Zhuohang Jiang

My research focuses on LLM reasoning, multimodal RAG and self-evolving agents.

I am currently pursuing a PhD degree at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. My supervisors are Qing Li and Wenqi Fan. My current Cumulative GPA is 3.60/4.00.

I studied at Sichuan University (SCU) from 2020 to 2024, where I majored in Computer Science & Technology. My Major GPA (CS courses): 3.79/4, 89.39/100; Overall GPA: 3.78/4, 89.25/100

During my time at Sichuan University, I worked as a research assistant at MachineILab from 2022 to 2024, advised by Prof. JiZhe Zhou. I participated in one National Natural Science Foundation of China project and one National Key R&D Program of China.

Email  /  CV  /  Google Scholar  /  Github 

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🤝 Seeking Internship Opportunities
I am currently seeking internship opportunities in large language models (LLMs) and AI agents. Please feel free to reach out via Email or WeChat.
Please note: search, advertising, and recommendation opportunities are not a fit.

Research Topics

My research focuses on LLM reasoning and evaluation, self-evolving agents, and multimodal retrieval-augmented generation. I lead work on hierarchical reasoning benchmarks (HiBench), multimodal retrieval agents (SUPERGLASSES / SUPERLENS and QA-Dragon), experience-driven strategy iteration (A/B Agent), and the decoupling of offline LLM intent reasoning from online retrieval (AIR). My earlier research in computer vision is now a supporting background to these directions.


News

🏆 2026-09-08 - Our paper "Do You Truly Love Me?" Benchmarking LLM Capability on Hierarchical Pragmatic Tactic Conversations was accepted to AACL-IJCNLP 2026 Main! 🎉

📜 2026-08-14 - Our new survey A Survey on AI Smart Glasses for Wearable Intelligence: From Egocentric Sensing to Agentic Personalization is now available on Preprints.org! 🎉

📜 2026-08-05 - Our new paper A/B Agent: A Self-Evolving Agent for Strategy Iteration in Industrial A/B Testing is now available on arXiv! 🎉

🏆 2026-05-16 - Our paper Atomic Intent Reasoning: Bringing LLM Semantics to Industrial Cross-Domain Recommendations was accepted as a presentation at the KDD 2026 Main Conference ADS Track! 🎉

🏆2026-04 - Our paper SUPERGLASSES was accepted by CVPR 2026 Findings! 🎉

💼 2025-10 - Will join Kuaishou E-commerce Team as a research intern.

📝 2025-09 - Appointed as Topic Coordinator for Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (Impact Factor: 4.7, CiteScore: 7.3, Logic and Reasoning Section) and Frontiers in Big Data (Impact Factor: 2.3, CiteScore: 6.1).

🏆 2025-08-20 - Our work QA-Dragon was accepted by KDD 2025 Workshop for Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation.

🎤 2025-08-07 - Invited to give a talk "Understanding Hierarchical Data with Large Language Models: RAG, Structural Reasoning, and Future Directions" at KDD 2025 Reasoning Day in Toronto, Canada! 🎙️

🏅 2025-06-18 - Achieved 12th place globally in KDD Cup 2025 - Meta CRAG-MM Multimodal Retrieval Challenge among hundreds of international teams! 🌍

🏆 2025-05-16 - Our benchmark paper HiBench was accepted to KDD Benchmark Track! 🎉

🎉 2025-05-07 - Our survey paper A Survey of WebAgents: Towards Next-Generation AI Agents for Web Automation with Large Foundation Models was accepted to KDD Tutorial Track! 🎊

📘 2025-03-01 - Completed the HiBench paper and released the code and dataset on GitHub and Hugging Face.

🌟 2025-01-15 - Mesoscopic Insights: Orchestrating Multi-Scale & Hybrid Architecture for Image Manipulation Localization was published in AAAI 2025.

🏆 2024-12-01 - IMDL-BenCo was published in NeurIPS 2024 Benchmark Tracks and received a Spotlight award.

🎓 2024-09-01 - Beginning my pursuit of a PhD degree in Hong Kong PolyU.

🎓 2024-06-26 - Got Outstanding Graduate Award from Sichuan University and Sichuan Province! 🎉

🎓 2024-06-26 - Graduated from Sichuan University with a bachelor's degree.

🛠️ 2024-06-12 - Completed the co-work project IMDLBenCo and finished a paper IMDL-BenCo: A Comprehensive Benchmark and Codebase for Image Manipulation Detection & Localization

🔍 2024-05-24 - Finished a paper Beyond Visual Appearances: Privacy-sensitive Objects Identification via Hybrid Graph Reasoning

📚 2023-08-01 - Participated in NUS Summer School research program at National University of Singapore, completed face recognition project! 🇸🇬


Selected Publications
[KDD'25 Benchmark & Dataset Track] HiBench: Benchmarking LLMs Capability on Hierarchical Structure Reasoning
Zhuohang Jiang, Pangjing Wu, Ziran Liang, Peter Q. Chen, Xu Yuan, Ye Jia, Jiancheng Tu, Chen Li, Peter H.F. Ng, Qing Li
CCF-A CORE A* (KDD) arXiv GitHub Hugging Face
Hierarchical Reasoning · LLM Benchmark · 30 Tasks · 39,519 Queries

As first author and project lead, I led benchmark design and code development for evaluating hierarchical structure reasoning in LLMs. I built tree, JSON and formula generators with controlled depth, width and node counts, algorithmic ground-truth answers and unified prompts, and incorporated code and paper tasks. The benchmark contains 30 tasks and 39,519 queries.

We evaluated 20 LLMs from 10 families, comparing structural representations, complexity and chain-of-thought prompting. I constructed instruction-tuning data that yielded average relative gains of 88.84% for Llama-3.1-8B and 31.38% for Qwen2.5-7B. The dataset and modular evaluation toolkit are open-source, supporting reproducible evaluation and further research on structure-aware reasoning.

[CVPR'26 Findings] SUPERGLASSES: Benchmarking Vision Language Models as Intelligent Agents for AI Smart Glasses
Zhuohang Jiang, Xu Yuan, Haohao Qu, Shanru Lin, Kanglong Liu, Wenqi Fan, Qing Li
CCF-A arXiv
AI Smart Glasses · VQA Benchmark · Vision-Language Models · Multimodal RAG

As first author, I built SUPERGLASSES, a benchmark for evaluating vision-language models as smart-glasses agents, and SUPERLENS, the accompanying multimodal agent. The real-device dataset contains 2,422 QA pairs across 14 domains and 8 question types, with tool-use traces. Domain routing selects direct answering or RAG, while open-vocabulary detection localizes small objects and multi-hop questions are decomposed into single-hop subqueries.

The agent searches image and text evidence, cleans HTML and reranks evidence chunks. A two-level Redis cache reuses query-to-URL and URL-to-content results. We evaluated 26 model/RAG variants; SUPERLENS improved the Qwen2.5-VL-7B score from 32.82 to 44.10, a gain of 11.28 points.

[arXiv Preprint, 2026] A/B Agent: A Self-Evolving Agent for Strategy Iteration in Industrial A/B Testing
Zhuohang Jiang, Yuxin Chen, Yongsen Pan, Zheng Hu, Wenqi Fan, Qing Li, Hongyang Wang, Jun Wang, Wenwu Ou
arXiv
Self-Evolving Agents · Tree-RAG · A/B Testing · Strategy Optimization

As first author, I developed a self-evolving LLM agent for strategy iteration in industrial A/B testing. It organizes experience by business domain, scenario, stage and optimization objective. Hybrid sparse/dense retrieval, tree-path proximity weighting and Qwen-Reranker retrieve relevant evidence; generated strategy configurations are checked for engineering feasibility and guardrail risks.

The experiment tree records strategies, parameters, metrics and context, enabling parent-child and sibling-branch comparisons. Confidence-weighted gains and guardrail-loss penalties guide local search within valid parameter ranges, or a switch to another strategy branch when gains stall. Recording successful and failed trials provides a reusable feedback loop for subsequent iterations. This work is a 2026 arXiv preprint.

[KDD'25 Workshop] QA‑Dragon: Query‑Aware Dynamic RAG System for Knowledge‑Intensive Visual Question Answering
Zhuohang Jiang, Pangjing Wu, Xu Yuan, Wenqi Fan, Qing Li
CCF-A arXiv
Query-Aware RAG · Knowledge-Intensive VQA · Multi-Hop Reasoning

I am the first author of QA-Dragon, a multimodal retrieval-augmented generation system for complex visual questions. The system drafts a candidate answer first, then decides in a query-aware manner whether that draft should be returned directly, verified through search, or handed to the retrieval-augmented pipeline.

Tool selection follows the detected knowledge gap of the draft, and the retrieval pipeline combines target cropping, image and text retrieval, evidence reranking, and answer verification to ground the final answer in retrieved evidence. Under single-source, multi-source, and multi-turn question settings, the system improves over the baseline by 5.06%, 6.35%, and 5.03% respectively.

[KDD'26 ADS Track] Atomic Intent Reasoning: Bringing LLM Semantics to Industrial Cross-Domain Recommendations
Zhuohang Jiang, Yuxin Chen, Shijie Wang, Haohao Qu, Zhou Jindong, Wenqi Fan, Li Qing, Dongxu Liang, Jun Wang
CCF-A CORE A* (KDD) arXiv
LLM Reasoning · Atomic Intents · Offline-to-Online Retrieval · Industrial Deployment

As first author, I developed AIR to decouple LLM intent reasoning from online serving. Offline, an LLM maps behavior records, user attributes and object descriptions into hierarchical intent paths, stored as reusable atomic knowledge. This moves semantic generation out of the online request path and makes the resulting knowledge cacheable and composable.

Online, AIR builds intent trees with behavior weights and time decay, retrieves target-relevant intent chains and fuses evidence with multi-head attention. Retrieval and composition approximate sequence-level semantic reasoning without live LLM calls. The system achieves approximately 400× throughput improvement, demonstrating an efficient path from offline LLM-generated knowledge to online evidence retrieval and composition.

[AACL-IJCNLP'26 Main] "Do You Truly Love Me?" Benchmarking LLM Capability on Hierarchical Pragmatic Tactic Conversations
Peter Q. Chen, Pangjing Wu, Zhuohang Jiang, Xiaodong Li, Peter H. F. Ng
AACL-IJCNLP 2026 Main CORE B (IJCNLP)
LLM Evaluation · Hierarchical Pragmatics · Conversational Reasoning

Evaluates LLM capability in hierarchical pragmatic tactic conversations, extending my research on structured reasoning evaluation to conversational contexts.

[KDD'25] A Survey of WebAgents: Towards Next-Generation AI Agents for Web Automation with Large Foundation Models
Liangbo Ning, Ziran Liang, Zhuohang Jiang, Haohao Qu, Yujuan Ding, Wenqi Fan, Xiao-yong Wei, Shanru Lin, Hui Liu, Philip S. Yu, Qing Li
CCF-A arXiv
Web Agents · Foundation Models · Web Automation · Trustworthiness

A survey of web automation agents built on large foundation models. This work complements my implementation research on retrieval and tool-using agents.


Selected Projects
HiBench: Benchmark for Hierarchical Reasoning
First Author & Team Leader • KDD 2025 Benchmark Track • 2025
arXiv GitHub Hugging Face
Hierarchical Reasoning · 39,519 Queries · Open-Source Toolkit · KDD 2025 Oral
Meta CRAG-MM: Multimodal Retrieval Challenge
Team Leader • KDD Cup 2025 • 2025
Multimodal Retrieval · RAG · Team Leadership · Global Rank #12
IMDL-BenCo: Benchmark for Image Manipulation Detection & Localization
Co-First Author • NeurIPS 2024 Benchmark Track — Spotlight • 2024
arXiv GitHub
Image Forensics · 8 Baselines · GPU-Accelerated Evaluation · NeurIPS 2024 Spotlight

Invited Talks
Understanding Hierarchical Data with Large Language Models: RAG, Structural Reasoning, and Future Directions
Invited Talks • Reasoning Day @ KDD 2025 • Toronto, ON, Canada • Aug 2025
Invited Talk · Hierarchical Reasoning · RAG · KDD 2025 Reasoning Day

Tutorials
WebAgents: Towards Next-Generation AI Agents for Web Automation with Large Foundation Models
Yujuan Ding, Liangbo Ning, Ziran Liang, Zhuohang Jiang, Haohao Qu, Wenqi Fan, Qing Li, Hui Liu, Xiaoyong Wei, Philip S. Yu
KDD 2025 Tutorial • The 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2025) • 2025
arXiv
KDD 2025 Tutorial · Web Agents · Foundation Models · Web Automation

Education
Sichuan University, Chengdu, Sichuan, China
B.E. in Computer Science and Technology • Sep. 2020 to Jun. 2024

Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hongkong, China
PHD. in Computer Science and Technology • Sep. 2024 to Present

Experience
National University of Singapore (NUS)
Summer School Participant • Aug. 2023
• Participated in the School of Computing summer research programme

DICALab, Sichuan University
Research Assistant • Sep. 2022 to Jun. 2024
Advisor: Prof. JiZhe Zhou
• Earlier research in computer vision and image forensics; participated in national research projects and co-authored peer-reviewed publications

Kuaishou E-commerce Team, Kuaishou Inc.
Research Intern • Oct. 2025 to Present
Beijing, China
• Developed A/B Agent: aligned historical strategies and code changes, parameters and measured outcomes into retrievable units; integrated automatic experiment comparison, tuning recommendations, configuration checks and review with the A/B platform. Successful and failed experience is continuously written back to support subsequent iterations.
• Developed AIR: decomposed LLM-generated semantic intent into reusable atomic knowledge. Offline intent generation and caching support online retrieval and composition, approximating sequence-level semantic reasoning without live LLM calls on the serving path.


Selected Awards
KDD Cup 2025 — Meta CRAG-MM
Toronto, Canada, 2025
12th Place (Global)
NeurIPS 2024 — IMDL‑BenCo (Co‑first Author)
Vancouver, Canada, 2024
Spotlight Award
Outstanding Graduate
Sichuan University & Sichuan Province, 2024
Top Achievement
Tencent Scholarship
Sichuan University, China, 2023
Top 2%
A-Level Certificate
Comprehensive Quality Evaluation, China, 2023
Excellence
Comprehensive First Class Scholarship
Sichuan University, Sichuan, China, 2022
Top 1%
Outstanding Students of Sichuan University
Sichuan University, Sichuan, China, 2022
Top 5%

Professional Service
Conference & Journal Reviewer
2023-2025
TIP, ECCV, NeurIPS, KDD, AAAI, IoTJ,
Conference & Journal Topic Coordinator
2025-2026
Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, Frontiers in Big Data
Teaching Assistant
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU)
Artificial Intelligence (COMP4431)
NLP Practicum (COMP5423)
DataBase System (COMP2411)

Skills
Research Topics Large Language Models (LLMs), AI Agents, Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG), LLM Reasoning & Evaluation
Frameworks & Tools PyTorch, Hugging Face, NumPy, Docker, Git, Anaconda
Languages Mandarin (native), English (fluent, IELTS 6.5)

Friends
Pangjing Wu  /  Xu Yuan  /  Changao Shen  /  Xiaochen Ma  /  Yuchuan Deng  /  Jiaye  /  Haohao Qu  /  Wendian Luo

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