CV
Education
- M.S. in Natural Language Processing (NLP), University of California, Santa Cruz, 2021
- B.S. in Computer Science, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2020
Work experience
- April-July 2023: Research Analyst
- University of California, Santa Cruz (Silicon Valley Campus)
- Supervisor: Ian Lane
- August 2022-March 2023: Research Analyst
- University of California, Santa Cruz (Silicon Valley Campus)
- Supervisor: Adwait Ratnaparkhi
- July-September 2020: Undergraduate Researcher
- University of California, Santa Cruz
- Supervisor: Lise Getoor
Honors and Awards
- NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Graduate Fellowship (CSGrad4US) 2023-2028
- Awarded 3 years of research funding from the National Science Foundation
- Viterbi School of Engineering Graduate Fellowship 2023-2024
- Awarded 1 year of research funding from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Publications
Shrestha, K., Gupta, A., Dukkipati, H., Shi, Z., & Matarić, M. (2026, July) Can Large Language Models Infer Human Actions and Motives? Evaluation in Social Prediction and Inspection Games” in Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Conference, San Diego, CA, July 2-7, 2026. (18% Acceptance Rate to Findings)
Kwon, D.</sup>, Shrestha, K.*, Han, B., Lin, S., Hale, J., Gratch, J., Matarić, M. & Lucas, G. (2026, January). Can LLMs Truly Embody Human Personality? Analyzing AI and Human Behavior Alignment in Dispute Resolution. AAAI 2026, Special Track on AI for Social Impact. *(24.1%. Acceptance Rate) *Equal Contribution
Kwon, D., Shrestha, K., Han, B., Lee, E. H., & Lucas, G. (2025, November). Evaluating Behavioral Alignment in Conflict Dialogue: A Multi-Dimensional Comparison of LLM Agents and Humans. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 16377-16391). (22.16% Acceptance Rate)
Han, B., Kwon, D., Lin, S., Shrestha, K., & Gratch, J. (2025, September). Can LLMs Generate Behaviors for Embodied Virtual Agents Based on Personality Traits?. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (pp. 1-10).
Shrestha, K., Dukkipati, H., Hulyalkar, A., Penamante, K., Samanta, A., & Matarić, M. (2025, May). Exploring Socially Assistive Peer Mediation Robots for Teaching Conflict Resolution to Elementary School Students. In Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium Series (Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 405-414).
Kian, M.</sup>, Shrestha, K*., Fischer, K., Zhu, X., Ong, J., Trehan, A., … & Mataric, M. (2025, April). Using Linguistic Entrainment to Evaluate Large Language Models for Use in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025 (pp. 7724-7743). *(37% Acceptance Rate) *Equal Contribution
Shi, Z., Zhao, E., Dennler, N., Wang, J., Xu, X., Shrestha, K., … & Matarić, M. (2025). HRIBench: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Real-Time Human Perception in Human-Robot Interaction. arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.20566.
Kian, M., Zong, M., Fischer, K., Velentza, A. M., Singh, A., Shrestha, K., … & Matarić, M. (2025). Engagement and Disclosures in LLM-Powered Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Exercises: A Factorial Design Comparing the Influence of a Robot vs. Chatbot Over Time. arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.17831.
Shi, Z., Landrum, E., O’Connell, A., Kian, M., Pinto-Alva, L., Shrestha, K., … & Matarić, M. J. (2024, May). How can large language models enable better socially assistive human-robot interaction: a brief survey. In Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium Series (Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 401-404).
Authored Awarded Grants
- NAIRR Pilot Program #250180: Evaluating Human Engagement Classification in Human-Robot Interaction Using Pre-trained Open-Source Vision Language Models (400,000 SUs total)
- PI: Maja Matarić
- July 2025 - July 2026
- Led the grant writing and determined computational resources needed for large scaled investigation and improvement of open-source VLMs for classifying cognitive-affective states in two unique HRI applications. Leading computational experiments with papers being prepared for publication.