Stanford CS 329X | Human-Centered LLMs

Class Schedule

Note: tentative schedule is subject to change.

Week	Date	Theme	Course Material
1	Sep 21, Monday	No Class
1	Sep 23, Wednesday	Introduction to Human Centered LLMs [slides]	Readings: Ziems, Caleb and Zhao, Dora and 56 others. "Reflections and New Directions for Human-Centered Large Language Models." arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.06901 (2026).
2	Sep 28, Monday	The Ultimate Crash into LLMs [slides]	Readings: Khattab, Omar, Arnav Singhvi, Paridhi Maheshwari, Zhiyuan Zhang, Keshav Santhanam, Sri Vardhamanan, Saiful Haq et al. "Dspy: Compiling declarative language model calls into self-improving pipelines." arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.03714 (2023). Schulhoff, Sander, Michael Ilie, Nishant Balepur, Konstantine Kahadze, Amanda Liu, Chenglei Si, Yinheng Li et al. "The Prompt Report: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Techniques." arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.06608 (2024).
2	Sep 30, Wednesday	Learning from Human Preferences [slides]	Readings: Ouyang, Long, Jeff Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida, Carroll L. Wainwright, Pamela Mishkin, Chong Zhang et al. "Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback." arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.02155 (2022). Rafailov, Rafael, Archit Sharma, Eric Mitchell, Christopher D. Manning, Stefano Ermon, and Chelsea Finn. "Direct preference optimization: Your language model is secretly a reward model." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (2024).
3	Oct 5, Monday	✨ Guest Lecture: Will Held (Open Athena) and Rafal Wojdyla (Open Athena): Data, Data, and Data [slides]	Readings: Zhou, Chunting, Pengfei Liu, Puxin Xu, Srinivasan Iyer, Jiao Sun, Yuning Mao, Xuezhe Ma et al. "Lima: Less is more for alignment." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (2023): 55006-55021. Penedo, Guilherme, Hynek Kydlíček, Anton Lozhkov, Margaret Mitchell, Colin A. Raffel, Leandro Von Werra, and Thomas Wolf. "The fineweb datasets: Decanting the web for the finest text data at scale." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37 (2024): 30811-30849. Longpre, Shayne, Robert Mahari, Naana Obeng-Marnu, William Brannon, Tobin South, Jad Kabbara, and Sandy Pentland. "Data Authenticity, Consent, and Provenance for AI Are All Broken: What Will It Take to Fix Them?." (2024).
3	Oct 7, Wednesday	Human-AI Interaction [slides]	Readings: Shaikh, Omar, Valentino Chai, Michele J. Gelfand, Diyi Yang, and Michael S. Bernstein. "Rehearsal: Simulating conflict to teach conflict resolution." arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.12309 (2023). Wu, Shirley, Michel Galley, Baolin Peng, Hao Cheng, Gavin Li, Yao Dou, Weixin Cai, James Zou, Jure Leskovec, and Jianfeng Gao. "CollabLLM: From Passive Responders to Active Collaborators." In Forty-second International Conference on Machine Learning (2025).
4	Oct 12, Monday	Evaluating Human-AI interaction [slides]	Readings: Long, Tao, Katy Ilonka Gero, and Lydia B. Chilton. "Not Just Novelty: A Longitudinal Study on Utility and Customization of AI Workflows." arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.09894 (2024). Lee, Mina, Megha Srivastava, Amelia Hardy, John Thickstun, Esin Durmus, Ashwin Paranjape, Ines Gerard-Ursin et al. "Evaluating Human-Language Model Interaction." Transactions on Machine Learning Research. Shao, Yijia, Zora Zhiruo Wang, Neel Ahuja, Yicheng Wang, Bowen Liu, and Diyi Yang. "CollabSkill: Evaluating Human-Agent Collaboration On Real-World Tasks." arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.09833 (2026).
4	Oct 14, Wednesday	Human-Agent Collaboration [slides]	Readings: Shao, Yijia, Vinay Samuel, Yucheng Jiang, John Yang, and Diyi Yang. "Collaborative Gym: A Framework for Enabling and Evaluating Human-Agent Collaboration." arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.15701 (2025). Shen, Shannon, Valerie Chen, Ken Gu, Alexis Ross, Zixian Ma, Jillian Ross, Alex Gu, Chenglei Si, Wayne Chi, Andi Peng, Jocelyn J Shen, Ameet Talwalkar, Tongshuang Wu, David Sontag. "Scaling Collaborative Effort with Agents." In Findings of the Association of Computational Linguistics (2026).
5	Oct 19, Monday	Building Full-Stack HAI Systems	Readings: Packer, Charles, Sarah Wooders, Kevin Lin, Vivian Fang, Shishir G. Patil, Ion Stoica, and Joseph E. Gonzalez. "MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems." arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.08560 (2023). Wu, Qingyun, Gagan Bansal, Jieyu Zhang, Yiran Wu, Beibin Li, Erkang Zhu, Li Jiang, Xiaoyun Zhang, Shaokun Zhang, Jiale Liu, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Ryen W. White, Doug Burger, and Chi Wang. "AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation." arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.08155 (2023). Jiang, Yucheng, Yijia Shao, Dekun Ma, Sina J. Semnani, and Monica S. Lam. "Into the Unknown Unknowns: Engaged Human Learning through Participation in Language Model Agent Conversations." In Proceedings of EMNLP (2024).
5	Oct 21, Wednesday	New Frontiers in Generative Interaction	Readings: Cao, Yining, Peiling Jiang, and Haijun Xia. "Generative and Malleable User Interfaces with Generative and Evolving Task-Driven Data Model." In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1-20. (2025). Chen, Jiaqi, Yanzhe Zhang, Yutong Zhang, Yijia Shao, and Diyi Yang. "Generative Interfaces for Language Models." arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.19227 (2025). Chen, Yunnong, Chengwei Shi, and Liuqing Chen. "SpecifyUI: Supporting Iterative UI Design Intent Expression through Structured Specifications and Generative AI." arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.07334 (2025). Lam, Michelle, Omar Shaikh, Hallie Xu, Alice Guo, Diyi Yang, Jeffrey Heer, James Landay, Michael S. Bernstein. "Just-In-Time Objectives: A General Approach for Specialized AI Interactions." In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1-20. (2026). Kim, Eunhye, Bryan Min, Haijun Xia, Juho Kim. Elicitive User Interfaces: Designing How Users Shape Generative Interfaces. arXiv preprint arXiv:2609.23642 (2026).
6	Oct 26, Monday	LLMs and the Future of Work	Readings: Shao, Yijia, Humishka Zope, Yucheng Jiang, Jiaxin Pei, David Nguyen, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Diyi Yang. "Future of Work with AI Agents: Auditing Automation and Augmentation Potential across the US Workforce." arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.06576 (2025). Tomlinson, Kiran, Sonia Jaffe, Will Wang, Scott Counts, and Siddharth Suri. "Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI." arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.07935 (2025). Appel, Ruth, Peter McCrory, Alex Tamkin, Michael Stern, Miles McCain, and Tyler Neylon. "Anthropic Economic Index report: Uneven geographic and enterprise AI adoption" Anthropic (2025). Wang, Zora Zhiruo, Yijia Shao, Omar Shaikh, Daniel Fried, Graham Neubig, and Diyi Yang. "How do AI agents do human work? Comparing AI and human workflows across diverse occupations." arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.22780 (2025).
6	Oct 28, Wednesday	Midway Project Showcase
7	Nov 2, Monday	✨ Guest Lecture: Valerie Chen (Stanford) and Weiyan Shi (Northeastern): Emerging Topics in Human-AI Interaction
7	Nov 4, Wednesday	✨ Guest Lecture: Emma Pierson (UC Berkeley)
8	Nov 9, Monday	The Rise of AI Companions	Readings: Zhang, Yutong, Dora Zhao, Jeffrey T. Hancock, Robert Kraut, and Diyi Yang. "The Rise of AI Companions: How Human-Chatbot Relationships Influence Well-Being." arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.12605 (2025). Pataranutaporn, Pat, Sheer Karny, Chayapatr Archiwaranguprok, Constanze Albrecht, Auren R. Liu, and Pattie Maes. “My Boyfriend Is AI: A Computational Analysis of Human-AI Companionship in Reddit's AI Community.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.11391, September 14, 2025. Kaffee, Lucie-Aimée, Giada Pistilli, and Yacine Jernite. "INTIMA: A Benchmark for Human-AI Companionship Behavior." arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.09998 (2025).
8	Nov 11, Wednesday	✨ Guest Lecture: Kunal Handa (Anthropic)
9	Nov 16, Monday	Safety and Privacy in LLM Use	Readings: TBD
9	Nov 18, Wednesday	✨ Guest Lecture: Vishakh Padmakumar (Stanford) and Myra Cheng (Stanford): Overreliance and Sycophancy
10	Nov 23, Monday	Thanksgiving Holiday - No Class
10	Nov 25, Wednesday	Thanksgiving Holiday - No Class
11	Nov 30, Monday	Latest Human-Centered LLM Topics in Late 2026
11	Dec 2, Wednesday	Final Presentations

Week	Deadline	Date	Time
2	Homework 1 Released	Monday, Sep 28
4	Homework 1 Due Homework 2 Released	Monday, Oct 12	11:59 PM PT
4	Project Proposal Due	Wednesday, Oct 14	11:59 PM PT
5	15-Minute Video Due	Wednesday, Oct 21	11:59 PM PT
6	Midway Project Presentation	Wednesday, Oct 28	In-Class
6	Homework 2 Due Homework 3 Released	Wednesday, Oct 28	11:59 PM PT
7	Midway Report Due	Wednesday, Nov 4	11:59 PM PT
8	Homework 3 Due	Wednesday, Nov 11	11:59 PM PT
8	Course Withdrawal Deadline	Friday, Nov 13	5:00 PM PT
11	Final Project Presentation in Class	Wednesday, Dec 2	In-Class
12	Final Report Due	Wednesday, Dec 9	11:59 PM PT

CS 329X: Human-Centered LLMs

Stanford / Fall 2026

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