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 agentic AI.

Generative Recommendation LLM Personalization Agentic AI

Email: baiyimeng77@gmail.com GitHub Google Scholar DBLP ORCID

News

16 May 2026One paper is accepted by KDD 2026 on latent reasoning.
3 Apr 2026One paper is accepted by SIGIR 2026 on generative recommendation.

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

SODA: Semantic-Oriented Distributional Alignment 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

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

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

The 1st Workshop on LLM Agents for Social Simulation, CIKM 2025 pdf

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

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

ArXiv 2026 pdf

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.

Reviewer: KDD 2025 ADS, Cycle 2; WWW 2026 Industry; KDD 2026 ADS, Cycle 1-2; KDD 2026 Research, Cycle 2; SIGIR 2026; NeurIPS 2026; KDD 2027 Research, Cycle 1.