Ali Lotfi

Dr. Ali Lotfi

orcid

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

3Years (2024-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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6 January 2026 in Results in Applied Mathematics
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
MMMohammad Meysami
Mohammad Meysami
ALAli Lotfi
Ali Lotfi

13 December 2025 in Machine Learning with Applications
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
MMMohammad Meysami
Mohammad Meysami
ALAli Lotfi
Ali Lotfi
SSSehar Saleem
Sehar Saleem

5 May 2026 in Machine Learning with Applications
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
ALAli Lotfi
Ali Lotfi
ACAdam Carter
Adam Carter
Thuan HaThuan Ha
Thuan Ha
MMMohammad Meysami
Mohammad Meysami
KNKwabena Nketia
Kwabena Nketia
SSSteve Shirtliffe
Steve Shirtliffe

25 September 2025 in Research Square
Verified
Preprint
Open access
PDF file
ALAli Lotfi
Ali Lotfi
IMIan McQuillan
Ian McQuillan
SRSteven Rayan
Steven Rayan
L-systems can be made to model and create simulations of many biological processes, such as plant development. Finding an L-system for a given process is typically solved by hand, by experts, in a massively time-consuming process. It would be significant if this could be done automatically from data, such as from sequences of images. In this paper, we are interested in inferring a particular type of L-system, deterministic context-free L-system (D0L-system) from a sequence of strings. We introduce the characteristic graph of a sequence of strings, which we then utilize to translate our problem (inferring D0L-systems) in polynomial time into the maximum independent set problem (MIS) and the SAT problem. After that, we offer a classical exact algorithm and an approximate quantum algorithm for the problem.

11 January 2026 in arXiv
Verified
Preprint
Open access
PDF file
ALAli Lotfi
Ali Lotfi
ACAdam Carter
Adam Carter
MMMohammad Meysami
Mohammad Meysami
Thuan HaThuan Ha
Thuan Ha
KNKwabena Nketia
Kwabena Nketia
SSSteve Shirtliffe
Steve Shirtliffe
Normalized difference indices have been a staple in remote sensing for decades. They stay reliable under lighting changes produce bounded values and connect well to biophysical signals. Even so, they are usually treated as a fixed pre processing step with coefficients set to one, which limits how well they can adapt to a specific learning task. In this study, we introduce the Normalized Difference Layer that is a differentiable neural network module. The proposed method keeps the classical idea but learns the band coefficients from data. We present a complete mathematical framework for integrating this layer into deep learning architectures that uses softplus reparameterization to ensure positive coefficients and bounded denominators. We describe forward and backward pass algorithms enabling end to end training through backpropagation. This approach preserves the key benefits of normalized differences, namely illumination invariance and outputs bounded to $[-1,1]$ while allowing gradient descent to discover task specific band weightings. We extend the method to work with signed inputs, so the layer can be stacked inside larger architectures. Experiments show that models using this layer reach similar classification accuracy to standard multilayer perceptrons while using about 75\% fewer parameters. They also handle multiplicative noise well, at 10\% noise accuracy drops only 0.17\% versus 3.03\% for baseline MLPs. The learned coefficient patterns stay consistent across different depths.

2 July 2026 in Results in Applied Mathematics
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
MMMohammad Meysami
Mohammad Meysami
ALAli Lotfi
Ali Lotfi
UKUmesh Kumar
Umesh Kumar
SSSehar Saleem
Sehar Saleem