Chengkai Huang

About Me

Hi there! I am a Ph.D. candidate at Data Dynamics group, School of Computer Science and Engineering, the University of New South Wales (UNSW) since 2021. I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Lina Yao.

Research Interests

Recommender Systems: sequential recommendation, multi-modal recommendation

News

[Apr. 2026] 🎉 Three of our papers on latent reasoning for recommendation and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have been accepted to SIGIR 2026. Congrats to Tianqi and Xihang!
[Jan. 2026] 🎉 Two of our papers on multi-domain recommendation and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have been accepted to WWW 2026.
[Oct. 2025] I gave a talk titled “Towards Agentic Recommenders: A Journey from Discriminative to Generative Paradigms” at Macquarie University.
[Oct. 2025] 🎉 Our paper about diffusion models for sequential recommendation has been accepted by WSDM 2026.
[Oct. 2025] 🎉 Our paper about diffusion models for user behavior trajectories prediction has been accepted by NeurIPS 2025.
[Sep. 2025] 🎉 Our tutorial about LLM agent for Recsys has been accepted by RecSys 2025.
[Aug. 2025] Our paper about debiasing Recsys has been accepted by CIKM 2025.
[Mar. 2025] Our paper about diffusion models for recommender systems has been posted on arXiv.
[Mar. 2025] Our perspective paper on Agentic Recommender Systems has been posted on arXiv.
[Nov. 2024] Our paper about adaptive RAG for LLMs is accepted to COLING 2025.
[Sep. 2024] Our survey on federated large language models has been posted on arXiv.
[Feb. 2024] Our survey on foundation models for recommendations has been posted on arXiv.
[Apr. 2023] Our paper about sequential recommendation is accepted to SIGIR 2023.
[Jan. 2023] Our paper about sequential recommendation is accepted to The Web Conference 2023

Selected Publications

Factorized Latent Reasoning for LLM-based Recommendation

Tianqi Gao*, Chengkai Huang*, Zihan Wang, Cao Liu, Ke Zeng and Lina Yao (*Equal first authors)

ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2026.

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Purifying Multimodal Retrieval: Fragment-Level Evidence Selection for RAG

Xihang Wang, Zihan Wang, Chengkai Huang+, Cao Liu, Ke Zeng, Quan Z. Sheng and Lina Yao (+Corresponding author)

ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2026.

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Gaussian Mixture Flow Matching with Domain Alignment for Multi-Domain Sequential Recommendation

Xiaoxin Ye, Chengkai Huang+, Hongtao Huang, Lina Yao (+Corresponding author)

The ACM Web Conference (WWW), 2026.

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PruneRAG: Confidence-Guided Query Decomposition Trees for Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Shuguang Jiao, Xinyu Xiao, Yunfan Wei, Shuhan Qi, Chengkai Huang+, Quan Z. Sheng, Lina Yao (+Corresponding author)

The ACM Web Conference (WWW), 2026.

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Dual Conditional Diffusion Models for Sequential Recommendation

Hongtao Huang*, Chengkai Huang*, Tong Yu, Xiaojun Chang, Wen Hu, Julian McAuley, Lina Yao (*Equal first authors)

The Nineteenth International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), 2026.

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Listwise Preference Diffusion Optimization for User Behavior Trajectories Prediction

Hongtao Huang*, Chengkai Huang*, Junda Wu, Tong Yu, Julian McAuley and Lina Yao (*Equal first authors)

The Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025.

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Federated In-Context Learning: Iterative Refinement for Improved Answer Quality

Ruhan Wang*, Zhiyong Wang*, Chengkai Huang*, Rui Wang, Tong Yu, Lina Yao, John C. S. Lui and Dongruo Zhou(*Equal first authors)

Forty-Second International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025.

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Embedding-Informed Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Models

Chengkai Huang*, Yu Xia, Rui Wang, Kaige Xie, Tong Yu, Julian McAuley and Lina Yao (*Corresponding authors)

International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 2025.

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Dual Contrastive Transformer for Hierarchical Preference Modeling in Sequential Recommendation

Chengkai Huang*, Shoujin Wang, Xianzhi Wang and Lina Yao (*Corresponding authors)

International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), 2023.

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Modeling Temporal Positive and Negative Excitation for Sequential Recommendation

Chengkai Huang*, Shoujin Wang, Xianzhi Wang and Lina Yao (*Corresponding authors)

The ACM Web Conference (WWW), 2023.

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About Me

Research Interests

News

Selected Publications

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