About Me
Yukun Zhao is an Associate Professor at the School of Artificial Intelligence, Shandong University, as a member of GAI lab. He received his Ph.D. from Shandong University in 2024, advised by Prof. Zhaochun Ren and Dr. Dawei Yin. His research interests primarily lie in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Information Retrieval (IR), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Language Agents.
Prior to joining Shandong University, he served as a Staff Engineer at Baidu Inc. for nearly five years. During his tenure, he led core initiatives in trustworthy LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), question answering, and dialogue systems. His work has powered widely used platforms, including Baidu Web Search and Multimodal Search, reaching billions of users.
His research has been published at top-tier conferences such as ACL, NAACL, COLING, EMNLP, and SIGIR, addressing fundamental challenges in LLM deployment, including hallucination, robustness, generalization, and visual-linguistic grounding. Currently, his latest research focuses on the stability of LLMs and the development of reasoning language agents. His research philosophy centers on translating academic advancements into real-world impact. He strives to tackle problems that are both scientifically fundamental and practically valuable.
Prospective Students: He is actively looking for self-motivated undergraduate and Master’s students to join his research group. If you are interested in his research, please feel free to contact him via email (zhaoyukun@sdu.edu.cn).
Research Interests
- Natural Language Processing (NLP)
- Information Retrieval (IR)
- Large Language Models (LLMs)
- Language Agents
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
- Multimodal Learning
Selected Publications
Task Knowledge Injection via Interpolations and Reinstatement for Large Language Model Generalization
ACL 2025 Findings (CCF A)
Yukun Zhao, Lingyong Yan, Zhenyang Li, Shuaiqiang Wang, Zhumin Chen, Zhaochun Ren, Dawei Yin
Knowing What LLMs DO NOT Know: A Simple Yet Effective Self-Detection Method
NAACL 2024 (CCF B, TH-CPL A)
Yukun Zhao, Lingyong Yan, Weiwei Sun, Guoliang Xing, Shuaiqiang Wang, Chong Meng, Zhicong Cheng, Zhaochun Ren, Dawei Yin
Improving the Robustness of Large Language Models via Consistency Alignment
COLING 2024 (CCF B)
Yukun Zhao, Lingyong Yan, Weiwei Sun, Guoliang Xing, Shuaiqiang Wang, Chong Meng, Zhicong Cheng, Zhaochun Ren, Dawei Yin
VisLingInstruct: Elevating Zero-Shot Learning in Multi-Modal Language Models with Autonomous Instruction Optimization
NAACL 2024 (CCF B, TH-CPL A)
Dongsheng Zhu, Xunzhu Tang, Weidong Han, Jinghui Lu, Yukun Zhao, Guoliang Xing, Junfeng Wang, Dawei Yin
DiQAD: A Benchmark Dataset for Open-domain Dialogue Quality Assessment
EMNLP 2023 Findings (CCF B, TH-CPL A)
Yukun Zhao, Lingyong Yan, Weiwei Sun, Chong Meng, Shuaiqiang Wang, Zhicong Cheng, Zhaochun Ren, Dawei Yin
Feature-level Debiased Natural Language Understanding
AAAI 2023 (CCF A)
Yougang Lyu, Piji Li, Yechang Yang, Maarten de Rijke, Pengjie Ren, Yukun Zhao, Dawei Yin, Zhaochun Ren
Explainable User Clustering in Short Text Streams
SIGIR 2016 (CCF A)
Yukun Zhao, Shangsong Liang, Zhaochun Ren, Jun Ma, Emine Yilmaz, Maarten de Rijke
Personalized Re-ranking of Tweets
WISE 2016 (CCF B)
Yukun Zhao, Shangsong Liang, Jun Ma
Inferring Dynamic User Interests in Streams of Short Texts for User Clustering
TOIS 2017 (CCF A)
Shangsong Liang, Zhaochun Ren, Yukun Zhao, Jun Ma, Emine Yilmaz, Maarten De Rijke
Education
- Ph.D. in Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, 2020 - 2024
- M.S. in Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, 2014 - 2017
- B.S. in Software Engineering, Northeastern University, 2010 - 2014
Career
- Shandong University, 2025 - Present
- Baidu Inc., 2020 - 2025
- Alibaba Group, 2019 - 2020
- JD.com, Inc., 2017 - 2019
Contact
- Email: zhaoyukun@sdu.edu.cn
- Address: 3rd Floor, Building B, Luneng Technology Building, Central Campus, Shandong University, Jinan, Shandong Province, China