Lixin Zou
Associate Professor
School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University, China
Xiaomi Young Scholar
Huawei Young Scholar
Email (zoulixin AT whu DOT edu DOT cn)
Google Scholar / HomePage@Wuhan University

I am currently an Associate Professor in the School of Cyber Science and Engineering at Wuhan University since 2022.12. I received my Ph.D. degree from Tsinghua University in 2020, where I was advised by Prof. Weidong Liu. Before joining Wuhan University, I was a Staff Algorithm Engineer at Baidu Inc. from 2020 to 2022. My main research interests include efficient large language models, web search, recommendation systems, and data denoising. I have received the COLING 2025 Best Social Impact Paper, the KDD Cup 2019 Runner-Up Award, and have been selected as a Xiaomi Young Scholar and Huawei Young Scholar.
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
Education and Work Experience
Selected Publications [Full Publications] (*Corresponding Author)
Generative Causality-driven Network for Graph Multi-task Learning
Xixun Lin, Yu Qing, Yanan Cao, Lixin Zou, Chuan Zhou, Jia Wu, Chenliang Li, Peng Zhang, Shirui Pan
Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 2025
Who You Are Matters: Bridging Interests and Social Roles via LLM-Enhanced Logic
Qing Yu, Xiaobei Wang, Shuchang Liu, cheng.feng, Xiaoyu Yang, Xueliang Wang, Chang Meng, Shanshan Wu, HailanYang, Bin Wen, Huihui Xiao, Xiang Li, Fan Yang, Xiaoqiang Feng, Lantao Hu, Han Li, Kun Gai, Lixin Zou* (*Corresponding Author)
The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025
AIGuard: A Benchmark and Lightweight Detection for E-commerce AIGC Risks
Wenhua Zhang, Xuanrong Rao, Weicheng Li, Lixin Zou*, Xiangyang Luo, Chubin Zhuang, Yongjie Hong, Zhen Qin, Hengyu Chang, Chenliang Li, Bo Zheng* (*Corresponding Author)
The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Findings), 2025
Token-level Preference Self-Alignment Optimization for Multi-style Outline Controllable Generation
Zihao Li, Xuekong Xu, Ziyao Chen, Lixin Zou, Ethanhjwu, Qiang Chen, Chenliang Li (*Corresponding Author)
The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Findings), 2025
Weak-to-Strong Honesty Alignment via Learning-to-Rank Supervision
Yunfan Xie, Lixin Zou*, Dan Luo, Min Tang, Chenliang Li (*Corresponding Author)
The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Findings), 2025
Flow Matching based Sequential Recommender Model
Feng Liu, Lixin Zou*, Xiangyu Zhao, Min Tang, Liming Dong, Dan Luo, Xiangyang Luo*, Chenliang Li (*Corresponding Author)
The 34th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.(CCF-A), 2025
DANCE: Resource-Efficient Neural Architecture Search with Data-Aware and Continuous Adaptation
Maolin Wang, Tianshuo Wei, Sheng Zhang, Ruocheng Guo, Wangyu Wang, Shanshan Ye, Lixin Zou, Xuetao Wei, Xiangyu Zhao*
The 34th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.(CCF-A), 2025
Uniform Graph Pre-training and Prompting for Transferable Recommendation
Qing Yu, Lixin Zou*, Xiangyang Luo*, Xiangyu Zhao, Chenliang Li (*Corresponding Author)
ACM Transactions on Information Systems.(CCF-A), 2025
Mitigating Language Confusion through Inference-time Intervention
Yunfan Xie, Lixin Zou*, Dan Luo, Min Tang, Chenliang Li, Liming Dong, Xiangyang Luo* (*Corresponding Author)
The 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics.(CCF-B), 2025
META-LORA：Memory-Efficient Sample Reweighting for Fine-Tuning Large Language Models
Weicheng Li, Lixin Zou*, Min Tang, Qing Yu, Wanli Li, Chenliang Li (*Corresponding Author)
The 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics.(CCF-B), 2025
CHIFRAUD：A Long-term Web Text Benchmark for Chinese Fraud Detection
Min Tang, Lixin Zou*, Shiuan-ni Liang, Zhe Jin, Weiqing Wang, Shujie Cui (*Corresponding Author)
The 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics.(CCF-B, Best Social Impact Paper), 2025
Sequential Recommendation by Reprogramming Pretrained Transformer
Min Tang, Shujie Cui, Zhe Jin, Shiuan-ni Liang, Chenliang Li, Lixin Zou* (*Corresponding Author)
Information Processing & Management 62 (1), 103938. (SCI-1, CCF-B, Best Journal Paper Award Winner in RecSys 2025), 2025
Spectral and Geometric Spaces Representation Regularization for Multi-Modal Sequential Recommendation
Zihao Li, Xuekong Xu, Zuoli Tang, Lixin Zou, Qian Wang, Chenliang Li (*Corresponding Author)
The 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. (CCF-B), 2024
TEXT CAN BE FAIR：Mitigating Popularity Bias with PLMs by Learning Relative Preference
Zuoli Tang, Zhaoxin Huan, Zihao Li, Shirui Hu, Xiaolu Zhang, Jun Zhou, Lixin Zou*, Chenliang Li* (*Corresponding Author)
The 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. (CCF-B), 2024
Unbiased Recommendation Through Invariant Representation Learning
Min Tang, Lixin Zou*, Shujie Cui, Shiuan-ni Liang, Zhe Jin (*Corresponding Author)
Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases. (CCF-B), 2024
Efficient Sparse Attention needs Adaptive Token Release
Chaoran Zhang, Lixin Zou*, Dan Luo, Xiangyang Luo, Zihao Li, Min Tang, Chenliang Li (*Corresponding Author)
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024. (CCF-A), 2024
Unbiased Learning-to-Rank Needs Unconfounded Propensity Estimation
Dan Luo, Lixin Zou*, Qingyao Ai, Zhiyu Chen, Chenliang Li, Dawei Yin, Brian D. Davison (*Corresponding Author)
The 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. (CCF-A), 2024
Toward Bias-Agnostic Recommender Systems：A Universal Generative Framework
Zhidan Wang, Lixin Zou*, Chenliang Li, Shuaiqiang Wang, Xu Chen, Dawei Yin, Weidong Liu (*Corresponding Author)
ACM Transactions on Information Systems 2024. (CCF-A), 2024
Whole Page Unbiased Learning to Rank
Haitao Mao, Lixin Zou*, Yujia Zheng, Jiliang Tang, Xiaokai Chu, Jiashu Zhao, Dawei Yin
The ACM on Web Conference 2024. (CCF-A), 2024
LT^2R：Learning to Online Learning to Rank for Web Search
Xiaokai Chu, Jiashu Zhao, Changying Hao, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Lixin Zou*, Chenliang Li (*Corresponding Author)
2024 IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE). (CCF-A), 2024
Model-based Unbiased Learning to Rank
Dan Luo, Lixin Zou*, Qingyao Ai, Zhiyu Chen, Dawei Yin, Brian D Davison
The 16th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining. (CCF-B), 2023
Tutorial：Data Denoising Metrics in Recommender Systems
Pengfei Wang, Chenliang Li, Lixin Zou*, Zhichao Feng, Kaiyuan Li, Xiaochen Li, Xialong Liu, Shangguang Wang
The 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management., 2023
STRec：Sparse Transformer for Sequential Recommendations
Chengxi Li, Yejing Wang, Qidong Liu, Xiangyu Zhao, Wanyu Wang, Yiqi Wang, Lixin Zou*, Wenqi Fan, Qing Li
The 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems. (CCF-B), 2023
Towards Flexible and Adaptive Neural Process for Cold-Start Recommendation
Xixun Lin, Chuan Zhou, Jia Wu, Lixin Zou*, Shirui Pan, Yanan Cao, Bin Wang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. (CCF-A), 2023
Sample Efficient Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning
Siyuan Guo, Lixin Zou*, Hechang Chen, Bohao Qu, Haotian Chi, S Yu Philip, Yi Chang
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. (CCF-A), 2023
Towards Multi-Interest Pre-training with Sparse Capsule Network
Zuoli Tang, Lin Wang, Lixin Zou*, Xiaolu Zhang, Jun Zhou, Chenliang Li* (*Corresponding Author)
The 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval.(CCF-A), 2023
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)
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems.(SCI-1, CCF-B), 2023
Adversarial Multi-Teacher Distillation for Semi-Supervised Relation Extraction
Wanli Li, Tieyun Qian*, Xuhui Li, Lixin Zou*
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems.(SCI-1, CCF-B), 2023
User Retention-oriented Recommendation with Decision Transformer
Kesen Zhao, Lixin Zou**, Xiangyu Zhao*, Maolin Wang, Dawei Yin (*Corresponding Author)
Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023. (CCF-A), 2023
A Large Scale Search Dataset for Unbiased Learning to Rank
Lixin Zou*, Haitao Mao, Xiaokai Chu, Jiliang Tang, Wenwen Ye, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin
The 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. (CCF-A), 2022
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 17 (1), 1-36.(CCF-B), 2022
Approximated Doubly Robust Search Relevance Estimation
Lixin Zou*, Changying Hao, Hengyi Cai, Suqi Cheng, Shuaiqiang Wang, Wenwen Ye, Zhicong Cheng, Simu Gu, Dawei Yin
The 31st International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management.(CCF-B), 2022
A Hierarchical Multi-Granularity Pre-Trained Language Model for Web Search
Xiaokai Chu, Jiashu Zhao, Lixin Zou*, Dawei Yin
The 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval.(CCF-A), 2022
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
The 27th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications. (CCF-B), 2022
Generative Session-based Recommendation
Zhidan Wang, Wenwen Ye, Xu Chen, Wenqiang Zhang, Zhenlei Wang, Lixin Zou*, and Weidong Liu
Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022.(CCF-A), 2022
Fast Semantic Matching via Flexible Contextualized Interaction
Wenwen Ye, Yiding Liu, Lixin Zou*, Hengyi Cai, Suqi Cheng, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin
The 15th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining.(CCF-B), 2022
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
The 27th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.(CCF-A), 2021
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, Yi Chang (*Corresponding author)
The 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval.(CCF-A), 2021
Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Malaria Control
Lixin Zou*, Long Xia, Linfang Hou, Xiangyu Zhao, Dawei Yin
The 28th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.(CCF-A), 2021
UserSim：User Simulation via Supervised Generative Adversarial Network
Xiangyu Zhao, Long Xia, Lixin Zou*, Dawei Yin, Jiliang Tang
Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021.(CCF-A), 2021
Whole-Chain Recommendations
Xiangyu Zhao, Long Xia, Lixin Zou*, Hui Liu, Dawei Yin, Jiliang Tang
The 29th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management.(CCF-B), 2020
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
The 29th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management.(CCF-B), 2020
Meta-Learning for Neural Relation Classification with Distant Supervision
Zhenzhen Li, Jian-Yun Nie, Benyou Wang, Pan Du, Yuhan Zhang, Lixin Zou*, Dongsheng Li
The 29th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management.(CCF-B), 2020
Task-based Focal Loss for Adversarially Robust Meta-Learning
Yufang Hou, Lixin Zou*, Weidong Liu
The 25th International Conference on Pattern Recognition.(CCF-C), 2020
Neural Interactive Collaborative Filtering
Lixin Zou*, Long Xia, Yulong Gu, Xiangyu Zhao, Weidong Liu, Jimmy Xiangji Huang, Dawei Yin
The 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval.(CCF-A), 2020
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
The 13th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining.(CCF-B), 2020
Reinforcement Learning to Diversify Top-N Recommendation
Lixin Zou*, Long Xia, Zhuoye Ding, Dawei Yin, Jiaxing Song, Weidong Liu
The 24th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications.(CCF-B), 2019
Reinforcement learning to optimize long-term user engagement in recommender systems
Lixin Zou*, Long Xia, Zhuoye Ding, Jiaxing Song, Weidong Liu, Dawei Yin
The 25th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.(CCF-A), 2019
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)
The 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval.(CCF-A), 2019
HLGPS：a home location global positioning system in location-based social networks
Yulong Gu, Jiaxing Song, Weidong Liu, Lixin Zou*
The 16th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining.(CCF-B), 2016
Selected Awards
Profressional Service