Qingpeng Cai is currently a Senior Staff Research Scientist at KuaiShou Technology, where he is responsible for business optimization and technical management. He received his Ph.D. from the Interdisciplinary Information Sciences program at Tsinghua University. His core research focuses on Reinforcement Learning and its applications to Large Language Models and practical domains (Recommender Systems and Advertising). He serves as Area Chair/Senior Program Committee Member for prestigious conferences including NeurIPS, ICLR, CIKM and AAMAS. He was awarded the 2024 Qian Weichang Prize for Chinese Information Processing Science and Technology (First Prize in Natural Sciences). Additionally, he led his team to win dual-track championships in the NeurIPS 2024 Auto-Bidding in Large-Scale Auctions Competition.

More information can be found in Google Scholar, DBLP.

I am hiring students passionate about RL and LLM. If interested, please feel free to contact me. Email:cqpcurry [@] gmail [DOT] com

Selected Awards

• First Prize of the General track at the NeurIPS 2024 Competition: Auto-Bidding in Large-Scale Auctions [News Link]

• First Prize of the AIGB track at the NeurIPS 2024 Competition: Auto-Bidding in Large-Scale Auctions [News Link]

• 2024年“钱伟长中文信息处理科学技术奖”自然科学类一等奖[News Link]

Selected Invited Talks

• Reinforcement Learning for Short Video Recommender Systems [pdf]
  The 1st Workshop on LARGE-SCALE VIDEO RECOMMENDER SYSTEMS@ACM RecSys'23
  

• Reinforcement Learning for Industrial Recommender Systems [pdf]
  DRL4IR@SIGIR2022
  

Professional Activities

Organizer:

• Agent-based Information Retrieval Workshop @SIGIR 2024, SIGIR 2025

Area Chair:

• NeurIPS, ICLR

Senior Program Committee:

• AAMAS, CIKM

Program Committee:

• ICML, WWW, AAAI

Working Paper(* indicates the corresponding author)

• 1.Navigate the Unknown: Enhancing LLM Reasoning with Intrinsic Motivation Guided Exploration [pdf]
  Jingtong Gao, Ling Pan, Yejing Wang, Rui Zhong, Chi Lu, Qingpeng Cai*, Peng Jiang, Xiangyu Zhao
  

• 2.TrackRec: Iterative Alternating Feedback with Chain-of-Thought via Preference Alignment for Recommendation [pdf]
  

• 3.Generative Auto-Bidding in Large-Scale Competitive Auctions via Diffusion Completer-Aligner [pdf]
  

Publications(* indicates the corresponding author)

• 36.Random Policy Evaluation Uncovers Policies of Generative Flow Networks
  Haoran He, Emmanuel Bengio, Qingpeng Cai, Ling Pan
  ICML-2025
  

• 35.LLM-Powered Efficient User Simulator for Recommender System [pdf]
  Zijian Zhang, Shuchang Liu, Ziru Liu, Rui Zhong, Qingpeng Cai*, Xiangyu Zhao, Chunxu Zhang, Qidong Liu, Peng Jiang
  AAAI-2025, Oral
  

• 34.Flow Factorization for Efficient Generative Flow Networks [pdf]
  Jiashun Liu, Chunhui Li, Cheng-Hao Liu, Dianbo Liu, Qingpeng Cai, Ling Pan
  AAAI-2025, Oral
  

• 33.DLCRec: A Novel Approach for Managing Diversity in LLM-Based Recommender Systems [pdf]
  Jiaju Chen, Chongming Gao, Shuai Yuan, Shuchang Liu, Qingpeng Cai, Peng Jiang
  WSDM-2025
  

• 32.Generative Auto-Bidding with Value-Guided Explorations[pdf]
  Jingtong Gao, Yewen Li, Shuai Mao, Peng Jiang, Nan Jiang, Yejing Wang, Qingpeng Cai*, Fei Pan, Peng Jiang, Kun Gai, Bo An, Xiangyu Zhao
  SIGIR-2025
  

• 31.GAS: Generative Auto-bidding with Post-training Search [pdf]
  Yewen Li, Shuai Mao, Jingtong Gao, Nan Jiang, Yunjian Xu, Qingpeng Cai*, Fei Pan, Peng Jiang, Bo An
  WWW-2025, Industry Track
  

• 30.AURO: Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive User Retention Optimization in Recommender Systems[pdf]
  Zhenghai Xue, Qingpeng Cai*, Tianyou Zuo, Bin Yang, Lantao Hu, Peng Jiang, Kun Gai, Bo An
  WWW-2025, Oral
  

• 29.Value Function Decomposition in Markov Recommendation Process[pdf]
  Xiaobei Wang, Shuchang Liu, Qingpeng Cai, Xiang Li, Lantao Hu, Han Li, Guangming Xie
  WWW-2025, Oral
  

• 28.Modeling User Retention through Generative Flow Networks [pdf]
  Ziru Liu, Shuchang Liu, Bin Yang, Zhenghai Xue, Qingpeng Cai*, Xiangyu Zhao, Zijian Zhang, Lantao Hu, Han Li, Peng Jiang
  KDD-2024, industry track
  

• 27.Future Impact Decomposition in Request-level Recommendations [pdf]
  Xiaobei Wang, Shuchang Liu, Xueliang Wang, Qingpeng Cai*, Lantao Hu, Han Li, Peng Jiang, Guangming Xie
  KDD-2024, industry track
  

• 26.Sequential Recommendation for Optimizing Both Immediate Feedback and Long-term Retention [pdf]
  Ziru Liu, Shuchang Liu, Zijian Zhang, Qingpeng Cai*, Xiangyu Zhao, Kesen Zhao, Lantao Hu, Peng Jiang, Kun Gai
  SIGIR-2024
  

• 25.M3oE: Multi-Domain Multi-Task Mixture-of Experts Recommendation Framework [pdf]
  Zijian Zhang, Shuchang Liu, Jiaao Yu, Qingpeng Cai, Xiangyu Zhao, Chunxu Zhang, Ziru Liu, Qidong Liu, Hongwei Zhao, Lantao Hu, Peng Jiang, Kun Gai
  SIGIR-2024
  

• 24.State Regularized Policy Optimization on Data with Dynamics Shift [pdf]
  Zhenghai Xue, Qingpeng Cai, Shuchang Liu, Dong Zheng, Peng Jiang, Kun Gai, Bo An
  NeurIPS-2023
  

• 23.KuaiSim: A Comprehensive Simulator for Recommender Systems [pdf]
  Kesen Zhao, Shuchang Liu, Qingpeng Cai*, Xiangyu Zhao*, Ziru Liu, Dong Zheng, Peng Jiang, Kun Gai
  NeurIPS-2023
  

• 22.ResAct: Reinforcing Long-term Engagement in Sequential Recommendation with Residual Actor [pdf]
  Wanqi Xue, Qingpeng Cai, Ruohan Zhan, Dong Zheng, Peng Jiang, Kun Gai, Bo An
  ICLR-2023
  

• 21.PrefRec: Recommender Systems with Human Preferences for Reinforcing Long-term User Engagement [pdf]
  Wanqi Xue, Qingpeng Cai, Zhenghai Xue, Shuo Sun, Shuchang Liu, Dong Zheng, Peng Jiang, Kun Gai, Bo An
  KDD-2023
  

• 20.Generative Flow Network for Listwise Recommendation [pdf]
  Shuchang Liu, Qingpeng Cai, Zhankui He, Bowen Sun, Julian McAuley, Dong Zheng, Peng Jiang, Kun Gai
  KDD-2023
  

• 19.Multi-Task Recommendations with Reinforcement Learning [pdf]
  Ziru Liu, Jiejie Tian, Qingpeng Cai*, Xiangyu Zhao*, Jingtong Gao, Shuchang Liu, Dayou Chen, Tonghao He, Dong Zheng, Peng Jiang and Kun Gai
  WWW-2023
  

• 18.Exploration and Regularization of the Latent Action Space in Recommendation [pdf]
  Shuchang Liu, Qingpeng Cai, Bowen Sun, Yuhao Wang, Dong Zheng, Peng Jiang, Kun Gai, Ji Jiang, Xiangyu Zhao and Yongfeng Zhang
  WWW-2023
  

• 17.Two-Stage Constrained Actor-Critic for Short Video Recommendation [pdf]
  Qingpeng Cai, Zhenghai Xue, Chi Zhang, Wanqi Xue, Shuchang Liu, Ruohan Zhan, Xueliang Wang, Tianyou Zuo, Wentao Xie, Dong Zheng, Peng Jiang and Kun Gai
  WWW-2023
  

• 16.Reinforcing User Retention in a Billion Scale Short Video Recommender System [pdf] [news link]
  Qingpeng Cai, Shuchang Liu, Xueliang Wang, Tianyou Zuo, Wentao Xie, Bin Yang, Dong Zheng, Peng Jiang and Kun Gai
  WWW-2023, industry track
  

• 15.Exploration in policy optimization through multiple paths
  Ling Pan, Qingpeng Cai, Longbo Huang
  JAAMAS-2021
  

• 14.Softmax Deep Double Deterministic Policy Gradients [pdf]
  Ling Pan, Qingpeng Cai, Longbo Huang
  NeurIPS-2020
  

• 13.Reinforcement Learning with Dynamic Boltzmann Softmax Updates [pdf]
  Ling Pan, Qingpeng Cai, Qi Meng, Wei Chen, Longbo Huang
  IJCAI-2020
  

• 12.Multi-path Policy Optimization [pdf]
  Ling Pan, Qingpeng Cai, Longbo Huang
  AAMAS-2020
  (Invited for fast-track publication in JAAMAS, top 5%)
  

• 11.Deterministic Value-Policy Gradients [pdf]
  Qingpeng Cai, Ling Pan, Pingzhong Tang
  AAAI-2020
  

• 10.Policy optimization with model-based explorations
  Feiyang Pan, Qingpeng Cai, An-Xiang Zeng, Chun-Xiang Pan, Qing Da, Hualin He, Qing He, Pingzhong Tang
  AAAI-2019
  

• 9.A Deep Reinforcement Learning Framework for Rebalancing Dockless Bike Sharing Systems [pdf]
  Ling Pan, Qingpeng Cai, Zhixuan Fang, Pingzhong Tang, Longbo Huang
  AAAI-2019
  

• 8.Reinforcement Learning Driven Heuristic Optimization [pdf]
  Qingpeng Cai, Will Hang, Azalia Mirhoseini, George Tucker, Jingtao Wang, Wei Wei
  DRL4KDD-2019
  

• 7.Policy gradients for contextual recommendations
  Feiyang Pan, Qingpeng Cai, Pingzhong Tang, Fuzhen Zhuang, Qing He
  WWW-2019
  

• 6.Reinforcement Mechanism Design for E-commerce [pdf]
  Qingpeng Cai, Aris Filos-Ratsikas, Pingzhong Tang, Yiwei Zhang
  WWW-2018
  

• 5.Reinforcement Mechanism Design for Fraudulent Behaviour in E-commerce [pdf]
  Qingpeng Cai, Aris Filos-Ratsikas, Pingzhong Tang, Yiwei Zhang
  AAAI-2018
  

• 4.Ranking Mechanism Design for Price-setting Agents in E-commerce [pdf]
  Qingpeng Cai, Pingzhong Tang, Yulong Zeng
  AAMAS-2018
  

• 3.Multi-armed Bandit Mechanism With Private Histories [pdf]
  Chang Liu, Qingpeng Cai, Yukui Zhang
  AAMAS-2017 (Extended abstract)
  

• 2.Facility location with Minimax Envy [pdf]
  Qingpeng Cai, Aris Filos-Ratsikas, Pingzhong Tang
  IJCAI-2016
  

• 1.Mechanism Design for Personalized Recommender Systems [pdf]
  Qingpeng Cai, Aris Filos-Ratsikas, Chang Liu, Pingzhong Tang
  Recsys-2016