👨‍🎓About Me

I am an Excellent Hundred Postdoctoral Fellow (Assistant Researcher) at Beihang University, working with Prof. Chunming Hu and Prof. Richong Zhang.

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Beihang University, under the guidance of Prof. Richong Zhang and Prof. 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 have also worked with the Embedding Team 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🌟)
• Mingxin Li, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie. Towards Better Understanding of Contrastive Sentence Representation Learning: A Unified Paradigm for Gradient. ACL 2024
• Mingxin Li, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie, Yongyi Mao. Narrowing the Gap between Supervised and Unsupervised Sentence Representation Learning with Large Language Model. AAAI 2024
• Zhanyu Wu, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie. Learning to Select: Query-Aware Adaptive Dimension Selection for Dense Retrieval. ACL 2026 (Accepted)
• Zhanyu Wu, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie. Constructing Hard-Positive Query–Document Pairs for Dense Retrieval via Phrase Representativeness. SIGIR 2026 (Accepted)
• Mingxin Li, Zhijie Nie, Yanzhao Zhang, Dingkun Long, Richong Zhang, Pengjun Xie. Improving General Text Embedding Model: Tackling Task Conflict and Data Imbalance through Model Merging. Preprint
• Ruize An, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie, Zhanyu Wu, Yanzhao Zhang, Dingkun Long. Text2Token: Unsupervised Text Representation Learning with Token Target Prediction. Preprint

🖼️ 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, Junfan Chen, Jaein Kim. 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, Xudong Liu. Code-Style In-Context Learning for Knowledge-Based Question Answering. AAAI 2024
• Zhongyuan Wang, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie, Jaein Kim. ToolSQL: A Tool-Assisted Agent for SQL Verification and Refinement. KDD 2025

🎨Others

• Fanshuang Kong, Richong Zhang, Qiyu Sun, Zhijie Nie, Ting Deng, Chunming Hu. inversedMixup: Data Augmentation via Inverting Mixed Embeddings. KDD 2026 (Accepted)
• Peiyi Zhang, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie, Ziqiao Wang. Dynamic Task Vector Grouping for Efficient Multi-Task Prompt Tuning. ACL 2025 Findings

🏅Honors

• 2025 Wu Wenjun Artificial Intelligence Science & Technology Award, First Prize (Technology Invention): “Key Technologies and Applications for Vertical-Domain Model Tuning and Knowledge Reasoning.” Sole student contributor; ranked 6/6.
• 2025 ACL SAC Highlights for A Text is Worth Several Tokens: Text Embedding from LLMs Secretly Aligns Well with The Key Tokens. The only selected paper in Semantics; approximately 0.6% of submissions received the distinction.
• 2025 National Scholarship, Ministry of Education of China (National)
• 2025 DAAD AINet Fellow, German Academic Exchange Service (National)
• 2024 Young Talent Support Program for Doctoral Students, China Association for Science and Technology (National)
• 2024 Joint Ph.D. Training Program, China Scholarship Council (National)
• 2024 Huawei Scholarship, Beihang University (1/2)
• 2024 BYD Scholarship, Beihang University (1/1)
• 2024 AVIC Scholarship, Beihang University (2/3)