Zhiyao Shu (Zoey Shu)
PhD · Information Science & Technology

Zhiyao Shu (Zoey)

Fairfax, VA·Computer VisionHuman–AI Collaboration

I am a Ph.D. student in Information Science & Technology at George Mason University and a member of the DEER Lab.

My research focuses on image retrieval and video understanding and reasoning. I explore how AI can understand and support question-answering interactions around video, where people clarify questions, examine evidence, and revisit answers as new information emerges.

Research areas
  • Computer vision: image retrieval and video understanding and reasoning
  • Human–AI collaboration: question-answering interactions, evidence inspection, and clarification

Recent News

Jun 2026

🎉 Our paper “Lost in the Tail: Addressing Geographic Imbalance in Urban Visual Place Recognition” was accepted to ECCV 2026 as a Spotlight.

Aug 2025

Began my PhD in Information Science & Technology at George Mason University.

Mar 2025

Released MindCoder v2 — generate full reports in one click. Try it at mindcoder.ai.

Publications

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EMNLP 2026Main2026

Agent-as-Peer-Debriefer: A Multi-Agent Framework with Perspective-Based Refinement for Qualitative Analysis

Zhimin Lin, Kun Cheng, Zhiyao Shu, Junhua Fang, Juntao Li, Fan Bai, Jie Gao

Projects

May 2026Visit ↗

Multimodal Plan Inference for Human–Robot Interaction

A Bayesian framework that infers the intended plan of a person from multimodal cues — speech, pointing gestures, and facial expressions — so robots can interpret and act on human intent during collaborative interaction.

Apr 2025Visit ↗

MindCoder — LLM-Supported Qualitative Analysis

A full-stack tool for flexible, structured inductive qualitative analysis. Automates open coding, axial coding, and concept development with GPT-5, producing one-click reports to support insight presentation.

Blogs

Apr 2026

Building a Weekly Research Digest Agent

A couple hundred new arXiv papers land in my categories every week, and maybe a dozen are worth my time. So I built an agent to find them — it scores each paper against my actual research and posts the 20 best to my Discord every Monday. Serverless, and free.

12 min
Jul 2025

Ten Days Across the Country

A summer road trip from Seattle to Fairfax: wild horses over the Columbia, Devils Tower, the Badlands, a modernist pilgrimage in Columbus, Indiana, and Fallingwater on the way home. With a clickable route map.

6 min

Let's connect

Open to research collaborations.

Email me
© 2026 Content copyrighted by Zoey (Zhiyao) Shu · All rights reserved.