About Me

I am a Machine Learning Scientist at Bagel Labs, San Francisco, CA, working on distributed training of reinforcement learning algorithms. I obtained my Ph.D from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University and MILA (Quebec AI Institute). I was part of Systems and Control group, Center for Intelligent Machines (CIM) and was supervised by Professor Aditya Mahajan and Professor Jerome Le Ny.

I obtained my Master's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from McGill University and my undergraduate degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Islamic University of Technology.

Research Interest

I am primarily interested in using Machine Learning algorithms for achieving optimal control for multi-agent systems. My research is therefore at the intersection of Reinforcement Learning and Control Systems for intelligent control applications. I work on control sharing in human automation team problems.

Education

Doctor of Philosophy

McGill University 2019-2025
Research Area: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Game Theory, Machine learning. Supervisor(s): Aditya Mahajan and Jerome Le Ny

Awards and Honors

  • McGill Engineering Doctoral Award(MEDA) (2019-2022).
  • GERAD co-supervised student award (2019).
  • Mitacs Accelerate Fellowship (2018).
  • Recepient of Graduate Excellence Fellowship at McGill (2017,2018,2021).
  • Member of the winning team of Brac Manthan Award for e health catagory (2016).
  • OIC scholarship (for academic excellence in university entrance examination) (2011).
  • Recipient of the Daily Star Award for academic excellence in O and A levels (2011).

Selected Publications

  • Raihan Seraj, Jerome Le Ny, Aditya Mahajan. "Fatigue and Task Load Dependent Decision Referrals for Joint Binary Classification in Human-Automation Teams", IEEE Control Systems Letters.[pdf]

  • Raihan Seraj, Aditya Mahajan, Jerome Le Ny. "Dynamic Estimation of Mental Workload and Operator Accuracy for Time-Constrained Binary Classification Tasks", IEEE Transactions of Human Machine Systems.[pdf]

  • Anurag Koul, Shivakanth Sujit, Shaoru Chen, Ben Evans, Lili Wu, Byron Xu, Rajan Chari, Riashat Islam, Raihan Seraj, Yonathan Efroni, Lekan P Molu, Miroslav Dudík, John Langford, Alex Lamb. "PcLast: Discovering Plannable Continuous Latent States". In Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Vienna, Austria, 2024.[pdf]

  • Qi Yan, Raihan Seraj, Jiawei He, Lili Meng, Tristan Sylvain. "Autocast++: Enhancing world event prediction with zero-shot ranking-based context retrieval". In International Conference on Learning Representation (ICLR), 2024.[pdf]

  • Raihan Seraj, Jivitesh Sharma and Ole-Christoffer Granmo. "Tsetlin Machine for Solving Contextual Bandit Problems". In 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). [pdf]

  • Raihan Seraj, Jerome Le Ny and Aditya Mahajan "Mean-field approximation for large-population beauty-contest games". In 2021 IEEE 60th Conference on Decision and Control (CDC).[pdf]

  • Jayakumar Subramanian, Amit Sinha, Raihan Seraj and Aditya Mahajan. "Approximate information state for approximate planning and reinforcement learning in partially observed systems." Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR).[pdf]

  • Jayakumar Subramanian, Raihan Seraj and Aditya Mahajan ”Reinforcement learning for mean-field teams” AAMAS Workshop on Adaptive and Learning Agents, Montreal, Canada, 13-17 May, 2019. [pdf]

  • Riashat Islam, Raihan Seraj, Pierre-Luc Bacon, Doina Precup. “Entropy Regularization with Discounted Future State Distribution in Policy Gradient Methods”, NeurIPS 2019 workshop on Optimization Foundations for Reinforcement Learning. [pdf]

  • Riashat Islam, Raihan Seraj, Samin Yeasar Arnob, Doina Precup. “Doubly Robust Off-Policy Actor Critic Algorithms for Reinforcement Learning”, NeurIPS 2019 workshop on Safety and Robustness in Decision Making. [pdf]

  • Raihan Seraj, Mohiuddin Ahmed ”Concept drifts for big data”, Combating Security Challenges in the Age of Big Data - Powered by State-of-theArt Artificial Intelligence Techniques, Springer.[pdf]

  • Ahmed, Mohiuddin, Raihan Seraj, and Syed Mohammed Shamsul Islam. "The k-means algorithm: A comprehensive survey and performance evaluation." Electronics 9.8 (2020): 1295.[pdf]

News

  • 13-July-2025 Paper titled "Dynamic Estimation of Mental Workload and Operator Accuracy for Time-Constrained Binary Classification Tasks" got accepted at IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems (THMS)
  • 3-June-2025 Joined Bagel Labs as a Machine Learning Scientist. Excited to work on distributed reinforcement learning
  • 2-June-2025 Paper titled "Fatigue and task load dependent decision referrals for joint binary classification in human-automation teams" accepted at IEEE-LCSS
  • 29-May-2025 Obtained my unfoldable and fragile PhD diploma from McGill University. Congratulations to class of 2025
  • 21-March-2025 I have successfully defended my PhD thesis
  • 05-June-2024 I have successfully completed my PhD research seminar examination.
  • 14-Sep-2022 Paper titled "Tsetlin Machine for Solving Contextual Bandit Problems" got accepted at Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2022.
  • 9-Sept-2021 Successfully completed my PhD thesis proposal examination.
  • 1-Jul-2021 Joined Valence Drug Discovery for Scientist in Residence Program.
  • 27-Jul-2021 Paper titled "Mean-field approximation for large-population beauty-contest games" got accepted at IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) 2021.
  • 1-Aug-2021 Paper titled "Approximate information state for approximate planning and reinforcement learning" got accepted at Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR).
  • 24-Feb-2020 Successfully completed my PhD comprehensive examination.
  • 1-Jan-2019 Started my PhD at the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
  • 31-Dec-2018 Successfully completed my Masters degree from the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
  • 1-Mar-2018 Joined Aerial Technologies as a Research Scientist Intern.
  • 1-Jan-2017 Started graduate school at the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill Univeristy.
  • 31-Dec-2015 Started a job as a Research Engineer at the Department of Biomedical Physics and Technology, University of Dhaka.
  • 25-Dec-2015 Graduated with first class honors from the department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Islamic University of Technology.

Curriculum Vitae

My Academic CV

Blogs

Research blogs