About

I am a first-year Ph.D. student in the NLP Group at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), supervised by Prof. Wenjie Li and Prof. Yongqi Li, and closely collaborating with Prof. Wenjie Wang from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC).

Before joining PolyU, I worked with Prof. Tat-Seng Chua at the NExT++ Research Center, National University of Singapore (NUS), and completed my Master’s degree in 2025. I received my Bachelor’s degree from Beihang University (BUAA) in 2023.

My research focuses on LLMs for Search, especially Search Agents and Generative Retrieval.

You can reach me at henry [dot] hongrucai [at] gmail [dot] com. I am always happy to connect with people working on related topics!

News

Aug2026

One paper is accepted by EMNLP 2026, see you in Budapest!

Apr2026

One paper is accepted by ACL 2026, congrats to my collaborators!

Apr2026

One paper is accepted by SIGIR 2026, see you in Melbourne!

Mar2026

We have open-sourced PalmClaw, the OpenClaw on your phone.

Nov2025

I will join as a Ph.D. student!

Apr2025

Two papers are accepted by SIGIR 2025!

Jan2025

One paper is accepted by WWW 2025 as an Oral Presentation!

Oct2023

I joined as a research assistant.

Sep2023

One paper is accepted by Advanced Intelligent Systems.

Oct2021

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

Publications

EMNLP 2026 System Demonstration

PalmClaw: A Native On-Device Agent Framework for Mobile Phones

Hongru Cai, Yongqi Li, Ran Wei, Wenjie Li.

Paper Code Project

SIGIR 2026

One Adapts to Any: Meta Reward Modeling for Personalized LLM Alignment

Hongru Cai, Yongqi Li, Tiezheng Yu, Fengbin Zhu, Wenjie Wang, Fuli Feng, Wenjie Li.

Paper Code

arXiv 2026

A Survey on Agent-as-a-Judge

Runyang You*, Hongru Cai*, Caiqi Zhang, Qiancheng Xu, Meng Liu, Tiezheng Yu, Yongqi Li, Wenjie Li.

Paper Code

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 Presentation Most Influential Paper

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

Services

Awards