Wenlin Zhang

Introduction

I am now a third-year PhD candidate at AML Lab CityU, supervised by Prof.Xiangyu Zhao. Before that, I got M.S. and BS degree from Northwestern Polytechnical university in 2023 and 2020, supervised by Prof. Xuelong Li.

My research interests include Large Language Models, Search Agent, and Recommender System.

For more information, please feel free to contact me. Email: wl.z@my.cityu.edu.hk.

Selected Publications

Conference & Journal Papers

• To Search or Not to Search: Aligning the Decision Boundary of Deep Search Agents via Causal Intervention
  • Wenlin Zhang, Kuicai Dong, Junyi Li, Yingyi Zhang, Xiaopeng Li, Pengyue Jia, Yi Wen, Derong Xu, Maolin Wang, Yichao Wang, Yong Liu, Xiangyu Zhao
  • WWW’26, Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2026, CCF-A
• Exploring Recommender System Evaluation: A Multi-Modal LLM Agent Framework for A/B Testing
  • Wenlin Zhang, Xiangyang Li, Qiyuan Ge, Kuicai Dong, Pengyue Jia, Xiaopeng Li, Zijian Zhang, Maolin Wang, Yichao Wang, Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang, Xiangyu Zhao
  • KDD’26 (Benchmark track), Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, CCF-A
• Process vs. Outcome Reward: Which is Better for Agentic RAG Reinforcement Learning
  • Wenlin Zhang, Xiangyang Li, Kuicai Dong, Yichao Wang, Pengyue Jia, Xiaopeng Li, Yingyi Zhang, Derong Xu, Zhaocheng Du, Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang, Xiangyu Zhao
  • NeurIPS’25, Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, CCF A
• LLMTreeRec: A Tree-based Large Language Model Framework for Cold-start Recommendation
  • Wenlin Zhang, Chuhan Wu, Xiangyang Li, Yuhao Wang, Kuicai Dong, Yichao Wang, Xinyi Dai, Xiangyu Zhao, Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang
  • COLING’25, Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, CCF B
• A Survey of Personalization: From RAG to Agent
  • Xiaopeng Li, Pengyue Jia, Derong Xu, Yi Wen, Yingyi Zhang, Wenlin Zhang, Wanyu Wang, Yichao Wang, Xiangyang Li, Zhaocheng Du, Yong Liu, Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang, Xiangyu Zhao
  • TOIS, ACM Transactions on Information Systems, CCF-A
• Personalize Before Retrieve: LLM-based Personalized Query Expansion for User-Centric Retrieval
  • Yingyi Zhang, Pengyue Jia, Derong Xu, Yi Wen, Xianneng Li, Yichao Wang, Wenlin Zhang, Xiaopeng Li, Weinan Gan, Huifeng Guo, Yong Liu, Xiangyu Zhao
  • AAAI’26 (Oral), Proceedings of the 40th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, CCF-A
• NEZHA: A Zero-sacrifice and Hyperspeed Parallel Decoding Architecture for Generative Recommendations
  • Yejing Wang, Shengyu Zhou, Jinyu Lu, Ziwei Liu, Langming Liu, Maolin Wang, Wenlin Zhang, Feng Li, Wenbo Su, Pengjie Wang, Jian Xu, Xiangyu Zhao
  • WWW’26 (Industry Track), Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2026, CCF-A
• GFlowGR: Fine-tuning Generative Recommendation Frameworks with Generative Flow Networks
  • Yejing Wang, Shengyu Zhou, Jinyu Lu, Qidong Liu, Xinhang Li, Wenlin Zhang, Feng Li, Pengjie Wang, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao
• Towards Multi-Granularity Memory Association and Selection for Long-Term Conversational Agents
  • Derong Xu, Yi Wen, Pengyue Jia, Yingyi Zhang, Wenlin zhang, Yichao Wang, Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang, Xiangyu Zhao, Enhong Chen, Tong Xu
• Graph Convolution RPCA With Adaptive Graph
  • Rui Zhang, Wenlin Zhang, Pei Li, Xuelong Li
  • IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, CCF-A
• Robust kernel principal component analysis with optimal mean
  • Pei Li, Wenlin Zhang, Chengjun Lu, Rui Zhang, Xuelong Li
  • Neural Networks, CCF-B

Honors and Awards

• 2025.08 Outstanding Academic Performance Award (OAPA) and Research Tuition Scholarship(RTS), Granted by CityUHK
• 2025.10 NeurIPS 2025 Travel Award, Granted by NeurIPS 2025
• 2025.01 COLING 2025 Volunteer
• 2024.08 Research Tuition Scholarship(RTS), Granted by CityUHK
• 2023 National Scholarship, Granted by NWPU
• 2018 ACM-ICPC Asia QingDao Regional Contest Silver Medal

Work Experience

Research Intern - Huawei, Noah’s Ark Lab

Teaching Experience

2025~2026 Semester A - SDSC5002 Exploratory Data Analysis and Visualization, TA
2024~2025 Semester B - GE2343_SDSC2004 Data Visualization, TA
2024~2025 Semester A - SDSC5002 Exploratory Data Analysis and Visualization, TA\

News

[2026.01] Our paper ‘To Search or Not to Search: Aligning the Decision Boundary of Deep Search Agents via Causal Intervention’ is accepted to WWW’26!

[2025.11] Our paper AB Agent is accepted to KDD’26 Benchmark Track!

[2025.11] Our paper PBR is accepted to AAAI’26!

[2025.9] Our paper ReasonRAG is accepted to NeurIPS’25!

[2025.8] I’m honored to receive the Outstanding Academic Performance Award (OAPA) granted by CityU HK.

[2025.8] I’m honored to receive the Research Tuition Scholarship (RTS) granted by CityU HK.

[2024.12] Serve as the Volunteer in COLING’2025.

[2024.12] Our paper LLMTreeRec is accepted to COLING’2025.

[2024.8] I’m honored to receive the Research Tuition Scholarship (RTS) granted by CityU HK.

[2023.9] Start my Ph.D. at CityU HK.