Rifaa Qadri
About Me
Hi! I am a second-year PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD), where I am advised by Prof. Tom Goldstein at the Center for Machine Learning. I also completed my undergraduate degree at UMD in Computer Science, with a minor in Mathematics.
My research focuses on building robust, efficient machine learning systems, with an emphasis on coding models and agentic systems that can reason, retrieve knowledge, and iteratively improve. My interests span retrieval models, vision-language systems, and end-to-end optimization of large-scale ML pipelines.
Publications and Preprints [Full List]
PHORECAST: Enabling AI Understanding of Public Health Outreach Across Populations
Rifaa Qadri, Anh N Nhu, Swati Ramnath, Laura Yu Zheng, Raj Bhansali, Sylvette La Touche-Howard, Tracy M. Zeeger, Tom Goldstein, Ming Lin
Preprint
Rifaa Qadri, Anh N Nhu, Swati Ramnath, Laura Yu Zheng, Raj Bhansali, Sylvette La Touche-Howard, Tracy M. Zeeger, Tom Goldstein, Ming Lin
Preprint
Zero-Shot Vision Encoder Grafting via LLM Surrogates
Kaiyu Yue, Vasu Singla, Menglin Jia, John Kirchenbauer, Rifaa Qadri, Zikui Cai, Abhinav Bhatele, Furong Huang, Tom Goldstein
ICCV 2025
paper
Kaiyu Yue, Vasu Singla, Menglin Jia, John Kirchenbauer, Rifaa Qadri, Zikui Cai, Abhinav Bhatele, Furong Huang, Tom Goldstein
ICCV 2025
paper
GenQA: Generating Millions of Instructions from a Handful of Prompts
Jiuhai Chen, Rifaa Qadri, Yuxin Wen, Neel Jain, John Kirchenbauer, Tianyi Zhou, Tom Goldstein
Preprint
paper
Jiuhai Chen, Rifaa Qadri, Yuxin Wen, Neel Jain, John Kirchenbauer, Tianyi Zhou, Tom Goldstein
Preprint
paper
A Smart, Energy-Efficient, and Low Cost Portable Device for Continuous Breath Analysis
Rifaa Qadri, Geng Liu, Faizan Wajid, Mara Cai, Ashok Agrawala
IEEE Sensors 2024
paper
Rifaa Qadri, Geng Liu, Faizan Wajid, Mara Cai, Ashok Agrawala
IEEE Sensors 2024
paper
Research Experience
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January 2024 – Present, Research Assistant, Center for Machine Learning, University of Maryland
Advisor: Prof. Tom Goldstein
Conducting research on coding models and agents, end-to-end system optimization techniques, as well as retrieval models, vision-language models, and world models for robotic tasks. -
September 2022 – 2024, Research Assistant, MIND Lab, University of Maryland
Advisor: Prof. Ashok Agrawala
Developed a low-cost, energy-efficient device for continuous respiratory monitoring. Created novel segmentation algorithms to classify breath patterns and detect anomalies, enabling early detection of sleep apnea and correlation of breathing activities with physical activities.
Teaching Experience
- CMSC451: Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms (Spring 2021)
- CMSC351: Algorithms (Summer 2021, Fall 2022)
- CMSC422: Introduction to Machine Learning (Summer 2023)
- CMSC320: Introduction to Data Science (Summer 2023)
- CMSC475: Machine Learning Capstone (Fall 2025)
Contact
rqadri [at] umd [dot] edu