Yu Gong - Director of Engineering @ TikTok | AI Search | LLM Agents

About

I'm a Director of Engineering at TikTok, leading a 40+ algorithm team on Search, AI Search, and Shopping Agent for global e-commerce. I have 9+ years in large-scale search and recommender systems, previously at ByteDance and Alibaba.

My work spans search, recommendation, and agent systems. I am building toward an AI-native shopping decision system — unifying retrieval and ranking with multi-step reasoning and autonomous decision making.

My current research interests include LLM-powered search, LLM agents (harness engineering, memory & personalization, post-training, agentic-RL, and evaluation), and recommender systems. Recipient of the SIGIR 2017 Best Paper Honorable Mention (IRGAN, 880+ citations).

Featured Projects

TikTok Shopping Agent In Production

Production LLM-based shopping agent — multi-step reasoning, memory-driven personalization, and RL post-training.

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T3 ICLR 2026 Oral

Active reasoning of LLM agents via reinforcement learning with belief deviation reduction.

IRGAN Best Paper Hon. Mention

Minimax game framework unifying generative and discriminative IR models. SIGIR 2017, 880+ citations.

SIGIR 2017 Best Paper Award Honorable Mention

EdgeRec Industry First

First on-device AI recommender system in billion-scale commerce feed, Mobile Taobao. CIKM 2020.

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News

2026 Paper "APeB: Benchmarking Personalization Ability of Large Language Model Agents" accepted to EMNLP 2026.
2026 Open-sourced Hermes Research Skills — a composable skill pack that turns literature discovery, deep reading, evidence review, and synthesis into a structured end-to-end research workflow.
2026 Paper "On Information Self-Locking in Reinforcement Learning for Active Reasoning of LLM Agents" accepted to ICML 2026.
2026 Paper "Reducing Belief Deviation in Reinforcement Learning for Active Reasoning of LLM Agents" accepted to ICLR 2026 as Oral.

Experience

2024 – Present

Director of Engineering TikTok

Lead a 40+ person algorithm organization owning Search, AI Search, and Shopping Agent systems for TikTok global e-commerce across multiple regions (US, Europe, Southeast Asia and more), driving end-to-end product and technical roadmap for search systems serving ~140M daily e-commerce queries in the US alone.

LLM-powered Search

Led the evolution of search systems toward LLM-based retrieval and ranking:

Query Planning — LLM multi-agent framework (Analyzer-Identifier-Rewriter-Judger) for resolving ambiguous queries into latent product intents.
Generative Retrieval — decode-only generative models for product retrieval.
Large Search Model — Transformer-based search model with parameter and behavior sequence scaling up across retrieval and ranking.
Multi-Modality — multi-modal representation fusion and co-training for retrieval and ranking.

Shopping Agent

Built and launched TikTok's Shopping Agent from scratch:

Agent Framework — Planner-Executor-Verifier architecture (Harness) with multi-turn context management and heterogeneous tool use (Web / Product / Video Search).
Memory & Personalization — Memory-as-Tool design: hierarchical memory distilled from long-horizon user behavioral signals; a decoupled MemAgent performs query-aware retrieval and evidence-grounded extraction for personalized decisions.
Post-Training — rejection-sampling SFT with synthetic multi-turn data for model cold-start; RL fine-tuning with Rubric Reward & Deep Search Reward; related active-reasoning work includes T3 (ICLR '26 Oral) and AREW (ICML '26).
Evaluation & Benchmark — built ShoppingBench (deep product search), APeB (personalized agent behavior), and rubric-based report evaluation.

2021 – 2024

Senior Engineering Manager / Tech Lead ByteDance

Led a 20+ person algorithm team building Douyin Mall's core recommendation and product growth systems from 0→1, defining the foundation for personalized e-commerce and contributing to its growth into China's Top 3 largest e-commerce platform by GMV. Owned end-to-end recommendation architecture supporting ~170M daily active users across products, short videos, and livestreams, spanning retrieval, ranking, and cold-start systems.

Homepage Feed Recommendation

Built and scaled the full-stack recommendation pipeline for Douyin Mall's homepage feed:

Deep Retrieval — Beyond-dual-tower retrieval with cross-tower feature interaction, multi-objective cascade for full-pipeline consistency with advanced loss optimization, and advanced i2i modeling, among other strategies.
Large Ranking Model — Pioneered Large Ranking Model with parameter scaling up across sparse and dense components, long-sequence-to-graph modeling, and scaling-law exploration, among other strategies.

Product Cold-Start System

Led the design of a dedicated cold-start system to bootstrap new products at scale:

Traffic Strategy — Built a lane-separated serving architecture decoupled from the main traffic flow, enabling controlled exploration of new products; developed uplift modeling for personalized traffic allocation, balancing exploration efficiency and conversion impact.
Efficiency Optimization — Enhanced cold-start ranking with multi-modal representations, similar-product knowledge transfer, and cold-start-aware training strategies under sparse feedback.

2017 – 2021

Tech Lead Alibaba Group

Pioneered EdgeRec — the industry's first on-device AI recommender systems in a billion-scale commerce feed for Mobile Taobao (CIKM 2020). Invented the Generator-Evaluator two-stage re-ranking framework (GRN, GE), now the standard paradigm for listwise re-ranking. Created Alibaba's Edge-X-Platform (Edge-Cloud MLOps), powering 10+ business lines across Alibaba.

Selected Publications

Total citations: 1,794 · h-index: 16 · Full list on Google Scholar

LLM Agents

On Information Self-Locking in Reinforcement Learning for Active Reasoning of LLM Agents D Zou, Y Chen, F Feng, M Li, P Li, Y Gong, J Cheng ICML 2026 Project Lead Paper
Reducing Belief Deviation in Reinforcement Learning for Active Reasoning of LLM Agents D Zou, Y Chen, J Wang, G Yang, M Li, Q Da, J Cheng, P Li, Y Gong ICLR 2026 Oral Project Lead Cited by 1 Paper Code
MemRerank: Preference Memory for Personalized Product Reranking Z Peng, X Wu, H Tou, Y Fang, Y Gong arXiv 2026 Project Lead Paper

Benchmarks

APeB: Benchmarking Personalization Ability of Large Language Model Agents Y Gong, et al. EMNLP 2026 Project Lead Paper
ShoppingComp: Are LLMs Really Ready for Your Shopping Cart? H Tou, Y Zeng, Y Li, C Ma, M Li, M Li, W Yuan, H Zhang, K Jia arXiv 2025 Co-Researcher Paper Code

Recommender Systems

EdgeRec: Recommender System on Edge in Mobile Taobao Y Gong, Z Jiang, Y Feng, B Hu, K Zhao, Q Liu, W Ou CIKM 2020 First Author Cited by 110 Paper
Personalized Adaptive Meta Learning for Cold-start User Preference Prediction R Yu, Y Gong, X He, Y Zhu, Q Liu, W Ou, B An AAAI 2021 Project Lead Cited by 104 Paper
Exact-k Recommendation via Maximal Clique Optimization Y Gong, Y Zhu, L Duan, Q Liu, Z Guan, F Sun, W Ou, KQ Zhu SIGKDD 2019 First Author Cited by 63 Paper Code
GRN: Generative Rerank Network for Context-wise Recommendation Y Feng, B Hu, Y Gong, F Sun, Q Liu, W Ou arXiv 2021 Project Lead Cited by 35 Paper
Revisit Recommender System in the Permutation Prospective Y Feng, Y Gong, F Sun, Q Liu, W Ou arXiv 2021 Project Lead Cited by 35 Paper
Query-based Interactive Recommendation by Meta-path and Adapted Attention-GRU Y Zhu, Y Gong, Q Liu, Y Ma, W Ou, J Zhu, B Wang, Z Guan, D Cai CIKM 2019 Co-First Author Cited by 22 Paper
Gift: Graph-guided Feature Transfer for Cold-start Video Click-through Rate Prediction Y Cao, S Hu, Y Gong, Z Li, Y Yang, Q Liu, S Ji CIKM 2022 Cited by 19 Paper

Information Retrieval & Search

IRGAN: A Minimax Game for Unifying Generative and Discriminative Information Retrieval Models J Wang, L Yu, W Zhang, Y Gong, Y Xu, B Wang, Z Peng, D Zhang ACM SIGIR 2017 Best Paper Honorable Mention First Industry Author Cited by 880 Paper Code
Conceptualize and Infer User Needs in E-commerce X Luo, Y Yang, KQ Zhu, Y Gong, K Yang CIKM 2019 Cited by 21 Paper
Query Tracking for E-commerce Conversational Search: A Machine Comprehension Perspective Y Yang, Y Gong, X Chen CIKM 2018 Cited by 13 Paper
A Minimax Game for Instance Based Selective Transfer Learning B Wang, M Qiu, X Wang, Y Li, Y Gong, X Zeng, J Huang, B Zheng, D Cai, ... SIGKDD 2019 Cited by 60 Paper

NLP & Text Generation

Deep Cascade Multi-task Learning for Slot Filling in Online Shopping Assistant Y Gong, X Luo, Y Zhu, W Ou, Z Li, M Zhu, KQ Zhu, L Duan, X Chen AAAI 2019 First Author Cited by 42 Paper Code
Multi-Modal Generative Adversarial Network for Short Product Title Generation in Mobile E-Commerce J Zhang, P Zou, Z Li, Y Wan, X Pan, Y Gong, PS Yu NAACL 2019 Cited by 35 Paper
Automatic Generation of Chinese Short Product Titles for Mobile Display Y Gong, X Luo, KQ Zhu, W Ou, Z Li, L Duan AAAI 2019 First Author Cited by 35 Paper Code
Representing Verbs as Argument Concepts Y Gong, K Zhao, KQ Zhu AAAI 2016 First Author Cited by 21 Paper Code

Education

2014 – 2017

M.S. in Computer Science Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Research Assistant in ADAPT Lab. Research areas: Information Retrieval, NLP, Machine Learning.

2010 – 2014

B.S. in Computer Software Engineering Xi'an Jiaotong University

Google Excellent Scholarship recipient (awarded to 100 students in China).

Honors & Awards

ACM SIGIR 2017 Best Paper Award Honorable Mention
Google Excellent Scholarship — awarded to 100 students in China (2013)