Lixin Zou (邹立新) Associate Professor School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University Email: zoulixin AT whu DOT edu DOT cn [Google Scholar] [DBLP] [GitHub]

About Me

Lixin Zou (邹立新) is an Associate Professor at the School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University. Before that, he was a Staff Algorithm Engineer at Baidu Search Science team from Jul. 2020 to Nov. 2022. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science & Technology from Tsinghua University in 2020. Currently, he focuses on unbiased learning & pre-training for web search, recommendation and reinforcement learning.

Note: I am looking for self-motivated students to do long-term research with me!
If you are interested in working with me, please drop me an email.

News

• [June. 2023] One paper accepted by RecSys 2023.

• [May. 2023] The CheeseChat is launching its internal beta testing. Wuhan University students and faculty members can participate and try it out..

• [Apr. 2023] One paper accepted by SIGIR 2023, congratulations to Zuoli.

• [Apr. 2023] One paper accepted by TNNLS 2023, congratulations to Yuanguo.

• [Mar. 2023] One paper accepted by TNNLS 2023, congratulations to Wanli.

• [Jan. 2023] One paper accepted by The Web Conference 2023, congratulations to Kesen.

• [Oct. 2022] The WSDM Cup 2023, Unbiased Learning & Pre-training for Web Search, is kicked off. Welcome to join the competition!

• [Oct. 2022] One paper accepted by WSDM 2023, congratulations to Dan Luo.

• [Sep. 2022] One paper accepted by NeurIPS 2022.

• [Sep. 2022] One paper accepted by TWeb 2022.

• [Aug. 2022] One paper accepted by CIKM 2022.

• [Jul.   2022] Publish A Large Scale Search Dataset from Baidu Search Engine.

Professional Services

• Editorial Board Member
• Frontiers in Big Data

• PC Member & Reviewer:
• 2023: KDD, SIGIR, IJCAI, AAAI, WWW, ECIR, TKDE, JASIST, TALLIP, TOIS
• 2022: WSDM, IJCAI, KDD, SIGIR, NeurIPS
• 2021: SIGIR, IJCAI, AAAI, CIKM
• 2020: SIGIR, IJCAI, SIGKDD

• Session Chair:
• SIGIR'22 - Session on Bias, Conversational IR, NLP and Semantics

Educations & Academic Experience

• School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University. [2022.12 ~ Now]

• Associate Professor.

• Collaborator: Chenliang Li.

• Baidu Inc., Beijing, China. [2020.07 ~ 2022.11]

• Staff Algorithm Engineer.

• Mentor: Dawei Yin.

• Tsinghua University. Beijing, China. [2015.09 ~ 2020.06]

• Ph.D. in Computer Science & Technology (Outstanding Graduate).

• Advisor: Weidong Liu.

• Université de Montréal. Montreal, Canada. [2018.09 ~ 2019.03]

• Exchange Student at the Laboratoire RALI of Université de Montréal.

• Advisor: Jian-Yun Nie.

• JD.COM Data Science Lab. Beijing, China. [2017.09 ~ 2020.06]

• Research Intern.

• Mentor: Dawei Yin, Long Xia.

• Northwestern Polytechnical University. Xi'an, Shaanxi, China. [2011.09 ~ 2015.07]

• BEng. in Microelectronics (Outstanding Graduate).

Publications

• A Survey on Reinforcement Learning for Recommender Systems.
  Yuanguo Lin, Yong Liu, Fan Lin*, Lixin Zou*, Pengcheng Wu, Wenhua Zeng, Huanhuan Chen, Chunyan Miao.
  *Corresponding Author. To appear on TNNLS 2023.

• Adversarial Multi-Teacher Distillation for Semi-Supervised Relation Extraction.
  Wanli Li, Tieyun Qian*, Xuhui Li, Lixin Zou.
  *Corresponding Author. To appear on TNNLS 2023.

• User Retention-oriented Recommendation with Decision Transformer.
  Kesen Zhao,Lixin Zou*, Xiangyu Zhao*, Maolin Wang, Dawei Yin.
  * Corresponding Author. To appear on WWW 2023.

• Whole Page Unbiased Learning to Rank.
  Haitao Mao, Lixin Zou, Yujia Zheng, Jiliang Tang, Xiaokai Chu, Jiashu Zhao, Dawei Yin.
  Preprint on arXiv.[PDF]

• A Large Scale Search Dataset for Unbiased Learning to Rank.
  Lixin Zou, Haitao Mao, Xiaokai Chu, Jiliang Tang, Wenwen Ye, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin.
  NeurIPS 2022, CCF-A.[PDF] [CODE]

• Pre-trained Language Model based Retrieval and Ranking for Web Search.
  Lixin Zou*, Weixue Lu*, Yiding Liu*, Hengyi Cai*, Xiaokai Chu, Dehong Ma, Dating Shi, Zhicong Cheng, Simiu Gu, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin.
  * Equal Contribution. ACM Transactions on the Web, CCF-B.

• Model-based Unbiased Learning to Rank.
  Dan Luo, Lixin Zou, Qingyao Ai, Zhiyu Chen, Dawei Yin, Brian D Davison.
  WSDM 2023, CCF-B, Tsinghua-A. [PDF]

• Approximated Doubly Robust Search Relevance Estimation.
  Lixin Zou, Changying Hao, Hengyi Cai, Suqi Cheng, Shuaiqiang Wang, Wenwen Ye, Zhicong Cheng, Simu Gu, Dawei Yin.
  CIKM 2022, CCF-B. [PDF]

• A Hierarchical Multi-Granularity Pre-Trained Language Model for Web Search.
  Xiaokai Chu, Jiashu Zhao, Lixin Zou, Dawei Yin.
  SIGIR 2022, CCF-A. [PDF]

• Contrastive Disentangled Graph Convolutional Network for Weakly-supervised Node Classification.
  Xiaokai Chu, Jiashu Zhao, Xinxin Fan, Di Yao, Zhihua Zhu, Dawei Yin, Lixin Zou, Jingping Bi.
  DASFAA 2022, CCF-B. [PDF]

• Generative Session-based Recommendation.
  Zhidan Wang, Wenwen Ye, Xu Chen, Wenqiang Zhang, Zhenlei Wang, Lixin Zou and Weidong Liu.
  WWW 2022, CCF-A. [PDF]

• Fast Semantic Matching via Flexible Contextualized Interaction.
  Wenwen Ye, Yiding Liu, Lixin Zou, Hengyi Cai, Suqi Cheng, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin.
  WSDM 2022, CCF-B, Tsinghua-A. [PDF]

• Pre-trained Language Model based Ranking in Baidu Search.
  Lixin Zou, Shengqiang Zhang, Hengyi Cai, Dehong Ma, Suqi Cheng, Daiting Shi, Shuaiqiang Wang, Zhichong Cheng, Dawei Yin.
  KDD 2021, CCF-A. [PDF]

• Enhanced Doubly Robust Learning for Debiasing Post-Click Conversion Rate Estimation.
  Siyuan Guo, Lixin Zou*, Yiding Liu, Wenwen Ye, Suqi Cheng, Shuaiqiang Wang, Hechang Chen, Dawei Yin and Yi Chang.
  * Corresponding author, SIGIR 2021, CCF-A. [PDF]

• Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Malaria Control.
  Lixin Zou, Long Xia, Linfang Hou, Xiangyu Zhao, Dawei Yin.
  IJCAI 2021, CCF-A. [PDF][CODE]

• Whole-Chain Recommendations.
  Xiangyu Zhao, Long Xia, Lixin Zou, Hui Liu, Dawei Yin, Jiliang Tang.
  CIKM 2020, CCF-B. [PDF]

• Deep Multifaceted Transformers for Multi-objective Ranking in Large-Scale E-commerce Recommender Systems.
  Yulong Gu, Zhuoye Ding, Shuaiqiang Wang, Lixin Zou, Yiding Liu, Dawei Yin.
  CIKM 2020, CCF-B. [PDF]

• Meta-Learning for Neural Relation Classification with Distant Supervision.
  Zhenzhen Li, Jian-Yun Nie, Benyou Wang, Pan Du, Yuhan Zhang, Lixin Zou, Dongsheng Li.
  CIKM 2020, CCF-B. [PDF]

• Task-based Focal Loss for Adversarially Robust Meta-Learning.
  Yufang Hou, Lixin Zou, Weidong Liu.
  ICPR 2020, Tsinghua-B. [PDF]

• Neural Interactive Collaborativei Filtering.
  Lixin Zou, Long Xia, Yulong Gu, Xiangyu Zhao, Weidong Liu, Jimmy Xiangji Huang, Dawei Yin.
  SIGIR 2020, CCF-A. [PDF]

• Pseudo Dyna-Q: A reinforcement learning framework for interactive recommendation.
  Lixin Zou, Long Xia, Pan Du, Zhuo Zhang, Ting Bai, Weidong Liu, Jian-Yun Nie, Dawei Yin.
  WSDM 2020, CCF-B, Tsinghua-A. [PDF]

• UserSim: User Simulation via Supervised Generative Adversarial Network.
  Xiangyu Zhao, Long Xia, Lixin Zou, Dawei Yin, Jiliang Tang.
  WWW 2021, CCF-A. [PDF]

• Reinforcement learning to optimize long-term user engagement in recommender systems.
  Lixin Zou, Long Xia, Zhuoye Ding, Jiaxing Song, Weidong Liu, Dawei Yin.
  KDD 2019, CCF-A. [PDF]

• Ctrec: A long-short demands evolution model for continuous-time recommendation.
  Ting Bai, Lixin Zou*, Wayne Xin Zhao, Pan Du, Weidong Liu, Jian-Yun Nie, Ji-Rong Wen.
  * Co-first author, SIGIR 2019, CCF-A. [PDF]

• Reinforcement Learning to Diversify Top-N Recommendation.
  Lixin Zou, Long Xia, Zhuoye Ding, Dawei Yin, Jiaxing Song, Weidong Liu.
  DASFAA 2019, CCF-B. [PDF]

• HLGPS: a home location global positioning system in location-based social networks.
  Yulong Gu, Jiaxing Song, Weidong Liu, Lixin Zou.
  ICDM 2016, CCF-B. [PDF]

Selected Awards

• 2021  Outstanding Staff of MEG, Baidu Inc..

• 2020 Outstanding Graduate of Department of Computer Science, Tsinghua University.

• 2019  Tsinghua Yiqi Mei Scholarship.

• 2019  The Runner Up Award of KDD Cup.

• 2017  The Scholarship of People.cn..

• 2016   The Frist Prize in CCF National Big Data Innovation Contest, 1/all.

• 2014   Yajun Wu Second Scholarship for Undergraduate Student, 1/all.

• 2013   National Scholarship for Undergraduate Student, 1/all.

• 2012  National Scholarship for Undergraduate Student, 1/all.

• 2014   The Honorable Mention in the US Mathematical Contest in Modeling.

• 2012  The First Prize in National Advanced Mathematics Competition.