Yongkang Li

Yongkang Li 李永康

PhD Candidate

The University of Amsterdam

About me

I am currently a last year ELLIS Academic Track PhD student at the IR LAB, the University of Amsterdam. I am working with Prof. Evangelos Kanoulas, Prof. Emine Yilmaz and Dr. Panagiotis Eustratiadis.

My research focuses on making embedding-based retrieval more robust and efficient, including work on adversarial attacks and embedding compression. My broader interests include recommender systems and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Alongside my PhD studies, I’m currently an Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon and I previously worked at Temu. I enjoy connecting academic research with practical challenges in search, recommendation, and LLM-powered applications.

I am the reviewer of the following conferences and journals: SIGIR, WWW, EMNLP, TKDE, ECIR, TBD, TNNLS, IPM, TMC.

Interests
  • Information Retrieval
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Recommender System
  • Graph Neural Network
Education

  • PhD in Artificial Intelligence, 2023~Now

    The University of Amsterdam

  • MEng in Electronic Science and Technology, 2020~2023

    Southern University of Science and Technology

  • BSc in Information Engineering, 2016~2020

    Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Recent News

  • [2026/09/28] I started my internship at Amazon Rufus Science Team in London, working on efficient LLM Agents.
  • [2026/09/24] One paper got accepted by the NeurIPS 2026.
  • [2026/09/21] One paper got accepted by the SIGIR-AP 2026.
  • [2026/04/3] One short paper and two reproducibility papers got accepted by the SIGIR 2026.
  • [2026/03/17] One paper got accepted by the Expert Systems With Applications Journal.
  • [2026/01/08] I have been admitted to the ELLIS PhD Program!
  • [2025/12/16] One paper got accepted by the ECIR 2026, Doctoral Consortium Track.
  • [2025/11/07] One paper got accepted by the AAAI 2026, Main Technical Track.
  • [2025/07/03] One paper got accepted by the RecSys 2025, Reproducibility Track.
  • [2025/06/23] I gave a talk on robust IR at the Glasgow Information Retrieval Group.
  • [2025/04/08] I won the Best Reproducibility Paper Award at ECIR 2025!
  • [2025/04/05] One paper got accepted by the SIGIR 2025, Full paper.
  • [2024/12/16] One paper got accepted by the ECIR 2025, Reproducibility Track.
  • [2024/12/05] One paper got accepted by the ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD).
  • [2024/05/28] One co-authored paper got accepted by the World Wide Web Journal.
  • [2024/03/13] One co-authored abstract got accepted by the ECIR 2024, see you in Glasgow.
  • [2023/09/28] Congratulations to myself on successfully being a PhD student. A new life start.
  • [2023/09/14] Goodbye Pinduoduo and Temu, I have officially left.
  • [2023/07/11] I joined Temu in Pinduoduo as a Machine Learning Algorithm Engineer.
  • [2023/06/30] Congratulations to myself on successfully earning a master's degree. I have graduated.
  • [2022/11/29] One Chinese invention patent has been issued.
  • [2022/08/02] One paper has been accepted by the CIKM 2022.
  • [2022/07/31] One paper has been accepted by the World Wide Web Journal.
  • [2022/07/26] One Chinese invention patent has been issued.
  • [2022/07/01] I am doing a summer deep learning internship at Pinduoduo.
  • [2022/04/05] One paper has been accepted by the Geoinformatica.
  • [2022/03/08] One Chinese invention patent has been issued.

Selected Publications

Quickly discover relevant content by filtering publications.
Dan Li, Yongkang Li, Simon Huesgen, Hosein Azarbonyad (2026). Context-Enriched Figure Indexing for Scientific Multi-Modal RAG: An Industry Case Study at Scale. SIGIR-AP 2026(Full Paper, Oral).

Code DOI

Arne Eichholtz, Yongkang Li, Jutte Vijverberg, Tobias Groot, Mohammad Aliannejadi (2026). On the Reproducibility of “Hypencoder: Hypernetworks for Information Retrieval”. SIGIR2026(Reproducibility Paper, Oral).

PDF Code DOI

Yongkang Li, Panagiotis Eustratiadis, Evangelos Kanoulas (2026). Spectral Tempering for Embedding Compression in Dense Passage Retrieval. SIGIR2026(Short Paper, Poster).

PDF Code DOI

Dominykas Seputis, Yongkang Li, Karsten Langerak, Serghei Mihailov (2025). Rethinking the Privacy of Text Embeddings: A Reproducibility Study of “Text Embeddings Reveal (Almost) As Much As Text”. RecSys2025(Reproducibility Paper, Oral).

PDF Code DOI

Yongkang Li, Panagiotis Eustratiadis,Simon Lupart, Evangelos Kanoulas (2025). Unsupervised Corpus Poisoning Attacks in Continuous Space for Dense Retrieval. SIGIR2025(Full Paper, Oral).

PDF Code DOI

See all publications

Industrial Experience

 
 
 
 
 
Amazon
Applied Scientist Internship
Amazon
September 2026 – Present London
Developing personalized shopping pages for Alexa for Shopping, with tailored product information and comparisons. Researching retrieval-based methods to reduce LLM generation latency.
 
 
 
 
 
TEMU
Machine Learning Engineer
TEMU
July 2023 – September 2023 Shanghai
Developed an automated customer intent classification and analytics system to identify real-time user requests (e.g., returns, refunds, and shipping inquiries) during e-commerce customer service interactions. Engineered a hybrid model integrating deep learning architectures with traditional feature-matching techniques, fusing cleaned multi-turn dialogue data, customer purchase history, and real-time order status. Deployed the pipeline to accelerate agent response times and provide actionable statistical insights for cross-departmental business analysis.

Teaching

Teaching Assistant

Information Retrieval 1 (February 2026 - May 2026) – MSc Artificial Intelligence

  • University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  • Work with Evangelos Kanoulas and Maria Heuss

Information Retrieval 2 (October 2025 - December 2025) – MSc Artificial Intelligence

  • University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  • Work with Mohammad Aliannejadi and Panagiotis Eustratiadis

Information Retrieval 1 (February 2025 - May 2025) – MSc Artificial Intelligence

  • University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  • Work with Evangelos Kanoulas

Information Retrieval 2 (Nov. 2024 - Dec 2024) – MSc Artificial Intelligence

  • University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  • Work with Mohammad Aliannejadi and Panagiotis Eustratiadis

Information Retrieval 1 (Feb. 2024 - March 2024) – MSc Artificial Intelligence

  • University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  • Work with Andrew Yates

Contact

Welcome to come to me~

  • y.li7@uva.nl
  • 310635630756
  • LAB42, Science Park 900, Amsterdam, North Holland 1098XH
  • LAB42 is a building
  • Monday - Friday 11:00 to 20:00