Shenghui Chen

Shenghui (Vivian) Chen

I am a final-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, advised by Ufuk Topcu. Previously, I earned my B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Virginia, advised by Lu Feng.

I study how AI agents reason about human partners and adapt their actions and communication to collaborate with them, one-on-one or in groups.

My research spans the following topics:

Human-Centered Evaluation and Information Selection (3)
  • Overview of VEGAS: Human-Aligned Video Caption Evaluation via Gaze
    VEGAS: Human-Aligned Video Caption Evaluation via Gaze

    Shenghui Chen, Po-han Li, Ximeng Sun, Shijia Yang, Emad Barsoum, Zicheng Liu, Sandeep Chinchali, Ufuk Topcu

    Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2026 · (Accepted for publication)

    paper bibtex Dataset project
  • Overview of VIBE: Annotation-Free Video-to-Text Information Bottleneck Evaluation for TL;DR
    VIBE: Annotation-Free Video-to-Text Information Bottleneck Evaluation for TL;DR

    Shenghui Chen*, Po-han Li*, Sandeep Chinchali, Ufuk Topcu

    Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025

    paper bibtex code project
  • Overview of What We are Missing in Multimodal LLM Evaluation?
    What We are Missing in Multimodal LLM Evaluation?

    Po-han Li*, Shenghui Chen*, Sandeep Chinchali, Ufuk Topcu

    Communications of the ACM, 2026 · (Accepted for publication)

    paper bibtex
Planning with Human Intent under Incomplete Information (3)
  • Overview of Human-Agent Cooperation in Games under Incomplete Information through Natural Language Communication
    Human-Agent Cooperation in Games under Incomplete Information through Natural Language Communication

    Shenghui Chen, Daniel Fried, Ufuk Topcu

    International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Human-Centred AI, 2024

    paper doi bibtex code
  • Overview of Human-Agent Coordination in Games under Incomplete Information via Multi-Step Intent
    Human-Agent Coordination in Games under Incomplete Information via Multi-Step Intent

    Shenghui Chen*, Ruihan Zhao*, Sandeep Chinchali, Ufuk Topcu

    International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2025

    paper doi bibtex code project
  • Overview of IG-MCTS: Human-in-the-Loop Cooperative Navigation under Incomplete Information
    IG-MCTS: Human-in-the-Loop Cooperative Navigation under Incomplete Information

    Shenghui Chen*, Ruihan Zhao*, Sandeep Chinchali, Ufuk Topcu

    International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2026 · (Extended Abstract)

    paper bibtex
Inverse Game and Mechanism Design for Multi-Agent (3)
  • Overview of Cost Design in Atomic Routing Games
    Cost Design in Atomic Routing Games

    Yue Yu, Shenghui Chen, David Fridovich-Keil, Ufuk Topcu

    American Control Conference (ACC), 2023

    paper doi bibtex code blog
  • Overview of Relationship Design for Socially-Aware Behavior in Static Games
    Relationship Design for Socially-Aware Behavior in Static Games

    Shenghui Chen*, Yigit E. Bayiz*, David Fridovich-Keil, Ufuk Topcu

    Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (JAAMAS), 2025

    paper bibtex code
  • Overview of Soft-Bellman Equilibrium in Affine Markov Games: Forward Solutions and Inverse Learning
    Soft-Bellman Equilibrium in Affine Markov Games: Forward Solutions and Inverse Learning

    Shenghui Chen, Yue Yu, David Fridovich-Keil, Ufuk Topcu

    Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2023

    paper doi bibtex code

* Equal contribution.

See the complete list of publications.

Open-Source Datasets

Explore the datasets.

News

Older updates

  • Invited talk to Prof. Mykel Kochenderfer’s group, SISL, at Stanford University.

  • Invited talk to Prof. Amy Pavel’s group at UC Berkeley.

  • Invited talk at Prof. Changliu Liu’s Intelligent Control Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.

  • Wrapped up a rewarding internship with AMD’s GenAI group.

  • Glad to be shortlisted for the ADF 2025 Rising Stars Asia program, see here.

  • Our paper on annotation-free video-to-text evaluation has been accepted to NeurIPS 2025! Learn more on our project page.

  • Check out our new preprint on annotation-free video-to-text evaluation, introducing VIBE to select captions as human-centered TL;DRs

  • Presented at the AIML Seminar, University of Virginia on title “Human-Agent Collaboration under Incomplete Information: Intent, Communication, and Planning”

  • Presented at the NSF CPS Frontier Site Visit, Purdue University on title “Human-Agent Coordination in Games under Incomplete Information via Multi-Step Intent”

Outreach Activities

Selected Honors

  • ICML Silver Reviewer Award — International Conference on Machine Learning
  • Rising Stars Women in Engineering — Asian Deans’ Forum · Shortlisted; participated in 2026
  • Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher — Computing Research Association · Honorable Mention
  • Outstanding Winner & INFORMS Award — Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling · Top 0.5%