Zhaochun Ren

I am currently an Associate Professor at Leiden University, the Netherlands. My research focuses on information retrieval and natural language processing, with a particular emphasis on conversational information-seeking, generative retrieval, recommender systems, and large language models. My overarching goal is to develop intelligent agents capable of addressing complex user requests and solving fundamental challenges in NLP and IR. Before joining Leiden, I served as a Professor at Shandong University from 2019 to 2023 and worked as a Research Scientist at JD.com from 2017 to 2019. I earned my PhD in 2016 from the University of Amsterdam, where I was supervised by Prof. dr. Maarten de Rijke and Prof. dr. Evangelos Kanoulas. Prior to that, I completed both my B.E. (2009) and M.E. (2012) at Shandong University and spent time as a short-term visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in 2012.

Research interests

Information Retrieval:

• Recommender systems
• Conversational IR
• Generative retrieval
• Agentic information retrieval

Natural Language Processing:

• Empathetic dialogue systems
• Knowledge representation and distillation

Large Language Models:

• LLMs fine-tuning and alignment
• Tool learning and multi-agent with LLMs
• Efficient pre-training and inference