Kelong Mao

Kelong Mao毛科龙

Senior Research Engineer at JD.com · Post-training Team Lead

kyriemkl@gmail.com Google Scholar DBLP GitHub LinkedIn

About

I'm a senior research engineer at JD.com, having joined through JD's TGT program. I lead the post-training team in the Consumer AI Technology Department, where we build JD Retail's consumer-facing AI agent.

Previously, I received my Ph.D. from the Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China, in 2025, where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Zhicheng Dou. I received my M.Eng. and B.Eng. degrees in Computer Science from Tsinghua University (2021) and Nankai University (2018), respectively.

Experience

Work & Research

  • JD.com
    Post-training Team Lead, Consumer AI Technology Dept.
    Present · Beijing
  • Amazon Fashion
    Applied Scientist Intern
    Aug 2024 – Nov 2024 · Seattle
  • Waseda University
    Visiting Research Fellow
    Jan 2024 – Jun 2024 · Tokyo
  • Amazon Ads
    Applied Scientist Intern
    Jul 2023 – Oct 2023 · Seattle
  • ByteDance, TikTok Search
    Research Engineer Intern
    Jan 2021 – Jun 2021 · Beijing
  • Tencent WeChat
    Research Intern
    Jul 2020 – Sep 2020
  • Tencent AI Lab
    Research Intern
    Jul 2019 – Dec 2019 · Shenzhen

Education

  • Renmin University of China
    Ph.D., Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence
    2025 · Advisor: Prof. Zhicheng Dou
  • Tsinghua University
    M.Eng., Computer Science
    2021
  • Nankai University
    B.Eng., Computer Science
    2018

Publications & Preprints

* denotes equal contribution

2026
  • RealWorldShop: Benchmarking and Improving Conversational Shopping Agents in Real-World E-commerce
    Xinwei Yang, Kelong Mao, Yudong Guo, Sulong Xu, Simiu Gu, Chen Huang, Wenqiang Lei
    EMNLP 2026 Findings
  • See Less, Shop Better: Efficient Visual Evidence Acquisition for E-commerce Search Agents
    Luyu Chen, Kelong Mao, Yudong Guo, Xinwei Yang, Rongqing Li, Lirui Luo, Sulong Xu, Simiu Gu, Xu Chen
    Under Review
  • Coding Agent Memory Post-training: Unlocking the Memory Potential of Pre-trained File Operations for Long-Horizon Tasks via Reinforcement Learning
    Lirui Luo, Kelong Mao, Heming Xia, Rongqing Li, Xinwei Yang, Luyu Chen, Kieran Wong, Yudong Guo, Xinrui Wang, Jiayin Zhu, Simiu Gu, Sulong Xu, Cong Fang
    Under Review
  • SWE-Shift: Evaluating Coding Agents in Evolving Workspaces
    Victor Shea-Jay Huang, Rongqing Li, Zhangyue Yin, Kelong Mao, Yaqi Zhao, Xinyuan Wang, Yao Yin, Lirui Luo, Renrui Zhang, Hongsheng Li
    Under Review
  • ConsumerGym: Training LLM Agents for Real-World Conversational Commerce via Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning
    Xinwei Yang, Kelong Mao, Shi-Yu Tian, Lirui Luo, Yudong Guo, Rongqing Li, Sulong Xu, Simiu Gu, Chen Huang, Wenqiang Lei
    Under Review
  • Learning from Online User Feedback for Shopping Agents
    Haobo Zhang, Kelong Mao, Sulong Xu, Simiu Gu, Zhicheng Dou
    arXiv 2026
  • ComboShoppingBench: Evaluating LLM Agents for Budget-Constrained Basket Shopping with Coupons
    Rongqing Li, Kelong Mao, Yudong Guo, Heming Xia, Xinwei Yang, Lirui Luo, Kieran Wong, Pu Yao, Sulong Xu, Simiu Gu
    arXiv 2026
  • SkillCoach: Self-Evolving Rubrics for Evaluating and Enhancing Agentic Skill-Use
    Jiayin Zhu, Kelong Mao, Yudong Guo, Dengbo He, Sulong Xu, Simiu Gu, Yutao Yue
    arXiv 2026
  • ChatShopBuddy: Towards Reliable Conversational Shopping Agents via Reinforcement Learning
    Yiruo Cheng, Kelong Mao, Tianhao Li, Jiejun Tan, Ji-Rong Wen, Zhicheng Dou
    arXiv 2026
  • RecThinker: An Agentic Framework for Tool-Augmented Reasoning in Recommendation
    Haobo Zhang, Yutao Zhu, Kelong Mao, Tianhao Li, Zhicheng Dou
    arXiv 2026
2025
  • UniGist: Towards General and Hardware-aligned Sequence-level Long Context Compression
    Chenlong Deng, Zhisong Zhang, Kelong Mao, Shuaiyi Li, Tianqing Fang, Hongming Zhang, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu, Zhicheng Dou
    NeurIPS 2025Paper
  • A Silver Bullet or a Compromise for Full Attention? A Comprehensive Study of Gist Token-based Context Compression
    Chenlong Deng, Zhisong Zhang, Kelong Mao, Shuaiyi Li, Xinting Huang, Dong Yu, Zhicheng Dou
    ACL 2025Paper
  • UniConv: Unifying Retrieval and Response Generation for Large Language Model in Conversation
    Fengran Mo, Yifan Gao, Chuan Meng, Xin Liu, Zhuofeng Wu, Kelong Mao, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Zheng Li, Xian Li, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang
    ACL 2025
  • Memory Never Fades: Boosting Long Context Processing with Global Memory-Enhanced Retrieval Augmentation
    Hongjin Qian, Zheng Liu, Peitian Zhang, Kelong Mao, Defu Lian, Zhicheng Dou, Tiejun Huang
    WWW 2025PaperCode
  • CORAL: Benchmarking Multi-turn Conversational Retrieval-Augmentation Generation
    Yiruo Cheng, Kelong Mao, Ziliang Zhao, Guanting Dong, Hongjin Qian, Yongkang Wu, Tetsuya Sakai, Ji-Rong Wen, Zhicheng Dou
    NAACL 2025 Findings
  • Tackling the Length Barrier: Dynamic Context Browsing for Knowledge-intensive Task
    Hongjin Qian, Zheng Liu, Peitian Zhang, Kelong Mao, Yujia Zhou, Xu Chen, Zhicheng Dou
    KDD 2025Paper
2024
  • ChatRetriever: Adapting Large Language Models for Generalized and Robust Conversational Dense Retrieval
    Kelong Mao, Chenlong Deng, Haonan Chen, Fengran Mo, Zheng Liu, Tetsuya Sakai, Zhicheng Dou
    EMNLP 2024Paper
  • RAG-Studio: Towards In-Domain Adaptation of Retrieval Augmented Generation Through Self-Alignment
    Kelong Mao, Zheng Liu, Hongjin Qian, Fengran Mo, Chenlong Deng, Zhicheng Dou
    EMNLP 2024 Findings
  • Aligning Query Representation with Rewritten Query and Relevance Judgments in Conversational Search
    Fengran Mo, Chen Qu, Kelong Mao, Yihong Wu, Zhan Su, Kaiyu Huang, Jian-Yun Nie
    CIKM 2024
  • YuLan: An Open-source Large Language Model
    Yutao Zhu, Kun Zhou, Kelong Mao, Wentong Chen, Yiding Sun, Zhipeng Chen, Qian Cao, Yihan Wu, Yushuo Chen, Feng Wang, Lei Zhang, Junyi Li, Xiaolei Wang, Lei Wang, Beichen Zhang, Zican Dong, Xiaoxue Cheng, Yuhan Chen, Xinyu Tang, Yupeng Hou, Qiangqiang Ren, Xincheng Pang, Shufang Xie, Wayne Xin Zhao, Zhicheng Dou, Jiaxin Mao, Yankai Lin, Ruihua Song, Jun Xu, Xu Chen, Rui Yan, Zhewei Wei, Di Hu, Wenbing Huang, Ze-Feng Gao, Yueguo Chen, Weizheng Lu, Ji-Rong Wen
    Tech Report 2024Paper
  • Enabling Discriminative Reasoning in LLMs for Legal Judgment Prediction
    Chenlong Deng, Kelong Mao, Yuyao Zhang, Zhicheng Dou
    EMNLP 2024 Findings
  • Learning Interpretable Legal Case Retrieval via Knowledge-Guided Case Reformulation
    Chenlong Deng, Kelong Mao, Zhicheng Dou
    EMNLP 2024
  • CHIQ: Contextual History Enhancement for Improving Query Rewriting in Conversational Search
    Fengran Mo, Abbas Ghaddar, Kelong Mao, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Boxing Chen, Qun Liu, Jian-Yun Nie
    EMNLP 2024Paper
  • Interpreting Conversational Dense Retrieval by Rewriting-Enhanced Inversion of Session Embedding
    Yiruo Cheng, Kelong Mao, Zhicheng Dou
    ACL 2024Paper
  • Grounding Language Model with Chunking-Free In-Context Retrieval
    Hongjin Qian, Zheng Liu, Kelong Mao, Yujia Zhou, Zhicheng Dou
    ACL 2024Paper
  • Generalizing Conversational Dense Retrieval via LLM-Cognition Data Augmentation
    Haonan Chen, Zhicheng Dou, Kelong Mao, Jiongnan Liu, Ziliang Zhao
    ACL 2024Paper
  • An Element is Worth a Thousand Words: Enhancing Legal Case Retrieval by Incorporating Legal Elements
    Chenlong Deng, Zhicheng Dou, Yujia Zhou, Peitian Zhang, Kelong Mao
    ACL 2024 Findings
  • History-Aware Conversational Dense Retrieval
    Fengran Mo, Chen Qu, Kelong Mao, Tianyu Zhu, Zhan Su, Kaiyu Huang, Jian-Yun Nie
    ACL 2024 FindingsPaper
  • ConvSDG: Session Data Generation for Conversational Search
    Fengran Mo, Bole Yi, Kelong Mao, Chen Qu, Kaiyu Huang, Jian-Yun Nie
    WWW 2024 Workshop
2023
  • Large Language Models Know Your Contextual Search Intent: A Prompting Framework for Conversational Search
    Kelong Mao, Zhicheng Dou, Fengran Mo, Jiewen Hou, Haonan Chen, Hongjin Qian
    EMNLP 2023 Findings
  • Learning to Relate to Previous Turns in Conversational Search
    Fengran Mo, Jian-Yun Nie, Kaiyu Huang, Kelong Mao, Yutao Zhu, Peng Li, Yang Liu
    KDD 2023
  • ConvGQR: Generative Query Reformulation for Conversational Search
    Fengran Mo, Kelong Mao, Yutao Zhu, Yihong Wu, Kaiyu Huang, Jian-Yun Nie
    ACL 2023
  • Search-oriented Conversational Query Editing
    Kelong Mao, Zhicheng Dou, Bang Liu, Hongjin Qian, Fengran Mo, Xiangli Wu, Xiaohua Cheng, Zhao Cao
    ACL 2023 Findings
  • Learning Denoised and Interpretable Session Representation for Conversational Search
    Kelong Mao, Hongjin Qian, Fengran Mo, Zhicheng Dou, Bang Liu, Xiaohua Cheng, Zhao Cao
    WWW 2023Best Paper Award Nominee · 16 / 365PaperCode
  • FinalMLP: An Enhanced Two-Stream MLP Model for CTR Prediction
    Kelong Mao*, Jieming Zhu*, Liangcai Su, Guohao Cai, Yuru Li, Zhenhua Dong
    AAAI 2023PaperCode
2022
  • ConvTrans: Transforming Web Search Sessions for Conversational Dense Retrieval
    Kelong Mao, Zhicheng Dou, Hongjin Qian, Fengran Mo, Xiaohua Cheng, Zhao Cao
    EMNLP 2022PaperCode
  • Curriculum Contrastive Context Denoising for Few-shot Conversational Dense Retrieval
    Kelong Mao, Zhicheng Dou, Hongjin Qian
    SIGIR 2022PaperCode
2021
  • UltraGCN: Ultra Simplification of Graph Convolutional Networks for Recommendation
    Kelong Mao, Jieming Zhu, Xi Xiao, Biao Lu, Zhaowei Wang, Xiuqiang He
    CIKM 2021PaperCode
  • SimpleX: A Simple and Strong Baseline for Collaborative Filtering
    Kelong Mao*, Jieming Zhu*, Jinpeng Wang, Quanyu Dai, Zhenhua Dong, Xi Xiao, Xiuqiang He
    CIKM 2021PaperCode
  • Byte-Label Joint Attention Learning for Network Traffic Classification
    Kelong Mao, Xi Xiao, Guangwu Hu, Xiapu Luo, Bin Zhang, Shutao Xia
    IWQoS 2021Paper
  • Molecular Graph Enhanced Transformer for Retrosynthesis Prediction
    Kelong Mao, Xi Xiao, Tingyang Xu, Yu Rong, Junzhou Huang, Peilin Zhao
    Neurocomputing 2021PaperCode
2020
  • Item Tagging for Information Retrieval: A Tripartite Graph Neural Network based Approach
    Kelong Mao, Xi Xiao, Jieming Zhu, Biao Lu, Ruiming Tang, Xiuqiang He
    SIGIR 2020PaperCode

Awards