Simret Araya Gebreegziabher
Simret Araya Gebreegziabher

Simret Araya Gebreegziabher

ስምረት አርአያ ገብረእግዚአብሄር

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Notre Dame advised by Prof. Toby Li. My research centers on Human-AI interaction, with a focus on designing and evaluating tools that foster collaboration between humans and AI in ambiguous or uncertain contexts. I draw on cognitive learning theories to guide this work, aiming to enable more effective human-AI alignment. Grounded in cognitive learning theories, my work explores how to support users in aligning their intentions, preferences and values during model training, fine-tuning, and evaluation processes.

Publications · Full List in Google Scholar

The Behavioral Fabric of LLM-Powered GUI Agents: Human Values and Interaction Outcomes

Simret Araya Gebreegziabher, Yukun Yang, Charles Chiang, Dan Yoo, Chaoran Chen, Hyo Jin Do, Zahra Ashktorab, Werner Geyer, Diego Gomez-Zara, and Toby Jia-Jun Li

ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (ACM IUI) · 2026

Dark Patterns Meet GUI Agents: LLM Agent Susceptibility to Manipulative Interfaces and the Role of Human Oversight

Jingyu Tang, Chaoran Chen, Jiawen Li, Zhiping Zhang, Bingcan Guo, Ibrahim Khalilov, Simret Araya Gebreegziabher, Bingsheng Yao, Dakuo Wang, Yanfang Ye, Tianshi Li, Ziang Xiao, Yaxing Yao, and Toby Jia-Jun Li

The Obvious Invisible Threat: LLM-Powered GUI Agents' Vulnerability to Fine-Print Injections

Chaoran Chen, Zhiping Zhang, Bingcan Guo, Shang Ma, Ibrahim Khalilov, Simret Araya Gebreegziabher, Yanfang Ye, Ziang Xiao, Yaxing Yao, Tianshi Li, and Toby Jia-Jun Li

Designing Staged Evaluation Workflows for LLMs: Integrating Domain Experts, Lay Users, and Model-Generated Evaluation Criteria

Annalisa Szymanski, Simret Araya Gebreegziabher, Oghenemaro Anuyah, Ronald A. Metoyer, and Toby Jia-Jun Li

Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) · 2026

Supporting Co-Adaptive Machine Teaching through Human Concept Learning and Cognitive Theories

🏆 CHI ’25 · Best Paper

Simret A. Gebreegziabher, Yukun Yang, Elena L. Glassman*, Toby Jia-jun Li*

Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) · 2025

MetricMate: An Interactive Tool for Generating Evaluation Criteria for LLM-as-a-Judge Workflow

Simret A. Gebreegziabher, Charles Chiang, Zichu Wang, Zahra Ashktorab, Michelle Brachman, Werner Geyer, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Diego Gómez-Zará

CHIWORK · 2025

Leveraging Variation Theory in Counterfactual Data Augmentation for Optimized Active Learning

Simret A. Gebreegziabher, Kuangshi Ai, Zheng Zhang, Elena L. Glassman, Toby Jia-jun Li

ACL Findings · 2025

MOCHA: Model Optimization through Collaborative Human-AI Alignment

Simret A. Gebreegziabher, Elena L. Glassman*, Toby Jia-jun Li*

UIST Demo · 2024

PaTAT: Human-AI Collaborative Qualitative Coding with Explainable Interactive Rule Synthesis

Simret A. Gebreegziabher*, Zheng Zhang*, Xiaohang Tang, Yihao Meng, Elena L. Glassman, Toby Jia-jun Li

CHI · 2023

News


[April 2025] Our CHI25 paper on co-adaptive machine teaching won the best paper award 🎉.

[Aug 2024] I will be at UIST presenting our demo paper MOCHA: Model Optimization through Collaborative Human-AI Alignment 🤓.

[Oct 2023] Finished my internship at Meta Reality Labs.

[May 2023] Started my internship at Meta Reality Labs.

[Feb 2023] Our paper PaTAT: Human-AI Collaborative Qualitative Coding with Explainable Interactive Rule Synthesis got into CHI 🎉 .

[Jan 2022] Started my PhD at the University of Notre Dame.

[Oct 2021] Graduated from Addis Ababa University, Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering with Great distinction.

[Oct 2021] Gave my graduation lecture as a Global Teaching Fellow at Delta Analytics, watch it here!

[Apr 2021] Started as a Global Teaching Fellow at Delta Analytics.

[May 2020] Started working as a research intern at University of Michigan, AURA2020.

[Oct 2019] Organized the 1st AI in Ethiopia Conference, Read about it!