Dr. Zheng Liu works as a technique specialist on search and recommendation algorithms in Poisson Lab, 2012 Labs, Huawei Tech Co., Ltd. He was affiliated with Microsoft Research Asia as a senior researcher in Social Computing and Natural Language Computation. He graduated from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology with a PhD degree in computer science and engineering. His research covers a broad scope of problems in search and recommendation. Recently, he focuses on developing retrieval-oriented pre-training algorithms and end-to-end optimized IR systems. His has conducted a series of product-driven research projects in Huawei and Microsoft, which contribute to Petal Search, Bing Sponsored Search, Microsoft News, etc.

Research Highlights

• [RetroMAE] A family of pre-trained algorithms tailored for deep semantic retrieval: simple, low-cost, and remarkably competitive throughout different settings.
  • Publications: RetroMAE (EMNLP’22), RetroMAE v2
  • Codebase: RetroMAE
  • Media coverage (in Chinese): 稠密检索新突破：华为提出掩码自编码预训练模型，大幅刷新多项基准
• [Uni-Retriever]. A package solution developed for Bing Sponsored Search, which is built upon the joint optimization of dense retriever and ANN index.
  • Publications: Uni-Retriever (KDD’22), Distill-VQ (SIGIR’22), BiDR (WWW’22), MoPQ (EMNLP’21)
  • Codebase: LibVQ
  • The team champions MS MARCO doc ranking leaderboard for two straight times in 2021/06/24 and 2021/07/14, leading to +1.3 points MRR@100 improvement in total!