Lizi Liao     

Assistant Professor (Tenure-Track)
Lee Kong Chian Fellow
School of Computing and Information Systems
Singapore Management University
  lzliao at smu dot edu dot sg
Office: SCIS2-4056
[Google Scholar]   [ORCID]

I am an Assistant Professor and Lee Kong Chian Fellow in the School of Computing and Information Systems at SMU, where I lead the CoAgent Lab. My research lies at the intersection of multimedia computing and conversational AI: we build agents that understand and generate across text, vision, speech, and audio, and that act proactively—planning, asking, reflecting, and coordinating—to move conversations toward user goals. This agenda is rooted in the multimedia community: my work on Knowledge-aware Multimodal Dialogue Systems received an ACM Multimedia Best Paper Finalist in 2018, and MMConv introduced a widely used environment for multimodal conversational search across domains. Today, the lab pursues (1) multimodal conversational systems, (2) proactive and goal-oriented dialogue, (3) multimodal reasoning, generation & retrieval, and (4) multi-agent training and alignment for trustworthy foundation models. I received my Ph.D. from NUS, advised by Professor Tat-Seng Chua.

  I'm recruiting 0–2 new PhD student(s) every intake batch (apply to the PhD program and list me as a potential advisor). Our group also has multiple positions for summer interns and visiting research students. Please feel free to email me with your CV if you are interested.
What's New
Research Highlights

Multimodal Conversational Systems

A central thread of my research is making machines converse about multimodal content—jointly grounding intent across vision, audio, structured knowledge, and language. This line began with our Knowledge-aware Multimodal Dialogue Systems framework [MM'18, Best Paper Finalist], and continues through the MMConv environment for multimodal conversational search [SIGIR'21], multimodal dialogue state tracking [WWW'19] [TMM'22], response strategy modeling [MM'22], and most recently multimodal emotional support conversation systems [TMM'25] and avatar-based text–speech–vision empathetic generation [WWW'25].

Proactive Conversational AI

Beyond reacting, agents should plan, ask, and steer toward user goals. I helped shape this emerging area in the LLM era: an early [EMNLP'23] prompting study and a comprehensive survey [TOIS'25], followed by adaptive conversational planners [EMNLP'25], hierarchical latent policy planning [AAAI'25, oral], user-world-model planning [SIGIR'25], and proactive question planning with reflection [EMNLP'24]. We co-organized tutorials on proactive conversational agents at WSDM'23 and SIGIR'23.

Multimodal Reasoning, Generation & Multi-Agent Systems

We push agents to reason and generate over richer modalities and to collaborate as specialist multi-agent teams. Recent directions include chart-to-code generation with multimodal LLMs [MM'25], interpretable multimodal retrieval [MM'18], partial-annotation video moment retrieval [MM'23], multimodal emotion recognition in conversation [MM'23], audio-language captioning [CIKM'25], the large-scale Sheetpedia corpus [NeurIPS'25 Spotlight], structured memory of multi-agent debates [COLM'25], and adaptive safety guardrails for foundation models [ACL'26].

Publications

Listed in reverse chronological order. For the complete list, please see my Google Scholar.

Service
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Teaching
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CoAgent Lab
    Jinggui Liang (PhD student, SMU Presidential Doctoral Fellowship)
    Huy Dao (PhD student, SMU Presidential Doctoral Fellowship)
    Zhihan Zhang (PhD student, SCIS PhD Research Excellence Award)
    Zhengyang Liang (PhD student)
    Shuai Ling (HIT Shenzhen, co-supervise)
    Zailong Tian (Research Engineer)
    Dang Hoang Minh Triet (Visiting Research student from University of Science, VNU-HCM)
    Gia-Thinh Pham (Visiting Research student from University of Science, VNU-HCM)
    Yi Han (Visiting Research student from Harbin Institute of Technology)
    Junqiao Gong (Visiting Research student from Hefei University of Technology)
    Yunxiao Wang (Visiting Research student from Shandong University)
Alumni
    Kun Zhu (Visiting student from HIT)
    Bohan Li (Visiting student from HIT)
    Xiaofeng Zhou (Visiting student from BIT)
    Yuqi Chu (Visiting student from HFUT)
    Tao He (Visiting student from HIT)
    Zhonghua Zheng (Visiting student from HIT Shenzhen)
    Suyu Liu (Master student)
    Shasha Guo (Visiting student from RUC, now in ICT)
    Chengyu Huang (Visiting student from NUS, now in NUS)
    Tongyao Zhu (Visiting student from NUS, now in NUS)
    Chenchen Ye (Visiting student from NUS, now in UCLA)
    Yuxia Wu (Visiting student from XJTU, now in Huawei)
Awards & Honors