About me

I am a third year Ph.D. student in the Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, advised by Yulia Tsvetkov. I do research in Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Modeling, with a growing emphasis on personalization and proactive learning (question-asking).

I'm particularly interested in using computational methods to model cognitive processes, including how humans reason, communicate uncertainty, and make decisions in complex domains like healthcare. My long-term goal is to build socially and cognitively aligned AI systems that support safer, more personalized, and equitable care.

Research interests: AI for Health, Safety & Reliability, Proactive Learning, Social Reasoning, and more!

Before grad school, I received my B.S. and M.S.E. at Johns Hopkins with majors in Computer Science, Cognitive Science (linguistics focus), and Applied Mathematics (statistics focus). I worked as a research assistant at the Center for Language and Speech Processing advised by Philipp Koehn and Kenton Murray.

Please contact me at stelli [at] cs.washington.edu if you are interested in my work!

  • Click here to view my CV (updated July 25)

     
  • Current Projects

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      Proactive Reasoning

      I'm thinking about how to identify and proactively seek information using LLMs to improve model safety & reliability with statistical guarantee. How to make LLMs ask good questions? How do we model "intuition" in expert domains like medicine?

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      Socially-Intelligent Personalization

      Modeling how different social groups express health concerns and interpret medical advice. Aiming to personalize AI systems for more equitable, culturally-aware health communication.

    News

    1. 2026-01

      Our paper "Personalized Reasoning: Just-In-Time Personalization and Why LLMs Fail At It" got accepted to ICLR 2026🇧🇷!

    2. 2025-11

      Check out our new paper "Cognitive Foundations for Reasoning and Their Manifestation in LLMs" that extracts and analyze patterns in LLM and human reasoning.

    3. 2025-11

      Guest lecture at UT Austin Computational Discourse and NLG class on PrefPalette [Slides].

    4. 2025-08

      "PrefPalette: Personalized Preference Modeling with Latent Attributes" won a Spotlight at COLM 2025🏆!

    5. 2025-06

      Presenting Spurious Rewards at Cohere Labs [YouTube] [Slides].

    6. 2025-06

      Prompt engineering can elicit similar behaviors in models as RLVR does. We show that "Spurious Prompt" can boost Qwen2.5-Math MATH-500 performance by 20% as well‼️ Check out our new blogpost "Spurious Rewards and Spurious Prompts."

    7. 2025-05

      Doing RLVR on incorrect and even random rewards can boost Qwen2.5-Math MATH-500 performance by 20%🤯 We explore how and why this happens in our new paper "Spurious Rewards: Rethinking Training Signals in RLVR" (blogpost).

    Experience

  • Click here to view my CV (updated July 25)

     
  • Education

    1. University of Washington

      2023 — present | Seattle, WA

      Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering

      Advised by Yulia Tsvetkov.

    2. Johns Hopkins University

      2022 — 2023 | Baltimore, MD

      M.S.E. in Computer Science with Human Language Technology Concentration

      Advised by Philipp Koehn and Kenton Murray.

      Thesis: Learning from Gibberish: Code-Mixing Data Augmentation for Sentiment Analysis

    3. Johns Hopkins University

      2019 — 2022 | Baltimore, MD

      B.S. in Applied Mathemtics and Statistics

      Advised by Philipp Koehn and Ed Scheinerman.

      Other Majors: Computer Science, Cognitive Science (linguistics focus)

      Minor: Mathematics

    4. Stanford Online High School

      2018 — 2019 | Palo Alto, CA

      Dual enrollment program with a focus in advanced mathematics

    5. Robert Louis Stevenson School

      2016 — 2019 | Pebble Beach, CA

      Awards & Leadership: Cum Laude Society, USABO Semifinalist, USAMO Qualified, Bausch & Lomb National Science Award, Math Madness Silver Medalist, Math Team Captain, Spanish National Honor Society, Varsity Volleyball

    Teaching/TA Experience

    1. Ethics in AI: Teaching Assistant

      2025 Winter

      CSE 582

    2. Introduction to Statistics: Teaching Assistant

      2020 Spring, 2021 Fall, 2022 Spring, 2023 Spring

      EN.503.430 (undergrad) & EN.503.630 (grad) & EN.503.431 (honors)

    3. Artificial Intelligence: Course Assistant

      2023 Spring

      EN.601.464 (undergrad) & EN.601.664 (grad)

    4. Human-Computer Interaction: Course Assistant

      2022 Fall

      EN.601.490 (undergrad) & EN.601.690 (grad)

    5. Computer Ethics: Head Course Assistant

      2022 Summer

      EN.601.104

    6. Intermediate Programming: Course Assistant

      2020 Spring, 2021 Fall, 2022 Spring

      EN.601.220

    Work Experience

    1. Meta FAIR: Visiting Researcher

      2024 - Current | Seattle, WA

      Advised by Asli Celikyilmaz.

      Working on Social Alignment on the SAGE Team at Meta FAIR.

    2. Yext: Software Engineering Intern

      2022 Summer | Arlington, VA

      Integrated client data to Yext platform for real-time site information updates using Go.

      Created a Figma Style Picker to improve developer workflow and scalability using ReactJS.

    3. Michigan State University: Research Intern

      2021 Summer | East Lansing, MI

      Advised by Wolfgang Banzhaf.

      Designed and implemented novel GP algorithm for LLVM compiler flag optimization (20%).

      Published work at GECCO; second author of GP paper; first author of GI paper.

    4. Johns Hopkins Language and Cognition Lab: Research Assistant

      2020 - 2022 | Baltimore, MD

      Advised by Barbara Landau.

      Investigated developmental spatial cognition using Lego Block building.

      Created ML model for movement prediction and stability analysis using motion sensor data.

    Publications

    Below is a list of projects for which I was very involved in (lead/co-lead/contributed significantly). For a more comprehensive list of papers, check out my Google Scholars page. I also try to record the time that I spent on each project in case anyone finds it helpful!

    Photography