About Me

Hi~ 🏖️: I am Yu Xia (夏羽), a 2nd-year CSE PhD student at University of California San Diego, where I am working with Prof. Julian McAuley on Large Language Models and Conversational Recommendation. I earned my bachelor’s degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and master’s degree from University of Michigan.

Currently I am interested in RL / Finetuning of LLMs / LLM Agents for applications under various scenarios. Feel free to drop me an email if you would like to discuss anything or explore potential collaborations!

News

• 08/2025 : Our LLM agent tuning framework SAND🏖️ is accepted to EMNLP 2025 Main Conference! SAND🏖️ enables LLM agents to teach themselves when and how to reason deliberatively for difficult tasks. See you (likely) in Suzhou!

Selected Publications

• SAND: Boosting LLM Agents with Self-Taught Action Deliberation
  Yu Xia, Yiran Shen, Junda Wu, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Lina Yao, Julian McAuley.
  EMNLP 2025 [Paper]

• From Selection to Generation: A Survey of LLM-based Active Learning
  Yu Xia*, Subhojyoti Mukherjee*, Zhouhang Xie, Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Ryan Aponte, Hanjia Lyu, Joe Barrow, Hongjie Chen, Franck Dernoncourt, Branislav Kveton, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Jiuxiang Gu, Nesreen K Ahmed, Yu Wang, Xiang Chen, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Sungchul Kim, Zhengmian Hu, Yue Zhao, Nedim Lipka, Seunghyun Yoon, Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang, Zichao Wang, Puneet Mathur, Soumyabrata Pal, Koyel Mukherjee, Zhehao Zhang, Namyong Park, Thien Huu Nguyen, Jiebo Luo, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley.
  ACL 2025 [Paper]

• Knowledge-Aware Query Expansion with Large Language Models for Textual and Relational Retrieval
  Yu Xia, Junda Wu, Sungchul Kim, Tong Yu, Ryan A. Rossi, Haoliang Wang, Julian McAuley.
  NAACL 2025 [Paper]

• Beyond Chain-of-Thought: A Survey of Chain-of-X Paradigms for LLMs
  Yu Xia, Rui Wang, Xu Liu, Mingyan Li, Tong Yu, Xiang Chen, Julian McAuley, Shuai Li.
  COLING 2025 [Paper]

• The Closeness of In-Context Learning and Weight Shifting for Softmax Regression
  (Alphabetical Order) Shuai Li, Zhao Song, Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Tianyi Zhou.
  NeurIPS 2024 [Paper]

• Aligning as Debiasing: Causality-Aware Alignment via Reinforcement Learning with Interventional Feedback
  Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Zhankui He, Handong Zhao, Julian McAuley, Shuai Li.
  NAACL 2024 [Paper]

• Hallucination Diversity-Aware Active Learning for Text Summarization
  Yu Xia, Xu Liu, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Anup Rao, Tung Mai, Shuai Li.
  NAACL 2024 [Paper]

• Which LLM to Play? Convergence-Aware Online Model Selection with Time-Increasing Bandits
  Yu Xia*, Fang Kong*, Tong Yu, Liya Guo, Ryan A. Rossi, Sungchul Kim, Shuai Li.
  WWW 2024 Oral [Paper]

• Towards Joint Utilization of Absolute and Relative Bandit Feedback for Conversational Recommendation
  Yu Xia*, Zhihui Xie*, Tong Yu, Canzhe Zhao, Shuai Li.
  UMUAI 2024 Special Issue on CRS [Paper]

• User-Regulation Deconfounded Conversational Recommender System with Bandit Feedback
  Yu Xia, Junda Wu, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Shuai Li.
  KDD 2023 [Paper]

Presentations

• Knowledge-Aware Query Expansion with Large Language Models for Textual and Relational Retrieval
  Information Retrieval and Text Mining Session at NAACL’25, Albuquerque, NM. [Poster]

• Which LLM to Play? Convergence-Aware Online Model Selection with Time-Increasing Bandits
  Web Mining Session at WWW’24, Singapore. [Poster] [Slides] [Video]

• User-Regulation Deconfounded Conversational Recommender System with Bandit Feedback
  Conversational AI Session at KDD’23, Long Beach, CA. [Poster] [Slides]

CV

Educations

• University of California San Diego, 2024-Now
  Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering

• University of Michigan, 2022-2024
  M.S. in Information

• 🦶 Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2019-2023
  B.Eng. in Electrical and Computer Engineering

Experiences

• Research Scientist Intern
  • Adobe Research ‘25 Jun.-Sep. (Mentor: Dr. Sungchul Kim)
  • Adobe Research ‘24 Jun.-Nov. (Mentor: Dr. Sungchul Kim)
• Conference Reviewer
  • RecSys’23, WWW’24, NAACL’24, COLING’25, WWW’25, NAACL’25, ACL’25, EMNLP’25
• Conference Volunteer
  • NAACL’24

Interesting Projects

• FLEE [Game Link] [Code]: An interactive web game of an intersteller journey!
• 🕵️ A Study in Red [Link]: A funny interative fanfiction of Sherlock Holmes that I have no idea when I wrote it!
• Science Fiction Text Generation [Link]
• Beer Recommender System [Link]

Awards

• University of Michigan - Shanghai Jiao Tong University Yu Liming Scholarship, 2021
• Shanghai Jiao Tong University Outstanding Undergraduate Award, 2021
• University of Michigan - Shanghai Jiao Tong University Yu Liming Scholarship, 2020
• Shanghai Jiao Tong University Outstanding Undergraduate Award, 2020

Visitors

Full Publication List