Kuangshi (Leo) Ai

University of Notre Dame

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247 Fitzpatrick Hall

Notre Dame, IN 46556

Hi! I’m a third-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. In summer 2026, I was a ML Research Scientist Intern at TikTok in San Jose, where I worked on long-horizon, self-evolving agents for AIGC video editing.

My research lies at the intersection of LLM agents, visualization, and HCI, with a current focus on self-evolving agents for long-horizon tasks through agentic RL, agent post-training, and memory. I also develop agentic benchmarks and systems that support human–agent collaboration and 3D/4D interaction, making complex scientific data easier to explore, understand, and manipulate. My work has been recognized with an IEEE VIS Best Paper Award.

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

news

Jul 16, 2026 Two first-author full papers and one short paper accepted to IEEE VIS 2026!
Jan 28, 2026 🚀 Calling for Collaborators: SciVisAgentBench!
🔗 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!

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. IEEE VIS
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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
    In Proceedings of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (IEEE VIS), 2026
    arXiv Code Website HF
  3. IEEE VIS
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    HiLSVA: Design and Evaluation of a Human-in-the-Loop Agentic System for Scientific Visualization
    Kuangshi Ai, Patrick Phuoc Do, and Chaoli Wang
    In Proceedings of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (IEEE VIS), 2026
    arXiv Video Code Website
  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. IEEE VIS Short
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    Exploring LLM Agent Designs and Interaction Modalities for Scientific Visualization
    Jackson Vonderhorst, Kuangshi Ai, Haichao Miao, Shusen Liu, and Chaoli Wang
    In Proceedings of IEEE Visualization and Visual Analytics (IEEE VIS Short Paper), 2026
    arXiv
  6. VIS x GenAI Oral
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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
  7. 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 Workshop), 2025
    arXiv Slides
  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
  9. Preprint
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    SVLAT: Scientific Visualization Literacy Assessment Test
    Patrick Phuoc Do, Kaiyuan Tang, Kuangshi Ai, and Chaoli Wang
    2026
    arXiv Supp
  10. Preprint
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    SciVisAgentSkills: Design and Evaluation of Agent Skills for Scientific Data Analysis and Visualization
    Kuangshi Ai, Haichao Miao, Kaiyuan Tang, Shusen Liu, and Chaoli Wang
    2026
    arXiv Code