Ziyao Shangguan

Ziyao Shangguan 上官子窈

Ph.D. Student @ Inquisitive Robotics Lab
Yale University

Email: ziyao.shangguan [at] yale [dot] edu

Google Scholar / GitHub / LinkedIn / X

I am a second-year Ph.D. student in the Inquisitive Robotics Lab at Yale University, advised by Prof. Tesca Fitzgerald. My research interest lies in interactive robot learning, particularly in enabling robots to reason over human intentions and to learn from human interactions adaptively. My current projects focus on utilizing Vision-Language-Action Models to enhance robotics systems.

Prior to my Ph.D. program, I was a master's student in Computer Science at Yale University, advised by Prof. Tesca Fitzgerald and Prof. Arman Cohan. I received my bachelor's degree in Mathematics & Computer Science from New York University. During my undergraduate years, I was affiliated with NYU Robotic Design Team, advised by Prof. Haldun Hadimioglu.

News ▾

Apr '26	CPTCoder is accepted to ACL 2026 System Demonstrations.
Jan '26	INSIGHT is accepted to ICRA 2026.
Dec '25	Received Yale Computer Science department Distinguished Teaching Award.
Sep '25	MedTutor is accepted to EMNLP 2025 System Demonstrations.
Sep '25	Started my Ph.D. program at Yale.
Apr '25	Presented 🍅TOMATO at the Open Multimodal Gathering Workshop at National University of Singapore.
Jan '25	MMVU is accepted to CVPR 2025.
Jan '25	🍅TOMATO is accepted to ICLR 2025. Let's catch up in Singapore! 🇸🇬✨
Sep '24	M3SciQA is accepted to EMNLP 2024.
Sep '23	Started my master's program at Yale.

Selected Publications

* denotes equal contributions.

	INSIGHT: INference-time Sequence Introspection for Generating Help Triggers in Vision-Language-Action Models Ulas Berk Karli, Ziyao Shangguan, Tesca Fitzgerald ICRA 2026 ArXiv
	TOMATO: Assessing Visual Temporal Reasoning Capabilities in Multimodal Foundation Models Ziyao Shangguan, Chuhan Li, Yuxuan Ding, Yanan Zheng, Yilun Zhao, Tesca Fitzgerald, Arman Cohan ICLR 2025 ArXiv / Dataset
	M3SciQA: A Multi-Modal Multi-Document Scientific QA Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Models Chuhan Li, Ziyao Shangguan, Yilun Zhao, Deyuan Li, Yixin Liu, Arman Cohan EMNLP 2024 ArXiv / Dataset

Teaching

Yale University — Graduate Teaching Fellow

CPSC 776: Topics in Industrial AI Applications, Spring 2026
CPSC 381/581: Introduction to Machine Learning, Spring 2025 & Spring 2024
CPSC 474/574: Computational Intelligence for Games, Fall 2024
CPSC 370/570: Artificial Intelligence, Fall 2023

New York University — Teaching Assistant

Digital Logic and State Machine Design, Spring 2019 & Fall 2018

Awards & Honors

Distinguished Teaching Award, Yale Computer Science Department, 2024-25
University Fellowship, Yale University, 2023-25

Professional Services

Conference Reviewer: ICLR 2026; NeurIPS 2026; CoRL 2026; ACL Rolling Review 2025
Workshop Reviewer: Reasoning and Planning for LLMs @ ICLR 2025

Outreach

Mentor, Girl Scout Troop 3329 FIRST LEGO League Challenge, New York City, 2016-2019