Zhichao Xu 徐志超 My name is Chih-Chao Hsu in Wade-Giles system; aside from my legal name, you can also call me Brutus Ph.D. Student School of Computing University of Utah Email: zhichao.xu@utah.edu Google Scholar, Github, Twitter, Huggingface

Looking for Internships

I am look for internship for Summer 2024, drop me an email if you're interested in my works :)

About [CV]

I am currently a third-year PhD student at University of Utah, advised by Prof. Bei Wang and Prof. Vivek Srikumar.

I also work closely with Prof. Qingyao Ai and Prof. Yongfeng Zhang.

I am interested in multiple sub-domains of Information Retrieval, including machine learning-motivated IR, i.e. learning-to-rank, Dense Retrieval, and Explainable IR

News

• 05/2023: Started as student researcher at Google Research !
• 04/2023: Paper titled A Lightweight Constrained Generation Alternative for Query-focused Summarization accepted to SIGIR 2023 !
• 12/2022: Finished my Research Internship at Dataminr working with Dr. Daniel Cohen and Dr. Hemank Lamba on Neural Information Retrieval.

Selected Publications

• A Lightweight Constrained Generation Alternative for Query-focused Summarization. pdf, code
  Zhichao Xu and Daniel Cohen.
  in proceedings of The 46th ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2023)
• Automated Generation of Security-centric Descriptions for Smart Contract Bytecode.
  Yu Pan, Zhichao Xu, Levi Taiji Li, Yunhe Yang and Mu Zhang.
  in proceedings of The 32nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2023)
• Marginal-Certainty-aware Fair Ranking Algorithm. pdf
  Tao Yang, Zhichao Xu, Zhenduo Wang, Anh Tran and Qingyao Ai.
  in proceedings of the 16th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 2023)
• Understanding the Effectiveness of Reviews in E-commerce Recommendation. pdf, slides, code
  Zhichao Xu, Hansi Zeng and Qingyao Ai.
  in proceedings of 11th International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR 2021)
• A Zero Attentative Relevance Matching Network for Review Modeling in Recommnder System. code, pdf
  Hansi Zeng, Zhichao Xu and Qingyao Ai.
  in proceedings of 43rd European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2021)
• E-commerce Recommendation with Weighted Expected Utility. pdf, code
  Zhichao Xu, Yi Han, Yongfeng Zhang and Qingyao Ai.
  in proceedings of 29th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2020),
• Speech-based Activity Recognition for Trauma Resuscatation. pdf
  Jalal Abdulbaqi, Yue Gu, Zhichao Xu, Chenyang Gao, Ivan Marsic and Randall Burd
  in proceedings of 8th IEEE Conference on Health Informatics (ICHI 2020)

Preprints

• Counterfactual Editing for Search Result Explanation pdf
  Zhichao Xu, Hemank Lamba, Qingyao Ai, Joel Tetreault and Alex Jaimes.
  
• An In-depth Investigation of User Simulation for Conversational Search pdf
  Zhenduo Wang, Zhichao Xu, Qingyao Ai and Vivek Srikumar.
  
• Reward-free Policy Imitation Learning for Conversational Search pdf
  Zhenduo Wang, Zhichao Xu and Qingyao Ai.
  
• Effective Exposure Amortizing for Fair Top-k Recommendation pdf
  Tao Yang, Zhichao Xu and Qingyao Ai.
  

Technical Reports

(* represents equal contribution)

• Reinforcement Learning to Rank with Coarse-grained Labels pdf
  Zhichao Xu*, Anh Tran*, Tao Yang and Qingyao Ai.
  manuscript on arxiv,
• Learning to Rank Rationales for Explainable Recommendation pdf, code
  Zhichao Xu, Yi Han, Tao Yang, Anh Tran and Qingyao Ai.
  manuscript on arxiv,

Education

• PhD in Computer Science
  University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, 2020 Fall - Present
• MS in Computer Science
  Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, 2018 Fall - 2020 Summer
• BS in Applied Statistics
  Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, 2014 Fall - 2018 Summer

Professional Experience

• Research Intern, mentored by Dr. Daniel Cohen and Dr. Hemank Lamba
  Dataminr, New York City, NY, 09.2022 - 12.2022
• Research Intern, mentored by Dr. Sebastian Bruch and Dr. Hemank Lamba
  Dataminr, New York City, NY, 05.2022 - 08.2022
• Data Science Intern
  SAP Lab, Shanghai, CN, 12.2017 - 05.2018

Academic Services

• Conference Reviewer: CCL 2021, DLP-KDD 2021, ACL 2023, CCL 2023
• Conference Subreviewer: TheWebConf 2022, KDD 2022, SIGIR 2023, RecSys 2023
• Journal Reviewer: TOIS

Teaching Experiences

• Lead TA, CS 6140 Data Mining, 2023 Spring, University of Utah, School of Computing, lectured by Prof. Ana Marasovic.
• TA, CS 2100 Discrete Structures, 2022 Fall, University of Utah, School of Computing, lectured by Prof. Bei Wang Philips.
• TA, CS 6140 Data Mining, 2022 Spring, University of Utah, School of Computing, lectured by Prof. Qingyao Ai.

Writings

• Random Writing, Protestant Ethics, Jan Hus and the First Defenestrations of Prague

Facts and Thoughts

• I am motivated by the Movie Rocky and Kingdom of Heaven
• My favoriate historical figure is Aurelian, i.e. Restitutor Orbis.
• My favoriate food is thin crust pizza ramana, but vanilla cheese pizza makes do
• I used to play basketball; now I am more of a jogger
• If you're also a PhD student or planning to apply, read Kevin Gimpel's advice on How to be a happier PhD student, Karl Stratos's advices to perspective students and Philip Guo's The PhD Grind.