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 Jessica Hullman
    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, Jason Hartline, and Jessica Hullman
    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 Jessica Hullman
    In The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations , 2026
  4. Vmc: A grammar for visualizing statistical model checks
    Ziyang Guo, Alex Kale, Matthew Kay, and Jessica Hullman
    IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2024
  5. Explanations are a means to an end
    Ziyang Guo, Berk Ustun, and Jessica Hullman
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.22740, 2026