Arshia Afzal
EPFL STI IEM LIONS
ELD 244 (Bâtiment ELD)
Station 11, 1015 Lausanne
I’m Arshia, a third-year Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering at EPFL advised by Professor Volkan Cevher. My research explores efficient and fast LLMs by merging deep learning architectures with systems.
Previously, I studied Electrical Engineering at Sharif University of Technology and earned a Bronze Medal at the 2018 International Physics Olympiad 🥉 and a Gold medal of National Physics Olympiad 🥇.
Beyond academics, I’m a passionate rock climber 🧗♂️ and pianist 🎹! :)
news
| Mar 06, 2026 | M Excited to join Mistral AI as a research intern!  |
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| Jan 26, 2026 | ✍️ New blog post: On the Legacy of Linear Transformers as Positional Embeddings — exploring the duality of forget gates and position encodings! 📍 |
| Jan 02, 2026 | 🏰 Selected for the PhD Summit at Coitadel! Honored to be among the participants. 🎓 |
| Dec 01, 2025 | 🇧🇷 Our paper Selective Rotary Position Embedding got accepted at ICLR 2026! See you in Rio! 🎉 |
| Sep 19, 2025 | 🦁 LION is accepted to NeuRIPS 2025!🍾 |
| Apr 06, 2025 | 🎉 Thrilled to receive an internship offer from  ! |
| Feb 25, 2025 | 🦁 LION is out! Check out our blog post for an in-depth look, and explore our new bi-directional linear attention framework on arXiv! 😃 |
| Oct 20, 2024 | Best Poster award of Neuro-X! |
| Jul 21, 2024 | REST was accepted at ICML! 🤩 |
selected publications
- ICLR 2026
- ICML 2024
REST: Efficient and Accelerated EEG Seizure Analysis through Residual State Updates, Vienna. Webpage of paper can be found here , Jul 2024
