Hi! I am currently a staff engineer at Baidu Search Ads, leading a team working on personalized ad creative generation and ranking. Prior to that, I was an algorithm expert at Alibaba Ad Tech, honored with “Alibaba-Star” (“阿里星”). I received my Ph.D. degree in June 2021 from the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA) and my B.Eng. degree in June 2016 from Wuhan University (WHU).

Research Interests

My research interests are in Computational Advertising and Generative AI, and broader interests include reinforcement learning, federated learning, graph neural networks and their applications in advertising, search and recommendation.

News

• Jul. 2024: [Creative] Our GenAI-powered Ad Creative team was named a Top-8 candidate for the 2024 Baidu Highest Award (“百度最高奖”候选Top8).
• Aug. 2023: [Ranking] Our paper about multi-scenario pretraining for ad ranking was accepted at CIKM 2023. [Paper]
• May. 2023: [Strategy] A first-authored paper about impression pacing with reinforcement learning for brand ads was accepted at KDD 2023. [Paper]
• Apr. 2023: [Ranking] A first-authored paper about vertical federated learning benchmark and diffusion-based feature synthesis for CVR estimation was accepted at SIGIR 2023. [Paper]
• Jan. 2023: [Retrieval] A co-first authored paper about hypergraph neural networks for ad retrieval was accepted at WWW 2023. [Paper]
• Aug. 2022: [Ranking] A corresponding authored paper about learning sparse structures for multi-scenario ranking was accepted at CIKM 2022. [Paper]
• Apr. 2022: [Creative] Two first-authored papers about personalized ad creative generation were accepted at NAACL 2022 and SIGIR 2022. [Paper1] [Paper2]
• Apr. 2022: [Ranking] A first-authored paper about calibrated ranking was accepted at SIGIR 2022. [Paper]
• Jan. 2022: [Ranking] A co-first authored paper about debiased ranking was accepted at WWW 2022. [Paper]
• Aug. 2021: [Ranking] A first-authored paper about multi-task ranking with one-shot neural architecture search was accepted at CIKM 2021. [Paper]

Experience and Education

Experience

• Sep. 2023 – Present. Staff MLE, Search Ads @ Baidu Inc.
  Working on developing large language models to build Baidu’s next-generation search ads system.

• Jul. 2021 – Sep. 2023. Algorithm Expert (Senior MLE), Ad Tech @ Alibaba Group.
  Worked on large-scale retrieval, ranking and generation models to improve ad revenue.

Education

• Sep. 2016 – Jun. 2021. Ph.D., Pattern Recognition and Intelligent Systems @ Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASIA).
• Sep. 2012 – Jun. 2016. B.Eng., Department of Automation (a.k.a. Control Science and Engineering) @ Wuhan University (WHU). Rank: 1st (Overall GPA 3.84 / 4.0, Major GPA 3.92 / 4.0).
• Sep. 2009 – Jul. 2012. Tianjin Nankai High School.

Publications

Selected Publications

Awards

• 2020, Pollyanna Chu Scholarship for Outstanding PhD Student, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS)
• 2020, Pacemaker to Merit Student, CASIA
• 2019, “Climbing” Second-Class Scholarship, CASIA
• 2019, AAAI Student Scholarship, AAAI
• 2018 & 2019, SIGIR Student Travel Grants, ACM SIGIR
• 2017, Second Place in the 12th CASIA Five-a-side Football League, CASIA
• 2017, Second Place in 2017 UCAS Football League, UCAS
• 2016, Outstanding Graduate Award, Wuhan University
• 2015, Chinese Academy of Sciences Scholarship for College Students (rewarding top 10% students with postgraduate recommendation), UCAS
• 2015, First Prize in the 10th Freescale Cup Smart Car Competition (Magnetic Navigation Double-Car Group, South China), Teaching Steering Committee on Automation, Department of Higher Education under the Ministry of Education
• 2014 & 2015, National Scholarships, Ministry of Education

Services

• Program Committee Member or Reviewer: ACL Rolling Review, ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, AIJ, TNNLS, TOIS.

Misc

• I am a yo-yo player, styles: 1A (Single Hand String Trick) and 5A (Counterweight). My favorite yo-yo performers are Hiroyuki Suzuki and Jake Elliott.
• Here is my technology blog (in Chinese). I wrote some notes about machine learning and natural language processing techniques.
• I love playing football and table tennis. I am a Real Madrid fan, and my favorite athlete is LIU Shiwen.

Last Updated: Sep. 2024