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Yansen Zhang (张岩森)

Ph.D. Candidate

School of Computing
City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK)
Hong Kong SAR
Email: yanszhang7-c@my.cityu.edu.hk [Copy]

Open to any kind of collaboration! 👀

About Me

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Computing, City University of Hong Kong, supervised by Prof. Chen Ma. My research focuses on LLM Reasoning and Planning, LLM-based Decision Intelligence, and Data-Centric AI. My recent work explores LLMs for decision intelligence and self-evolving agents, especially for scientific discovery and complex decision-making tasks.

I received my M.S. degree in Software Engineering from the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, where I was supervised by Prof. Yubao Liu on graph-based sequential recommendation. I obtained my B.S. degree in Software Engineering from the Software College, Northeastern University, where my academic enlightenment advisor was Prof. Guibing Guo, and I followed him to work on explainable recommendation.

Research Interests

  • Reasoning, planning, and decision-making with LLMs

  • Self-evolving agents for scientific discovery

  • Data-centric AI and recommender systems

News

  • [05/2026] Two papers on optimization modeling and retrieval-augmented LLM compression have been accepted to ICML 2026.

  • [03/2026] SAC-Opt has been accepted to AIMS Workshop at ICLR 2026.

  • [09/2025] Started a visiting student position at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI).

  • [05/2025] One paper about explainable diversity in recommendation has been accepted to ECML PKDD 2025.

  • [05/2025] One paper about data pruning by Shapley values in recommendation has been accepted to KDD 2025.

Past News
  • [01/2025] One paper about explainable operations research with large language models has been accepted to ICLR 2025.

  • [01/2025] One paper about cross-domain sequential recommendation has been accepted to TOIS 2025.

  • [03/2024] One paper about diversity in search and recommendation has been accepted to TKDE 2024.