Kimia Shaban

I am a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Toronto, working on AI for healthcare and computer vision.

Before my PhD, I completed an MMath in Combinatorics & Optimization at the University of Waterloo, supervised by Dr. Karen Yeats. I also worked with Dr. Paul-Hermann Balduf on machine learning for Feynman period estimation; our joint work is published in the Journal of High Energy Physics. My master’s thesis is available here.

I grew up in Waterloo, Ontario. Outside of research, I enjoy playing piano, hiking with my dog, and playing Tetris.

news

Mar 02, 2026	New preprint: When Does RL Help Medical VLMs? — disentangling vision, SFT, and RL gains. Project page here.
Sep 01, 2025	Started my PhD in Computer Science at the University of Toronto, advised by Dr. Babak Taati. Also joined the Vector Institute as a Faculty Affiliate Researcher and KITE UHN as a Research Appointee.
May 01, 2025	Awarded the NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship — Doctoral (CGS-D), $40,000/year for 2025–2028.

selected publications

Preprint
When Does RL Help Medical VLMs? Disentangling Vision, SFT, and RL Gains

others and Kimia Shaban

arXiv preprint, 2026

Abs arXiv Bib HTML Website

We study when reinforcement learning provides meaningful gains over supervised fine-tuning for medical vision-language models, disentangling the contributions of vision encoders, SFT, and RL to model performance.
@article{shaban2026medbridgerl, title = {When Does RL Help Medical VLMs? Disentangling Vision, SFT, and RL Gains}, author = {others and Shaban, Kimia}, year = {2026}, journal = {arXiv preprint}, }

JHEP

Predicting Feynman periods in φ^4-theory

Paul-Hermann Balduf and Kimia Shaban

Journal of High Energy Physics, Nov 2024

Abs DOI Bib HTML

@article{balduf2024feynman,
  title = {Predicting {F}eynman periods in $\phi^4$-theory},
  author = {Balduf, Paul-Hermann and Shaban, Kimia},
  journal = {Journal of High Energy Physics},
  year = {2024},
  month = nov,
  publisher = {Springer},
  doi = {10.1007/JHEP11(2024)038},
}