Shaobo Cui

Welcome to my homepage! I am Shaobo Cui, a fourth-year PhD student in Computer Science at EPFL. I have the privilege of being supervised by Prof. Boi Faltings (AAAI and EurAI Fellow), with co-supervision from Prof. Antoine Bosselut and mentorship by Prof. Michael C. Gastpar.

My research advances three interconnected directions: Human-Aligned Causal Intelligence (causal defeasibility, causal uncertainty, causal strength, commonsense causality, causal consistency), Human-Aligned Generative AI (heading design, logically fallacy, open-source softwares), Human-Computer Interaction (session-based HCI, predictive response timing strategy, virtual influencer, generative HCI). Along the way, my work has been recognized with prestigious honors including the Alibaba Rising Star Award (2020), DAAD AInet Fellow in AI for Science Track (2024), and NAACL Outstanding Paper Award, 2025. My work has also resulted in 9 patents for industrial applications.

Before embarking on my doctoral journey, I worked as a full-time Senior Research Engineer at DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group: I led projects in human-computer interaction, natural language processing, and recommendation algorithms. Notably, I developed the recommendation algorithm for Alibaba’s Virtual Influencer from 0 to 1, showcased at the Winter Olympic Games, Beijing 2022.

Selected Publications

* means the students I supervise. ⁼ means equal contribution.

Nuance Matters: Probing Epistemic Consistency in Causal Reasoning
Shaobo Cui, Junyou Li, Luca Mouchel, Yiyang Feng, and Boi Faltings
Proceedings of AAAI 2025, long paper
[paper], [code]

The Odyssey of Commonsense Causality: From Foundational Benchmarks to Cutting-Edge Reasoning
Shaobo Cui, Zhijing Jin, Bernhard Schölkopf, and Boi Faltings
Proceedings of EMNLP 2024, long paper
[paper], [code]

Exploring Defeasibility in Causal Reasoning
Shaobo Cui, Lazar Milikic, Yiyang Feng, Mete Ismayilzada, Debjit Paul, Antoine Bosselut, and Boi Faltings
Findings of ACL 2024, long paper
[paper], [code]

Unveiling the Art of Heading Design: A Harmonious Blend of Summarization, Neology, and Algorithm
Shaobo Cui⁼, Yiyang Feng⁼, Yisong Mao, Yifan Hou, Boi Faltings Findings of ACL 2024, long paper
[paper], [code]

Context-to-Session Matching: Utilizing Whole Session for Response Selection in Information-Seeking Dialogue Systems
Zhenxin Fu*, Shaobo Cui, Mingyue Shang, Feng Ji, Dongyan Zhao, Haiqing Chen, and Rui Yan
Proceedings of KDD 2020 (Research Track), long paper
[paper], [code]

Query-to-Session Matching: Do NOT Forget History and Future during Response Selection for Multi-Turn Dialogue Systems
Zhenxin Fu*, Shaobo Cui, Feng Ji, Ji Zhang, Haiqing Chen, Dongyan Zhao, and Rui Yan
Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information & Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2020
[paper][code]

Predict-then-Decide: A Predictive Approach for Wait-or-Answer Task in Dialogue Systems
Zehao Lin*, Shaobo Cui, Guodun Li, Xiaoming Kang, Feng Ji, Fenglin Li, Zhongzhou Zhao, Haiqing Chen, and Yin Zhang
IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, 2021
[paper]

Selected Patents 📑

I have contributed to patents in generative AI and HCI systems. Highlights include:

• Cui, Shaobo; Lian, Rongzhong; Jiang, Di; He, Jingzhou. 2018. “Training method and device as well as computer equipment and readable storage medium.” CN108846124B, filed on June 29, 2018, and granted on May 17, 2022.
• Cui, Shaobo; Ji, Feng; Tang, Dahuai, Kang Xiaoming. 2020. “Dialogue system testing method and device and statement rewriting method.” CN113742461B, filed on May 28, 2020, and granted on January 10, 2025.
• Kang, Xiaoming; Cui, Shaobo; Ji, Feng. 2020. “A man-machine interaction dialogue method and device.” CN113901181A, filed on July 6, 2020. Patent Pending.
• Fu, Zhenxin; Cui, Shaobo; Ji, Feng; Yan, Rui; Zhang, Ji; Chen, Haiqing. 2020. “Dialogue method and system.” CN114036267A, filed on July 21, 2020. Patent Pending.
• Cui, Shaobo; Ji, Feng; Lin, Zehao; Zhao, Zhongzhou; Chen, Haiqing; Zhang, Yin. 2020. “Dialogue model training method, dialogue method and dialogue device.” CN114254086A, filed on September 25, 2020. Patent Pending.
• Cui, Shaobo; Zu, Xinxing; Bao, Xintong; Zhao, Zhongzhou; Zhang, Ji; Chen, Haiqing. 2021. “A question-answer pair generation method, device, electronic device, and computer storage medium” CN115114416A, filed on March 23, 2021. Patent Pending.
• Cui, Shaobo; Fu, Zhenxin; Ji, Feng; Yan, Rui; Zhao, Zhongzhou; Chen, Haiqing. 2021. “Data processing method, device, electronic equipment and computer storage medium” CN115129831A, filed on March 29, 2021. Patent Pending.
• Cui, Shaobo; Tang, Dahuai; Zhao, Zhongzhou; Zhang,Ji; Chen, Haiqing. 2021. “Inquiry statement rewriting method and device.” CN113673256B, filed on July 21, 2021 and granted on August 27, 2024.

Selected Softwares 📑

Please feel free to let me know if you find any bugs. There will be some vouchers for these bug-reporting efforts.

• fancy-title: Python package for evaluating and optimizing titles in academia, SEO, and more.
• causal-strength: Python package for measuring and visualizing causal strength.

For Prospective Students

I have reserved time slots to supervise master students for thesis and semester projects. Undergraduate and master’s students interested in research projects are encouraged to read this page for more information. Feel free to drop me an email via myfirstname.mylastname[at]epfl.ch