Michael Cardei

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My name is Michael Cardei and I am Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Virginia, where I work under the supervision of Professor Ferdinando Fioretto. As a member of the RAISE lab, my research is focused on Responsible Generative AI and Generative AI for Scientific Applications.

I completed my BS in Computer Science at the University of Florida, where I performed research under the guidance of Dr. My Thai in the areas of LLM’s, Federated Learning, and XAI. I was part of the 2023 Robotics Institute Summer Scholars program RISS at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where I worked on Computer Vision applications for Autonomous Vehicles under the guidance of Dr. Srinivasa Narasimhan. In the summer of 2022, I was part of the Wake Forest University, Center for Artificial Intelligence summer REU program under the guidance of Dr. Umit Topaloglu researching ML privacy and bias.

news

Jun 10, 2025 Awarded the NSF GRFP Scholarship Award - 2025
May 16, 2025 Starting a new internship at Visa as a Staff Machine Learning Research Scientist.
May 10, 2025 Our paper Neuro-symbolic Generative Diffusion Models was awarded a DARPA Disruptive Idea Award (Top 5 Conference Submission).
Apr 20, 2025 Paper titled Neuro-symbolic Generative Diffusion Models for Physically Grounded, Robust, and Safe Generation accepted to NeuS 2025 and selected for Oral Presentation!
Mar 10, 2025 Excited to share a new preprint: Constrained Discrete Diffusion.

selected publications

  1. neus.jpg
    Neuro-Symbolic Generative Diffusion Models for Physically Grounded, Robust, and Safe Generation
    Jacob Christopher, Michael Cardei, Jinhao Liang, and 1 more author
    International Conference on Neuro-symbolic Systems (NeuS 2025), 2025
  2. cdd.jpg
    Constrained Discrete Diffusion
    Michael Cardei, Jacob Christopher, Thomas Hartvigsen, and 2 more authors
    arXiv, 2025