MohammadHossein Rezaei

Email: mhrezaei@arizona.edu

I am a Machine Learning Research Engineer at Scale AI where I work on post-training and evaluation of LLMs. I worked on OnlineRubrics, an approach for post-training LLMs with evolving rubrics to improve alignment in tasks without verifiable ground-truth.

I earned a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Arizona UArizona . I was a member of the Computational Language Understanding (CLU) Lab, advised by Eduardo Blanco, where I worked on making SLMs more robust against negation by further pre-training and paraphrasing in affirmative terms.

Previously, I was a research intern at Stanford University in the SALT Lab advised by Diyi Yang. There, I co-created EgoNormia, a benchmark for evaluating physical-social norm understanding in vision-language models.

selected publications

Scale AI

Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation: Post-Training Without Rubric Verifiers

MohammadHossein Rezaei, Anas Mahmoud, Zihao Wang, Utkarsh Tyagi, Advait Gosai, Razvan-Gabriel Dumitru, Aakash Sabharwal, Bing Liu, and Yunzhong He

Jun 2026

arXiv Bib PDF

@misc{rezaei2026rgsd,
  title = {Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation: Post-Training Without Rubric Verifiers},
  author = {Rezaei, MohammadHossein and Mahmoud, Anas and Wang, Zihao and Tyagi, Utkarsh and Gosai, Advait and Dumitru, Razvan-Gabriel and Sabharwal, Aakash and Liu, Bing and He, Yunzhong},
  month = jun,
  year = {2026},
  eprint = {2606.12507},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.LG},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12507},
}

Scale AI

Reward Hacking in Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning

Anas Mahmoud, MohammadHossein Rezaei, Zihao Wang, Anisha Gunjal, Bing Liu, and Yunzhong He

May 2026

arXiv Bib PDF

@misc{mahmoud2026rewardhacking,
  title = {Reward Hacking in Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Mahmoud, Anas and Rezaei, MohammadHossein and Wang, Zihao and Gunjal, Anisha and Liu, Bing and He, Yunzhong},
  month = may,
  year = {2026},
  eprint = {2605.12474},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.CL},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12474},
}

ICML

Online Rubrics Elicitation from Pairwise Comparisons

MohammadHossein Rezaei, Robert Vacareanu, Zihao Wang , Clinton Wang, Bing Liu, Yunzhong He, and Afra Feyza Akyürek

In Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Jul 2026

arXiv Bib PDF Website

@inproceedings{rezaei2026onlinerubricselicitationpairwise,
  title = {Online Rubrics Elicitation from Pairwise Comparisons},
  author = {Rezaei, MohammadHossein and Vacareanu, Robert and Wang, Zihao and Wang, Clinton and Liu, Bing and He, Yunzhong and Akyürek, Afra Feyza},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},
  month = jul,
  year = {2026},
  address = {Seoul, South Korea},
  eprint = {2510.07284},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
  primaryclass = {cs.CL},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07284},
}

ACL (Findings)

EgoNormia: Benchmarking Physical-Social Norm Understanding

MohammadHossein Rezaei^*, Yicheng Fu^*, Phil Cuvin^*, Caleb Ziems, Yanzhe Zhang, Hao Zhu, and Diyi Yang

In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, Jul 2025

DOI arXiv Bib PDF Code Poster Slides Website

@inproceedings{rezaei-etal-2025-egonormia,
  title = {EgoNormia: Benchmarking Physical-Social Norm Understanding},
  author = {Rezaei, MohammadHossein and Fu, Yicheng and Cuvin, Phil and Ziems, Caleb and Zhang, Yanzhe and Zhu, Hao and Yang, Diyi},
  booktitle = {Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025},
  month = jul,
  year = {2025},
  address = {Vienna, Austria},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.985/},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.985},
  pages = {19256--19283},
  isbn = {979-8-89176-256-5},
}