I am currently a Research Scientist at Salesforce AI Research and an Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department in Stony Brook University (SUNY). My work has been published at top peer reviewed venues such as ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, TACL, CHI, ICML, COLM and CogSci.

My research interests are broadly in AI, NLP and Human AI Interaction and my goal is to design and build reliable AI systems that can handle implicature and ambiguity, understand human behavior and are aligned with the requirements humans have from technology. I often rely on knowledge, methods, and perspectives from multiple disciplines to address complex problems or questions that cannot be fully understood or solved within the boundaries of Computer Science. Some of the research directions I am very excited about:

1) Long Form Text Generation Evaluation: How can we design better ways to evaluate long-form text generation by drawing on technical skills from computer science and design in combination with other disciplines, including the humanities, to expand the communities?

2) Evaluation for Reasoning and Explainability: How can we build good evaluations that facilitate both understanding and explainability of complex reasoning patterns in both language ( [1],[2] ) and vision.

3) Better Design and Improvement of Human AI Alignment: Todays powerful AI systems are supported by RLHF which converts human feedback/preferences to meaninful training signal. For complex tasks this is a fundamental bottlenck as feedback can be inherently noisy. How can we design better ways to elicit human feedback that improve alignnment?

4) Human AI Collaboration: AI technologies, created by humans and for humans, will increasingly shape future of workforce. How can we design better collaboration strategies and human computer interaction interfaces that understand user intention and preferences, and help them solve tasks efficiently.

5) Impact of Generative on the AI Labor Market: Todays AI models have zero consideration in fair and responsible data use and their deployment and safety strategy is often myopic without considering longitudinal harms. Most powerful models are trained on huge amount of data from professionals without consent, disrupting their livelihoods. My research aims to evaluate and understand what aspects of skilled labor are being automated and how can we empirically measure the impact on labor market dilution.

I am open to recruiting visiting researchers (pre-doc or PhD students). You should be able to dedicate atleast 6 months

PhD students

• Xinyue Liu (Last Stop CMU MS)

Media

• Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age Interview with Pultizer Fiction Finalist Vauhini Vara in Chapter 13 : Thank You for Your Important Work
• TechCrunch OpenAI’s ‘creative writing’ AI evokes that annoying kid from high school fiction club
• MIT Technology Review An AI script editor could help decide what films get made in Hollywood
• Bloomberg AI Has a Way to Go to Become A Connections Puzzle Champ
• MIT Technology Review AI can make you more creative—but it has limits
• MIT Technology Review Why artists are becoming less scared of AI?
• MIT Technology Review What happened when 20 comedians got AI to write their routines?
• Washington Post Can you tell which of these break-up texts are AI-generated?
• The Hollywood Reporter Why AI Isn’t Funny — At Least Not Yet
• The New York Times R&D Generating Open-Ended Questions from News Articles

Recent News

• Grateful to receive ICML Outstanding Position Paper Award for our paper on AI Safety and Future of Work (Top 1%)
• New paper on Learning better rewards for improving AI writing accpted to COLM 2025
• Grateful to receive Best Paper Honorable mention at CHI 2025
• CHI 2025 paper accepted on quantifying and mitigating idiosyncracies in AI writing
• Recognized as an outstanding AC at EMNLP 2024
• Paper on LLM and abstract reasoning accepted to EMNLP
• First author paper on Creativity Evaluation accepted to CHI 2024, Honolulu
• First author paper on Creativity Support with LLM accepted to Creativity and Cognition 2024, Chicago