I am a PhD student at Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence (GSAI), Renmin University of China (RUC). I am advised by Prof. Ruihua Song. Prior to this, I graduated from School of Information and Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China where I obtained my bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in 2020 and 2023, respectively.
My research centers on building intelligent systems that integrate multimodal understanding, creative reasoning, and open-domain generation, with a focus on advancing both the controllability and applicability of AI in real-world scenarios.
Main Research Interests:
Creative AI: Developing and evaluating LLMs for controllable and human-like creative text generation.
Multimodal Understanding & Interaction: Exploring vision-language interplay and building multimodal LLMs with stronger cross-modal reasoning abilities.
Applied LLM Systems: Constructing efficient and domain-specific LLM systems, from foundational models to knowledge-augmented applications.
My long-term goal is to develop AI systems that seamlessly unify perception, knowledge, and creativity, enabling machines not only to understand the world, but also to generate meaningful and creative content across modalities.
News
Jan 15, 2026
Our new work DPWriter: Reinforcement Learning with Diverse Planning Branching for Creative Writing is now available! Check it out on [arXiv] !
Jun 9, 2025
Joined the foundation LLM team at Kuaishou Technology as a research intern!
May 25, 2025
Our new work Evaluating Text Creativity across Diverse Domains: A Dataset and Large Language Model Evaluator is now available! Check it out on [arXiv] to explore our dataset [CreataSet] and out creativity evaluator [CrEval] !
Oct 10, 2024
Our work Understanding the Roles of Visual Modality in Multimodal Dialogue: An Empirical Study was accepted by MMM 2025!
Sep 21, 2024
Our work BSharedRAG: Backbone Shared Retrieval-Augmented Generation for the E-commerce Domain was accepted by EMNLP 2024 Findings!
Jul 16, 2024
Our work See or Guess: Counterfactually Regularized Image Captioning was accepted by ACM MM 2024!
@article{cao2026dpwriter,title={DPWriter: Reinforcement Learning with Diverse Planning Branching for Creative Writing},author={Cao, Qian and Liu, Yahui and Bi, Wei and Zhao, Yi and Song, Ruihua and Wang, Xiting and Tang, Ruiming and Zhou, Guorui and Li, Han},journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.09609},year={2026},}
@article{cao2025evaluating,title={Evaluating Text Creativity across Diverse Domains: A Dataset and Large Language Model Evaluator},author={Cao, Qian and Wang, Xiting and Yuan, Yuzhuo and Liu, Yahui and Luo, Fang and Song, Ruihua},journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.19236},year={2025},}
@inproceedings{Guan2024BSharedRAG,title={BSharedRAG: Backbone Shared Retrieval-Augmented Generation for the E-commerce Domain},author={Guan, Kaisi and Cao, Qian and Sun, Yuchong and Wang, Xiting and Song, Ruihua},booktitle={Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024,},year={2024},month=nov,doi={10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.62},}
@inproceedings{Cao2024SeeOrGuess,title={See or Guess: Counterfactually Regularized Image Captioning},author={Cao, Qian and Chen, Xu and Song, Ruihua and Wang, Xiting and Huang, Xinting and Ren, Yuchen},booktitle={Proceedings of the 32th ACM international conference on Multimedia,},year={2024},month=oct,doi={10.1145/3664647.3681458},}
@article{zhu2024yulan,title={YuLan: An Open-source Large Language Model},author={Zhu, Yutao and Zhou, Kun and Mao, Kelong and Chen, Wentong and Sun, Yiding and Chen, Zhipeng and Cao, Qian and Wu, Yihan and Chen, Yushuo and Wang, Feng and others},journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.19853},year={2024},}
@inproceedings{Cao2022MultiModalEI,title={Multi-Modal Experience Inspired AI Creation},author={Cao, Qian and Chen, Xu and Song, Ruihua and Jiang, Hao and Yang, Guang and Cao, Zhao},booktitle={Proceedings of the 30th ACM international conference on Multimedia,},year={2022},month=oct,doi={10.1145/3503161.3548189},}
Experiences
2025.6 - 2026.1
Foundation LLM Team @ , Kuaishou
Research Intern
2022.6 - 2023.3.6
AI Lab NLP Center @ , Tencent
Research Intern
2020.9 - Now
AIMind Group @ Beijing Key Lab of Big Data Management and Analysis, RUC
Research Assistant
2021.6 - 2022.2
Bing powered Xiaoice, Software Technology Center at Asia @ , Microsoft
, Kuaishou
RUC