Yimeng Bai

Ph.D. Student, Lab for Data Science, University of Science and Technology of China

I am a final-year Ph.D. student at Lab for Data Science, USTC, advised by Prof. Fuli Feng and mentored by Dr. Yang Zhang. My research focuses on generative recommendation, LLM personalization, and multi-agent systems.

Generative Recommendation LLM Personalization Multi-Agent System

Email: baiyimeng77 [AT] gmail.com; baiyimeng [AT] mail.ustc.edu.cn

GitHub Google Scholar DBLP ORCID

News

8 Aug 2026One paper is accepted by CIKM 2026 on item indexing.
16 May 2026One paper is accepted by KDD 2026 on latent reasoning.
3 Apr 2026One paper is accepted by SIGIR 2026 on item tokenization.

Experience & Education

Sep. 2024 - Jun. 2026

Research Intern, ByteDance
TikTok-Data-Rec Core. Mentor: Shaohui Ruan.

Dec. 2022 - Aug. 2024

Research Intern, Kuaishou
Mentor: Dr. Jing Lu.

Sep. 2022 - Present

Ph.D. Student, University of Science and Technology of China
Cyber Science and Technology, Hefei, China.

Sep. 2018 - Jun. 2022

B.S., Beijing Jiaotong University
Beijing, China.

Publications

2026

DuST: Dual-Stage Tuning of LLMs for Next-Post-Topic Prediction in Social Media Bots

Yulong Huang, Yimeng Bai, Yang Zhang, Fuli Feng, Haoyan Liu, Chongming Gao

JCST pdf

MERGE: Next-Generation Item Indexing Paradigm for Large-Scale Streaming Recommendation

Jing Yan, Yimeng Bai, Zongyu Liu, Yahui Liu, Junwei Wang, Jingze Huang, Haoda Li, Sihao Ding, Shaohui Ruan, Yang Zhang

CIKM 2026, Applied Research Track, Acceptance Rate: 28.9% pdf code

Distribution-Level Contrastive Supervision for Generative Recommendation

Ziqi Xue, Dingxian Wang, Yimeng Bai, Shuai Zhu, Jialei Li, Xiaoyan Zhao, Frank Yang, Andrew Rabinovich, Yang Zhang, Pablo N. Mendes

RecSys 2026, Short Paper, Acceptance Rate: 17.8% pdf code

Intuition-Guided Latent Reasoning for LLM-Based Recommendation

Chang Liu, Yimeng Bai, Xiaoyan Zhao, Yang Zhang, Qifan Wang, Fuli Feng, Wenge Rong

KDD 2026, Research Track, Acceptance Rate: 18.5% pdf code

Bi-Level Optimization for Generative Recommendation: Bridging Tokenization and Generation

Yimeng Bai, Chang Liu, Yang Zhang, Dingxian Wang, Frank Yang, Andrew Rabinovich, Wenge Rong, Fuli Feng

SIGIR 2026, Full Paper, Acceptance Rate: 18.4% pdf code

2025

Measuring What Makes You Unique: Difference-Aware User Modeling for Enhancing LLM Personalization

Yilun Qiu, Xiaoyan Zhao, Yang Zhang, Yimeng Bai, Wenjie Wang, Hong Cheng, Fuli Feng, Tat-Seng Chua

ACL 2025 Findings pdf code

Unconstrained Monotonic Calibration of Predictions in Deep Ranking Systems

Yimeng Bai, Shunyu Zhang, Yang Zhang, Hu Liu, Wentian Bao, Enyun Yu, Fuli Feng, Wenwu Ou

SIGIR 2025, Full Paper, Acceptance Rate: 21.5% pdf code

2024

Recommendation Unlearning via Influence Function

Yang Zhang, Zhiyu Hu, Yimeng Bai, Jiancan Wu, Qifan Wang, Fuli Feng

ACM TORS, Original Research pdf code

GradCraft: Elevating Multi-task Recommendations through Holistic Gradient Crafting

Yimeng Bai, Yang Zhang, Fuli Feng, Jing Lu, Xiaoxue Zang, Chenyi Lei, Yang Song

KDD 2024, Applied Data Science Track, Acceptance Rate: 20% pdf code

LabelCraft: Empowering Short Video Recommendations with Automated Label Crafting

Yimeng Bai, Yang Zhang, Jing Lu, Jianxin Chang, Xiaoxue Zang, Yanan Niu, Yang Song, Fuli Feng

WSDM 2024, Poster, Acceptance Rate: 18% pdf code

2023

Leveraging Watch-time Feedback for Short-Video Recommendations: A Causal Labeling Framework

Yang Zhang, Yimeng Bai, Jianxin Chang, Xiaoxue Zang, Song Lu, Jing Lu, Fuli Feng, Yanan Niu, Yang Song

CIKM 2023, Applied Research Paper, Acceptance Rate: 32% pdf code

Preprints

SWE-Clar: Can Coding Agents Clarify Incomplete Client Requirements and Deliver Greenfield Software?

Jialei Li, Dingxian Wang, Xiaoyan Zhao, Yimeng Bai, Xuanyi Zhu, Yang Zhang, Chao Yin, Wentao Shi, Ganesh Prabhu, Karthik Gomadam Rajagopal, Brett Levert, Darvin Yi, Andrew Rabinovich, Zhao Chen

ArXiv 2026 pdf code

Behavior-Aware Reward Shaping for Personalized Preference Optimization

Yang Zhang, Hanbin Wang, Yimeng Bai, Yilun Qiu, Fengbin Zhu, Xiaoyan Zhao

OpenReview 2026 paper

PrefReward: Learning User Preference Matrix for Personalized Text Generation

Yue Wu, Chengbing Wang, Yimeng Bai, Xiaoyan Zhao, Yang Zhang, Fuli Feng

ArXiv 2026 pdf code

UniGRec: Unified Generative Recommendation with Soft Identifiers for End-to-End Optimization

Jialei Li, Yang Zhang, Yimeng Bai, Shuai Zhu, Ziqi Xue, Xiaoyan Zhao, Dingxian Wang, Frank Yang, Andrew Rabinovich, Xiangnan He

ArXiv 2026 pdf code

Unveiling Inference Scaling for Difference-Aware User Modeling in LLM Personalization

Suyu Chen, Yimeng Bai, Yulong Huang, Xiaoyan Zhao, Yang Zhang

ArXiv 2025 pdf code

Brownian Bridge Diffusion for Sequential Recommendation

Yimeng Bai, Yang Zhang, Sihao Ding, Shaohui Ruan, Han Yao, Fuli Feng, Tat-Seng Chua

ArXiv 2025 pdf code

DiscRec: Disentangled Semantic-Collaborative Modeling for Generative Recommendation

Chang Liu, Yimeng Bai, Xiaoyan Zhao, Yang Zhang, Fuli Feng, Wenge Rong

ArXiv 2025 pdf code

Causality-Enhanced Behavior Sequence Modeling in LLMs for Personalized Recommendation

Yang Zhang, Juntao You, Yimeng Bai, Jizhi Zhang, Keqin Bao, Wenjie Wang, Tat-Seng Chua

ArXiv 2024 pdf code

Awards & Professional Services

National Scholarship, USTC, China, 2024.

AC/SPC: KDD 2026 ADS, Cycle 1.

Journal Reviewer: TOIS; TKDE.

Conference Reviewer: KDD ADS (2025–2027); KDD Research (2026–2027); WWW Industry (2026); SIGIR (2026); NeurIPS (2026); AAAI (2027); ICLR (2027).