Head

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

Selected Publications [Full List]

  • 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

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

  • :part_alternation_mark: 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
  • Conference Reviewer
    • RecSys’23, WWW’24, NAACL’24, COLING’25, WWW’25, NAACL’25, ACL’25
  • Conference Volunteer
    • NAACL’24

Interesting Projects

  • :milky_way: 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!
  • :books: Science Fiction Text Generation [Link]
  • :beer: 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

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