Kepu Zhang

dblp:330/9095 · DBLP profile ↗
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6ranked-venue papers in the field
5as first author
6since 2021 · last 2026
—ORCID · conflict

Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several

Information Retrieval & Web Search · 5 (5 first)Knowledge Engineering, Semantic Web & Information Systems · 1
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 QE-RAG: A Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation Benchmark for Query Entry Errors
abstract
Current benchmarks evaluate the performance of RAG methods from various perspectives, they share a common assumption that user queries used for retrieval are error-free. However, in real-world interactions between users and LLMs, query entry errors are frequent. The impact of these errors on current RAG methods against such errors remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose QE-RAG, the first robust RAG benchmark designed specifically to evaluate performance against query entry errors. We analyze the impact of these errors on LLM outputs and find that corrupted queries degrade model performance, which can be mitigated through query correction and training a robust retriever for retrieving relevant documents. Based on these insights, we propose a contrastive learning-based robust retriever training method and a retrieval-augmented query correction method. Extensive experiments reveal that: (1) state-of-the-art RAG methods including sequential, branching, and iterative methods, exhibit poor robustness to query entry errors; (2) our method enhances the robustness of RAG when handling query entry errors and it's compatible with existing RAG methods, further improving their robustness.
Kepu Zhang, Zhongxiang Sun, Weijie Yu 0003, Xiaoxue Zang, Kai Zheng 0001, Yang Song 0008, Han Li 0005, Jun Xu 0001
SIGIR1
2026 Empowering open-domain LLMs for legal document correction via legal knowledge integration and decoding constraints
Kepu Zhang, Weijie Yu 0003, Zhongxiang Sun, Weicong Qin, Jun Xu 0001, Ji-Rong Wen
Inf. Process. Manag.1
2025 SyLeR: A Framework for Explicit Syllogistic Legal Reasoning in Large Language Models
abstract
Syllogistic reasoning is a fundamental aspect of legal decision-making, enabling logical conclusions by connecting general legal principles with specific case facts. Although existing large language models (LLMs) can generate responses to legal questions, they fail to perform explicit syllogistic reasoning, often producing implicit and unstructured answers that lack explainability and trustworthiness. To address this limitation, we propose SyLeR, a novel framework that empowers LLMs to engage in explicit syllogistic legal reasoning. SyLeR integrates a tree-structured hierarchical retrieval mechanism to effectively combine relevant legal statutes and precedent cases, forming comprehensive major premises. This is followed by a two-stage fine-tuning process: supervised fine-tuning warm-up establishes a foundational understanding of syllogistic reasoning, while reinforcement learning with a structure-aware reward mechanism refines the model's ability to generate diverse logically sound and well-structured reasoning paths. We conducted extensive experiments across various dimensions, including in-domain and cross-domain user groups (legal laypersons and practitioners), multiple languages (Chinese and French), and different LLM backbones (legal-specific and open-domain LLMs). The results show that SyLeR significantly improves response accuracy and consistently delivers explicit, explainable, and trustworthy legal reasoning.
Kepu Zhang, Weijie Yu 0003, Zhongxiang Sun, Jun Xu 0001
CIKM1
2025 PrLM: Learning Explicit Reasoning for Personalized RAG via Contrastive Reward Optimization
abstract
Personalized retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) aims to produce user-tailored responses by incorporating retrieved user profiles alongside the input query. Existing methods primarily focus on improving retrieval and rely on large language models (LLMs) to implicitly integrate the retrieved context with the query. However, such models are often sensitive to retrieval quality and may generate responses that are misaligned with user preferences. To address this limitation, we propose PrLM, a reinforcement learning framework that trains LLMs to explicitly reason over retrieved user profiles. Guided by a contrastively trained personalization reward model, PrLM effectively learns from user responses without requiring annotated reasoning paths. Experiments on three personalized text generation datasets show that PrLM outperforms existing methods and remains robust across varying numbers of retrieved profiles and different retrievers.
Kepu Zhang, Teng Shi, Weijie Yu 0003, Jun Xu 0001
CIKM1
2025 Uncertainty-aware evidential learning for legal case retrieval with noisy correspondence
Weicong Qin, Weijie Yu 0003, Kepu Zhang, Haiyuan Zhao, Jun Xu 0001, Ji-Rong Wen
Inf. Sci.3
2024 SAQRec: Aligning Recommender Systems to User Satisfaction via Questionnaire Feedback
abstract
In real-world recommender systems, user engagement and subjective feedback play pivotal roles in shaping the content distribution mechanism of the platform. When platforms reach a certain scale, they often gather valuable questionnaire feedback data from users to evaluate their satisfaction with recommended items. Compared to traditional user feedback such as likes, questionnaires explicitly capture both satisfaction and dissatisfaction and are unaffected by other users' questionnaires, thus better expressing users' true preferences. In this paper, we aim to leverage the questionnaire feedback to align the recommendation model with users' true preferences. However, due to the platform distribution mechanism and divergent user attitudes toward questionnaires, the questionnaire feedback data frequently becomes sparse and exhibits selection biases, resulting in challenges in feature integration and training process. To address these issues, we introduce a novel user Satisfaction Alignment framework that effectively leverages Questionnaire feedback to enhance Recommendation, named SAQRec. SAQRec begins by training an unbiased satisfaction model to impute satisfaction, addressing selection bias and data sparsity. Then, SAQRec aligns features with users' true preferences by disentangling satisfaction and dissatisfaction from click history and categorizing clicked items into multiple satisfaction levels through the imputed satisfactions. Additionally, the imputed satisfactions from the pre-trained unbiased satisfaction model serve as pseudo-labels to align the model's outputs with users' true preferences. Extensive experiments on both public and commercial datasets demonstrate SAQRec's superior integration of questionnaire feedback in recommendation models. Online A/B testing on a short video platform confirms its effectiveness in boosting user watch time and positive-to-negative feedback ratio, enhancing overall performance and user satisfaction.
Kepu Zhang, Teng Shi, Sunhao Dai, Xiao Zhang 0034, Yinfeng Li, Xiaoxue Zang, Yang Song 0008, Jun Xu 0001
CIKM1