Ziyang Guo

PhD student in Computer Science at Northwestern University

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Hello! I’m Ziyang Guo. I’m a fourth-year PhD student in Computer Science at Northwestern University. Currently, I work with Professor Jessica Hullman at MU Colective. Previously, I received my B.S. in Computer Science from Zhejiang University in China.

I study how to design AI systems that are complementary partners in decision-making. My work integrates human–computer interaction, statistical decision theory, and machine learning. I use statistical decision theory to formalize and measure complementarity in human–AI pipelines, build explainability techniques that communicate human-complementary evidence in model outputs, and develop post-training approaches for LLMs that optimize for downstream human–AI decision quality rather than standalone model accuracy.

selected publications

  1. A Decision Theoretic Framework for Measuring AI Reliance
    Ziyang Guo, Yifan Wu, Jason Hartline , and 1 more author
    ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT ’24), 2024
  2. The Rational Agent Benchmark for Data Visualization
    Yifan Wu, Ziyang Guo, Michails Mamakos , and 2 more authors
    IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2023
  3. The value of information in human-ai decision-making
    Ziyang Guo, Yifan Wu, Jason Hartline , and 1 more author
    In The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations , 2025
  4. Vmc: A grammar for visualizing statistical model checks
    Ziyang Guo, Alex Kale, Matthew Kay , and 1 more author
    IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2024
  5. Explanations are a means to an end
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.22740, 2025