Zinnia Z. Nie

CSE Master's student at the University of Michigan.

Email: zznie [at] umich [dot] edu

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Hello! I am a second-year Master's student in CSE at the University of Michigan. I recieved my bachelor's of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, double majoring in Computer Science and Data Science with a certificate/minor in Game Design.

My research interests lie in multi-modal models, embodied agents, human-AI collaboration, and interpretability.
I am interested in how multi-modal models connect together and use information from different modalities, so they can better understand their environment to augment human abilities. I believe that effective agents must reason not only about the physical world, but also about the humans they interact with.

Currently I work in the SLED lab, advised by Joyce Chai, on research investigating how vision-language models (VLMs) establish common ground with human and autonomous partners, and the representational mechanisms behind this behavior.

News

• [Sept 2026] SIMLIFE is accepted to LSEI@COLM 2026 and selected as a lightning talk!
• [June 2025] CuRe is accepted as a main conference paper at ICCV 2025!
• [May 2025] CuRe is accepted as an oral at CVPR DemoDiv workshop!

Research

Webpage adapted from here.