Shuhaib Mehri
Hi 👋! I am a PhD Student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Dilek Hakkani-Tur.
I am interested in building user-centered conversational agents that can handle real-world interaction. Currently, my research includes:
- Multi-turn interactions: Loading… ⌛️ (I am super excited!)
- Multi-session interactions: We introduced the first benchmark for multi-session collaboration, and demonstrated that equipping agents with memory can improve collaboration quality over time (through both simulated experiments and human studies) [tweet] [paper].
- User simulation: We identified that user simulators struggle to consistently adhere to their assigned goals throughout multi-turn interactions, and introduced user goal state tracking to address this [tweet] [paper].
Before starting my PhD, I earned my BSc in Honours Computer Science from the University of British Columbia. I was fortunate to work with Prof. Vered Shwartz and Prof. Giuseppe Carenini. I also interned at Amazon (x3), iClinic Systems, and Clir Renewables.
news
| Feb 13, 2026 | Excited to give a talk at Google Research on user-centered conversational agents! I will cover (1) LLMs that reliably simulate users during multi-turn conversations, and (2) agents that continuously learn user preferences & improve collaboration across multiple sessions. |
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| Feb 03, 2026 | I am presenting our recent preprint Learning User Preferences Through Interaction for Long-Term Collaboration at the Assistive and Inclusive Technology workshop today. |
| Jan 08, 2026 | Really excited to release the preprint for our work on improving multi-session collaboration with memory, check it out here. |
| Jan 04, 2026 | Received news that our work on reference-level feedback has been accepted as an oral at EACL 2026 ✈️ See you in Morocco! |
| Dec 11, 2025 | Came full circle with a visit to the UBC NLP Group (where my research journey began!) and gave a talk on goal alignment for LLM-based user simulators. |
| Sep 18, 2025 | Our work on user simulator goal alignment has been accepted to TACL! |
| Jan 08, 2024 | I was awarded the Mitacs Accelerate Fellowship for Master’s and PhD Students as an undergrad. Really excited to start working with iClinic Systems Inc.! |