Ziqi Zhao 赵子奇

Hi, I am a final-year master student at IR Lab of Shandong University, supervised by Prof. Zhaochun Ren and Prof. Xin Xin. I also worked with Zihan Wang in University of Amsterdam. I received my bachelor's degree from the School of Software Engineering at Tongji University in 2023. My current research focuses on both fundamental and practical aspects of reinforcement learning, such as its applications in LLM post-training and recommendation systems.

I am currently applying for PhD positions in 2026 Fall! I am open to exploring diverse and emerging directions. If you find my background interesting, please feel free to reach out.

Email: ziqizhao.work@gmail.com  /  Google Scholar  /  Github

profile photo

News

  • 2025.05: One paper on reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been released, feel free to reach out if you are interested!
  • 2025.05: One paper on model-based offline reinforcement learning has been accepted by KDD'2025!
  • 2025.05: Started an research intern on LLM post-training at Baidu.
  • 2025.04: One paper on reinforcement learning for sequential recommendation has been accepted by SIGIR'2025!
  • 2025.01: One paper on LLM-based named entity recognition has been accepted by WWW'2025!.

Selected Publications

* Equal contribution
Reinforced Efficient Reasoning via Semantically Diverse Exploration
Ziqi Zhao, Zhaochun Ren, Jiahong Zou, Liu Yang, Zhiwei Xu, Xuri Ge, Zhumin Chen, Xinyu Ma, Daiting Shi, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xin Xin
Preprint
Paper / Code

Offline Trajectory Optimization for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Ziqi Zhao, Zhaochun Ren, Liu Yang, Yunsen Liang, Fajie Yuan, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Xin Xin
KDD'2025
Paper / Code

Improving Sequential Recommenders through Counterfactual Augmentation of System Exposure
Ziqi Zhao, Zhaochun Ren, Jiyuan Yang, Zuming Yan, Zihan Wang, Liu Yang, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Maarten de Rijke, Xin Xin
SIGIR'2025
Paper / Code

A cooperative multi-agent framework for zero-shot named entity recognition
Zihan Wang*, Ziqi Zhao*, Yougang Lyu, Zhumin Chen, Maarten de Rijke, Zhaochun Ren
WWW'2025
Paper / Code

Experience

  • 2025.05 - Now : Research Intern, Search Team, Baidu, Beijing, China
  • 2024.12 - 2025.05 : Applied Research Intern, Computational Advertising Team, Kuaishou, Beijing, China
  • 2023.09 - 2024.12 : Research assistant, IR Lab, Shandong University, Qingdao, China

Selected Awards

  • 2021 China Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling national 2nd prize
  • 2021,2022,2023 Academic Scholarship of Tongji University
  • 2024 Academic Scholarship of Shandong University

Academic Services

  • Conference Reviewer: CIKM2024, WWW2025, SIGIR2025
  • Journal Reviewer: IPM, TOIS

Website Template: Here