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Wenlin Zhang

Ph.D. Candidate
City University of Hong Kong
wl.z(at)my.cityu.edu.hk


About Me

I am a third-year Ph.D. candidate at AML Lab, City University of Hong Kong, supervised by Prof. Xiangyu Zhao. Before that, I received my M.S. and B.S. degrees 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 at wl.z@my.cityu.edu.hk.

🔥 News

🏆 Honors and Awards

  1. 2025
    Outstanding Academic Performance Award (OAPA), granted by CityUHK
  2. 2025
    NeurIPS 2025 Travel Award, granted by NeurIPS 2025
  3. 2025
    COLING 2025 Volunteer
  4. 2025
    Research Tuition Scholarship (RTS), granted by CityUHK
  5. 2024
    Research Tuition Scholarship (RTS), granted by CityUHK
  6. 2023
    National Scholarship, granted by Northwestern Polytechnical University
  7. 2018
    ACM-ICPC Asia Qingdao Regional Contest Silver Medal

🎓 Education

  1. City University of Hong Kong
    Sep. 2023 - Now
    Ph.D. Candidate

  2. Northwestern Polytechnical University
    2020 - 2023
    M.S.

  3. Northwestern Polytechnical University
    2016 - 2020
    B.S.

đź“‘ Publications

  1. 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
    Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'26 Benchmark Track), CCF-A.
    PDF

  2. 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
    Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference (WWW'26), CCF-A.
    PDF

  3. 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
    Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS'25), CCF-A.
    PDF

  4. 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
    Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING'25), CCF-B.
    PDF

  5. Tutorial on Generative Recommendation: Foundations and Frontiers
    Xiaopeng Li, Yejing Wang, Honghui Bao, Bo Chen, Kuo Cai, Wenlin Zhang, Ziwei Liu, Sheng Zhang, Binhao Wang, Qinglin Jia, Qiang Luo, Ruiming Tang, Xiangyu Zhao
    Proceedings of the 32nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'26 Tutorial).

  6. T-GINEE: A Tensor-Based Multi-Graph Representation Learning
    Maolin Wang, Xuhui Chen, Ziting Mai, Zhiqi Li, Tianshuo Wei, Yutian Xiao, Wenlin Zhang, Wanyu Wang, Ruocheng Guo, Haoxuan Li, Zenglin Xu, Xiangyu Zhao
    Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML'26), CCF-A.

  7. Towards Pareto-Optimal Tool-Integrated Agents with Pareto Ranking Policy Optimization
    Junyi Li, Xiaowei Qian, Yingyi Zhang, Wenlin Zhang, Guojing Li, Sheng Zhang, Xiao Han, Yichao Wang, Xiangyu Zhao
    Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML'26), CCF-A.
    Spotlight

  8. MemSearch-o1: Empowering Large Language Models with Reasoning-Aligned Memory Growth in Agentic Search
    Sheng Zhang, Junyi Li, Yingyi Zhang, Pengyue Jia, Yichao Wang, Xiaowei Qian, Wenlin Zhang, Maolin Wang, Yong Liu, Xiangyu Zhao
    Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'26), CCF-A.
    PDF

  9. MTA: A Merge-then-Adapt Framework for Personalized Large Language Models
    Xiaopeng Li, Yuanjin Zheng, Wanyu Wang, Wenlin Zhang, Pengyue Jia, Yingyi Zhang, Haiying He, Mengyang Ma, Yiqi Wang, Maolin Wang, Xuetao Wei, Xiangyu Zhao
    Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'26), CCF-A.
    PDF

  10. Learning How and What to Memorize: Cognition-Inspired Two-Stage Optimization for Evolving Memory
    Derong Xu, Shuochen Liu, Pengfei Luo, Pengyue Jia, Yingyi Zhang, Yi Wen, Yimin Deng, Wenlin Zhang, Enhong Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Tong Xu
    Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL'26), CCF-A.
    PDF

  11. Bridging Personalization and AI: From RAG to Agent
    Pengyue Jia, Xiaopeng Li, Derong Xu, Yi Wen, Yingyi Zhang, Wenlin Zhang, Wanyu Wang, Yichao Wang, Yong Liu, Xiangyu Zhao
    Proceedings of the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'26 Tutorial).

  12. 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, Chuan Yu, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao
    Proceedings of the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'26), CCF-A.
    PDF Deployed across Taobao businesses

  13. Personalized Deep Research: A User-Centric Framework, Dataset, and Hybrid Evaluation for Knowledge Discovery
    Xiaopeng Li, Wenlin Zhang, Yingyi Zhang, Pengyue Jia, Yejing Wang, Yichao Wang, Yong Liu, Huifeng Guo, Xiangyu Zhao
    Proceedings of the 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'26 Resource Track), CCF-A.
    PDF

  14. Evoking User Memory: Personalizing LLM via Recollection-Familiarity Adaptive Retrieval
    Yingyi Zhang, Junyi Li, Wenlin Zhang, Pengyue Jia, Xianneng Li, Yichao Wang, Derong Xu, Yi Wen, Huifeng Guo, Yong Liu, Xiangyu Zhao
    Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR'26).
    PDF

  15. From Single to Multi-Granularity: Toward Long-Term Memory Association and Selection of Conversational Agents
    Derong Xu, Yi Wen, Pengyue Jia, Yingyi Zhang, Wenlin Zhang, Yichao Wang, Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang, Xiangyu Zhao, Enhong Chen, Tong Xu
    Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR'26).

  16. 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
    Proceedings of the 40th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'26 Oral), CCF-A.
    PDF

  17. 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
    Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference (WWW'26 Industry Track), CCF-A.
    PDF

  18. 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
    ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), CCF-A.
    PDF

  19. 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
    Preprint.
    PDF

  20. Graph Convolution RPCA With Adaptive Graph
    Rui Zhang, Wenlin Zhang, Pei Li, Xuelong Li
    IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, CCF-A.
    PDF

  21. Robust kernel principal component analysis with optimal mean
    Pei Li, Wenlin Zhang, Chengjun Lu, Rui Zhang, Xuelong Li
    Neural Networks, CCF-B.
    PDF

đź’Ľ Internships

✏️ Teaching Experience


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