Yuzheng Cai

About

I am a final year PhD candidate at School of Data Science, Fudan University, advised by Dr. Weiguo Zheng. I obtained a B.S. in Data Science from Fudan University in 2021. My research focuses on information retrieval, including

  • Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
  • Vector Retrieval (Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search, ANNS)
  • Graph Retrieval

I expect to graduate in July 2026 and am actively seeking job opportunities. Feel free to connect if you are interested in collaboration or have relevant openings.

News

  • [2025/11] One paper accepted by AAAI 2026
  • [2025/10] Awarded the National Scholarship for PhD studies.
  • [2025/09] One paper accepted by NeurIPS 2025
  • [2025/05] One paper accepted by ACL 2025
  • [2025/05] One paper accepted by KDD 2025
  • [2025/01] One paper accepted by TKDE
  • [2024/12] One paper published in SIGMOD 2025
  • [2024/09] One paper accepted by NeurIPS 2024
  • [2023/11] One paper accepted by SIGMOD 2024
  • [2022/11] One paper accepted by SIGMOD 2023

Internships

Tencent Youtu Lab Tencent Youtu Lab - Research Intern

Youtu-Agent Team GitHub Repo stars, supervised by Ke Li.
2025.08 - Present

Alibaba Tongyi Lab Alibaba Tongyi Lab - Research Intern

Qwen Embedding Team, supervised by Dingkun Long and Yanzhao Zhang.
2025.03 - 2025.07

Ant Group Ant Group - Research Intern

Safety Intelligence Team, supervised by Baokun Wang.
2023.02 - 2023.08

Publications

đź“Ś Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

1. ERank: Fusing Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning for Effective and Efficient Text Reranking.
Yuzheng Cai, Yanzhao Zhang, Dingkun Long, Mingxin Li, Pengjun Xie, Weiguo Zheng.
The Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
AAAI 2026. [pdf] [model]

2. SimGRAG: Leveraging Similar Subgraphs for Knowledge Graphs Driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation.
Yuzheng Cai*, Zhenyue Guo*, Yiwen Pei, Wanrui Bian, and Weiguo Zheng.
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Findings).
ACL 2025. [link] [pdf] [code] GitHub Repo stars

đź“Ś Vector Retrieval

3. Navigating Labels and Vectors: A Unified Approach to Filtered Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search.
Yuzheng Cai, Jiayang Shi, Yizhuo Chen, and Weiguo Zheng.
ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data.
SIGMOD 2025. [link] [poster] [code] GitHub Repo stars

4. Hi-PNG: Efficient Interval-Filtering ANNS via Hierarchical Interval Partition Navigating Graph.
Ming Yang, Yuzheng Cai, and Weiguo Zheng.
Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.
KDD 2025. [link] [code]

5. CSPG: Crossing Sparse Proximity Graphs for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search.
Ming Yang, Yuzheng Cai, and Weiguo Zheng.
Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.
NeurIPS 2024. [link] [pdf] [code] [slides]

6. Results of the Big ANN: NeurIPS’23 competition.
Harsha Vardhan simhadri, Martin AumĂĽller, Matthijs Douze, Dmitry Baranchuk, Amir Ingber, Edo Liberty, George Williams, Ben Landrum, Magdalen Dobson Manohar, Mazin Karjikar, Laxman Dhulipala, Meng Chen, Yue Chen, Rui Ma, Kai Zhang, Yuzheng Cai, Jiayang Shi, Weiguo Zheng, Yizhuo Chen, Jie Yin, Ben Huang.
The Thirty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems Datasets and Benchmarks Track.
NeurIPS 2025. [link] [pdf] [code]

đź“Ś Graph Retrieval

7. Generating k-hop-constrained s-t Path Graphs.
Yuzheng Cai, Siyuan Liu, Weiguo Zheng, Xuemin Lin, Chengbo Zhang, Xuecang Zhang.
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.
TKDE. [link]

8. Towards Generating Hop-constrained s-t Simple Path Graphs.
Yuzheng Cai, Siyuan Liu, Weiguo Zheng, Xuemin Lin.
ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data.
SIGMOD 2023. [link] [pdf] [code] [slides] [poster]

9. Answering Label-Constrained Reachability Queries via Reduction Techniques.
Yuzheng Cai, Weiguo Zheng.
International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications.
DASFAA 2023. [link] [code] [slides]

10. ESTI: Efficient k-Hop Reachability Querying over Large General Directed Graphs.
Yuzheng Cai, Weiguo Zheng.
GDMA workshop, International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications
DASFAA 2021 workshop. [link] [code]

11. HERO: A Hierarchical Set Partitioning and Join Framework for Speeding up the Set Intersection Over Graphs.
Boyu Yang, Weiguo Zheng, Xiang Lian, Yuzheng Cai, X. Sean Wang.
ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data.
SIGMOD 2024. [link] [code]

12. Towards Computing A Near-Maximum Weighted Independent Set on Massive Graphs.
Jiewei Gu, Weiguo Zheng, Yuzheng Cai, Peng Peng.
ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.
KDD 2021. [link]

13. Enhancing Link Prediction Based on Simple Path Graphs.
Zhiren Li, Yuzheng Cai, and Hongwei Feng.
GDMA workshop, International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications.
DASFAA 2024 workshop. [link] [slides]

(* indicates equal contribution)

Honors & Awards

  • National Scholarship (PhD).
  • National Scholarship (Top 1% undergraduates in Fudan University).
  • Nomination Award for “Fudan Graduation Star” (20 out of 3600 undergraduates).
  • Champion of NeurIPS’23 Big-ANN Competition: Out-Of-Distribution track and Sparse track.
  • Second Place for CCKS 2022 Competition: Evaluation of custom graph analysis algorithms based on graph databases.
  • Second Place for WISA 2021 Competition: Graph data mining.

Services

  • Reviewer of top journals: ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE).
  • President of Student Union, School of Data Science, Fudan University (2020.08-2021.07).
  • Leader of volunteer team for Hong Kong Trade Development Council in the 2nd China International Import Expo, 2019.