CS PhD Candidate at USC
Hi
I'm Tianyi (Mavis) Zhang.
张天怡 · Zhāng Tiānyí · pronounced “Jahng TYEN-ee”
I am a third-year CS PhD candidate at USC working on natural language processing and personalized AI, with a particular interest in systems that can model individual ways of thinking, speaking, deciding, and remembering.
I am advised by
Prof. David Traum
in the
Natural Language Dialogue Group at
,
and work closely with
Dr. Rui Mao
and
Prof. Erik Cambria
at Nanyang Technological University. Before starting my PhD, I
worked as an NLP research engineer at
.
Updates
-
Milestone I passed my PhD qualifying exam!
-
Award Our paper DiPS: Dialogue Policy Selection for High-Stakes Persuasion Agents received the Best Paper Award at SIGDial 2026!
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Career I received an Applied Scientist Intern offer from Amazon's Alexa AI team
!
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Paper Our paper DiPS: Dialogue Policy Selection for High-Stakes Persuasion Agents has been accepted by SIGDial 2026!
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Paper Our paper GameplayQA: A Benchmarking Framework for Decision-Dense POV-Synced Multi-Video Understanding of 3D Virtual Agents has been accepted to ACL 2026, see you in San Diego!
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Paper Our paper Rethinking Evaluation in Retrieval-Augmented Personalized Dialogue: A Cognitive and Linguistic Perspective has been accepted to LREC 2026!
- (TA) DSCI-552: Machine Learning for Data Science, 2025 Fall
- (TA) DSCI-352: Applied Machine Learning and Data Mining, 2026 Spring
Technical Program Committee (TPC) Member/Reviewer
- EMNLP 2025
- ACL 2025
- NAACL 2025
- ICASSP 2026
- NeurIPS 2026
- AAAI 2027