👨‍🎓About Me

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Beihang University, under the guidance of Prof. Richong Zhang and Yongyi Mao (uOttawa). I finished my undergraduate studies at Beihang University and transitioned into the Ph.D. program in 2021.

I visited Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence from 2024.09 to 2025.08, under the guidance of Prof. Qiang Sun (Uoft). I am currently interning at Qwen Lab in Beijing.

I have a broad interest in Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval.

📝Publication

🗒️ Text Representation Learning

  • Zhijie Nie, Richong Zhang, Yongyi Mao. On The Inadequacy of Optimizing Alignment and Uniformity in Contrastive Learning of Sentence Representations. ICLR 2023
  • Zhijie Nie, Richong Zhang, Zhanyu Wu. A Text is Worth Several Tokens: Text Embedding from LLMs Secretly Aligns Well with The Key Tokens. ACL 2025 (SAC Highlight🌟)
  • Minxin Li, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie. Towards Better Understanding of Contrastive Sentence Representation Learning: A Unified Paradigm for Gradient. ACL 2024
  • Minxin Li, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie. Narrowing the Gap between Supervised and Unsupervised Sentence Representation Learning with Large Language Model. AAAI 2024
  • Zhijie Nie, Zhangchi Feng, Mingxin Li, Cunwang Zhang, Yanzhao Zhang, Dingkun Long, Richong Zhang. When Text Embedding Meets Large Language Model: A Comprehensive Survey. Preprint (Survey)

🖼️ Multi-Modal Semantic Alignment

  • Zhijie Nie, Richong Zhang, Zhangchi Feng, Hailang Huang, Xudong Liu. Improving the Consistency in Cross-Lingual Cross-Modal Retrieval with 1-to-K Contrastive Learning. KDD 2024
  • Dongdong Kuang, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie. Momentum Pseudo-Labeling for Weakly Supervised Phrase Grounding. AAAI 2025
  • Zhangchi Feng, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie. Improving Composed Image Retrieval via Contrastive Learning with Scaling Positives and Negatives. ACM MM 2024
  • Hailang Huang, Zhijie Nie, Ziqiao Wang, Ziyu Shang. Cross-Modal and Uni-Modal Soft-Label Alignment for Image-Text Retrieval. AAAI 2024

🔍︎Complex Reasoning on Structured Data

  • Zhijie Nie, Richong Zhang, Zhongyuan Wang. Code-Style In-Context Learning for Knowledge-Based Question Answering. AAAI 2024
  • Zhongyuan Wang, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie, Jaein Kim. Tool-Assisted Agent on SQL Inspection and Refinement in Real-World Scenarios. KDD 2025
  • Zhongyuan Wang, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie. General Table Question Answering via Answer-Formula Joint Generation. Preprint

🎨Others

  • Peiyi Zhang, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie. Dynamic Task Vector Grouping for Efficient Multi-Task Prompt Tuning. ACL 2025 Findings
  • Yani Huang, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie, Junfan Chen, Xuefeng Zhang. A Graph-based Verification Framework for Fact-Checking. Preprint
  • Fanshuang Kong, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie, Ziqiao Wang. Rethink the Evaluation Protocol of Model Merging on Classification Task. Preprint

🏅Honors

  • 2025.06 DAAD AInet Fellow for Natural Language Processing
  • 2025.06 CAST Young Talent Support Program for Doctoral Students
  • 2025.04 Huawei Scholarship
  • 2024.12 AVIC Scholarship
  • 2024.09 Beihang University First Prize Scholarship
  • 2024.07 CSC Scholarship
  • 2023.12 Beihang University Research Excellence Grant: Research on Embodied Intelligent Task Planning Methods for Natural Language Instructions