About Me

Hi~ 🏖️: I am Yu Xia (夏羽), a 1st-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

• 06/2025 : I will join Adobe again this summer as a Research Intern, mentored by Dr. Sungchul Kim! See you in San Jose and Bay Area!

• 05/2025 : 3 Papers on i) LLM-based Active Learning ii) Document ReAct Agent and iii) GUI Agent accepted to ACL 2025!

Selected Publications

• 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]

• Doc-React: Multi-page Heterogeneous Document Question-answering
  Junda Wu, Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Xiang Chen, Sai Sree Harsha, Akash V Maharaj, Ruiyi Zhang, Victor Bursztyn, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley, Yunyao Li, Ritwik Sinha.
  ACL 2025

• 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]

• OCEAN: Offline Chain-of-thought Evaluation and Alignment in Large Language Models
  Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Ruoyu Wang, Yu Xia, Yuxin Xiong, Jianing Wang, Tong Yu, Xiang Chen, Branislav Kveton, Lina Yao, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley.
  ICLR 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]

• Embedding-Informed Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Models
  Chengkai Huang, Yu Xia, Rui Wang, Kaige Xie, Tong Yu, Julian McAuley, Lina Yao.
  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 2024 Summer (Mentor: Dr. Sungchul Kim)
• Conference Reviewer
  • RecSys’23, WWW’24, NAACL’24, COLING’25, WWW’25, NAACL’25, ACL’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