Cara (Shanghao) Li

About

I am a computer science Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), fortunate to be advised by Prof. Philip S. Yu in his Big Data and Social Computing (BDSC) Lab.

Generally, my research lies at the intersection of Large Language Models(LLMs) and Human–Computer Interaction(HCI). More specifically, I develop methods to make LLMs more reliable, aligned, and effective collaborators in knowledge-intensive and multi-turn tasks.

Recently, I have been working on GraphRAG, creating metrics that analyze LLM attention patterns and semantic drift, and building efficient detectors for identifying reasoning drift from retrieved subgraphs. I am also developing TactfulLLM, a framework that trains LLMs to regulate their initiative by learning when to ask clarifying questions and when to act, using preference learning and multi-objective rewards.

News

• 2025/08/10: Invited to serve as Program Committee (PC) member for the ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) 2026.
• 2025/07/28: One paper submitted to KDD 2026
• 2024/05/11: Attending a CHI2024 conference in Hawaii.
• 2024/03/01: One paper got accepted by ACM CHI 2024.
• 2023/08/18: Started my PhD at the University of Illinois Chicago ~

Selected Publications

Detecting Hallucinations in Graph Retrieval Augmented Generation via Attention Patterns and Semantic Alignment (In submission)
Shanghao Li, Jinda Han, Yibo Wang, Yuanjie Zhu, Zihe Song, Langzhou He, Kenan Kamel A Alghythee, Philip S. Yu
arXiv 2025 [arXiv]

Towards Understanding Group Collaboration Patterns Around Mobile Augmented-Reality Interfaces for Geospatial Data Visualizations
Shanghao Li, Taylor Lane, Nuoran Chen, Alicia Hernandez, Vinayak Kabra, Karthik Singh, Stefany Sit and Nikita Soni
CHI2024 [PDF] [ACM] [VIDEO] [POSTER]

Sentiment analysis and topic modeling regarding online classes on the Reddit Platform: educators versus learners
Shanghao Li, Zerong Xie, Dickson KW Chiu, Kevin KW Ho
Applied Sciences [PDF] [LINK]

Fun Fact

My cat creamsicle 🐱