👋 About Me

I am an incoming Ph.D. student at NLP Group of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), supervised by Prof. Wenjie Li and Prof. Yongqi Li, and closely collaborating with Prof. Wenjie Wang. Before joining PolyU, I completed my Master’s studies at the NExT++ Research Center of the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2025 under the supervision of Prof. Tat-Seng Chua. I received my Bachelor’s degree in 2023 from the Institute of Artificial Intelligence at Beihang University (BUAA).

My research focuses on LLM for Search, Multimodal Learning, and Language Agents.

I am open to collaboration and would be glad to discuss with anyone interested in these topics!

🔥 News

Nov 2025: I will join as a Ph.D. student!

Apr 2025: Two papers are accepted by !

Jan 2025: One paper is accepted by as an Oral Presentation!

Oct 2023: I joined as a research assistant.

Sep 2023: One paper is accepted by Advanced Intelligent Systems.

Oct 2021: I joined Biomechanics and Soft Robotics Lab as a research assistant.

📝 Publications

In the year of 2025:

SIGIR 2025

Exploring Training and Inference Scaling Laws in Generative Retrieval
Hongru Cai, Yongqi Li, Ruifeng Yuan, Wenjie Wang, Zhen Zhang, Wenjie Li, Tat-Seng Chua.
Paper | Code

WWW 2025 (Oral)

Large Language Models Empowered Personalized Web Agents
Hongru Cai, Yongqi Li, Wenjie Wang, Fengbin Zhu, Xiaoyu Shen, Wenjie Li, Tat-Seng Chua.
Paper | Code | Project

SIGIR 2025

Revolutionizing Text-to-Image Retrieval as Autoregressive Token-to-Voken Generation
Yongqi Li, Hongru Cai, Wenjie Wang, Leigang Qu, Yinwei Wei, Wenjie Li, Liqiang Nie, Tat-Seng Chua.
Paper | Code

🌟 Experiences

Research Assistant
NExT++, National University of Singapore.
Mainly works on Generative Retrieval and LLM-based Agents with Dr. Yongqi Li and Dr. Wenjie Wang.
Advisor: Prof. Tat-Seng Chua.
Oct 2023 - Oct 2025

Research Assistant
Biomechanics and Soft Robotics Lab, Beihang University.
Mainly works on 3D Vision for Aerial-Aquatic Hitchhiking Robot with Dr. Lei Li.
Advisor: Prof. Li Wen.
Oct 2021 - Jun 2023

📚 Professional Services

Reviewer of WWW 2025-2026, ACL 2026, EMNLP 2025, COLING 2025, SIGIR 2024.

PC Member of WWW 2024 - The 2nd Workshop on Recommendation with Generative Models.

🏅 Honors and Awards

Excellent Conclusion of National College Students Innovation and Entrepreneurship Project, Nov 2022, Beijing.

Top Twelve Universities Joint Mechanical Engineering Academic Forum: Best Popularity Report, May 2022, Beijing.