CV | Xinghua Zhang

RESEARCH INTERESTS

LLM Alignment, LLM Reasoning, Agentic RL, LLM Evaluation, Low Resource, Information Extraction, et al.

ABOUT ME

I am a researcher at Tongyi Lab, Alibaba Group, focusing on LLM Alignment/Reasoning/Evaluation, Agentic RL, and Post-training for business applications. I received my Ph.D. from the Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Before my Ph.D., I graduated from Harbin Institute of Technology.

I have published 30+ papers at multiple top-tier Conferences and Journals, including ICLR, ACL, SIGIR, KDD, ICDE, WWW, TOIS, TACL, EMNLP, et al. I welcome any questions or opportunities for further discussion.

EDUCATION

Ph.D., Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of SciencesBeijing, 2019.09 - 2024.06

Major: Computer Applied Technology

Supervisor: Professor Tingwen Liu and Professor Hongbo Xu

GPA: 3.9/4.0

B.E., Harbin Institute of TechnologyHarbin, 2015.09 - 2019.06

Major: Computer Science and Technology

Score: 92.11/100

PUBLICATION

‡ Project Leader, * Corresponding Author, † Equal Contribution

Post-Training & RL

Ruoran Li, Xinghua Zhang‡, Haiyang Yu, Shitong Duan, Xiang Li, Wenxin Xiang, Chonghua Liao, Xudong Guo, Yongbin Li, Jinli Suo. MemPO: Self-Memory Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon Agents . The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), July 2026.

Shipeng Li†, Shikun Li†, Zhiqin Yang†, Xinghua Zhang, Gaode Chen, Xiaobo Xia, Hengyu Liu, Zhe Peng. LearnAlign: Reasoning Data Selection for Reinforcement Learning in Large Language Models Based on Improved Gradient Alignment . The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), July 2026.

Minzheng Wang, Yongbin Li, Haobo Wang, Xinghua Zhang*‡, Nan Xu, Bingli Wu, Fei Huang, Haiyang Yu, Wenji Mao*. Adaptive Social Learning via Mode Policy Optimization for Language Agents . The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026), April 2026.

Tao Zou, Xinghua Zhang‡, Haiyang Yu, Minzheng Wang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li. EIFBench: Extremely Complex Instruction Following Benchmark for Large Language Models . Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025 main), November 2025.

Xinghua Zhang, Haiyang Yu, Cheng Fu, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li. IOPO: Empowering LLMs with Complex Instruction Following via Input-Output Preference Optimization . The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025 main), July 2025.

Minzheng Wang, Xinghua Zhang‡, Kun Chen, Nan Xu, Haiyang Yu, Fei Huang, Wenji Mao, Yongbin Li. Reframing Dialogue Interaction with Fine-grained Element Modeling . The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), July 2025.

LLM Benchmark, Evaluation & Test-time Optimization

Wenyuan Zhang, Xinghua Zhang‡, Haiyang Yu, Shuaiyi Nie, Bingli Wu, Juwei Yue, Tingwen Liu, Yongbin Li. ExpSeek: Self-Triggered Experience Seeking for Web Agents . The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), July 2026.

Wenyuan Zhang†, Shuaiyi Nie†, Xinghua Zhang‡, Zefeng Zhang, Tingwen Liu. S1-Bench: A Simple Benchmark for Evaluating System 1 Thinking Capability of Large Reasoning Models . IJCAI 2026 (Submitted).

Wenyuan Zhang, Jiawei Sheng, Shuaiyi Nie, Zefeng Zhang, Xinghua Zhang, Yongquan He, Tingwen Liu. Revealing and Mitigating the Challenge of Detecting Character Knowledge Errors in LLM Role-Playing . Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025 main), November 2025.

Xinghua Zhang, Bowen Yu, Haiyang Yu, Yangyu Lv, Tingwen Liu, Fei Huang, Hongbo Xu and Yongbin Li. Wider and Deeper LLM Networks are Fairer LLM Evaluators . Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL). 2025.

Xiang Li, Haiyang Yu, Xinghua Zhang, Ziyang Huang, Shizhu He, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li. SOCRATIC-PRMBENCH: Benchmarking Process Reward Models with Systematic Reasoning Patterns . arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.23474.

Minzheng Wang†, Longze Chen†, Cheng Fu, Shengyi Liao, Xinghua Zhang, Bingli Wu, Haiyang Yu, Nan Xu, Lei Zhang, Run Luo, Yunshui Li, Min Yang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li. Leave No Document Behind: Benchmarking Long-Context LLMs with Extended Multi-Doc QA . The 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2024, Oral), November 2024.

Xinghua Zhang, Haiyang Yu, Yongbin Li, Minzheng Wang, Longze Chen, Fei Huang. The Imperative of Conversation Analysis in the era of LLMs: A Survey of Tasks, Techniques, and Trends . arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.14195.

Mengyao Chen, Xinghua Zhang, Junhao Zhang, Quangang Li, Tingwen Liu. Empowering LLMs for Multi-Page Layout Generation via Consistency-Oriented In-Context Learning . In Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2024), October 2024.

LLM Safety

Zhenhong Zhou, Haiyang Yu, Xinghua Zhang, Rongwu Xu, Fei Huang, Kun Wang, Yang Liu, Junfeng Fang, Yongbin Li. On the Role of Attention Heads in Large Language Model Safety . The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR, Oral), April 2025.

Zhenhong Zhou, Haiyang Yu, Xinghua Zhang, Rongwu Xu, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li. How Alignment and Jailbreak Work: Explain LLM Safety through Intermediate Hidden States . The 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2024), November 2024.

Information Extraction & Semantic Understanding

Xinghua Zhang, Gaode Chen, Shiyao Cui, Jiawei Sheng, Tingwen Liu and Hongbo Xu. Exogenous and Endogenous Data Augmentation for Low-Resource Complex Named Entity Recognition . In Proceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2024), July 2024.

Minghuan Yuan, Shiyao Cui, Xinghua Zhang, Shicheng Wang, Hongbo Xu and Tingwen Liu. Exploring the Trade-Off within Visual Information for MultiModal Sentence Summarization . In Proceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2024), July 2024.

Xinghua Zhang, Bowen Yu, Xin Cong, Taoyu Su, Quangang Li, Tingwen Liu and Hongbo Xu. Cross-domain NER under a Divide-and-Transfer Paradigm . In ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS 2024), April 2024.

Wenyuan Zhang, Xinghua Zhang, Shiyao Cui, Kun Huang, Xuebin Wang and Tingwen Liu. Adaptive Data Augmentation for Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction . In 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2024), April 2024.

Wenhao Zhang, Shiyao Cui, Wenyuan Zhang, Xinghua Zhang, Tingwen Liu and Hongbo Xu. Improving Chinese Spelling Correction With Text-Phonetics Differentiation and Adaptive Fusion . In 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2024), April 2024.

Kun Huang, Yongxiu Xu, Xinghua Zhang, Wenyuan Zhang and Hongbo Xu. Prompting Generative Language Model with Guiding Augmentation for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction . In Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI 2023), November 2023.

Tianyun Liu, Xinghua Zhang, Zhenyu Zhang, Yubin Wang, Quangang Li, Shuai Zhang and Tingwen Liu. Enhancing Table Retrieval with Dual Graph Representations . In Proceedings of the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases 2023 (ECML PKDD 2023), September 2023.

Xinghua Zhang, Tianyun Liu, Wenyuan Zhang and Tingwen Liu. System Report for CCL23-Eval Task 1: Information Theory Constraint and Paragraph based Classical Named Entity Recognition . In Proceedings of the 22nd Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics (CCL 2023), August 2023.

Xinghua Zhang, Bowen Yu, Jiangxia Cao, Quangang Li, Xuebin Wang, Tingwen Liu and Hongbo Xu. Representation and Labeling Gap Bridging for Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition . In Proceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2023), July 2023.

Xinghua Zhang, Bowen Yu, Tingwen Liu, Yubin Wang, Taoyu Su and Hongbo Xu. Exploring Modular Task Decomposition in Cross-domain Named Entity Recognition . In Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2022), July 2022.

Zhaohui Wang, Xinghua Zhang, Yanzeng Li, Yubin Wang, Jiawei Sheng, Tingwen Liu and Hongbo Xu. Enhancing Pre-Trained Language Representations Based on Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction . In Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE 2022), July 2022.

Xinghua Zhang, Bowen Yu, Tingwen Liu, Zhenyu Zhang, Jiawei Sheng, Mengge Xue and Hongbo Xu. Improving Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition with Self-Collaborative Denoising Learning . In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2021), November 2021.

Recommendation & Graph

Xiaodong Li, Juwei Yue, Xinghua Zhang, Jiawei Sheng, Wenyuan Zhang, Taoyu Su, Zefeng Zhang, Tingwen Liu. S²CDR: Smoothing-Sharpening Process Model for Cross-Domain Recommendation . Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2026 (WWW '26), April 2026.

Xiaodong Li, Hengzhu Tang, Jiawei Sheng, Xinghua Zhang, Li Gao, Suqi Cheng, Dawei Yin, Tingwen Liu. Exploring Preference-Guided Diffusion Model for Cross-Domain Recommendation . In Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD '25), July 2025.

Xiaodong Li, Jiawei Sheng, Jiangxia Cao, Xinghua Zhang, Wenyuan Zhang, Yong Sun, Shirui Pan, Zhihong Tian, Tingwen Liu. Personalized Multi-Interest Modeling for Cross-Domain Recommendation to Cold-Start Users . In 2025 IEEE 41st International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2025), May 2025.

Juwei Yue, Haikuo Li, Jiawei Sheng, Yihan Guo, Xinghua Zhang, Chuan Zhou, Tingwen Liu, Li Guo. Graph Wave Networks . In Proceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 2025 (WWW '25), April 2025.

Gaode Chen, Ruina Sun, Yuezihan Jiang, Jiangxia Cao, Qi Zhang, Jingjian Lin, Han Li, Kun Gai, Xinghua Zhang. A Multi-modal Modeling Framework for Cold-start Short-video Recommendation . In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys '24), October 2024.

Taoyu Su, Jiawei Sheng, Shicheng Wang, Xinghua Zhang, Hongbo Xu, Tingwen Liu. IBMEA: Exploring Variational Information Bottleneck for Multi-modal Entity Alignment . In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM '24), October 2024.

Taoyu Su, Xinghua Zhang, Jiawei Sheng, Zhenyu Zhang, Tingwen Liu. LoginMEA: Local-to-Global Interaction Network for Multi-modal Entity Alignment . 27th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2024), October 2024.

Gehang Zhang, Bowen Yu, Jiangxia Cao, Xinghua Zhang, Jiawei Sheng, Tingwen Liu and Chuan Zhou. ID-MixGCL: Identity Mixup for Graph Contrastive Learning . In 2023 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData 2023), December 2023.

Gaode Chen, Xinghua Zhang, Yijun Su, Yantong Lai, Ji Xiang, Junbo Zhang and Yu Zheng. Win-Win: A Privacy-Preserving Federated Framework for Dual-Target Cross-Domain Recommendation . In Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2023), February 2023.

Gaode Chen, Xinghua Zhang, Yanyan Zhao, Cong Xue and Ji Xiang. Exploring Periodicity and Interactivity in Multi-Interest Framework for Sequential Recommendation . In Proceedings of the 30th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2021), August 2021.

HONORS and AWARDS

Chinese Academy of Sciences Presidential Scholarship 2024.06

Outstanding Graduates (Beijing Municipal Education Commission) 2024.06

IIE President Special Scholarship (Top 1%) 2023.12

National Scholarship for Doctoral students 2023.09

First prize in CCL 2023 Named Entity Recognition for Ancient Chinese Literature 2023.08

Pacemaker to Merit Student (Top 1%) of University of Chinese Academy of Sciences 2023.05

Second prize in China Conference on Information Retrieval (CCIR) Cup 2021.11

Merit Student of University of Chinese Academy of Sciences 2020.06、2022.06

Top 100 Graduation Thesis of Harbin Institute of Technology 2019.06

Outstanding Graduate of Harbin Institute of Technology 2019.06

Nubian Scholarship 2019.03

First prize in the 11th National College Student Information Security contest 2018.07

Guanghua Scholarship 2017.12

Merit Student of Harbin Institue of Technology 2016.12

First prize in the 8th National College Student Mathematics competition (Heilongjiang) 2016.11

COMPETITION

CCL 2023 Task 1: Guji Named Entity Recognition (GuNER), Rank 1/127 (Team leader)2023.06

SemEval 2022 Task 11: MultiCoNER Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition, Rank 6/22 (Team leader)2022.02

CCIR CUP: Robustness Evaluation of Chinese Named Entity Recognition, Rank 3/387 (Team leader)2021.11

NLPCC 2018 Shared Task 1: Emotion Detection in Code-Switching Text, Rank 1/19 (Team leader)2018.04