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Researcher profile

Weiyan Shi

Weiyan Shi contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Artificial IntelligenceComputation and LanguageHuman-Computer InteractionCryptography and Securitycs.CYProgramming LanguagesSoftware Engineering

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Published work

8 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

How to Interpret Agent Behavior

Autonomous agents such as Claude Code and Codex now operate for hours or even days. Understanding their runtime behavior has become critical for downstream tasks such as diagnosing inefficiencies, fixing bugs, and ensuring better oversight. A primary way to gain this understanding is analyzing the reasoning trajectories and execution traces these agents generate. Yet such data remains in unstructured natural-language form, making it difficult for humans to interpret at scale. We introduce ACT*ONOMY (a combination of Action and Taxonomy), a taxonomy for describing and analyzing agent behavior at runtime. ACT*ONOMY has two components: (1) the taxonomy itself, developed through Grounded Theory and structured as a three-level hierarchy of 10 actions, 46 subactions, and 120 leaf categories; and (2) an open repository that hosts the living taxonomy, provides an automated analysis pipeline that applies it to agent trajectories analysis, and defines an extension protocol for customization and growth. Our experiments show that ACTONOMY can compare behavioral profiles across agents and characterize a single agent's behavior across diverse trajectories, surfacing patterns indicative of failure modes. By providing a shared vocabulary, ACT*ONOMY helps researchers, agent designers, and end users interpret agent behavior more consistently, enabling better oversight and control.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Human-AI Alignment of Multimodal Large Language Models with Speech-Language Pathologists in Parent-Child Interactions

Joint attention is a critical marker of early social-communicative development, yet remains difficult for caregivers to assess without expert guidance. In this work, we explore how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can be aligned with the reasoning processes of speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to support the interpretation of everyday parent-child interactions. We conducted in-depth interviews and video annotation studies with three experienced SLPs to uncover how they evaluate joint attention based on three core behavioural cues: gaze, action, and vocalisation. Using these insights, we developed a two-stage MLLM-based system that first extracts fine-grained behavioural descriptions from video segments and then judge joint attention quality using expert-aligned prompts. Our evaluation across 26 parent-child interaction videos shows that MLLMs can achieve up to 85% accuracy in perceptual cue extraction and over 75% average precision in simulating expert judgement. We further propose design guidelines for building MLLM-based behaviour observation-judgement systems that align with SLPs, emphasising the structuring of behavioural cues, the construction of exemplar libraries grounded in expert annotations, and the need to personalise system responses based on developmental stage and neurotypical or atypical presentation. This work provides structured behavioural cues derived from SLP expertise, demonstrates the feasibility of aligning SLPs observation and judgement using MLLMs, and offers practical design guidelines for building aligned systems to support parent-child interaction analysis.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Shepherd: A Runtime Substrate Empowering Meta-Agents with a Formalized Execution Trace

We introduce Shepherd, a functional programming model that formalizes meta-agent operations on target agents as functions, with core operations mechanized in Lean. Shepherd records every agent-environment interaction as a typed event in a Git-like execution trace, enabling any past state to be forked and replayed. The system forks the agent process and its filesystem $5\times$ faster than Docker, achieving $>95\%$ prompt-cache reuse on replay. We demonstrate the model through three applications. First, in runtime intervention, a live supervisor increases pair coding pass rates from 28.8% to 54.7% on CooperBench. Second, in counterfactual meta-optimization, branching exploration outperforms baselines across four benchmarks by up to 11 points while reducing wall-clock time by up to 58%. Third, in Tree-RL training, forking rollouts at selected turns improves TerminalBench-2 performance from 34.2% to 39.4%. These results establish Shepherd as an efficient infrastructure for programming meta-agents. We open-source the system to support future research.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Selective Differential Privacy for Language Modeling

With the increasing applications of language models, it has become crucial to protect these models from leaking private information. Previous work has attempted to tackle this challenge by training RNN-based language models with differential privacy guarantees. However, applying classical differential privacy to language models leads to poor model performance as the underlying privacy notion is over-pessimistic and provides undifferentiated protection for all tokens in the data. Given that the private information in natural language is sparse (for example, the bulk of an email might not carry personally identifiable information), we propose a new privacy notion, selective differential privacy, to provide rigorous privacy guarantees on the sensitive portion of the data to improve model utility. To realize such a new notion, we develop a corresponding privacy mechanism, Selective-DPSGD, for RNN-based language models. Besides language modeling, we also apply the method to a more concrete application--dialog systems. Experiments on both language modeling and dialog system building show that the proposed privacy-preserving mechanism achieves better utilities while remaining safe under various privacy attacks compared to the baselines. The data and code are released at https://github.com/wyshi/lm_privacy to facilitate future research .

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Towards Socially Intelligent Agents with Mental State Transition and Human Utility

Building a socially intelligent agent involves many challenges. One of which is to track the agent's mental state transition and teach the agent to make decisions guided by its value like a human. Towards this end, we propose to incorporate mental state simulation and value modeling into dialogue agents. First, we build a hybrid mental state parser that extracts information from both the dialogue and event observations and maintains a graphical representation of the agent's mind; Meanwhile, the transformer-based value model learns human preferences from the human value dataset, ValueNet. Empirical results show that the proposed model attains state-of-the-art performance on the dialogue/action/emotion prediction task in the fantasy text-adventure game dataset, LIGHT. We also show example cases to demonstrate: (i) how the proposed mental state parser can assist the agent's decision by grounding on the context like locations and objects, and (ii) how the value model can help the agent make decisions based on its personal priorities.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

A Tailored Pre-Training Model for Task-Oriented Dialog Generation

The recent success of large pre-trained language models such as BERT and GPT-2 has suggested the effectiveness of incorporating language priors in downstream dialog generation tasks. However, the performance of pre-trained models on the dialog task is not as optimal as expected. In this paper, we propose a Pre-trained Role Alternating Language model (PRAL), designed specifically for task-oriented conversational systems. We adopted (Wu et al., 2019) that models two speakers separately. We also design several techniques, such as start position randomization, knowledge distillation, and history discount to improve pre-training performance. We introduce a task-oriented dialog pretraining dataset by cleaning 13 existing data sets. We test PRAL on three different downstream tasks. The results show that PRAL performs better or on par with state-of-the-art methods.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Effects of Persuasive Dialogues: Testing Bot Identities and Inquiry Strategies

Intelligent conversational agents, or chatbots, can take on various identities and are increasingly engaging in more human-centered conversations with persuasive goals. However, little is known about how identities and inquiry strategies influence the conversation's effectiveness. We conducted an online study involving 790 participants to be persuaded by a chatbot for charity donation. We designed a two by four factorial experiment (two chatbot identities and four inquiry strategies) where participants were randomly assigned to different conditions. Findings showed that the perceived identity of the chatbot had significant effects on the persuasion outcome (i.e., donation) and interpersonal perceptions (i.e., competence, confidence, warmth, and sincerity). Further, we identified interaction effects among perceived identities and inquiry strategies. We discuss the findings for theoretical and practical implications for developing ethical and effective persuasive chatbots. Our published data, codes, and analyses serve as the first step towards building competent ethical persuasive chatbots.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Persuasion for Good: Towards a Personalized Persuasive Dialogue System for Social Good

Developing intelligent persuasive conversational agents to change people's opinions and actions for social good is the frontier in advancing the ethical development of automated dialogue systems. To do so, the first step is to understand the intricate organization of strategic disclosures and appeals employed in human persuasion conversations. We designed an online persuasion task where one participant was asked to persuade the other to donate to a specific charity. We collected a large dataset with 1,017 dialogues and annotated emerging persuasion strategies from a subset. Based on the annotation, we built a baseline classifier with context information and sentence-level features to predict the 10 persuasion strategies used in the corpus. Furthermore, to develop an understanding of personalized persuasion processes, we analyzed the relationships between individuals' demographic and psychological backgrounds including personality, morality, value systems, and their willingness for donation. Then, we analyzed which types of persuasion strategies led to a greater amount of donation depending on the individuals' personal backgrounds. This work lays the ground for developing a personalized persuasive dialogue system.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access