👋 About Me

Hi, I am Zijin Hong, a first-year Ph.D. student at DEEPLab at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), under the supervision of Prof. Xiao Huang. I received a dual bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics with Mathematics from Jinan University (JNU) and the University of Birmingham (UoB). I was fortunately supervised by Prof. Feiran Huang at JNU and worked closely with Dr. Hao Chen at CityU Macau.

My current research interests include large language models and their applications, information extraction, and code (SQL) generation. During my free time, I enjoy customizing mechanical keyboards and playing video games. Please feel free to reach me out!

📧 zijin[dot]hong[at]connect[dot]polyu[dot]hk

🔥 News

• 2025.02: 🔥🔥 Our graph-RAG survey “A Survey of Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Customized Large Language Models” has been released. Take a look!
• 2025.01: 🔥🔥 We release RV-Bench to benchmark LLMs’ genuine mathematical reasoning capabilities through random variable questions.
• 2025.01: 📢📢 I join the PolyU to start my Ph.D. journey!
• 2024.11: 🔥🔥 We release HNCSE, a novel approach to improving unsupervised sentence embedding.

• 2024.10: 🔥🔥 We release CLR-Bench, a benchmark to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of LLMs at the college level.

• 2024.09: 📖📖 Invited as the reviewer for ICLR 2025.
• 2024.08: 📖📖 Invited as the reviewer for IEEE TKDE since Aug. 2024.
• 2024.07: 📢📢 My thesis “Learning with Database’s Preference in Text-to-SQL for Large Language Models” was awarded as Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis.
• 2024.06: 🔥🔥 Our text-to-SQL survey “Next-Generation Database Interfaces: A Survey of LLM-based Text-to-SQL” has been released. Take a look!
• 2024.05:  🎉🎉 Our paper “Towards Better Question Generation in QA-based Event Extraction” is accepted by ACL 2024.
• 2024.05:  🎉🎉 Our paper “Knowledge-to-SQL: Enhancing SQL Generation with Data Expert LLM” is accepted by ACL 2024.

📝 Publications

• A Survey of Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Customized Large Language Models

  Qinggang Zhang, Shengyuan Chen, Yuanchen Bei, Zheng Yuan, Huachi Zhou, Zijin Hong, Junnan Dong, Hao Chen, Yi Chang, Xiao Huang

  arXiv Preprint

• Benchmarking Large Language Models via Random Variables

  Zijin Hong, Hao Wu, Su Dong, Junnan Dong, Yilin Xiao, Yujing Zhang, Zhu Wang, Feiran Huang, Linyi Li, Hongxia Yang, Xiao Huang

  arXiv Preprint

• HNCSE: Advancing Sentence Embeddings via Hybrid Contrastive Learning with Hard Negatives

  Wenxiao Liu, Zihong Yang, Chaozhuo Li, Zijin Hong, Jianfeng Ma, Zhiquan Liu, Litian Zhang, Feiran Huang

  arXiv Preprint

• CLR-Bench: Evaluating Large Language Models in College-level Reasoning

  Junnan Dong, Zijin Hong, Yuanchen Bei, Feiran Huang, Xinrun Wang, Xiao Huang

  arXiv Preprint

• Unconstrained Model Merging for Enhanced LLM Reasoning

  Yiming Zhang, Baoyi He, Shengyu Zhang, Yuhao Fu, Qi Zhou, Zhijie Sang, Zijin Hong, Kejing Yang, Wenjun Wang, Jianbo Yuan, Guanghan Ning, Linyi Li, Chunlin Ji, Fei Wu, Hongxia Yang

  arXiv Preprint

• Next-Generation Database Interfaces: A Survey of LLM-based Text-to-SQL

  Zijin Hong, Zheng Yuan, Qinggang Zhang, Hao Chen, Junnan Dong, Feiran Huang, Xiao Huang

  arXiv Preprint

• Towards Better Question Generation in QA-based Event Extraction

  Zijin Hong, Jian Liu

  In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

• Knowledge-to-SQL: Enhancing SQL Generation with Data Expert LLM

  Zijin Hong, Zheng Yuan, Hao Chen, Qinggang Zhang, Feiran Huang, Xiao Huang

  In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

⚒️ Projects

• Awesome-GraphRAG
• Double Encoder Seq2Seq-Based Presidential Concept Stock Price Prediction Model
• Dual-Path Attention-Based Text Sentiment Analysis Model with Summarization
• Low-Resource Chinese Named Entity Recognition

🎖 Honors and Awards

• 2024.07, Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis, Jinan University
• 2024.06, Outstanding Graduate, Jinan University
• 2024.05, First Class Graduates Scholarship, Jinan University
• 2023.11, First Class Scholarship, Jinan University
• 2022.11, Outstanding Leadership Scholarhip, University of Brimingham
• 2022.11, Second Class Scholarship, Jinan University

📋 Services

Conference Reviewer

• ICLR 2025, ACL Rolling Review (ARR) 2024

Journal Reviewer

• IEEE TKDE (Since 2024)

Teaching Assistant

• Fall 2023, J4-2022114001 Data Mining, Jinan University
• Spring 2023, J3GTMDM-32698 Game Theory and Multicriteria Decision Making, University of Birmingham

💻 Experiences

• 2024.08 - 2025.01, Reseach Intern, LLM-Eval Group@Reallm Labs, Advisor: Hongxia Yang, Hong Kong SAR, China.
• 2023.02 - 2025.01, Reseach Assistant, Computing Communication Research@Jinan University, Advisor: Feiran Huang, Guangzhou, China.
• 2023.01 - 2023.02, Algotithm Intern, WITMED Centre@China Unicom, Guangzhou, China.
• 2022.07 - 2022.09, Research Intern, COG-12 NLP Group@iFLYTEK Research, Mentor: Guanghui Xu, Guangzhou, China.
• 2021.07 - 2022.01, Data Analyst Intern, Data Centre@AOF Data, Guangzhou, China.