Sihang (Nagi) Zhao

We have 93% confidence that the one below is Nagi.

I am a CS PhD student @ NYU Courant, advised by Prof. Hongyi Wen.

My primary research interest lies in Human–AI Collaboration, which I like to organize through the lens of a recommender system: if a generative model and its harness form a system that produces personalized content, I work on its retrieval stage (agent memory, context construction), its ranking and re-ranking stage (from single-turn preference to long-horizon interaction policy), the multimodal signals that supervise it (explicit preference, and implicit ones — dialogue content, human attention and action), and the feedback loop that closes those signals back into the system (self-improving, online adaptation).

I currently study these in learning and educational settings, where the loop is optimized not only for engagement but for human after-interaction improvement.

news

Apr 06, 2026	My first work, SHaPE, in PhD study is selected for an Oral presentation at ACL 2026 in Oral Session C: NLP Applications 2 on July 5, 2026! See you in San Diego!
Apr 15, 2025	I will join NYU Courant and NYU Shanghai as a PhD Student in September 2025! GO Violet!

selected publications

ACL 2026

SHAPE: Unifying Safety, Helpfulness and Pedagogy for Educational LLMs

Sihang Zhao, Kangrui Yu, Youliang Yuan, and 2 more authors

In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2026 [Oral]

Bib HTML Code Link

@inproceedings{zhao2026shape,
  title = {{SHAPE}: Unifying Safety, Helpfulness and Pedagogy for Educational {LLM}s},
  author = {Zhao, Sihang and Yu, Kangrui and Yuan, Youliang and He, Pinjia and Wen, Hongyi},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2026},
  venue_note = {Oral},
}

CHI 2025

Let AI read first: Enhancing reading abilities for individuals with dyslexia through artificial intelligence

Sihang Zhao, Shoucong Carol Xiong, Bo Pang, and 2 more authors

In Proceedings of the extended abstracts of the CHI conference on human factors in computing systems, 2025

Bib Link

@inproceedings{zhao2025let,
  title = {Let AI read first: Enhancing reading abilities for individuals with dyslexia through artificial intelligence},
  author = {Zhao, Sihang and Xiong, Shoucong Carol and Pang, Bo and Tang, Xiaoying and He, Pinjia},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the extended abstracts of the CHI conference on human factors in computing systems},
  pages = {1--16},
  year = {2025},
}

EMNLP 2024

Difficult task yes but simple task no: Unveiling the laziness in multimodal LLMs

Sihang Zhao, Youliang Yuan, Xiaoying Tang, and 1 more author

In Findings of the association for computational linguistics: emnlp 2024, 2024

Bib Link

@inproceedings{zhao2024difficult,
  title = {Difficult task yes but simple task no: Unveiling the laziness in multimodal LLMs},
  author = {Zhao, Sihang and Yuan, Youliang and Tang, Xiaoying and He, Pinjia},
  booktitle = {Findings of the association for computational linguistics: emnlp 2024},
  pages = {7535--7548},
  year = {2024},
}

more about me

I was diagnosed with ADHD in 2022. So please excuse my (maybe too) wild imagination and frequent moments of sudden, deep contemplation :)

I dedicate two hours each week to help neurodiverse individuals with learning and education challenges. Please briefly describe your experience, status and the difficulties you are facing, plus your preferred method of communication (via email, WeChat, Zoom meeting, etc.) in your email, and send it to my personal email: [6+1]nutnut[at]gmail[dot]com. I will respond within 2-3 days upon receiving your message. My consultations are free. If you wish to donate, you can directly contribute to the Spring Bud Project, which supports the education of underprivileged girls.

Basketball is my another life. I played for Imperial College London Men's Basketball Team during 2021~2022 and Harmonia College Men's Basketball Team during 2023~2025.

You can also find my photography work in my Instagram. They are about my attempts to find and understand the implict beauty and harmony in ordinary life.