Farrin Sofian
Hey there! 👋 I'm a third-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at UC Irvine, advised by Prof. Stephan Mandt.
My research focuses on controllable and scalable generative AI across audio, text, image, and video, including diffusion models, reward-guided generation, editable systems, and efficient language-model decoding.
I have publications at ICML, ICLR, and NeurIPS, and have worked on scientific diffusion applications at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, large-scale ML systems at Adobe, and Turkey's first bird-song identification mobile application.
📚 Publications
Hierarchical Variational Policies for Reward-Guided Diffusion
K. Pandey*, F. M. Sofian*, J. Groeneveld, F. Draxler, S. Mandt
Pre-print, 2026
Variational Test-time Optimization for Diffusion Synchronization
H. Lee*, F. M. Sofian*, K. Pandey, S. Mandt
Pre-print, 2026
Control-Augmented Autoregressive Diffusion for Data Assimilation
P. Srivastava, F. M. Sofian, F. Immorlano, K. Pandey, S. Mandt
Pre-print, 2026
Parallel Token Generation for Language Models
F. Draxler, J. Will, F. M. Sofian, T. Karaletsos, S. Mandt
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026
Experience
Research
Mandt Lab
Working Under Supervision of Prof. Stephan Mandt on Generative Models.
KUIS AI Lab
Worked on a variaty of projects such as Bird songs classification, audio re-synthesis, and audio-based image editing under the supervision of Prof. Aykut Erdem, Prof. Erkut Erdem and Dr. Duygu Ceylan from Adobe Research.
Paper GitHubGGLab
Worked on creating the first extensive dataset and training SOTA models and baselines for Grammatical Error Correction in Turkish under the supervision of Prof. Gözde Gül Sahin.
Paper GitHub
Professional
Machine Learning Engineering Intern at Adobe
Worked on improving the AI Assistant in Adobe Acrobat.
Machine Learning Engineering Intern at RadiusAI
Worked on camera calibration based on scene geometry. Co-created the company's first fully automated camera calibration system, significantly reducing the company's reliance on expensive annotators.
Software Engineer at Digitopia
Designed the company's main product to provide marketing analytics for large enterprises, which included creating a dynamic PDF generator from user dashboard results using JavaScript, Node.js, and Handlebars.
Projects
Birds of Istanbul App
The first bird songs classification iOS app in Turkey developed for ornithologists, bird watcher, or those who are curious and want to explore birds in their surroundings.