I am currently a 4th-year Ph.D. student under the advisory of Prof.Defu Lian in School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). I got my B.S. degree from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2021.

My research interest includes large language models, data mining, information retrieval, especially on recommender system. Recently my major research direction is on the LLM-driven autonomous agents. I have published several papers at the top international AI conferences with total 400+ google scholar citations .

🔥 News

  • 2025.03:  🎉🎉 Our work InteRecAgent for interactive recommendation is accepted by TOIS.
  • 2025.01:  🎉🎉 Our work HyperGate for multi-domain multi-task recommendation is accepted by WWW 2025, accept rate 22.42%.
  • 2025.01:  🎉🎉 Our work ToolACE for enhancing tool-using ability of LLM is accepted by ICLR 2025.

📝 Publications

WWW 2025
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HyperGate: Hierarchical Perceptive Gating Network for Multi-domain Multi-task Recommendation

Xu Huang*, Xiaolong Chen*, Yichao Wang, Weiwen Liu, Yang Yang, Xingmei Wang, Defu Lian and Ruiming Tang

Project

  • A hierarchical gating network for multi-domain and multi-task recommendation.
  • We propose a contrastive domain and task representation augumentation module to extract domain and task embeddings, and a hierarchical gating network to construct a domain- and task-perceptive parameter-sharing network from the bottom up.
  • The paper will be public soon.
ICLR2025
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ToolACE: Winning the Points of LLM Function Calling

Weiwen Liu*, Xu Huang*, Xingshan Zeng*, Xinlong Hao, Shuai Yu, Dexun Li, Shuai Wang, Weinan Gan, et al.

Project

  • A data synthetic framework tailored for enhancing tool-using ability of LLMs.
  • Model; Dataset
arXiv
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WESE: Weak Exploration to Strong Exploitation for LLM Agents

Xu Huang, Weiwen Liu, Xiaolong Chen, Xingmei Wang, Defu Lian, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Enhong Chen

Project

  • A novel prompt-based method for LLM agents, leveraging weaker agent for exploration and stronger agent for exploitation.
arXiv
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Understanding the planning of LLM agents: A survey

Xu Huang, Weiwen Liu, Xiaolong Chen, Xingmei Wang, Hao Wang, Defu Lian, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Enhong Chen

Project

  • A survey about the planning ability of LLM agents.
WWW 2024
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A Data-Centric Multi-Objective Learning Framework for Responsible Recommendation Systems

Xu Huang, Jianxun Lian, Hao Wang, Defu Lian, Xing Xie

Project

  • A data-centric framework for multi-objective learning in recommendation systems.
  • Code
TOIS
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Recommender AI Agent: Integrating Large Language Models for Interactive Recommendations

Xu Huang, Jianxun Lian, Yuxuan Lei, Jing Yao, Defu Lian, Xing Xie

Project

  • A framework to build an interactive recommendation agent with LLM
  • Code
SIGIR 2023
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RecStudio: Towards a Highly-Modularized Recommender System

Defu Lian(mentor), Xu Huang, Xiaolong Chen, Jin Chen, Xingmei Wang, Yankai Wang, Haoran Jin, Rui Fan, Zheng Liu, Le Wu, Enhong Chen

Project

  • A modularized recommender system library RecStudio was developped and released to public
  • Project homepage
WWW 2023
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Cooperative Retriever and Ranker in Deep Recommenders

Xu Huang, Defu Lian, Jin Chen, Zheng Liu, Xing Xie, Enhong Chen

Project

  • An adaptive hard negative sampler was introduced to enhance the ranker
  • An sampling based KL divergence was proposed to enhance the retriever
KDD2024
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RecExplainer: Aligning Large Language Models for Explaining Recommendation Models

Yuxuan Lei, Jianxun Lian, Jing Yao, Xu Huang, Defu Lian, Xing Xie

Project

  • A novel approach to leverage LLMs as surrogate models for explaining black-box recommender models.
ICML2024
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Learning-Efficient Yet Generalizable Collaborative Filtering for Item Recommendation

Yuanhao Pu, Xiaolong Chen, Xu Huang, Jin Chen, Defu Lian, Enhong Chen

Project

  • This work proposes a new square loss RG2 for recommendation based on the approximation of the softmax loss with Taylor expansion.
  • We have studied the theoretical properties of the proposed loss in terms of generalization and consistency.
WWW2024
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RecAI: Leveraging Large Language Models for Next-GenerationRecommender Systems

Jianxun Lian, Yuxuan Lei, Xu Huang, Jing Yao, Wei Xu, Xing Xie

Project

  • A practical toolkit designed to augmentor even revolutionize recommender systems with the advanced capabilities of Large Language Models.
  • Demo Paper
WWWJ
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When large language models meet personalization: Perspectives of challenges and opportunities

Jin Chen, Zheng Liu, Xu Huang, Chenwang Wu, Qi Liu, Gangwei Jiang, Yuanhao Pu, Yuxuan Lei, Xiaolong Chen, Xingmei Wang, Defu Lian, Enhong Chen

Project

  • A survey to summarize the combination of large language models and personlization systems
WWW 2022
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Fast variational autoencoder with inverted multi-index for collaborative filtering

Jin Chen, Defu Lian, Binbin Jin, Xu Huang, Kai Zhang, Enhong Chen

Project

  • An adaptive negative sampler was proposed to training VAE efficiently

⚙️ Projects

  • ToolACE: Large Language Models tailored for functional-calling (or tool-using) tasks.
  • RecAI: A project aims to bridge this gap by investigating various strategies to integrate LLMs into recommender systems.
  • RecFM: A project aims to build foundation models for recommendation systems.
  • RecStudio: A modularized and unified library for recommendation system based on PyTorch.
  • UniRec: An easy-to-use, lightweight, and scalable implementation of recommender systems.

🎖 Honors and Awards

  • Stars of Tomorrow Award, Microsoft Research Asia, 2023.10
  • National Scholarship, 2023.10
  • USTC Academic Scholarship, 2021.09, 2022.09, 2023.09, 2024.09
  • USTC Excellent Student Prize, 2017.09, 2018.09, 2019.09
  • National Encouragement Scholarship, 2018.09
  • Shizhang Bei Talent class Scholarship, 2017.09

📖 Educations

💻 Internships

⏳ Professional Services

Program Committee Members

📃 Curriculum Vitae

I am a 2026 graduate seeking employment opportunities. Please do not hesitate to contact me via email if you have any suitable positions available. Contact me: xuhuangcs@mail.ustc.edu.cn.

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