Yuxuan ZONG

Yuxuan ZONG

Ph.D. candidate at Sorbonne University

Yuxuan ZONG

I am Yuxuan Zong, a final-year Ph.D. candidate in the Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique (ISIR) at Sorbonne University (SU), supervised under Benjamin Piwowarski. Graduation expected in March 2026.

I am interested in information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP) with the interaction of the Transformer-based models.

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Open to job opportunities — feel free to reach out.

Publications

I have authored several papers published in international or french-speaking proceedings, mainly focus on Infornmation Retrieval, such as SIGIR, ECIR, EACL.

  1. From Tokens to Concepts: Leveraging SAE for SPLADE
    Yuxuan Zong, Mathias Vast, Basile Van Cooten, Laure Soulier, Benjamin Piwowarski;
    SIGIR 2026: The 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval;
    pdf code
  2. A Voronoi Cell Formulation for Principled Token Pruning in Late-Interaction Retrieval Models
    Yash Kankanampati, Yuxuan Zong, Nadi Tomeh, Benjamin Piwowarski, Joseph Le Roux;
    SIGIR 2026: The 49th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval;
    pdf code
  3. QueStER: Query Specification for Generative keyword-based Retrieval
    Arthur Satouf, Yuxuan Zong, Habiboulaye Amadou-Boubacar, Pablo Piantanida, Benjamin Piwowarski;
    EACL 2026: The 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics;
    pdf code
  4. Towards Lossless Token Pruning in Late-Interaction Retrieval Models;
    Yuxuan Zong, Benjamin Piwowarski;
    SIGIR 2025: The 48th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval;
    pdf code
  5. Structured representation for Information Retrieval;
    Yuxuan Zong, Benjamin Piwowarski;
    CORIA 2024: COnférence en Recherche d’Informations et Applications;
    pdf
  6. Simple Domain Adaptation for Sparse Retrievers;
    Mathias Vast, Yuxuan Zong, Benjamin Piwowarski, Laure Soulier;
    ECIR 2024: The 46th European Conference on Information Retrieval;
    pdf code;
  7. XpmIR: A Modular Library for Learning to Rank and Neural IR Experiments;
    Yuxuan Zong, Benjamin Piwowarski;
    SIGIR 2023: The 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval;
    pdf code;

Teaching and Academic Service

  • Teaching assistant
    • Python, 2022; Sorbonne University; LU1IN001; project design, TP, TP grading
  • Program committee member
    • ICTIR 2025
    • SIGIR 2025, 2026

Invited Talks & Presentation

  • Presentations
    • Towards Lossless Token Pruning in Late-Interaction Retrieval Models
      • At MLIA, ISIR: 12/05/2025, post
      • At CORIA-TALN: 02/07/2025, post
      • At SIGIR
      • Slides
  • Invited Talks
    • Towards Efficient and Effective Vocabulary in Sparse Information Retrieval
      • At LIPN: 13/04/2026

Resources

I have participated in creating the following resources:

  • XpmIR providing components for launching basic IR experiments, based on experimaestro.
  • a code repository providing the experimenting and reproducing scripts for the work Simple Domain Adaptation for Sparse Retrievers, under the framework of XpmIR.

I have also contributed to key open-source toolkits in IR, including:

  • ir-datasets, a python toolkit for accessing the dataset of the IR tasks.
  • datamaestro_text, a python toolkit for prepare the data record for IR, especially used for XpmIR.

Education

  • October 2022 - Present
  • September 2021 - Febuary 2022
    • Master Exchange in Computer Science, EPFL, Switzerland
  • September 2017 - July 2022
    • Engineer Diploma in Computer Engineering, INSA LYON, France

Experience

  • March 2022 - August 2022
    • Research Intern
    • Lab LIRIS, École Centrale de Lyon, France
    • Working on the data and study the state-of-the-art of 6D pose estimation
    • Supervisor: Liming Chen
    • Report
  • June 2021 - August 2021
    • Backend software development engineer
    • Departement TEG, Tencent, Shenzhen, China
    • Building configuration of the server, based on Python
    • Mentor: Xiangtao LI
  • June 2020 - August 2020
    • Frontend software development engineer
    • Migu, Nanjing, China
    • Building a mobile application destinate at the companies.

Contact

  • Working email: yuxuan.zong AT isir.upmc.fr
  • Personal email: zongyuxuaner AT gmail.com