Haodong Chen

First-year PhD student at UQ

CS / NLP / IR

LLM / RAG / Agentic Search

Hi there!👋 I am a first-year PhD student in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at The University of Queensland (UQ), Brisbane, Australia.

I am a proud recipient of a full PhD scholarship from the Queensland Digital Health Centre (QDHeC). My research is conducted as a member of the Information Engineering Lab (ieLab) group, and I am supervised by Dr. Teerapong Leelanupab and Prof. Guido Zuccon.

I hold a Master of Engineering Science degree from UQ, completed in July 2025.

My research focuses on optimizing retrieval for agentic search, enabling more effective and efficient information access in long-horizon agent workflows.

Beyond research, I also serve as a tutor for DATA7901 / DATA7903 – Data Science Capstone Project and INFS7203 – Data Mining.

news

Aug 27, 2026	📑 Our new paper “ITER: Interaction-Aware Retrieval for Agentic Search” introduces an interaction-aware dense retriever that learns from agent trajectories and uses prior search interactions to improve retrieval.
Aug 15, 2026	🥈 Excited to share that our team placed second in the Retrieval Model Optimization Based on Agent Interaction Trajectories track at CCIR Cup 2026! The code and technical report are now available.
Aug 02, 2026	📑 Our new paper “Search, Inspect, Fetch: Exploiting Structure-Aware Boolean Retrieval for Deep-Search Agents” introduces Sieve, a structure-aware search-inspect-fetch strategy that improves answer accuracy while reducing context usage.
Apr 08, 2026	🔥 Our paper “Where Relevance Emerges: A Layer-Wise Study of Internal Attention for Zero-Shot Re-Ranking” has been accepted at SIGIR 2026!
Aug 31, 2025	📑 Our paper “Beyond GeneGPT: A Multi-Agent Architecture with Open-Source LLMs for Enhanced Genomic Question Answering” has been accepted at SIGIR-AP 2025!