Research output per year
Research output per year
Personal profile
Author IDs
ORCID iD: 0000-0003-2926-4416
Scopus Author ID: 57199991626
Google Scholar Profile: Nkm9r2IAAAAJ
Impact
Qualifications (Brief)
BEng (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China), MSc (University of Science and Technology of China), and PhD (Michigan State University)
Biography
Xiangyu Zhao is a tenured associate professor of Data Science at City University of Hong Kong (CityU). He is designated as the CityU Thetos Young Scholar (two awardees annually). He worked as an assistant professor at CityU from Sept 2021, and then got an early promotion in July 2025. Prior to CityU, he completed his Ph.D. under Prof. Jiliang Tang at MSU, his M.S. under Prof. Enhong Chen at USTC, and his B.Eng. under Prof. Tao Zhou and Prof. Ming Tang at 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 & Agents, Trustworthy AI, AutoML, Reinforcement Learning, and Multimodal ML
- AI + X: Healthcare, Urban Computing & Smart City, Science, and Education
His research has been awarded KDD'25 Best Paper Award Runner Up, 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), HW Innovation Research Program (twice), Tencent Focused Research Fund (twice), CCF-Alimama Research Fund, HW Young Scholar Funding Scheme, Kuaishou Consultation Service, HKIDS Early Career Research Grant, and MSU Dissertation Fellowship. He is the principal awardee of the HKRGC Key Projects ollaborative Research Fund (CRF) and Research Impact Fund (RIF), marking him as the ONLY assistant professor (then) to lead both such key projects in Hong Kong. He guided the students to win the NeurIPS Competition 2024 Champion (1/1500+ global teams), KDD Cup 2024 Runner Up (2/500+ global teams), International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva 2023 Silver Medal, and iCAN 2022 Gold Medal. He is the awardee of the CityU Outstanding Research Award, Thetos Young Scholar Award (two awardees annually), and CityU Teaching Excellence Award Honourable Mention. He is among the Stanford World's Top 2% Scientists in 2024-2025.
He serves as the top-tier Artificial Intelligence and Data Science conference chair and organizer at WSDM'27, WWW'25, ICICIP'25, ISNN'25, WAIM'24, NLPCC'24, and ADC'24, and the journal associate editor at Neural Networks, Nature NPJ Artificial Intelligence, ACM Transactions on the Web, and Frontiers in Big Data. He serves as the conference (senior) area chair and program committee member over 100 times. He serves as the workshop organizer at KDD'19, SIGIR'20/21/22/24/25, WWW'21/24, WSDM'26, CIKM'23/25, Recsys'23, and a lead tutor at KDD'23/25, 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.
Research Interests/Areas
- Personalization, Recommender System, Search Engine, Online Advertising, and Information Retrieval
- Large Language Model & Agents, Trustworthy AI, AutoML, Reinforcement Learning, and Multimodal ML
- AI + X: Healthcare, Urban Computing & Smart City, Science, and Education
Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):
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SDG 3 Good Health and Well-being -
SDG 4 Quality Education -
SDG 6 Clean Water and Sanitation -
SDG 7 Affordable and Clean Energy -
SDG 8 Decent Work and Economic Growth -
SDG 9 Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure -
SDG 11 Sustainable Cities and Communities -
SDG 13 Climate Action -
SDG 15 Life on Land -
SDG 17 Partnerships for the Goals
Fingerprint
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Collaborations from the last five years
Recent external collaboration based on locations. Dive into details by clicking on the dots or
Research output
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AEGI: Anchor Event Guided Inference for TKGQA
Fu, Y. (Co-first Author), Deng, Y. (Co-first Author), Wang, Y. (Co-first Author), Zhu, L., Qian, X., Zhao, G. & Zhao, X., Jun 2026, Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: 30th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, PAKDD 2026, Proceedings, Part III. Wong, R.C.-W., Tong, H., Lu, H., Kwok, J., Salim, F., Song, Y. & Yiu, M. L. (eds.). 1 ed. Springer Singapore, p. 253-264 12 p. (Lecture Notes in Computer Science; vol. 16599 LNAI).Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary Works › RGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication) › peer-review
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ARCHER: Shooting Straight in Multimodal E-Commerce Search at Alibaba with Progressive Alignment
Wang, M., Fu, L., Chu, J., Guo, K., Qin, C., Wang, X., Wu, S., Jiang, W. & Zhao, X., Apr 2026, WWW '26 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2026. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery, p. 7700-7711 12 p. (WWW - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference).Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary Works › RGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication) › peer-review
Open AccessFile6 Downloads (CityUHK Scholars) -
A Survey of Personalization: From RAG to Agent
Li, X. (Co-first Author), Jia, P. (Co-first Author), Xu, D., Wen, Y., Zhang, Y., Zhang, W., Wang, W., Wang, Y., Du, Z., Li, X., Liu, Y., Guo, H., Tang, R. & Zhao, X., May 2026, In: ACM Transactions on Information Systems. 44, 4, 39 p., 93.Research output: Journal Publications and Reviews › RGC 21 - Publication in refereed journal › peer-review
Open AccessFile3 Link opens in a new tab Citations (Scopus)12 Downloads (CityUHK Scholars) -
Automated Information Flow Selection for Multi-scenario Multi-task Recommendation
Yang, C., Liu, D., Li, S., Fu, Y., Tang, X., Luo, W., Zhao, X., He, X. & Ming, Z., 2026, WSDM '26: Proceedings of the Nineteenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. Association for Computing Machinery, p. 808-817 10 p. (WSDM - Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining).Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary Works › RGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication) › peer-review
Open AccessFile3 Downloads (CityUHK Scholars) -
BlossomRec: Block-level Fused Sparse Attention Mechanism for Sequential Recommendations
Ma, M. (Co-first Author), Li, X. (Co-first Author), Wang, W. (Co-first Author), Du, Z., Gao, J., Jia, P., Ye, Y., Wang, Y., Weng, Y., Luo, W., Han, X. & Zhao, X., Apr 2026, WWW '26 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2026. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery, p. 6389-6399 11 p. (WWW - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference).Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary Works › RGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication) › peer-review
Open AccessFile4 Downloads (CityUHK Scholars)
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GRF: Information Retrieval in the Era of Large Language Models: Understanding, Generalization, and Trustworthiness
ZHAO, X. (Principal Investigator / Project Coordinator), Li, Q. (Co-Investigator), Xu, J. (Co-Investigator) & YIN, D. (Co-Investigator)
1/01/26 → …
Project: Research
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NSFC-YPC-HK: Research on Key Technologies of Adaptive Recommendation Based on Automated Machine Learning
ZHAO, X. (Principal Investigator / Project Coordinator)
1/01/26 → …
Project: Research
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DON_RMG: Self-Evolving and Trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems
ZHAO, X. (Principal Investigator / Project Coordinator)
1/11/25 → …
Project: Research
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DON: Research on Personalized Bidding and Advertising Placement Based on Reinforcement Learning
ZHAO, X. (Principal Investigator / Project Coordinator)
23/10/25 → …
Project: Research
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CRF: Trustworthy Large Language Models: A Multifaceted Strategy for Truthfulness, Fairness, and Privacy Preservation
ZHAO, X. (Principal Investigator / Project Coordinator), JIA, X. (Co-Principal Investigator), KING, I. K. C. (Co-Principal Investigator), Li, Q. (Co-Principal Investigator), Xu, J. (Co-Principal Investigator), YANG, Y. (Co-Principal Investigator), TANG, J. (Collaborator), YIN, D. (Collaborator) & ZHENG, Y. (Collaborator)
30/06/25 → …
Project: Research
Prizes
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Tencent University Cooperation Project
ZHAO, X. (Recipient), Feb 2026
Prize: RGC 64B - Prizes and awards
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CityU College of Computing Research Excellence Award (awardee: Dr. Maoling Wang), supervisor
WANG, M. (Recipient) & ZHAO, X. (Recipient), 2026
Prize: RGC 64B - Prizes and awards
Press/Media
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CityU’s record-breaking showing at International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva
LAU, C., LEUNG, M. Y. K., HILL, F. I., PANG, S. W., LI, H., WANG, S., YU, X., LEI, D., LI, Y., WU, W., ZHU, Z., TSO, C. Y., ZHANG, W., TU, K. N., LIU, Y., NG, S. T. T., ZHAO, S., LEE, W. M., LAM, H. F., LUO, X., ZHANG, Z., ZHAO, X., YAN, H., XIE, M., ZHU, K., JING, X., HU, J., TSE, C. F. N., LU, J., LAM, H. W. M., LAM, H. W. R., HO, J. C. Y., DAOUD, W., KHOO, B. L., KWONG, T. W. S., LI, X., CHAN, C. H., LUK, K. M., CHU, P. K. H., LO, P. K. P. & ZHI, C.
29/04/23
7 items of Media coverage
Press/Media: Press / Media
Activities
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A Survey of Personalization: From RAG to Agent
ZHAO, X. (Invited Speaker)
Jun 2025Activity: Talk/lecture or presentation › Talk/lecture
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Adaptive and Automated Deep Recommender Systems, at KDD'24 Finance Day
ZHAO, X. (Keynote Speaker)
Jun 2025Activity: Talk/lecture or presentation › Talk/lecture
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The 29th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
ZHAO, X. (Senior Program Committee)
May 2025Activity: Organizing or Participating in a conference / an event › Conference / Symposium
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34th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2025)
ZHAO, X. (Senior Program Committee)
May 2025 → Aug 2025Activity: Organizing or Participating in a conference / an event › Conference / Symposium
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39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025)
ZHAO, X. (Area Chair)
Apr 2025 → Jul 2025Activity: Organizing or Participating in a conference / an event › Conference / Symposium