Selected Publications

IN THE YEAR OF 2025

• Yu-An Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Changjiang Zhou, Maarten de Rijke and Xueqi Cheng. On the Robustness of Generative Information Retrieval Models: An Out-of-Distribution Perspective. The 47th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2025). Lucca, Italy. (Full Paper)
• Yu-An Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng. Attack-in-the-Chain: Bootstrapping Large Language Models for Attacks against Black-box Neural Ranking Models. The 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2025). Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Full Paper)
• Yubao Tang, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Shihao Liu, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin and Xueqi Cheng. Generative Retrieval for Book Search. 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2025). Toronto, Canada. (Full Paper)

IN THE YEAR OF 2024

• Yubao Tang, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Wei Chen and Xueqi Cheng. Generative Retrieval Meets Multi-Graded Relevance. The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024). Vancouver, Canada. (Spotlight)
• Weichao Zhang, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng. Pretraining Data Detection for Large Language Models: A Divergence-based Calibration Method. The 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2024). Miami, USA. (Full Paper) (Best Paper Award)
• Lu Chen, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng. Controlling Risk of Retrieval-augmented Generation: A Counterfactual Prompting Framework. Findings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2024). Miami, USA. (Full Paper)
• Yuanzheng Wang, Yixing Fan, Jiafeng Guo, Ruqing Zhang and Xueqi Cheng. RoCEL: Advancing Table Entity Linking through Distinctive Row and Column Contexts. The 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2024). Miami, USA. (Full Paper)
• Yu-An Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng. Robust Neural Information Retrieval: An Adversarial and Out-of-distribution Perspective. arXiv:2407.06992
• Jun Yang, Yixing Fan, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, and Xueqi Cheng. GaQR: An Efficient Generation-augmented Question Rewriter. 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2024). Idaho, USA. (Short Paper, Acceptance Rate = 27%)
• Yinqiong Cai, Yixing Fan, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo, Wei Chen, Ruqing Zhang and Xueqi Cheng. CAME: Competitively Learning a Mixture-of-Experts Model for First-stage Retrieval. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS).
• Yubao Tang, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng. Bootstrapped Pre-training with Dynamic Identifier Prediction for Generative Retrieval. Findings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024). (Full Paper)
• Sen Li, Fuyu Lv, Ruqing Zhang, Dan Ou, Zhixuan Zhang and Maarten de Rijke. Text Matching Indexers in Taobao Search. 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2024). (Full Paper, Acceptance Rate = 20%)
• Yu-An Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng. Multi-granular Adversarial Attacks against Black-box Neural Ranking Models. The 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2024). (Full Paper, Acceptance Rate = 20.1%)
• Hengran Zhang, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng. Are Large Language Models Good at Utility Judgments?. The 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2024). (Full Paper, Acceptance Rate = 20.1%)
• Yubao Tang, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Wei Chen, and Xueqi Cheng. Listwise Generative Retrieval Models via a Sequential Learning Process. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS).
• Lu Chen, Wei Huang, Ruqing Zhang, Wei Chen, Jiafeng Guo and Xueqi Cheng. A Unified Causal View of Instruction Tuning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.06220
• Jiafeng Guo, Changjiang Zhou, Ruqing Zhang, Jiangui Chen, Maarten de Rijke, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng. CorpusBrain++: A Continual Generative Pre-Training Framework for Knowledge-Intensive Language Tasks. arXiv:2402.16767
• Yuan Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Mingkun Zhang, Wei Chen, Maarten de Rijke, Jiafeng Guo and Xueqi Cheng. Perturbation-Invariant Adversarial Training for Neural Ranking Models: Improving the Effectiveness-Robustness Trade-Off. The 38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2024). Vancouver, Canada. (Full Paper, Acceptance Rate = 23.75%)
• Yubao Tang, Ruqing Zhang, Zhaochun Ren, Jiafeng Guo and Maarten de Rijke. Recent Advances in Generative Information Retrieval. The 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024). Glasgow, Scotland. (Tutorial)
• Runze Fan, Yixing Fan, Jiangui Chen, Jiafeng Guo, Ruqing Zhang and Xueqi Cheng. RIGHT: Retrieval-augmented Generation for Mainstream Hashtag Recommendation. The 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2024). Glasgow, Scotland. (Full Paper, Acceptance Rate = 23%)

IN THE YEAR OF 2023

• Gabriel Bénédict, Ruqing Zhang, Donald Metzler, Andrew Yates, Romain Deffayet, Philipp Hager and Sami Jullien. Report on the 1st Workshop on Generative Information Retrieval (Gen-IR 2023) at SIGIR 2023. ACM SIGIR Forum.
• Yubao Tang, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo and Maarten de Rijke. Recent Advances in Generative Information Retrieval. 1st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Information Retrieval in the Asia Pacific (SIGIR-AP 2023). Beijing, China. (Tutorial)
• Hengran Zhang, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng. From Relevance to Utility: Evidence Retrieval with Feedback for Fact Verification. Findings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2023). Singapore.
• Jiangui Chen, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Wei Chen, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng. Continual Learning for Generative Retrieval over Dynamic Corpora. 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2023). Birmingham, UK. (Full Paper, Acceptance Rate = 24%)
• Yuan Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Wei Chen, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng. Black-box Adversarial Attacks against Dense Retrieval Models: A Multi-view Contrastive Learning Method. 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2023). Birmingham, UK. (Full Paper, Acceptance Rate = 24%)
• Lu Chen, Ruqing Zhang, Wei Huang, Wei Chen, Jiafeng Guo and Xueqi Cheng. Inducing Causal Structure for Abstractive Text Summarization. 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2023). Birmingham, UK. (Full Paper, Acceptance Rate = 24%)
• Yuan Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Wei Chen and Xueqi Cheng. On the Robustness of Generative Retrieval Models: An Out-of-Distribution Perspective. Gen-IR Workshop@SIGIR2023
• Yubao Tang, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Jiangui Chen, Zuowei Zhu, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin and Xueqi Cheng. Semantic-Enhanced Differentiable Search Index Inspired by Learning Strategies . 29th SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2023). (Full Paper)
• Jiangui Chen, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Yiqun Liu, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng. A Unified Generative Retriever for Knowledge-Intensive Language Tasks via Prompt Learning. The 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2023). (Full Paper, Acceptance Rate = 20.1%)
• Yuan Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Wei Chen, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng. Topic-oriented Adversarial Attacks against Black-box Neural Ranking Models. The 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2023). (Full Paper, Acceptance Rate = 20.1%)
• Garbiel Bénédict, Ruqing Zhang and Donald Metzler. Gen-IR@SIGIR 2023: The First Workshop on Generative Information Retrieval. The 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2023). (Workshop)
• Yiyi Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Yixing Fan, Jiafeng Guo and Xueqi Cheng. Prompt Tuning with Contradictory Intentions for Sarcasm Recognition. The 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL 2023 Main). (Full Paper)

IN THE YEAR OF 2022

• Yuting Wang, Yiyi Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Yixing Fan and Jiafeng Guo. Euphemism Detection by Transformers and Relational Graph Attention Network. Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FLP).
• Sihao Yu, Fei Sun, Jiafeng Guo, Ruqing Zhang and Xueqi Cheng. LegoNet: A Fast and Exact Unlearning Architecture. arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.16023.
• Chen Wu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Yixing Fan, Xueqi Cheng. PRADA: Practical Black-Box Adversarial Attacks against Neural Ranking Models. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS).
• Wenxiang Sun, Yixing Fan, Jiafeng Guo, Ruqing Zhang and Xueqi Cheng. Visual Named Entity Linking: A New Dataset and A Baseline. The 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2022 Findings). (Full Paper)
• Jiangui Chen, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Yiqun Liu, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng. CorpusBrain: Pre-train a Generative Retrieval Model for Knowledge-Intensive Language Tasks. The 31st ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2022). Hybrid Conference (Full Paper)
• Chen Wu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Wei Chen, Yixing Fan, Maarten de Rijke and Xueqi Cheng. Certified Robustness to Word Substitution Ranking Attack for Neural Ranking Models. The 31st ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2022). Hybrid Conference (Full Paper)
• Xinyu Ma, Jiafeng Guo, Ruqing Zhang, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng. Scattered or Connected? An Optimized Parameter-efficient Tuning Approach for Information Retrieval. The 31st ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2022). Hybrid Conference (Full Paper)
• Yinqiong Cai, Jiafeng Guo, Yixing Fan, Qingyao Ai, Ruqing Zhang and Xueqi Cheng. Hard Negatives or False Negatives: Correcting Pooling Bias in Training Neural Ranking Models. The 31st ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2022). Hybrid Conference (Full Paper)
• Xinyu Ma, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng. A Contrastive Pre-training Approach to Discriminative Autoencoder for Dense Retrieval. The 31st ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2022). Hybrid Conference (Short Paper)
• Lu Chen, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng. Discriminative Language Model via Self-Teaching for Dense Retrieval. The 31st ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2022). Hybrid Conference (Short Paper)
• Shaojie Jiang, Ruqing Zhang, Svitlana Vakulenko, Maarten de Rijke. A Simple Contrastive Learning Objective for Alleviating Neural Text Degeneration. arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.02517.
• Chen Wu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Yixing Fan, and Xueqi Cheng. Are Neural Ranking Models Robust?. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS).
• Jiangui Chen, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Yixing Fan, Xueqi Cheng. GERE: Generative Evidence Retrieval for Fact Verification . The 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR2022). Virtual Event (Short Paper, Acceptance Rate = 24.7%) [code]
• Xinyu Ma, Jiafeng Guo, Ruqing Zhang, Yixing Fan, Xueqi Cheng. Pre-train a Discriminative Text Encoder for Dense Retrieval via Contrastive Span Prediction . The 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR2022). Virtual Event (Full Paper, Acceptance Rate = 20%)
• Sihao Yu, Jiafeng Guo, Ruqing Zhang, Yixing Fan, Zizhen Wang and Xueqi Cheng. A Re-Balancing Strategy for Class-Imbalanced Classification Based on Instance Difficulty . 2022 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR2022). New Orleans, Louisiana (Full Paper, Acceptance Rate = 25.3%)
• Yixing Fan, Xiaohui Xie, Yinqiong Cai, Jia Chen, Xinyu Ma, Xiangsheng Li, Ruqing Zhang and Jiafeng Guo Pre-training Methods in Information Retrieval. Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval (FnTIR).

IN THE YEAR OF 2021

• Jiangui Chen, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Yixing Fan, and Xueqi Cheng. FedMatch: Federated Learning Over Heterogeneous Question Answering Data. 30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2021). Queensland, Australia, November 2021 (Full Paper, Acceptance Rate = 21%)
• Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Lu Chen, Yixing Fan, and Xueqi Cheng. A Review on Question Generation from Natural Language Text. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS).
• Yinqiong Cai, Yixing Fan, Jiafeng Guo, Ruqing Zhang, Yanyan Lan and Xueqi Cheng. A Discriminative Semantic Ranker for Question Retrieval. The 7th ACM SIGIR International Conference on the Theory of Information Retrieval (ICTIR2021) .
• Jiafeng Guo, Yinqiong Cai, Yixing Fan, Fei Sun, Ruqing Zhang, Xueqi Cheng. Semantic Models for the First-stage Retrieval: A Comprehensive Review. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS).
• Xinyu Ma, Jiafeng Guo, Ruqing Zhang, Yixing Fan, Xiang Ji, and Xueqi Cheng. B-PROP: Bootstrapped Pre-training with Representative Words Prediction for Ad-hoc Retrieval. The 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR2021). Virtual Event (Full Oral Paper, Acceptance Rate = 21%)
• Chen Wu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Yixing Fan, Yanyan Lan, and Xueqi Cheng. Learning to Truncate Ranked Lists for Information Retrieval. The Thirty-Fifth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI2021). (Full Paper, Acceptance Rate = 21%)
• Lixin Su, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Yixing Fan, Jiangui Chen, Yanyan Lan, and Xueqi Cheng. Beyond Relevance: Trustworthy Answer Selection via Consensus Verification. The 14th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM2021). Virtual Event (Full Oral Paper, Acceptance Rate = 18.6%)
• Xinyu Ma, Jiafeng Guo, Ruqing Zhang, Yixing Fan, Xiang Ji, and Xueqi Cheng. PROP: Pre-training with Representative Words Prediction for Ad-hoc Retrieval. The 14th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM2021). Virtual Event (Full Oral Paper, Acceptance Rate = 18.6%)
• Yixing Fan, Jiafeng Guo, Xinyu Ma, Ruqing Zhang, Yanyan Lan and Xueqi Cheng. A Linguistic Study on Relevance Modeling in Information Retrieval. 30th The Web Conference (WebConf2021). Ljubljana, Slovenia. (Full Paper, Acceptance Rate = 20.6%)

IN THE YEAR OF 2020

• Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Yixing Fan, Yanyan Lan, and Xueqi Cheng. Query Understanding via Intent Description Generation. The 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2020). Virtual Event (Full Oral Paper, Acceptance Rate = 21%)
• Lixin Su, Jiafeng Guo, Ruqing Zhang, Yixing Fan, Yanyan Lan, and Xueqi Cheng. Continual Domain Adaptation for Machine Reading Comprehension. The 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM2020). Virtual Event (Full Oral Paper, Acceptance Rate = 21%)
• Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Yixing Fan, Yanyan Lan, and Xueqi Cheng.Dual-factor Generation Model for Conversation. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS).
• Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Yixing Fan, Yanyan Lan, and Xueqi Cheng. Structure Learning for Headline Generation. The Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2020). New York, USA. February 2020 (Full Oral Paper, Oral Acceptance Rate = 5.87%)
• Zizhen Wang, Yixing Fan, Jiafeng Guo, Liu Yang, Ruqing Zhang, Yanyan Lan, Xueqi Cheng, Hui Jiang and Xiaozhao Wang. Match^2: A Matching over Matching Model for Similar Question Identification. Proceedings of the 43nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2020). Virtual Event (Full Oral Paper, Acceptance Rate = 26%)

IN THE YEAR OF 2019

• Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Yixing Fan, Yanyan Lan, and Xueqi Cheng. Outline Generation: Understanding the Inherent Content Structure of Documents. Proceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2019). Paris, France, pp. 745-754, July 2019 (Full Oral Paper, Acceptance Rate = 20%)[subdataset1][subdataset2]
• Lixin Su, Jiafeng Guo, Yixing Fan, Yanyan Lan, Ruqing Zhang, and Xueqi Cheng. An Adaptive Framework for Conversational Question Answering. The Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2019). Hawaii, USA, pp. 10041-10042, January 2019

IN THE YEAR OF 2018

• Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Yixing Fan, Yanyan Lan, Jun Xu, Huanhuan Cao, and Xueqi Cheng. Question Headline Generation for News Articles. The 27th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2018). Torino, Italy, pp. 617-626, October 2018 (Full Oral Paper, Acceptance Rate = 17%) [dataset]
• Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Yixing Fan, Yanyan Lan, Jun Xu, and Xueqi Cheng. Learning to Control the Specificity in Neural Response Generation. The 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2018). Melbourne, Australia, pp. 1108-1117, July 2018 (Full Oral Paper, Oral Acceptance Rate = 14.6%) [code]
• Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Yanyan Lan, Jun Xu, and Xueqi Cheng. Spherical Paragraph Model. The 40th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2018). Grenoble, France, pp. 289–302, March 2018 (Full Oral Paper, Acceptance Rate = 23%)
• Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Yanyan Lan, Jun Xu, and Xueqi Cheng. Aggregating Neural Word Embeddings for Document Representation . The 40th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2018). Grenoble, France, pp. 303–315, March 2018 (Full Oral Paper, Acceptance Rate = 23%)
• Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Yanyan Lan, Jun Xu, and Xueqi Cheng. Generative Paragraph Vector. The 24th China Conference on Information Retrieval (CCIR 2018). Guilin, China, pp. 105-118, September 2018 (Full Oral Paper, Excellent Paper Award)

IN THE YEAR OF 2017

• Ruqing Zhang, Yan Guo, Yue Liu, Xiaoming Yu, and Xueqi Cheng. Research on Theme Information Extraction of Any Page. Journal of Chinese Information Processing. 31(5):127-137, 2017