Junfeng Liao

Junfeng Liao

Visting Student
Hi there! My name is Junfeng Liao, working as a visiting student at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). This August, I will start my research journey to pursue my PhD degree at MBZUAI, supervised by Prof. Xiuying Chen. Before that, I was a Research Assistant at the University of Technology Sydney, working with Dr. Qizhou Wang, Prof. Zhen Fang, and Prof. Ling Chen. I also hold a Master's degree in Applied Statistics from the Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, advised by Prof. Riquan Zhang.

My research goal is to achieve auto-everything with Agentic AI. And I am particularly interested in Agent Memory and Agentic Reinforcement Learning. My earlier research focused on LLM unlearning and alignment to make LLMs adaptable to dynamic world criteria. I am always eager to explore new ideas and collaborate with researchers with diverse backgrounds to undertake something awesome for the community. If you wanna chat with me, please don't hesitate to reach out via email.
News
[2026.4] I will serve as a Reviewer at NeurIPS 2026.
[2026.4] Got my PhD offer at MBZUAI! Thanks for everyone!
[2026.1] 🎉 My first-author work was accepted by ICLR 2026! Heartfelt thanks to Dr. Qizhou Wang, Prof. Zhen Fang, Prof. Ling Chen, and all other co-authors!
[2025.6] Nominated for Shanghai Outstanding Graduate Award! And graduated from SUIBE. So fortunate to have such an amazing time with you all!
[2024.11] Got the National Scholarship! Thanks for you guys!
Research Experience
2024.12 - 2026.2

Research Assistant

University of Technology Sydney (UTS)
Advised by Dr. Qizhou Wang, Prof. Zhen Fang, and Prof. Ling Chen

Selected Publications
Preprints
Belief Memory: Agent Memory Under Partial Observability
Junfeng Liao, Qizhou Wang, Jianing Zhu, Bo Du, Rui Yan, Xiuying Chen
Arxiv, 2026
@article{liao2026belief, title={Belief Memory: Agent Memory Under Partial Observability}, author={Liao, Junfeng and Wang, Qizhou and Zhu, Jianing and Du, Bo and Yan, Rui and Chen, Xiuying}, journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.05583}, year={2026} }
Conference
Explainable LLM Unlearning through Reasoning
Junfeng Liao, Qizhou Wang, Shanshan Ye, Xin Yu, Ling Chen, Zhen Fang
ICLR 2026
@inproceedings{liao2026explainable, title={Explainable LLM Unlearning through Reasoning}, author={Liao, Junfeng and Wang, Qizhou and Ye, Shanshan and Yu, Xin and Chen, Ling and Fang, Zhen}, booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations}, year={2026} }
Honors & Awards
Shanghai Outstanding Graduate Award
2025
National Scholarship
2024
Academic Service

Conference Reviewer

  • AAAI 2027
  • NeurIPS 2026
  • ECML-PKDD 2026

Journal Reviewer

  • Neural Network
Beyond Research

Beyond my research, I'm super passionate about fitness, volunteering, and traveling. They really give me the energy to push through whenever I hit a wall, and I feel really lucky to learn so much from positive people I meet.