I am currently a second-year post-graduate Student at the School of Data Science and Engineering, East China Normal University, under the supervision of Prof. Xiang Li in the PLANING (graPh mining and LANguage processING) lab.

My research interests include:

• Large Language Models: applications in GraphRAG (E$^2$GraphRAG, CrossAug, CogGRAG), toxicity detection (MetaTox), and detoxification (GEM).
• Agentic Reinforcement Learning: Search Agent (Empirical Review, GRACE), Trajectory Doctor (OS-Themis), and skills related (Skill0.5).

★★★ Feel free to reach out to me for academic discussions and collaborations!

🔥 News

• 2026.05 🎉🎉 4 new papers released on ArXiv, enjoy!
• 2026.04 🔥🔥 Our work RATE is accepted by ACL 2026, see you in CA!
• 2026.01 🎊🎊 Happy New Year! A recent work GRACE has been released on ArXiv!

  📑 Publications

• EMNLP 2026 MERIT: Matching Expertise via Rubric-Informed Training for Reviewer Assignment,
  Zixuan Yang, Yibo Zhao, Weicong Liu, Xiang Li.

• EMNLP 2026 Findings APEX: Academic Poster Editing Agentic Expert,
  Chengxin Shi*, Qinnan Cai*, Zeyuan Chen*, Long Zeng*, Yibo Zhao, Jing Yu, Jianxiang Yu, Xiang Li.

• EMNLP 2026 Findings Skill0.5: Joint Skill Internalization and Utilization for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Agentic Reinforcement Learning,
  Jiapeng Zhu, Jianxiang Yu, Yibo Zhao, Chengcheng Han, Qi Gu, Xunliang Cai, Xiang Li, Weining Qian.

• EMNLP 2026 Findings Beyond Chunk-Local Extraction: Cross-Chunk Graph Augmentation for GraphRAG,
  Jiaming Zhang, Yibo Zhao, Jing Yu, Jianxiang Yu, Xiang Li.

• ACL 2026 RATE: Reviewer Profiling and Annotation-free Training for Expertise Ranking in Peer Review Systems,
  Weicong Liu*, Zixuan Yang*, Yibo Zhao, Xiang Li.

• AAAI 2026 Human Cognition Inspired RAG with Knowledge Graph for Complex Problem Solving,
  Yao Cheng, Yibo Zhao, Jiapeng Zhu, Yao Liu, Xing Sun, Xiang Li.

• EMNLP 2025 Text Detoxification: Data Efficiency, Semantic Preservation and Model Generalization,
  Jing Yu*, Yibo Zhao*, Jiapeng Zhu, Wenming Shao, Bo Pang, Zhao Zhang, Xiang Li.

• ACL 2025 Findings Enhancing LLM-based Hatred and Toxicity Detection with Meta-Toxic Knowledge Graph,
  Yibo Zhao, Jiapeng Zhu, Can Xu, Yao Liu, Xiang Li.

📜 Preprints

• Retrieval, Reward, and Training Protocols: What Matters in Training Search Agents?,
  Yibo Zhao, Zichen Ding, Jiayi Wu, Zun Wang, Xiang Li.

• E$^2$GraphRAG: Streamlining Graph-based RAG for High Efficiency and Effectiveness,
  Yibo Zhao, Jiapeng Zhu, Jianxiang Yu, Ye Guo, Kangkang He, Xiang Li.

• GRACE: Reinforcement Learning for Grounded Response and Abstention under Contextual Evidence,
  Yibo Zhao, Jiapeng Zhu, Zichen Ding, Xiang Li.

• Think Big, Search Small: Where Capacity Matters in Hierarchical Search Agents?,
  Qinnan Cai*, Yibo Zhao*, Xiang Li.

• LazyMem: Retrieve Broadly, Construct Selectively for Efficient Long-Term Agent Memory,
  Jing Y, Yibo Zhao, Jiaming Zhang, Xiang Li.

• OS-Themis: A Scalable Critic Framework for Generalist GUI Rewards,
  Zehao Li, Zhenyu Wu, Yibo Zhao, Bowen Yang, Jingjing Xie, Zhaoyang Liu, Zhoumianze Liu, Kaiming Jin, Jianze Liang, Zonglin Li, Feng Wu, Bowen Zhou, Zun Wang, Zichen Ding.

📖 Educations

• 2024.09 - now, Post-graduate student, Data Science and Engineering, East China Normal University
• 2020.09 - 2024.06, Undergraduate, School of Communication, East China Normal University.

💻 Internships

• 2025.12 - 2026.06 Post-training Intern, LLM Center, AI Lab , Shanghai, China.

🎲 Fun Facts