About me
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Dr. Xiaokun Zhang (张晓堃) |
I'm currently a postdoc research fellow at City University of HongKong working with Prof.Chen Ma and Prof. Kede Ma. I obtained my Phd, Master and Bachelor degree from Dalian University of Technology, fortunately supervised by Prof. Hongfei Lin. I also have a wonderful time working with Prof. Fenglong Ma at the Pennsylvania State University.
Welcome to any kind of collaborations. Let's do some interesting and meaningful works for the beautiful world!
NEWS!
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2026.8, One paper about Sequential recommendation is accepted by CIKM26', and another one about Agentic learing is accepted by fingdings of EMNLP26'. Thanks to all collaborators! -
2026.7, Our paper about Agent Reinforcement Learning has been awarded as Best Paper Runner-up at WAIC26'
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2026.5, One paper about Agentic evaluation for recommendation is accepted by KDD26' as Oral paper. Congratulations to Queyue!
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2026.4, One paper about Hateful content detection is accepted by SIGIR26'. Congratulations to Junyu!
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2026.1, Two papers about Data valuation in LLMs are accepted by ICLR26'. Thanks to all collaborators!
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2025.9, Our paper about News recommendation has been selected as Best Paper Candidate at RecSys25'.
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2024.10, Xiaokun obtained the Award of Outstanding Doctoral Thesis of Chinese Information Processing Society (CIPS)! Thank you to everyone who has provided support throughout my doctoral studies!
Selected Publications
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Branching Policy Optimization: Sandbox-Native Language Agent Reinforcement Learning. WAIC 2026, full paper, Best Paper Runner-up, [pdf].
Bowei He, Yankai Chen, Xiaokun Zhang, Xue Liu.
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LLM-as-a-Judge for Reliable and Explainable Offline Evaluation in Top-K Recommendation. KDD 2026, CCF B, full paper, Oral, [pdf].
Yue Que, Junyi Zhou, Xiaokun Zhang*, Haiming Jin, Qiao Xiang, Chen Ma*.
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Have We Really Understood Collaborative Information? An Empirical Investigation. WSDM 2026, CCF B, full paper, Oral, [pdf].
Xiaokun Zhang, Zhaochun Ren*, Bowei He, Ziqiang Cui, Chen Ma*.
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Preserving LLM Capabilities through Calibration Data Curation: From Analysis to Optimization. NeurIPS 2025, CCF A, full paper.
Bowei He, Lihao Yin, Huiling Zhen, Shuqi LIU, Han Wu, Xiaokun Zhang*, Mingxuan Yuan, Chen Ma*.
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IP2: Entity-Guided Interest Probing for Personalized News Recommendation. RecSys 2025, CCF B, full paper. Spotlight oral. Best paper candidate. [pdf]
Youlin Wu, Yuanyuan Sun, Xiaokun Zhang*, Haoxi Zhan, Bo Xu, Liang Yang, Hongfei Lin.
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MedDiTPro: A Prompt-Guided Diffusion Transformer for Multimodal Longitudinal Medical Data Synthesis. KDD 2025, CCF A, full paper.
Yuan Zhong, Xiaochen Wang, Jiaqi Wang, Xiaokun Zhang*, Fenglong Ma.
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A Survey on Side Information-driven Session-based Recommendation: From a Data-centric Perspective. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. TKDE 2025, CCF A, [pdf]
Xiaokun Zhang, Bo Xu*, Chenliang Li, Bowei He, Hongfei Lin, Chen Ma*, Fenglong Ma.
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Disentangling ID and Modality Effects for Session-based Recommendation. SIGIR 2024, CCF A, full paper. Best paper nominees,[pdf] [code] [zhihu]
Xiaokun Zhang, Bo Xu, Zhaochun Ren, Xiaochen Wang, Hongfei Lin* and Fenglong Ma.
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FineRec: Exploring Fine-grained Sequential Recommendation. SIGIR 2024, CCF A, full paper. [pdf] [code] [zhihu]
Xiaokun Zhang, Bo Xu, Youlin Wu, Yuan Zhong, Hongfei Lin* and Fenglong Ma.
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Beyond Co-occurrence: Multi-modal Session-based Recommendation. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. TKDE 2023, CCF A, [pdf] [code] [zhihu]
Xiaokun Zhang, Bo Xu, Fenglong Ma, Chenliang Li, Liang Yang and Hongfei Lin*.
Note: * indicates the corresponding author.Full list of publications in Google Scholar.
Academic Service
Conference PC Member
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WSDM 2027&2026, KDD 2027&2026&2025, SIGIR-AP 2026&2025, NeurIPS 2026 (Declined), ACL-ARR 2026(Area chair)&2025(Area chair)&2023, CIKM 2026&2024, ICML2026, MM 2026&2025, SIGIR 2026&2025&2023, IJCAI 2026, TheWebConf 2026&2025&2024, AAAI 2026&2025&2024&2023, COLING 2025&2024&2022, DASFAA 2024, etc.
Journal Reviewer
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TKDE, TOIS, TNNLS, IPM, TASLP, KAIS, Neural Networks, WWWJ, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, KBS, Information Fusion, Multimedia Systems, ESWA, Neurocomputing, EAAI, Applied Intelligence, etc.
Invited Talk
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2025, June, Multimodal recommendations and Student Panel at YSSNLP 2025, Dalian China.
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2024, July, Multimodal recommendations at VALSE Webinar, Online.
Experiences
-> 2024.7-Now, Postdoc, Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong.
-> 2020.9-2024.6, PhD, School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology.
-> 2023.10-2024.5, Visiting scholar, College of Information Sciences and Technology , Pennsylvania State University.
-> 2018.9-2020.6, Master, School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology.
-> 2016.6-2018.6, Software Engineer, working in a Startups.
-> 2012.9-2016.6, Bachelor Degree, School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology
Awards
Best paper Runner-up at WAIC 2026.
Best paper candidate at RecSys 2025.
Outstanding Reviewer at KDD 2025.
Outstanding Doctoral Thesis of Chinese Information Processing Society (CIPS), 2024.
Best paper nominees at SIGIR 2024.
Outstanding Graduates, Liaoning Province, 2024.
Outstanding Graduates, Dalian University of Technology, 2024.
National Scholarship for Doctoral Students, 2023.
Excellent Doctoral Candidate of Dalian University of Technology, 2021, 2022 and 2023.
IP&M 2022 Ph.D. Paper Award Honorable Mentions.
Outstanding Student Prize Scholarship of Baosteel, 2022.
Excellent postgraduate of Dalian University of Technology, 2019.
First Prize Scholarship for Doctoral Candidate of Dalian University of Technology, 2022.
First Prize Scholarship for Postgraduate of Dalian University of Technology, 2018, 2019 and 2020.
Updated at Aug, 2026