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. Some recent highlights:
- Introduce a method for measuring the distributional gap between real and simulated user behaviors, evaluate 24 LLM-based user simulators, and show that combining behaviorally complementary ones narrows the gap [paper].
- First to show that user simulators in widely used benchmarks (e.g., Ï„-Bench) do not reliably follow their assigned goals. We introduce user goal state tracking and train goal-aligned simulators [tweet] [paper].
- Built a benchmark for multi-session collaboration, and use simulator behavior as an RL training signal for improving agent memory [tweet] [paper].
I am super excited to simulate users at Microsoft Research this summer. Previously, I have interned at IBM Research, and Amazon (x3).
news
| Mar 24, 2026 | Very excited to virtually attend EACL 2026! I will be giving an oral presentation on our work on reference-level feedback. I’ll also serve as a session chair for Tuning & LLM Behaviour! |
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| 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. |
| Feb 03, 2026 | I am presenting our recent preprint MultiSessionCollab: Learning User Preferences with Memory to Improve Long-Term Collaboration at the Assistive and Inclusive Technology workshop today. |
| 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.! |