Publications

IN THE YEAR OF 2026

1. Scaling LLM Agents with Self-Evolving Structured Memory [Under Review]
   

2. : Thinking Forward and Backward: Multi-Objective RL for Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning
   AAAI’2026: The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

3. Is a Busy Search Agent a Good One? Overthinking and Overretrieval at Scale [Under Review]
   

4. Compete to Complete: Co-opetition Adversarial Learning for Retrieval-Augmented Generation [Under Review]
   ACL’2026: The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

5. : Stop Hardening Everything: A Training-Free Neuron-Level Defense for NRMs
   ACL’2026: The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

6. LLMs as Sparse Retrievers for First-Stage Product Search [Under Review]
   

7. Enhancing OOD Robustness in Sticker Retrieval via Cross-Modal Intent Alignment
   WWW’2026: The Web Conference 2026

IN THE YEAR OF 2025

1. On the Scaling of Robustness and Effectiveness in Dense Retrieval [PDF]
   Yu-An Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng
   SIGIR’2025: The 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

2. Attack-in-the-Chain: Bootstrapping Large Language Models for Attacks Against Black-box Neural Ranking Models [PDF]
   Yu-An Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke and Xueqi Cheng
   AAAI’2025: The 39th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

3. On the Robustness of Generative Information Retrieval Models [PDF]
   Yu-An Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Changjiang Zhou, Maarten de Rijke and Xueqi Cheng
   ECIR’2025: The 47th European Conference on Information Retrieval

4. Robust Information Retrieval (Tutorial) [PDF]
   Yu-An Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke
   WSDM’2025: The 18th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining

5. Robust-IR @ SIGIR 2025: The First Workshop on Robust Information Retrieval (Workshop) [PDF]
   Yu-An Liu, Haya Nachimovsky, Ruqing Zhang, Oren Kurland, Jiafeng Guo, Moshe Tennenholtz
   SIGIR’2025: The 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

IN THE YEAR OF 2024

1. Perturbation-Invariant Adversarial Training for Neural Ranking Models: Improving the Effectiveness-Robustness Trade-Off [PDF]
   Yu-An Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Mingkun Zhang, Wei Chen, Maarten de Rijke, Jiafeng Guo and Xueqi Cheng
   AAAI’2024: The 38th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence

2. Multi-granular Adversarial Attacks against Black-box Neural Ranking Models [PDF]
   Yu-An Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng
   SIGIR’2024: The 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

3. Robust Information Retrieval (Tutorial) [PDF]
   Yu-An Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke
   SIGIR’2024: The 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

4. Robust Neural Information Retrieval: An Adversarial and Out-of-distribution Perspective (Survey) [PDF]
   Yu-An Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng
   arXiv:2407.06992

IN THE YEAR OF 2023

1. Topic-oriented Adversarial Attacks against Black-box Neural Ranking Models [PDF]
   Yu-An Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Wei Chen, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng
   SIGIR’2023: The 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

2. Black-box Adversarial Attacks against Dense Retrieval Models: A Multi-view Contrastive Learning Method [PDF]
   Yu-An Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Wei Chen, Yixing Fan and Xueqi Cheng
   CIKM’2023: The 32nd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management

3. On the Robustness of Generative Retrieval Models: An Out-of-Distribution Perspective [PDF]
   Yu-An Liu, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Wei Chen and Xueqi Cheng
   Gen-IR workshop at SIGIR’2023: The First Workshop on Generative Information Retrieval

IN THE YEAR OF 2022

1. Micro-influencer Recommendation by Multi-perspective Account Representation Learning [PDF]
   Shaokun Wang, Tian Gan, Yu-An Liu, Jianlong Wu, Yuan Cheng and Liqiang Nie
   IEEE TMM: IEEE Transactions on Multimedia

IN THE YEAR OF 2021

1. Discover Micro-Influencers for Brands via Better Understanding [PDF]
   Shaokun Wang, Tian Gan, Yu-An Liu, Li Zhang, JianLong Wu and Liqiang Nie
   IEEE TMM: IEEE Transactions on Multimedia