Xu Chen
Tenure-track Associate Professor and Ph.D. Advisor, Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China
Xu Chen is a tenure-track Associate Professor and Ph.D. supervisor at the Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China, and a recipient of the National Science Fund for Excellent Young Scholars. He received his Ph.D. from Tsinghua University, studied as a visiting scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and conducted postdoctoral research at University College London. His main research interests include large language models, reinforcement learning, recommender systems, and causal inference. He has published over 100 papers in leading international conferences and journals such as TheWebConf, SIGIR, KDD, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, and AIJ, with more than 10,000 citations on Google Scholar. He has received five Best Paper Awards or nominations at prestigious international conferences (TheWebConf 2018, CIKM 2022 Resource, SIGIR-AP 2023, MM Asia 2024, AIRS 2017). He is also a recipient of the CCF Natural Science Award (Second Prize, ranked 2/2), the Youth Innovation Award from the Chinese Information Processing Society of China, and the ACM Beijing Rising Star Award. His research achievements have been widely adopted by industry, earning him Huawei’s “Pioneering President Award for Innovation (First Prize).”
Topic
Yulan-Wanxiang: Towards the Next-Generation Large Model Agent–Based Social Simulation System
With the rapid development of large model technologies, it has become increasingly evident that, compared to traditional methods, large models demonstrate human-like intelligence across a growing range of tasks. Social sciences, which study individuals or groups, are now gaining access to novel research tools and methodologies enabled by these models. Among the various branches of social science, social simulation stands out as a widely applicable and important research paradigm. Leveraging large models to construct social simulation environments thus presents a unique opportunity for the social sciences in the era of large models. This talk will focus on the key challenges and core technologies of deploying large model agents in social simulation environments. It will provide a systematic introduction to the “Yulan-Wanxiang” social simulation platform developed by the Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence at Renmin University of China, review the current progress in large model–based social simulation research, and explore future directions in this emerging field.
