HengranZhang (张恒然)

I am now a fourth-year PhD student in Computer Science at Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, advised by Prof. Jiafeng Guo and Keping Bi. And I received the B.E. degree from Jilin University in 2022. I have broad research interests in information retrieval and natural language processing, especially in utility-focused RAG.

NEWS

[🎉 2025-10] I received the “National Scholarship for Doctoral Students”(博士生国家奖学金)
[🎉 2025-09] Our paper “Distilling a Small Utility-Based Passage Selector to Enhance Retrieval-Augmented Generation” has been accepted at SIGIR-AP25!
[🎉 2025-08] Our paper “Utility-Focused LLM Annotation for Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation” has been accepted at EMNLP25 for the main conference!
[🎉 2025-05] Our paper “A Comparative Study of Specialized LLMs as Dense Retrievers” has been accepted by CCIR25!
[🎉 2024-03] Our paper “Are Large Language Models Good at Utility Judgments?” has been accepted by SIGIR24!
[🎉 2023-08] Our paper “From relevance to utility: Evidence retrieval with feedback for fact verification” has been accepted by EMNLP23 Findings!
[🎉 2022-08] Our paper “Cort: A new baseline for comparative opinion classification by dual prompts” has been accepted by EMNLP22 Findings!

Highlight

• A curated list of analytical papers on utility-focused RAG
• A curated list of awesome papers on retrieval-augmented generation
• A curated list of awesome papers on dense retrieval and ranking

Achievements

• First-class academic scholarship， University of Chinese Academy of Sciences，2024
• Merit Student, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences，2023
• Excellent Graduation Thesis, Jilin University, 2022
• Self-improvement Star of Chinese College Students. 2021年度中国大学生自强之星奖学金
• 吉林大学2021年度自强自立大学生（仅10人）

Services

• Volunteer: SIGIR-AP 2023, CCIR 2023
• Contact Person of Student Committee Member of CCIR: 2023-
• Reviewer: WWW2025, ACL2025, SIGIR2025, AACL25, EMNLP25 SIGIR-AP25