Xiangyu Zhao   赵翔宇

              Assistant Professor


               Applied Machine Learning Lab
               Department of Data Science
               College of Computing
               City University of Hong Kong (CityU)

Email: xy [dot] zhao [at] cityu [dot] edu [dot] hk
Mail: Lau Ming Wai Academic Building, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong 999077
Links: [LinkedIn]     [Publications]    [Google Scholar]     [Lab GitHub]     [Services]    [Grants]    [Awards]    [Teach&Talk]    [Experience]

Brief Biography

Xiangyu Zhao is a tenure-track assistant professor of Data Science at City University of Hong Kong (CityU). Prior to CityU, he completed his Ph.D. under the advisory of Prof. Jiliang Tang at DSE Lab of MSU, his M.S. under the advisory of Prof. Enhong Chen at BDAA Lab of USTC, and his B.Eng. under the advisory of Prof. Ming Tang and Prof. Tao Zhou at BigData Center of UESTC.

His current research interests include data mining and machine learning, especially

  • Personalization, Recommender System, Search Engine, Online Advertising, and Information Retrieval
  • Large Language Model, AGI, AutoML, Reinforcement Learning, Graph Learning, Trustworthy AI, and Multimodal ML
  • AI + X: Urban Computing & Smart City, Healthcare, and Education
  • His research has been awarded ICDM'22 and ICDM'21 Best-ranked Papers, Joint AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award Nomination, Global Chinese AI Rising Stars (Top 25 in Data Mining), CCF-Tencent Open Fund (twice), CCF-Alimama Research Fund, Tencent Focused Research Fund, CCF-Ant Research Fund, CCF-BaiChuan-Ebtech Foundation Model Fund, Ant Group Research Fund, Criteo Faculty Research Award, and MSU Dissertation Fellowship. He is the awardee of the HK RGC Research Impact Fund with a grant of HK$7 million, marking him as the ONLY assistant professor to lead such a key project in Hong Kong since 2020. He is among the top 2% in the Stanford list of the world's most-cited scientists in 2024.

    He serves as the top-tier Artificial Intelligence and Data Science conference chair and organizer at WWW'25, ICICIP'25, ISNN'25, WAIM'24, NLPCC'24, and ADC'24, and the journal editor at Neural Networks, ACM Transactions on the Web, and Frontiers in Big Data. He serves as conference area chair and (senior) program committee member over 100 times. He serves as the workshop organizer at KDD'19, SIGIR'20/21/22/24, WWW'21/24, Recsys'23 CIKM'23, and a lead tutor at KDD'23, WWW'21/22/23, IJCAI'21/23 and WSDM'23. He also serves as the founding academic committee member of MLNLP, the largest Chinese AI community with millions of subscribers. The models and algorithms from his research have been launched in the online systems of various companies, such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, Linkedin, Criteo, Lyft, Baidu, Tencent, Ant Group, Kuaishou, and JD.com.

    Openings
    • I have PhD (ddl: HKPFS Dec 1, Normal PhD Dec 31) and Joint-PhD (双一流A类+国科大, ddl: Dec 5, 2024) positions every year
    • Postdoc, Self-financed PhD, Part-time PhD, RA and Visiting Students positions are open year round
    • Please click HERE for more details (CityU is ranked #10 in QS Asia University Rankings 2025, #3 in HK)
    Our Large Language Models (LLMs) Papers
    • Medical LLMs, When MOE Meets LLMs: Parameter Efficient Fine-tuning for Multi-task Medical Applications (SIGIR'2024) [link]
    • IR LLMs, MILL: Mutual Verification with Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Query Expansion (NAACL'2024) [link]
    • LLMs Theory, Large Multimodal Model Compression via Efficient Pruning and Distillation (WWW'2024, Oral Presentation) [link]
    • LLMs Theory, Multi-­perspective Improvement of Knowledge Graph Completion with Large Language Models (COLING'2024) [link]
    • Medical LLMs, Editing Factual Knowledge and Explanatory Ability of Medical Large Language Models (CIKM'2024) [link]
    • RecSys LLMs, LLM4MSR: An LLM-Enhanced Paradigm for Multi-Scenario Recommendation (CIKM'2024) [link]
    • RecSys LLMs, Recommender Systems in the Era of Large Language Models (LLMs) (IEEE TKDE) [link]
    • LLMs Theory, Large Language Models for Generative Information Extraction: A Survey (Frontiers of Computer Science) [link]
    • Medical LLMs, Mitigating Hallucinations of Large Language Models in Medical Domain via Contrastive Decoding (EMNLP'24 Findings) [link]
    • RecSys LLMs, A Unified Framework for Multi-Domain CTR Prediction via Large Language Models (ACM TOIS) [link]
    • RecSys LLMs, LLM-ESR: Large Language Models Enhancement for Long-tailed Sequential Recommendation (NeurIPS'24) [link]
    • Multi-Modal & Spatial LLMs, G3: An Effective and Adaptive Framework for Worldwide Geolocalization Using Large Multi-Modality Models (NeurIPS'24) [link]
    • Trust LLMs, Seeing is NOT Always Believing! Unveiling the True Symmetric Moral Consistency of Large Language Models (NeurIPS'24) [link]
    • RecSys LLMs, Rethinking Large Language Model Architectures for Sequential Recommendations [link]
    • Medical LLMs, Large Language Model Distilling Medication Recommendation Model [link]
    • IR LLMs, Agent4Ranking: Semantic Robust Ranking via Personalized Query Rewriting Using Multi-agent LLM [link]
    • RecSys LLMs, Tired of Plugins? Large Language Models Can Be End-To-End Recommenders [link]
    • RecSys LLMs, E4SRec: An Elegant Effective Efficient Extensible Solution of Large Language Models for Sequential Recommendation [link]
    • RecSys LLMs, LLM-enhanced Reranking in Recommender Systems [link]
    • Graph LLMs, LATEX-GCL: Large Language Models (LLMs)-Based Data Augmentation for Text-Attributed Graph Contrastive Learning [link]
    Our Research Highlights
    • NeurIPS'2024, Spotlight (3%)
      LLM-ESR: Large Language Models Enhancement for Long-tailed Sequential Recommendation [link]
    • NeurIPS'2024, Spotlight (3%)
      Association of Objects May Engender Stereotypes: Mitigating Association-Engendered Stereotypes in Text-to-Image Generation [link]
    • WWW'2024, Oral Presentation (10%)
      Large Multimodal Model Compression via Efficient Pruning and Distillation [link]
    • ICDM'2022, Best-ranked Papers Award
      AutoAssign: Automatic Shared Embedding Assignment in Streaming Recommendation [link]
    • IJCAI'2022, Long Oral Presentation (3.75%)
      MLP4Rec: A Pure MLP Architecture for Sequential Recommendations [link]
    • WSDM'2021, Top-4 Most Cited Paper 4 / 155 Accepted Papers
      Towards Long-term Fairness in Recommendation [link]
    • ICDM'2021, Best-ranked Papers Award, Top-10 Most Cited Paper 10 / 208 Accepted Papers
      AutoEmb: Automated Embedding Dimensionality Search in Streaming Recommendations [link]
    • PhD Thesis, 2021 Joint AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award Nomination
      Adaptive and Automated Deep Recommender Systems, extended abstract at ACM SIGWEB Newsletter [link]
    • ACM SIGWEB Newsletter, Top-2 Most Cited Paper 2 / 551 in History
      Deep Reinforcement Learning for Search, Recommendation, and Online Advertising: A Survey [link]
    • RecSys'2018, Top-1 Most Cited Paper 1 / 117 Accepted Papers
      Deep Reinforcement Learning for Page-wise Recommendations [link]
    • KDD'2018, Top-20 Most Cited Paper 19 / 294 Accepted Papers
      Recommendations with Negative Feedback via Pairwise Deep Reinforcement Learning [link]
    • CIKM'2017, Top-20 Most Cited Paper 20 / 350 Accepted Papers
      Modeling Temporal-Spatial Correlations for Crime Prediction [link]
    Our Survey Papers
    • Embedding in Recommender Systems: A Survey [link]
    • Recommender Systems in the Era of Large Language Models (LLMs) (IEEE TKDE) [link]
    • Large Language Models for Generative Information Extraction: A Survey (Frontiers of Computer Science) [link]
    • Automated Machine Learning for Deep Recommender Systems: A Survey (ACM TORS) [link]
    • Multi-Task Deep Recommender Systems: A Survey [link]
    • Multimodal Recommender Systems: A Survey (ACM CSUR) [link]
    • A Comprehensive Survey on Trustworthy Recommender Systems [link]
    • Deep Reinforcement Learning for Search, Recommendation, and Online Advertising: A Survey (ACM SIGWEB Newsletter) [link]
    • Mobile Trajectory Anomaly Detection: Taxonomy, Methodology, Challenges, and Directions (IEEE IoT) [link]
    • Crime in Urban Areas: A Data Mining Perspective (ACM SIGKDD Explorations) [link]
    • On the Opportunities of Green Computing: A Survey [link]
    Call for Paper

    News [lab's publication news]

    • 11/2024: I will serve as the AC of IJCAI'25
    • 10/2024: Our team won the Outstanding Project (6/26) in CCF-Tencent Open Fund 2023
    • 10/2024: Zijian Zhang has passed PhD Oral Examination. He will join Jilin University as an assistant professor. He is the #3 PROFESSOR from AML Lab. Congratulations!
    • 10/2024: I will serve as the AC of AISTATS'25 and SPC of PAKDD'25
    • 09/2024: I will serve as the Action Editor of Neural Networks, starting 2025
    • 09/2024: I am among the top 2% in the Stanford list of the world's most-cited scientists in 2024
    • 09/2024: 10 PhD students (Yi Wen, Rungen Liu, Tongzhou Wu, Chao Zhang, Haokun Wen, Yingyi Zhang, Huidong Wu, Kai Li, Guojing Li, and Yimin Deng) are welcome to join the AML Lab!
    • 09/2024: I will serve as the AC of ICLR'25
    • 09/2024: Langming Liu and Ziru Liu have passed PhD Oral Examination. Congratulations to Dr. Langming Liu and Dr. Ziru Liu!
    • 09/2024: 3 of AML PhD students receive the Research Tuition Scholarship (RTS-CityU) and 6 students receive the Outstanding Academic Performance Award (OAPA-CityU). Congratulations!!
    • 08/2024: An invited talk at KDD Finance Day 2024
    • 07/2024: Our team ranked the overall 🥈 2/508 in Amazon KDD CUP 2024! Congrats to Pengyue, Jingtong, Xiaopeng, Zixuan and Yiyao. Proud of your dedication and hard work! 🎉
    • 07/2024: I am honored to receive the CCF-Alimama Research Fund (CCF-阿里妈妈科技袋基金)
    • 07/2024: I will serve as the AC for the ADS track of KDD'25
    • 06/2024: I will serve as the PC Member for the Research track of KDD'25
    • 05/2024: I will serve as the Tutorial Co-Chair of ACM The Web Conference'25 (WWW'25)
    • 05/2024: I will serve as the PC Member of NeurIPS'24
    • 05/2024: Jialin Liu has been appointed as an assistant professor in China. He is the #2 PROFESSOR from AML Lab. Congratulations!
    • 04/2024: I will serve as the Registration Co-Chair of IEEE ICICIP'25, and the Award and Grant Co-Chair of ADC'24 (Australasian Database Conference)
    • 04/2024: I will serve as the SPC Member of CIKM'24
    • 03/2024: I will serve as the Publicity Co-Chair of NLPCC'24
    • 02/2024: I will serve as the PC Member of RecSys'24 and IEEE BigData'24
    • 01/2024: I am honored to receive the Research Impact Fund (RIF) as Project Coordinator, the Key Project of Hong Kong and the only assistant professor to lead an RIF project in Hong Kong since 2020
    • 01/2024: I will serve as the PC Member of KDD'24 (two tracks) and ACM MM'24
    • 12/2023: I will serve as the Tutorial Co-Chair of APWeb-WAIM'24
    • 12/2023: I will serve as the SPC Member of SIGIR'24 and IJCAI'24, and PC Member of ICML'24
    • 11/2023: Yu Li has been appointed as an assistant professor at Jilin University. He is the #1 PROFESSOR from AML Lab. Congratulations!
    • 11/2023: I am honored to receive the CCF-BaiChuan-Ebtech Foundation Model Fund (CCF-百川-英博大模型基金)
    • 11/2023: Our new survey Embedding in Recommender Systems: A Survey is online
    • 11/2023: Our new survey On the Opportunities of Green Computing: A Survey is online
    • 10/2023, Congratulations to our team for winning the championship (Postgraduate Session) in the IET Young Professionals Exhibition & Competition (YPEC 2023), co-supervised with Dr. Liang Dong
    • 10/2023: I will serve as the PC Member of WSDM'24 demo track and SPC of PAKDD'24
    • 09/2023: 7 PhD students (Wenlin, Zichuan, Dayan, Yusheng, Jiawei, Siqi and Derong) are welcome to join the AML Lab!
    • 09/2023: 4 of AML PhD students receive the Research Tuition Scholarship (RTS-CityU) and 2 students receive the Outstanding Academic Performance Award (OAPA-CityU). Congratulations!
    • 08/2023: I will serve as the PC Member of WWW'24, SDM'24, and ICLR'24
    • 07/2023: I am honored to receive the CCF-Tencent Open Fund (CCF-腾讯犀牛鸟基金) for the second time
    • 07/2023: An invited talk at Baidu
    • 06/2023: I am honored to receive the Tencent Rhino-Bird Focused Research Fund (腾讯广告犀牛鸟专项研究计划)
    • 06/2023: I am honored to receive the Ant Group Research Fund (蚂蚁集团研究基金)
    • 06/2023: I will serve as the SPC Member of AAAI'24, CIKM'23, and PC Member of ACM MM'23
    • 05/2023: 1 tutorial (Trustworthy RS) got accepted by KDD'23
    • 05/2023: I am honored to receive the Environment and Conservation Fund (ECF) with Dr.Liang Dong and Prof.Joe Qin
    • 05/2023: Congratulations to our team for winning the Silver Medal at the International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva
    • 04/2023: We will co-organize the DLP workshop @ CIKM'23
    • 04/2023: 2 tutorials (Joint Modeling in RS & Trustworthy RS) got accepted by IJCAI'23
    • 03/2023: I will serve as the PC Member of NeurIPS'23, RecSys'23, ICDM'23 and IEEE BigData'23
    • 03/2023: An invited talk for undergraduates at CSE, CUHK
    • 03/2023: An invited talk at BigsCity, BUAA
    • 02/2023, I am honored to receive the Midstream Research Programme for Universities (MRP) with Dr.Zijun Zhang
    • 02/2023: Our new survey Multi-Task Deep Recommender Systems: A Survey is online
    • 02/2023: Our new survey Multimodal Recommender Systems: A Survey is online
    • 01/2023: 2 PhD students (Pengyue and Xiaopeng) are welcome to join the AML Lab!
             [2022]
    • 12/2022: I will serve as the SPC member of SIGIR'23 and IJCAI'23, and the PC member of KDD'23 (Both tracks) and ICML'23
    • 12/2022: I am honored to receive the CCF-Ant Research Fund (CCF-蚂蚁科研基金)
    • 12/2022: We will provide a tutorial of AutoML for Deep Recommender Systems @ WSDM'23
    • 12/2022: We will provide a tutorial of Trustworthy Recommender Systems @ WWW'23
    • 12/2022: Our team won the Outstanding Project (8/34) in CCF-Tencent Open Fund 2021
    • 11/2022: Our ICDM'22 paper AutoAssign was selected as one of the best-ranked papers
    • 10/2022: I am honored to join the Distinguished Review Board for ACM Transactions on the Web
    • 09/2022: I will serve as the Senior PC Member of WWW'23
    • 09/2022: I am honored to receive one Early Career Research Grant from HKIDS with Dr.Zijun Zhang
    • 09/2022: 11 PhD students (Yejing, Jingtong, Yuhao, Yuanshao, Ziru, Langming, Maolin, Xiao, Zijian, Qidong and Wei) are welcome to join the AML Lab!
    • 08/2022: Our team won the 🥇 Gold Medal and Top 10 best innovation award in the 7th International Invention Innovation Competition in Canada (iCAN 2022), co-supervised with Dr. Liang Dong
    • 08/2022: A keynote talk at DLP workshop @ KDD'22
    • 07/2022: I will serve as the SPC Member of AAAI'23 and PC Member of ICLR'23
    • 07/2022: I co-host the 3rd Workshop on Deep Reinforcement Learning for Information Retrieval @ SIGIR'22
    • 06/2022: I will serve as the PC Member of ICDM'22
    • 05/2022: Our team won the 🥇 Gold Award with Grand Prize (US$13,000) and the Microsoft Outstanding AI Influencer Award in the Global AI Challenge for Building E&M Facilities, co-supervised with Prof. S Joe QIN
    • 05/2022: Our team ranked the 🥉 3/100 in Carbon Neutral Competition track of the 3rd Shandong Data Competition, co-supervised with Prof. S Joe QIN
    • 05/2022: I am honored to receive two SIRG grants with Dr.Liang Dong and Dr.Junming Liu at CityU
    • 04/2022: We provide tutorial Automated Machine Learning for Recommendations @ WWW'22
    • 04/2022: I will serve as the PC Member of NeurIPS'22, CIKM'22, ECML-PKDD'22, RecSys'22, and IEEE BigData'22
    • 03/2022: 1 workshop proposal got accepted by SIGIR'22
    • 01/2022: I will serve as the PC Member of SIGIR'22
             [2021]
             [2020]
    • 12/2020: 1 tutorial got accepted by WWW'21
    • 12/2020: I will serve as the Senior PC Member of IJCAI'21
    • 12/2020: Awarded MSU Dissertation Completion Fellowship
    • 12/2020: 1 paper got accepted by AAAI'21
    • 11/2020: Passed my comprehensive exam!
    • 11/2020: I will serve as the PC Member of KDD'21
    • 11/2020: 1 workshop proposal got accepted by WWW'21
    • 11/2020: I will serve as the PC Member of ECIR'21
    • 11/2020: I will serve as the Session Chair of ICONIP'20
    • 10/2020: 1 paper got accepted by WSDM'21
    • 10/2020: 1 paper got accepted by ICDE'21
    • 09/2020: I will serve as the PC Member of IJCAI'21
    • 09/2020: Received the CIKM'20 Student Travel Award
    • 08/2020: I will serve as the PC Member of AAAI'21
    • 08/2020: Received the KDD'20 Student Travel Award and will serve as volunteer
    • 07/2020: 1 paper got accepted by CIKM'20
    • 07/2020: I will serve as the PC Member of ICLR'21
    • 06/2020: I will serve as the PC Member of CIKM'20
    • 06/2020: I will serve as the PC Member of ICONIP'20
    • 05/2020: 1 paper got accepted by KDD'20
    • 05/2020: 2 papers got accepted by SIGIR'20
    • 05/2020: I was invited to present our RL-based E-commerce papers at INFORMS'20 Annual Meeting
    • 05/2020: I will serve as the PC Member of IEEE BigData'20
    • 04/2020: I will serve as the PC Member of IRS@KDD'20
    • 03/2020: I will co-host the Workshop on Deep Reinforcement Learning for Information Retrieval @ SIGIR'20
    • 03/2020: 1 workshop proposal got accepted by SIGIR'20
             [2019]
    • 12/2019: I will serve as the PC Member of AI4EDU'20
    • 12/2019: I will serve as the PC Member of IJCAI'20
    • 11/2019: I was invited to present our RL-based E-commerce papers at East China Normal University
    • 08/2019: I will serve as the PC Member of ICLR'20
    • 08/2019: I was invited to present our RL-based E-commerce papers at Shandong University
    • 07/2019: I will serve as the PC Member of AAAI'20
    • 07/2019: I was invited to present our RL-based E-commerce papers at Beijing University Of Chemical Technology
    • 07/2019: I was invited to present our RL-based E-commerce papers at TAL(好未来)
    • 06/2019: Received the KDD'19 Student Travel Award and will serve as volunteer
    • 06/2019: 1 paper got accepted by KDD'19 workshop
    • 05/2019: I will serve as the PC Member of RL4RealLife@ICML'19
    • 05/2019: I will serve as the PC Member of NLPCC'19
    • 04/2019: I will serve as the PC Member of IEEE BigData'19
    • 03/2019: I will host the Workshop on Deep Reinforcement Learning for Knowledge Discovery @ KDD'19
    • 03/2019: 1 Workshop proposal got accepted by KDD'19
    • 02/2019: I will serve as the PC Member of RecSys'19
    • 02/2019: 1 survey paper got accepted by ACM SIGWEB Newsletter
             [2018]
    • 11/2018: Received Outstanding Master's Thesis Award from Anhui Computer Federation
    • 11/2018: I was invited to present our RL-based recommender papers at Leiphone.com(雷锋网大课堂)
    • 10/2018: Dr.Dawei Yin was invited to present our RL-based recommender papers at CAS-AMSS(中科院数学所)
    • 10/2018: Dr.Jiliang Tang was invited to present our RL-based recommender papers at Criteo, Ann Arbor
    • 10/2018: Dr.Dawei Yin was invited to present our RL-based recommender papers at Tsinghua University
    • 09/2018: Dr.Long Xia was invited to present our RL-based recommender papers at CAS-ICT(中科院计算所)
    • 08/2018: I was invited to present our RL-based recommender papers at Gifshow(快手)
    • 08/2018: Dr.Jiliang Tang was invited to present our RL-based recommender papers at Bytedance(今日头条)
    • 07/2018: Our RL-based recommender project received the Criteo Faculty Research Award
    • 07/2018: Received the RecSys'18 Student Travel Award and will serve as volunteer
    • 07/2018: I will serve as the PC Member of IEEE BigData'18
    • 07/2018: 1 paper got accepted by RecSys'18
    • 06/2018: Received the KDD'18 Student Travel Award and will serve as volunteer
    • 05/2018: 1 paper got accepted by KDD'18
    • 04/2018: 1 survey paper got accepted by ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter
    • 02/2018: Received the SDM'18 Student Travel Award and will participate in the Doctoral Forum
             [2017]
    • 09/2017: Received the CIKM'17 Student Travel Award
    • 09/2017: 1 paper got accepted by ICDM'17 PhD Forum
    • 08/2017: 1 paper got accepted by ICDM'17
    • 08/2017: 1 paper got accepted by CIKM'17
    • 01/2017: Joined MSU as a Ph.D. student of computer science