem Lahlou, Zangir Iklassov
• June 2025 — Co-PI on the Etihad flagship research project (450,000 USD per year, 24 months).
• June 2025 — Invited Area Chair for ICLR 2026.
• May 2025 — Tutorial "Reinforcement Learning through a probabilistic lens" (slides) at the METIS Spring School.
• May 2025 — Co-organized the International Symposium on Trustworthy Foundation Models at MBZUAI; co-Program Chair at NETYS 2025 (Rabat).
• April 2025 — Paper accepted at UAI 2025:
  • On the Privacy Risks of Spiking Neural Networks: A Membership Inference Analysis
    Junyi Guan*, Abhijith Sharma*, Chong Tian, Salem Lahlou
• February 2025 — Co-PI on the EnergyAI flagship research project (2M USD/year, 30 months).
• February 2025 — Talks at the MBZUAI–Berkeley Joint Workshop and the MBZUAI Paris Workshop 2025.
• February 2025 — Paper accepted at ICLR 2025 Workshop on Bidirectional Human-AI Alignment (to appear in PMLR):
  • Mitigating Societal Cognitive Overload in the Age of AI: Challenges and Directions
    Salem Lahlou
• January 2025 — Paper accepted at NAACL 2025:
  • PORT: Preference Optimization on Reasoning Traces
    Salem Lahlou*, Abdalgader Abubaker*, Hakim Hacid
• December 2024 — Keynote at the MoroccoAI 2024 conference.
• November 2024 — Attended the CLIMB and Domain Adaptation workshops at the Simons Institute, UC Berkeley.
• September 2024 — Joined MBZUAI as Assistant Professor in the Machine Learning department.