Research Group

Research

Human variation

Models and evaluations that treat differences in language, culture, beliefs, and viewpoints as structure to understand rather than noise to average away.

Multimodal grounding

Systems that connect language to what they see and hear, reason across long and changing contexts, and recognize when their evidence is insufficient.

Conversation and interaction

Conversational agents that revise, clarify, defer, and coordinate with people across multiple turns instead of treating communication as a one-shot prediction problem.

Reliable methods

Metrics, benchmarks, repair mechanisms, and efficient systems that expose failure and make multimodal models more useful outside curated settings.

Openings

I'm recruiting PhD students who apply in Fall 2026 to start in Fall 2027 through the UC Irvine CS PhD program. I'm also happy to work with UCI master's and undergraduate students. Details are on the students page.

Prior Students