Short Biography

I am an incoming Emmy Noether Junior Group Leader (location TBA), and currently finishing my postdoc with Eric Schulz (Helmholtz Munich) and Peter Dayan (Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen). Prior to moving to Germany, I completed my Ph.D. in Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL (2024; supervised by Wulfram Gerstner) and my B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at Sharif University of Technology (2018). My Ph.D. thesis was recognized by both the Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Award and the EPFL EDIC Thesis Distinction Award; a general-audience summary of the thesis is available via EPFL News.

Research

My research lies at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and machine learning, asking "How do biological systems make smart decisions?" and "How can we design systems that make smart decisions?" I address these questions through three complementary lines of work:

• First, I use mathematical tools to formalize and organize the psychological constructs—such as surprise, novelty, and curiosity—that have been proposed to drive smart decision-making; for example, what exactly does it mean for an agent to be surprised? [Modirshanechi et al. 2022, J. Math. Psych.] And how can we formally dissociate novelty from surprise? [Modirshanechi et al. 2023, Curr. Opin. Neurobiol.]

• Second, I use experimental studies and computational modeling to determine how these constructs shape learning and decision-making in humans and animals; for example, when exploring, do we seek surprising events or unfamiliar parts of the environment? [Modirshanechi et al. 2025, PNAS] And what makes us feel empowered and in control of our lives? [Modirshanechi et al., PsyArXiv]

• Third, I study how these constructs can help us design efficient AI algorithms, or explain the emergent behavior of modern AI systems; for example, how can we incorporate different types of curiosity into AI systems? [Gruaz* and Modirshanechi* et al. 2025, OpenMind] And how can a desire for empowerment help AI systems acquire complex, general-purpose skills? [Modirshanechi et al., arXiv]

Through these complementary approaches, my work aims to integrate fragmented concepts across disciplines into a more coherent account of intelligence. My broader vision is to deepen this understanding and translate it into concrete applications, such as human-aligned AI and new approaches in mental health.

Key Publications

1. Unifying goal-conditioned RL and unsupervised skill learning via control-maximization

2. An integrative framework for the human sense of control

3. Novelty as a drive of human exploration in complex stochastic environments

4. Surprise and novelty in the brain 

5. A taxonomy of surprise definitions