Kuangshi (Leo) Ai

University of Notre Dame

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247 Fitzpatrick Hall

Notre Dame, IN 46556

Hi! I’m a second-year CS Ph.D. student at the ND-VIS lab, advised by Prof. Chaoli Wang. I received my bachelor’s degree in AI from Fudan University. My work has been recognized with an IEEE VIS Best Paper Award. In summer 2026, I am working at TikTok in San Jose as a Research Scientist Intern.

My research interests lie at the intersection of LLM agents, scientific visualization, and human-computer interaction. I develop agentic systems that make complex visualization and 3D/4D data interaction more intuitive to broader audiences. My current research also explores self-evolving agents with memory, reflection, and adaptive learning capabilities for long-horizon tasks. In addition, I work on evaluating LLM agents for SciVis by building benchmarks that assess their capabilities and interaction behaviors.

More broadly, I’m excited about Agentic AI + VIS + HCI, with interests spanning self-evolving agent, 3D interaction and authoring, agentic workflows, and mixed-initiative visualization systems.

If you’re interested in my work or would like to collaborate, feel free to reach out at kai[at]nd[dot]edu.

news

Jan 28, 2026 🚀 Calling for Collaborators: SciVisAgentBench!
I’m launching an open collaboration effort for SciVisAgentBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate LLM agents in scientific visualization. 🔗 Learn more or contribute through our project page.
Aug 03, 2025 🏆 IEEE VIS 2025 Best Paper Award!
My first first-author paper NLI4VolVis has been selected as one of only 5 Best Papers out of 537 submissions! 📰 The work was also featured by Notre Dame News.
Jul 15, 2025 Two papers accepted to IEEE VIS 2025! This marks my first first-author paper during my Ph.D.! 🎉
May 16, 2025 One paper accepted to ACL 2025 findings!
Aug 15, 2024 Excited to start my Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame.

selected publications

  1. IEEE VIS
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    🏆 Best Paper VIS 2025 NLI4VolVis: Natural Language Interaction for Volume Visualization via LLM Multi-Agents and Editable 3D Gaussian Splatting
    Kuangshi Ai, Kaiyuan Tang, and Chaoli Wang
    In Proceedings of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (IEEE VIS), 2025
    arXiv Video Blog Code Slides Website
  2. Preprint
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    SciVisAgentBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Scientific Data Analysis and Visualization Agents
    Kuangshi Ai, Haichao Miao, Kaiyuan Tang, Nathaniel Gorski, Jianxin Sun, Guoxi Liu, Helgi I. Ingolfsson, David Lenz, Hanqi Guo, Hongfeng Yu, Teja Leburu, Michael Molash, Bei Wang, Tom Peterka, Chaoli Wang, and Shusen Liu
    2026
    arXiv Code Website HF
  3. Preprint
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    Toward AI VIS Co-Scientists: A General and End-to-End Agent Harness for Solving Complex Data Visualization Tasks
    Haichao Miao, Zhimin Li, Kuangshi Ai, Kaiyuan Tang, Chaoli Wang, Peer-Timo Bremer, and Shusen Liu
    2026
    arXiv Video
  4. IEEE VIS
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    TexGS-VolVis: Expressive Scene Editing for Volume Visualization via Textured Gaussian Splatting
    Kaiyuan Tang, Kuangshi Ai, Jun Han, and Chaoli Wang
    In Proceedings of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (IEEE VIS), 2025
    arXiv
  5. Preprint
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    SVLAT: Scientific Visualization Literacy Assessment Test
    Patrick Phuoc Do, Kaiyuan Tang, Kuangshi Ai, and Chaoli Wang
    2026
    arXiv Supp
  6. VIS x GenAI Oral
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    An Evaluation-Centric Paradigm for Scientific Visualization Agents
    Kuangshi Ai, Haichao Miao, Zhimin Li, Chaoli Wang, and Shusen Liu
    In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on GenAI, Agents, and the Future of VIS (IEEE VIS), 2025
    arXiv Slides
  7. Preprint
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    Exploring Interaction Paradigms for LLM Agents in Scientific Visualization
    Jackson Vonderhorst, Kuangshi Ai, Haichao Miao, Shusen Liu, and Chaoli Wang
    2026
    arXiv
  8. ACL Findings
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    Leveraging Variation Theory in Counterfactual Data Augmentation for Optimized Active Learning
    Simret Araya Gebreegziabher, Kuangshi Ai, Zheng Zhang, Elena L. Glassman, and Toby Jia-Jun Li
    In Proceedings of Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL, 2025
    arXiv Code