Zhengliang Shi

I am currently a final-year Master’s student in Computer Science at Shandong University, advised by Prof. Zhaochun Ren (now in Leiden University, Netherlands). I have also been fortunate to work closely with Shuo Zhang at Bloomberg and Weiwei Sun at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU).

I receive my B.E. degree from Shandong University. During my undergraduate studies, I was selected for the Elite Class program, supervised by Prof. Zhaochun Ren, where I developed a strong interest in areas such as NLP. Feel free to view my CV and transcript.

🤔 I am always excited about exploring practical, interesting problems, and have spent a wonderful time in core industry teams. I previously interned at Baidu’s Search Science Team, supervised by Dr. Dawei Yin. I also interned at the HunYuan team at Tencent, supervised by Dr. Zhaopeng Tu.

🧐 I work broadly on natural language processing and information retrieval, with a particular emphasis on LLMs. I investigate the core limitations of LLMs, such as hallucinations and the inability to interact with the digital world, that cannot be overcome by scaling alone. To address these challenges, my previous studies pioneered Tool-use LLMs, a novel class of LLMs that can automatically use various, external tools (e.g., code libraries, function-callings, or Web APIs) for complex task solving. This is also well-known as the LLM-based Agents.

Research interests

• 🔍 Retrieval-Augmented Generation
• 🔧 Tool-using LLMs and LLM-based Agents
• 🤖 Agentic Reasoning
• 😄 As the field goes rapidly, I actively explore new ideas and embrace new directions.

Services

• Area Chair for ACL Rolling Review, including ACL, EMNLP, and NAACL.
• Program Committee for AAAI, SIGIR, SIGIR-AP, WSDM, and TheWebConf (WWW)
• Reviewer for TKDE (Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering), Information Processing & Management, ECIR, TKDD (ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data), TORS (ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems)