Shenghui Chen CS PhD @UTAustin

Shenghui (Vivian) Chen

I am a fifth-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, advised by Professor Ufuk Topcu. I obtained B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Virginia, advised by Professor Lu Feng.

My research interest is in human-centered AI, with a focus on collaborative agents that infer intent, adapt their behavior, and communicate effectively with people. Recently, I have also become interested in human-centered evaluation of vision-language models (VLMs).

I am currently seeking opportunities for industry collaboration. Please feel free to reach out via shenghui.chen [at] utexas [dot] edu!

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News & Updates

  • Nov 2025 – Glad to be shortlisted for the ADF 2025 Rising Stars Asia program, see here.
  • Sep 2025 – Our paper on annotation-free video-to-text evaluation has been accepted to NeurIPS 2025! Learn more on our project page.
  • Aug 2025 – Check out our new preprint on annotation-free video-to-text evaluation, introducing VIBE to select captions as human-centered TL;DRs
  • Aug 2025 – Presented at the NSF CPS Frontier Site Visit, Purdue University on title “Communicating “Just Enough” Information to Enhance Human-Agent Collaboration”

Publications

Human-Centered AI

Human-Agent Collaboration

Interaction & Game Theory

XAI and Human Trust
Evaluating Human Trust in LLM-Based Planners: A Preliminary Study ArXiv
Chen, Shenghui, Yang, Yunhao, Boggess, Kayla, Heo, Seongkook, Feng, Lu, Topcu, Ufuk
ArXiv, 2025
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Multi-Objective Controller Synthesis with Uncertain Human Preferences ICCPS 2022
Chen, Shenghui, Boggess, Kayla, Parker, David, Feng, Lu
International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS), 2022
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Towards Transparent Robotic Planning via Contrastive Explanations IROS 2020
Chen, Shenghui, Boggess, Kayla, Feng, Lu
International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2020
paper doi bibtex

Blog Posts

Dec 2024 On Boltzmann Rationality A brief overview of Boltzmann rationality, a model of human decision-making Dec 2022 A function primer for optimization Different types of functions essential in optimization. Oct 2022 Cost Design in Atomic Routing Games How to design appropriate costs that encourage more desirable social interactions?

Outreach Activities