Shuhaib Mehri

Hi 👋! I am a PhD Student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Dilek Hakkani-Tur.

I work on user simulation and human-AI interaction. Some recent highlights:

• Measured the distributional gap between real and simulated user behaviors [tweet] [paper].
• Showed that user simulators in interactive benchmarks (e.g., τ-Bench) do not reliably follow their assigned goals. Introduced user goal state tracking and trained goal-aligned user simulators [tweet] [paper].
• Built a benchmark for multi-session collaboration and leveraged user simulator feedback signals to train agent memory [tweet] [paper].

I interned at Microsoft Research, where I had the wonderful opportunity to work with Michel Galley and Jianfeng Gao from the Deep Learning Group and Philippe Laban from the AI Interaction and Learning Group. Before that, I have also interned at IBM Research, and Amazon (x3).