Zitian Guo

Hi, I am Zitian Guo, currently a master student at UC San Diego, advised by Prof. Julian McAuley and Yupeng Hou. I am also working with Prof. Chenyan Xiong and Prof. Beibei Li at Carnegie Mellon University. I obtained my bachelor degree from Renmin University of China, advised by Prof. Qi Qi.

My research interests focus on Agentic Search and LLM Agents, Mechanism Design for Ranking Ecosystems, Generative Retrieval and Recommendation, and Efficient Inference.

🔥 I am actively looking for Fall 2027 Ph.D. positions and Summer 2027 internships! If you are looking for a highly motivated student for LLM agent, agentic search, or generative retrieval projects, please don't hesitate to drop me an email at ztguo@ucsd.edu.

Selected Papers

* Equal contribution. † Corresponding author.

Mechanism Design for Generative Engines: From Exploitation toward Win-Win Outcomes

Chen Xu, Zitian Guo, Chenyan Xiong†

[paper]

MLPs are Efficient Distilled Generative Recommenders

Zitian Guo, Yupeng Hou, Clark Mingxuan Ju, Neil Shah, Julian McAuley†

[paper]

OpticalRec: Unified Optical Vision-Language Representation for Multimodal Recommendation

Zitian Guo*, Yueqi Wang*, Yupeng Hou, Yifei Wang, Kibum Kim, Heming Xia, Renrui Zhang, Zhengzhong Tu, Julian McAuley†

How Well Does Generative Recommendation Generalize?

Yijie Ding, Zitian Guo, Jiacheng Li, Letian Peng, Shuai Shao, Wei Shao, Xiaoqiang Luo, Luke Simon, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley, Yupeng Hou†

KDD 2026 [paper]

Deterministic-Allocation and Anonymous Joint Advertising in E-commerce Platforms

Zhen Zhang, Luowen Liu, Wanzhi Zhang, Zitian Guo, Kun Huang, Qi Qi†, Qianlong Xie, Xingxing Wang

KDD 2026 [paper]

On Designing the Optimal Integrated Ad Auction in E-commerce Platforms

Yuchao Ma*, Weian Li*, Yuhan Wang, Zitian Guo, Yuejia Dou, Qi Qi†, Changyuan Yu

AAAI 2025 Poster [paper]

A Pre-trained Plug-in Mixture-of-LoRAs Model for Transferable Sequential Recommendation

Wenqi Sun, Ruobing Xie, Junjie Zhang, Zitian Guo, Wayne Xin Zhao†, Zhanhui Kang, Ji-Rong Wen

ICASSP 2025 [paper]

Experience

Research Assistant, Language Technologies Institute

Mar 2026 – present, Carnegie Mellon University

Supervisors: Prof. Chenyan Xiong and Prof. Beibei Li

Mechanism design for agentic search, game theory, LLM agents.

Research Assistant, Department of Computer Science Engineering

Apr 2025 – present, University of California, San Diego

Supervisors: Prof. Julian McAuley and Yupeng Hou

Generative recommendation and retrieval, efficient inference, multimodal representation learning.

Research Assistant, Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence

Sept 2023 – Apr 2025, Renmin University of China

Supervisor: Prof. Qi Qi

Mechanism design for advertising allocation, transferable sequential recommendation.

Education

M.S., University of California, San Diego

2025 – present, Electrical & Computer Engineering

Advisor: Prof. Julian McAuley

B.A., Renmin University of China

2021 – 2025, School of Economics

Advisor: Prof. Qi Qi

Exchange, University of California, Davis

2024, School of Economics

Beyond Academics

I am a lifelong lover of classical and rock music. You will often find me with a violin or timpani in hand, or collaborating with a symphony orchestra. Playing music is, and always will be, a core part of who I am.

Here are a few highlights from my musical journey:

Saint-Saëns: Danse Macabre Op.40

🎻 Honored to act as concertmaster and play the violin solo with Beijing Symphony Orchestra

Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 “Fate” Op.67

🥁 Playing the timpani in RUC Symphony Orchestra