Xiangyu Zhao   赵翔宇

              Assistant Professor


               School of Data Science
               City University of Hong Kong (CityU)

Correspondence

Email: zhaoxi35 [at] msu (dot) edu [contact me]
Mail: Xiangyu Zhao, Lau Ming Wai Academic Building, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong 999077
Links: [LinkedIn]     [Google Scholar]

[Biography]           [News]           [Publications]           [Services]           [Awards]           [Teaching]           [Internships]           [Openings]

Brief Biography

Xiangyu Zhao is a tenure-track assistant professor of the school 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 MSU (05/2021), his M.S. under the advisory of Prof. Enhong Chen at USTC (2017), and his B.Eng. under the advisory of Prof. Ming Tang and Prof. Tao Zhou at UESTC (2014) .

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

  • Reinforcement Learning, AutoML and their applications in Information Retrieval (search, recommendation and advertising)
  • Urban Computing, Human Mobility Modeling, Spatio-Temporal Data Analysis and Location-Based Social Networks
  • Social Computing, Social Network and Complex Network Analysis
  • AI for Finance, Education, Ecosystem, and Healthcare

    • My [CV] (updated Jun 2021).

    I have several PhD and Visiting positions in 2021/2022. CityU is ranked #48 in QS World University Rankings 2021. Please check HERE for more details.

    Our SIGIR 2021 workshop on deep reinforcement learning for information retrieval (DRL4IR) now calls for papers.

    News

    • 06/2021: I will serve as the PC Member of ICLR'22
    • 06/2021: I will serve as the PC Member of WSDM'22
    • 06/2021: I will serve as the PC Member of RL4RealLife@ICML'21
    • 05/2021: Passed my Ph.D. defense!
    • 05/2021: 1 paper got accepted by KDD'21
    • 05/2021: I was selected as Top 100 Chinese New Stars in Artificial Intelligence by Baidu Scholar [post]
    • 04/2021: We will provide tutorial Deep Learning for Recommendations: Fundamentals and Advances @ IJCAI'21
    • 04/2021: I will serve as the PC Member of NeurIPS'21
    • 03/2021: Received WWW 2021 Student Scholarship Award
    • 03/2021: [Call for Paper] I will co-host the 2nd Workshop on Deep Reinforcement Learning for Information Retrieval @ SIGIR'21
    • 03/2021: 1 workshop proposal got accepted by SIGIR'21
    • 01/2021: 2 papers got accepted by WWW'21
    • 01/2021: [Slides Uploaded] I will provide tutorial Deep Recommender System: Fundamentals and Advances @ WWW'21
    • 01/2021: [Video Uploaded] I will co-host the 2nd Workshop on Deep Reinforcement Learning for Knowledge Discovery @ WWW'21
    • 01/2021: Received the AAAI 2021 Student Travel Award and will serve as volunteer
    • 01/2021: I will serve as the PC Member of RecSys'21
    • 01/2021: I will serve as the PC Member of ICML'21
    • 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
    [More News]
    • 09/2020: I will serve as the PC Member of IJCAI'21
    • 09/2020: Received the CIKM 2020 Student Travel Award
    • 08/2020: I will serve as the PC Member of AAAI'21
    • 08/2020: Received the KDD 2020 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
    • 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 2019 Student Travel Award and will serve as volunteer
    • 06/2019: 1 paper got accepted by KDD2019 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 KDD2019
    • 02/2019: I will serve as the PC Member of RecSys'19
    • 02/2019: 1 survey paper got accepted by ACM SIGWEB Newsletter
    • 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 2018 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 RecSys2018
    • 06/2018: Received the KDD 2018 Student Travel Award and will serve as volunteer
    • 05/2018: 1 paper got accepted by KDD2018
    • 04/2018: 1 survey paper got accepted by ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter
    • 02/2018: Received the SDM 2018 Student Travel Award and will participate in the Doctoral Forum
    • 09/2017: Received the CIKM 2017 Student Travel Award
    • 09/2017: 1 paper got accepted by ICDM2017 PhD Forum
    • 08/2017: 1 paper got accepted by ICDM2017
    • 08/2017: 1 paper got accepted by CIKM2017

    Selected Publications


        Tutorial and Workshop Proposals



    1. Deep Learning for Recommendations: Fundamentals and Advances
      Wenqi Fan, Xiangyu Zhao, Dawei Yin, Jiliang Tang
      30th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI'2021) [Website]

    2. 2nd Deep Reinforcement Learning for Information Retrieval: Fundamentals and Advances
      Weinan Zhang, Xiangyu Zhao, Li Zhao, Dawei Yin, Grace Hui Yang, Alex Beutel
      44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'2021) [Website]

    3. Deep Recommender System: Fundamentals and Advances
      Xiangyu Zhao, Wenqi Fan, Dawei Yin, Jiliang Tang
      The Web Conference 2021 (WWW'2021) [Website][Slides][Videos]

    4. 2nd Deep Reinforcement Learning for Knowledge Discovery
      Jiliang Tang, Xiangyu Zhao, Dawei Yin, Long Xia, Huiji Gao, Rui Chen, Jason Gauci
      The Web Conference 2021 (WWW'2021) [Website][video]

    5. Deep Reinforcement Learning for Information Retrieval: Fundamentals and Advances
      Weinan Zhang, Xiangyu Zhao, Li Zhao, Dawei Yin, Grace Hui Yang, Alex Beutel
      43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'2020) [PDF][BibTeX][Website][Video]

    6. Deep Reinforcement Learning for Knowledge Discovery
      Jiliang Tang, Dawei Yin, Long Xia, Alex Beutel, Minmin Chen, Shauki Jain, Xiangyu Zhao
      25th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data (KDD'2019) [Website]

        Conference and Journal Publications



    1. AutoEmb: Automated Embedding Dimensionality Search in Streaming Recommendations
      Xiangyu Zhao, Haochen Liu, Wenqi Fan, Chong Wang, Ming Chen, Xudong Zheng, Xiaobing Liu, Jiliang Tang
      [PDF][BibTeX]

    2. Exploring Spatio-Temporal and Cross-Type Correlations for Crime Prediction
      Xiangyu Zhao, Hui Liu, Jiliang Tang
      [PDF][BibTeX]

    3. AutoLoss: Automated Loss Function Search in Recommendations
      Xiangyu Zhao, Haochen Liu, Wenqi Fan, Hui Liu, Jiliang Tang, Chong Wang
      27th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data (KDD'2021) [PDF][Slides][BibTeX]

    4. Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Malaria Control
      Lixin Zou, Long Xia, Linfang Hou, Xiangyu Zhao, Dawei Yin
      [PDF][BibTeX]

    5. AutoDim: Field-aware Embedding Dimension Search in Recommender Systems
      Xiangyu Zhao, Haochen Liu, Hui Liu, Jiliang Tang, Weiwei Guo, Jun Shi, Sida Wang, Huiji Gao, Bo Long
      The Web Conference 2021 (WWW'2021) [PDF][Slides][BibTeX]

    6. UserSim: User Simulation via Supervised Generative Adversarial Network
      Xiangyu Zhao, Long Xia, Lixin Zou, Hui Liu, Dawei Yin, Jiliang Tang
      The Web Conference 2021 (WWW'2021) [PDF][Slides][BibTeX]

    7. DEAR: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Online Advertising Impression in Recommender Systems
      Xiangyu Zhao, Changsheng Gu, Haoshenglun Zhang, Xiwang Yang, Xiaobing Liu, Jiliang Tang, Hui Liu
      35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'2021) [PDF][Slides][BibTeX]

    8. Towards Long-term Fairness in Recommendation
      Yingqiang Ge, Shuchang Liu, Ruoyuan Gao, Yikun Xian, Yunqi Li, Xiangyu Zhao, Changhua Pei, Fei Sun, Junfeng Ge, Wenwu Ou, Yongfeng Zhang
      13th International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'2021) [PDF][Slides][BibTeX]

    9. Attacking Black-box Recommendations via Copying Cross-domain User Profiles
      Wenqi Fan, Tyler Derr, Xiangyu Zhao, Yao Ma, Hui Liu, Jianping Wang, Jiliang Tang, Qing Li
      37th IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE'2021) [PDF][Slides][BibTeX]

    10. Whole-Chain Recommendations
      Xiangyu Zhao, Long Xia, Lixin Zou, Dawei Yin, Hui Liu, Jiliang Tang
      29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'2020) [PDF][Slides][BibTeX]

    11. Jointly Learning to Recommend and Advertise
      Xiangyu Zhao, Xudong Zheng, Xiwang Yang, Xiaobing Liu, Jiliang Tang
      26th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data (KDD'2020) [PDF][Slides][BibTeX]

    12. Automated Embedding Size Search in Deep Recommender Systems
      Xiangyu Zhao*, Haochen Liu*, Chong Wang, Xiaobing Liu, Jiliang Tang
      43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'2020) [PDF][Slides][BibTeX]

    13. Neural Interactive Collaborative Filtering
      Lixin Zou, Long Xia, Yulong Gu, Xiangyu Zhao, Weidong Liu, Jimmy Xiangji Huang, Dawei Yin
      43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR'2020) [PDF][Slides][BibTeX]

    14. Deep Reinforcement Learning for List-wise Recommendations
      Xiangyu Zhao, Liang Zhang, Long Xia, Zhuoye Ding, Dawei Yin, Jiliang Tang
      1st Workshop on Deep Reinforcement Learning for Knowledge Discovery (DRL4KDD'2019) [PDF][BibTeX][Code 1 2 3]

    15. Deep Reinforcement Learning for Search, Recommendation, and Online Advertising: A Survey
      Xiangyu Zhao, Long Xia, Jiliang Tang, Dawei Yin
      ACM SIGWEB Newsletter (SIGWEB), 2019, Issue Spring: Article No.4 [PDF][BibTeX]

    16. Deep Reinforcement Learning for Page-wise Recommendations
      Xiangyu Zhao, Long Xia, Liang Zhang, Zhuoye Ding, Dawei Yin, Jiliang Tang
      12th ACM Recommender Systems Conference (RecSys'2018) [PDF][Slides][Poster][BibTeX]

    17. Recommendations with Negative Feedback via Pairwise Deep Reinforcement Learning
      Xiangyu Zhao, Liang Zhang, Zhuoye Ding, Long Xia, Jiliang Tang, Dawei Yin
      24th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data (KDD'2018) [PDF][Poster][BibTeX]

    18. Crime in Urban Areas: A Data Mining Perspective
      Xiangyu Zhao, Jiliang Tang
      ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter (SIGKDD Explorations), 2018, 20(1): 1-12 [PDF][BibTeX]

    19. Modeling Temporal-Spatial Correlations for Crime Prediction
      Xiangyu Zhao, Jiliang Tang
      26th ACM International on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM'2017) [PDF][Slides][BibTeX]

    20. Incorporating Spatio-Temporal Smoothness for Air Quality Inference
      Xiangyu Zhao, Tong Xu, Yanjie Fu, Enhong Chen, Hao Guo
      17th International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM'2017) [PDF][Slides][BibTeX]

    21. Exploring Transfer Learning for Crime Prediction
      Xiangyu Zhao, Jiliang Tang
      17th International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM'2017), Ph.D. Forum [PDF][BibTeX]

    22. Taxi Driving Behavior Analysis in Latent Vehicle-to-Vehicle Networks: A Social Influence Perspective
      Tong Xu, Hengshu Zhu, Xiangyu Zhao, Qi Liu, Hao Zhong, Enhong Chen, Hui Xiong
      22nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD'2016) [PDF][Slides][Video][BibTeX]

    23. Exploring the Choice under Conflict for Social Event Participation
      Xiangyu Zhao, Tong Xu, Qi Liu, Hao Guo
      21st International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA'2016) [PDF][Slides][BibTeX]

    24. CoSoLoRec: Joint Factor Model with Content, Social, Location for Heterogeneous Point-of-Interest Recommendation
      Hao Guo, Xin Li, Ming He, Xiangyu Zhao, Guiquan Liu, Guandong Xu
      9th International Conference on Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management (KSEM'2016) [PDF][Slides][BibTeX]

    25. Identifying Effective Multiple Spreaders by Coloring Complex Networks
      Xiangyu Zhao, Bin Huang, Ming Tang, Haifeng Zhang, Duanbing Chen
      Europhysics Letters (EPL), 2015, 108(6): 68005 (SCI IF: 2.095) [PDF][BibTeX]

    26. Coloring the Complex Networks and its Application for Immunization Strategy
      Bin Huang, Xiangyu Zhao, Kai Qi, Ming Tang, Younghae Do
      Acta Physica Sinica (APS), 2013, 62(21): 218902-218902 (SCI IF: 0.845) [PDF][BibTeX]

    Services

    • Organizer
    • Conference Program Committee Member
      • 2022: ICLR, WSDM
      • 2021: KDD, AAAI, IJCAI (SPC), ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, RecSys, ECIR, RL4RealLife@ICML'21
      • 2020: AAAI, IJCAI, ICLR, CIKM, ICONIP, IEEE BigData, AI4EDU@AAAI'20, IRS@KDD'20
      • 2019: IEEE BigData, RecSys, NLPCC, RL4RealLife@ICML'19
      • 2018: IEEE BigData
    • Conference Reviewer
      • 2021: WWW, SIGIR, ACL
      • 2020: KDD, SIGIR, WSDM, ICWSM
      • 2019: KDD, AAAI, WWW, SIGIR, CIKM, ICWSM, EMNLP, ASONAM
      • 2018: KDD, AAAI, WWW, SIGIR, CIKM, WSDM, ICWSM, RecSys, ASONAM, CHI
      • 2017: AAAI, SIGIR, CIKM, SDM, RecSys, ICWSM, DASFAA, ASONAM
      • 2016: KDD, CIKM, ICDM, RecSys, DASFAA, PAKDD, WAIM, KSEM, ASONAM
      • 2015: KSEM, ASONAM, AAAI BigData
    • Journal Reviewer
      • IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (IEEE TKDE)
      • ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (ACM TKDD)
      • ACM Transactions on Information Systems (ACM TOIS)
      • ACM Computing Surveys (ACM CSUR)
      • Machine Learning
      • Journal of Computer Science and Technology (JCST)
      • IEEE Intelligent Systems
      • Journal of Big Data
      • IEEE Access
      • Information Processing and Management
      • Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI)
      • ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information (IJGI)
      • Sustainability
    • Student Membership
      • Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
      • Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR)
      • Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
      • Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)
    • Conference Volunteer
      • 2021: AAAI
      • 2020: KDD
      • 2019: KDD
      • 2018: KDD, RecSys
      • 2011: CCCN

    Honors and Awards

    • MSU:
      • 2021, Top 100 Chinese New Stars in Artificial Intelligence
      • 2021, WWW 2021 Student Scholarship Award
      • 2021, AAAI 2021 Student Travel Award
      • 2021, MSU Dissertation Completion Fellowship
      • 2020, CIKM 2020 Student Travel Award
      • 2020, KDD 2020 Student Travel Award
      • 2019, KDD 2019 Student Travel Award
      • 2018, Bytedance Research Award (PI: Dr. Jiliang Tang, based on my research)
      • 2018, RecSys 2018 Student Travel Award
      • 2018, KDD 2018 Student Travel Award
      • 2018, Criteo Research Award (PI: Dr. Jiliang Tang, based on my research)
      • 2018, SDM 2018 Student Travel Award
      • 2017, CIKM 2017 Student Travel Award
    • USTC:
      • 2018, Outstanding Master's Thesis Award of Anhui Computer Federation (Top 15 in Anhui Province)
      • 2017, Outstanding Graduate Award of USTC
      • 2016, National Scholarship for Graduate Students of China (Highest National Scholarship)
      • 2016, Graduate Student First-class Academic Scholarship
      • 2015, Graduate Student First-class Academic Scholarship
      • 2014, Graduate Student First-class Academic Scholarship
    • UESTC:
      • 2014, Outstanding Graduation Thesis (1% in university, 1/205 in department)
      • 2014, Outstanding Graduate Award of UESTC
      • 2012, First Prize of Contemporary Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling of China (Sichuan)
      • 2012, First Prize of Mathematical Contest in Modeling (3/200, only freshman team)
      • 2011, Futong Scholarship (3/600)

    Teaching

    • 2021 Aug, Conference Tutor, Deep Learning for Recommendations: Fundamentals and Advances, IJCAI'21
    • 2021 Apr, Conference Tutor, Deep Recommender System: Fundamentals and Advances, WWW'21
    • 2019 Nov, Guest Lecturer, Urban Security and Crime Prediction, East China Normal University
    • 2019 Aug, Guest Lecturer, Deep Reinforcement Learning for Online Advertising, Shandong University
    • 2019 Jul, Guest Lecturer, Urban Security and Crime Prediction, Beijing University of Chemical Technology
    • 2019 Jul, Invited Talk, Deep Reinforcement Learning based Recommendations, TAL Education Group
    • 2018 Nov, Lecturer, Deep Reinforcement Learning for E-commerce, Leiphone Online Course
    • 2018 Aug, Invited Talk, Deep Reinforcement Learning based Recommendations, Kuaishou.com
    • 2015 Fall, Teaching Assistant, Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery (for graduate students in USTC)
    • 2013 Spring, Teaching Assistant, Computer Science Research (for undergraduate students in UESTC)

    Internships

    • 2021 Jan-Apr, Research Intern, RL and AutoML for Recommendation/Advertising, AML Research@Bytedance
    • 2020 May-Aug, Research Engineer Intern, AutoML and RL for Search/Rec/Ads DNN Search, AI Foundation@Linkedin
    • 2019 May-Dec, Research Intern, RL and AutoML for Recommendation/Advertising, Applied Machine Learning@Bytedance
    • 2018 Sep, Invited Visiting Scholar, Reinforcement Learning Based Computational Advertising, Data-Advertising@Bytedance
    • 2018 May-Aug, Research Intern, Reinforcement Learning Based Recommender System, Data Science Lab@JD.com
    • 2017 Jun-Aug, Research Intern, Deep Learning Based Recommender System, Data Science Lab@JD.com