Reihaneh Rabbany

Biography

Reihaneh Rabbany is an assistant professor at the School of Computer Science, McGill University, and a core academic member of Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute. She is also a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and on the faculty of McGill’s Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship.

Before joining McGill, Rabbany was a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University. She completed her PhD in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta.

Rabbany heads McGill’s Complex Data Lab, where she conducts research at the intersection of network science, data mining and machine learning, with a focus on analyzing real-world interconnected data and social good applications.

Current Students

Hussein Abdallah

Collaborating researcher - Concordia University

Aurélien Bück-Kaeffer

Master's Research - McGill University

Jacob Chmura

Master's Research - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

PhD - McGill University

Co-supervisor :

Adriana Romero Soriano

Collaborating Alumni - McGill University

Co-supervisor :

Research Intern - McGill University

PhD - McGill University

Website

Sitao Luan

Postdoctorate - McGill University

Principal supervisor :

Guillaume Rabusseau

Shahrad Mohammadzadeh

Master's Research - McGill University

Co-supervisor :

Collaborating researcher - McGill University

Master's Research - McGill University

Website

Soroush Omranpour

Collaborating researcher - McGill University

Co-supervisor :

Guillaume Rabusseau

Farimah Poursafaei

Collaborating Alumni - McGill University

Collaborating researcher - McGill University University

Sneheel Sarangi

Collaborating researcher - McGill University

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Collaborating researcher - McGill University

Collaborating researcher - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

PhD - McGill University

Jie Zan

Research Intern - McGill University

Sveta Zhuk

Master's Research - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

Flight-SEIR: Incorporating Flight Data to Improve Epidemiological Modelling and Disease Outbreak Prevention

Blog Posts

August 3, 2021

Shenyang Huang

Reihaneh Rabbany

Read the article

Publications

A Guide to Misinformation Detection Data and Evaluation

Camille Thibault

Jacob-Junqi Tian

Gabrielle Péloquin-Skulski

Taylor Lynn Curtis

James Zhou

Florence Laflamme

Yuxiang Guan

Kellin Pelrine

Misinformation is a complex societal issue, and mitigating solutions are difficult to create due to data deficiencies. To address this probl… (see more)em, we have curated the largest collection of (mis)information datasets in the literature, totaling 75. From these, we evaluated the quality of all of the 36 datasets that consist of statements or claims, as well as the 9 datasets that consists of data in purely paragraph form. We assess these datasets to identify those with solid foundations for empirical work and those with flaws that could result in misleading and non-generalizable results, such as insufficient label quality, spurious correlations. We further provide state-of-the-art baselines on all these datasets, but show that regardless of label quality, categorical labels may no longer give an accurate evaluation of detection model performance. We discuss alternatives to mitigate this problem. Overall, this guide aims to provide a roadmap for obtaining higher quality data and conducting more effective evaluations, ultimately improving research in misinformation detection. All datasets and other artifacts are available at [anonymized].

2025-08-03

Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining V.2 (published)

Responsible AI Day

Ebrahim Bagheri

Faezeh Ensan

Calvin Hillis

Robin Cohen

Benjamin Fung

Sébastien Gambs

2025-08-03

Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining V.2 (published)

Responsible AI Day

Ebrahim Bagheri

Faezeh Ensan

Calvin Hillis

Robin Cohen

Benjamin Fung

Sébastien Gambs

2025-08-03

Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining V.2 (published)

Temporal Graph Learning Workshop

Daniele Zambon

Andrea Cini

Michael Bronstein

2025-08-03

Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining V.2 (published)

Temporal Graph Learning Workshop

Daniele Zambon

Andrea Cini

Micheal Bronstein

2025-08-03

Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining V.2 (published)

Temporal Graph Learning Workshop

Daniele Zambon

Andrea Cini

Micheal Bronstein

2025-08-03

Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining V.2 (published)

Uncovering Hidden Factions through Text-Network Representations: Unsupervised Public Opinion Mapping of Iran on Twitter in the 2022 Unrest

Sahar Omidi Shayegan

Ideological mapping on social media is typically framed as a supervised classification task that depends on stable party systems and abundan… (see more)t annotated data. These assumptions fail in contexts with weak political institutionalization, such as Iran. We recast ideology detection as a fully unsupervised mapping problem and introduce a text-network representation system, uncovering latent ideological factions on Persian Twitter during the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests. Using hundreds of millions of Persian tweets, we learn joint text–network embeddings by fine-tuning ParsBERT with a combined masked-language-modeling and contrastive objective and by passing the embeddings through a Graph Attention Network trained for link prediction on time-batched subgraphs. The pipeline integrates semantic and structural signals without observing labels. Density-based clustering reveals eight ideological blocs whose spatial relations mirror known political alliances. Alignment with 883 expert-labeled accounts yields 53% accuracy. This label-free framework scales to label-scarce contexts, offering new leverage for studying political debates online.

2025-07-26

colmweb.org/COLM/2025/Workshop/NLPOR (published)

Uncovering Hidden Factions through Text-Network Representations: Unsupervised Public Opinion Mapping of Iran on Twitter in the 2022 Unrest

Sahar Omidi Shayegan

2025-07-26

colmweb.org/COLM/2025/Workshop/NLPOR (published)

TRUTH: Teaching LLMs to Rerank for Truth in Misinformation Detection

Hao Yu

Zachary Yang

Maximilian Puelma Touzel

Kellin Pelrine

Misinformation detection presents a significant challenge due to its knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive nature. While Retrieval-Aug… (see more)mented Generation (RAG) systems offer a promising direction, the effectiveness of their retrieval and reranking components is crucial. This paper introduces TRUTH, a novel reranking approach designed for domain adaptation, specifically for misinformation detection, which employs a two-stage training methodology: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). We demonstrate that our 1B parameter TRUTH model achieves strong performance comparable to 7B models on established misinformation benchmarks such as FEVER and Canadian bilingual news datasets, improving retrieval quality and positively impacting downstream task accuracy. Our findings highlight the efficacy of combining SFT for broad knowledge acquisition and domain adaptation with DPO for nuanced reasoning alignment in developing efficient and effective rerankers for complex, knowledge-intensive tasks. Datasets and code will be available with the camera-ready version of the paper.

2025-07-25

colmweb.org/COLM/2025/Workshop/SoLaR (poster)

TRUTH: Teaching LLMs to Rerank for Truth in Misinformation Detection

Hao Yu

Zachary Yang

Maximilian Puelma Touzel

Kellin Pelrine

2025-07-25

colmweb.org/COLM/2025/Workshop/SoLaR (poster)

Hallucination Detox: Sensitivity Dropout (SenD) for Large Language Model Training

Shahrad Mohammadzadeh

Juan David Guerra

Marco Bonizzato

Golnoosh Farnadi

2025-07-01

Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (published)

The Singapore Consensus on Global AI Safety Research Priorities

Yoshua Bengio

Tegan Maharaj

Luke Ong

Stuart Russell

Dawn Song

Max Tegmark

Lan Xue

Ya-Qin Zhang

Stephen Casper

Wan Sie Lee

Sören Mindermann

Vanessa Wilfred

Vidhisha Balachandran

Fazl Barez

Michael Belinsky

Imane Bello

Malo Bourgon

Mark Brakel

Sim'eon Campos

Duncan Cass-Beggs … (see 67 more)

Jiahao Chen

Rumman Chowdhury

Kuan Chua Seah

Jeff Clune

Juntao Dai

Agnès Delaborde

Nouha Dziri

Francisco Eiras

Joshua Engels

Jinyu Fan

Adam Gleave

Noah D. Goodman

Fynn Heide

Johannes Heidecke

Dan Hendrycks

Cyrus Hodes

Bryan Low Kian Hsiang

Minlie Huang

Sami Jawhar

Jingyu Wang

Adam Tauman Kalai

Meindert Kamphuis

Mohan S. Kankanhalli

Subhash Kantamneni

Mathias Bonde Kirk

Thomas Kwa

Jeffrey Ladish

Kwok-Yan Lam

Wan Lee Sie

Taewhi Lee

Xiaojian Li

Jiajun Liu

Chaochao Lu

Yifan Mai

Richard Mallah

Julian Michael

Nick Moës

Simon Möller

Kihyuk Nam

Kwan Yee Ng

Mark Nitzberg

Besmira Nushi

Sean O hEigeartaigh

Alejandro Ortega

Pierre Peigné

James Petrie

Benjamin Prud'homme

Nayat Sanchez-Pi

Sarah Schwettmann

Buck Shlegeris

Saad Siddiqui

Aradhana Sinha

Martín Soto

Cheston Tan

Dong Ting

William-Chandra Tjhi

Robert Trager

Brian Tse

H. AnthonyTungK.

John Willes

Denise Wong

W. Xu

Rongwu Xu

Yi Zeng

HongJiang Zhang

Djordje Zikelic

Rapidly improving AI capabilities and autonomy hold significant promise of transformation, but are also driving vigorous debate on how to en… (see more)sure that AI is safe, i.e., trustworthy, reliable, and secure. Building a trusted ecosystem is therefore essential – it helps people embrace AI with confidence and gives maximal space for innovation while avoiding backlash. This requires policymakers, industry, researchers and the broader public to collectively work toward securing positive outcomes from AI’s development. AI safety research is a key dimension. Given that the state of science today for building trustworthy AI does not fully cover all risks, accelerated investment in research is required to keep pace with commercially driven growth in system capabilities. Goals: The 2025 Singapore Conference on AI (SCAI): International Scientific Exchange on AI Safety aims to support research in this important space by bringing together AI scientists across geographies to identify and synthesise research priorities in AI safety. The result, The Singapore Consensus on Global AI Safety Research Priorities, builds on the International AI Safety Report-A (IAISR) chaired by Yoshua Bengio and backed by 33 governments. By adopting a defence-in-depth model, this document organises AI safety research domains into three types: challenges with creating trustworthy AI systems (Development), challenges with evaluating their risks (Assessment), and challenges with monitoring and intervening after deployment (Control). Through the Singapore Consensus, we hope to globally facilitate meaningful conversations between AI scientists and AI policymakers for maximally beneficial outcomes. Our goal is to enable more impactful R&D efforts to rapidly develop safety and evaluation mechanisms and foster a trusted ecosystem where AI is harnessed for the public good.

2025-06-25

ArXiv (preprint)