Zaiyi Zheng

Ph.D. Student, Department of Computer Engineering, University of Virginia

prof_pic_zz.svg

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

I am currently a Ph.D. Candidate in the program of Computer Engineering at the University of Virginia, advised by Professor Jundong Li. I started my Ph.D. in Fall 2023. Before that, I received my B.E. in Computer Science from the University of Science and Technology of China. My research interests lie in building efficient and effective foundational models for the retrieval system.

Selected Publications

  1. arXiv
    SAPO: Step-Aligned Policy Optimization for Reasoning-Based Generative Recommendation
    Zaiyi Zheng, Guanghui Min, Yaochen Zhu, Liang Wu, Liangjie Hong, Chen Chen, and Jundong Li
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.17648, 2026
    arXiv
  2. Bioinformatics
    CeLLTra: Aligning Cell Names with Gene Expression via a Pathway-Informed Transformer
    Zhao Li*, Zaiyi Zheng*, Rongbin Li, Wenbo Chen, Yuntao Yang, Meer A. Ali, Jundong Li, and W. Jim Zheng
    Bioinformatics, 2026
  3. EMNLP
    CoRAG: Enhancing Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Generation through a Cooperative Retriever Architecture
    Zaiyi Zheng, Song Wang, Zihan Chen, Yaochen Zhu, Yinhan He, Liangjie Hong, Qi Guo, and Jundong Li
    Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2025
    PDF
  4. CIKM
    MI4Rec: Pretrained Language Model based Cold-Start Recommendation with Meta-Item Embeddings
    Zaiyi Zheng, Yaochen Zhu, Haochen Liu, Mingxuan Ju, Tong Zhao, Neil Shah, and Jundong Li
    ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 2025
    DOI HTML
  5. ICML
    Beyond the Permutation Symmetry of Transformers: The Role of Rotation for Model Fusion
    Binchi Zhang*, Zaiyi Zheng*, Zhengzhang Chen, and Jundong Li
    International Conference on Machine Learning. Spotlight (Acceptance Rate 2.6%) , 2025
    arXiv
  6. EMNLP
    Explaining Graph Neural Networks with Large Language Models: A Counterfactual Perspective on Molecule Graphs
    Yinhan He, Zaiyi Zheng, Patrick Soga, Yaochen Zhu, Yushun Dong, and Jundong Li
    Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2024
    HTML
  7. CSUR
    Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models: A Survey
    Song Wang, Yaochen Zhu, Haochen Liu, Zaiyi Zheng, Chen Chen, and Jundong Li
    ACM Computing Surveys, 2024
    DOI
  8. BigData
    KG-CF: Knowledge Graph Completion with Context Filtering under the Guidance of Large Language Models
    Zaiyi Zheng, Yushun Dong, Song Wang, Haochen Liu, and Jundong Li
    IEEE International Conference on Big Data, 2024
    PDF