Junfeng Liao

Junfeng Liao

Visting Student
Hi there! I am a first-year PhD student at NLP department of Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), advised by Prof. Xiuying Chen. I was a visiting student at MBZUAI, fortunately working with Prof. Xiuying Chen, and I was a research assistant at University of Technology Sydney, working with Dr. Qizhou Wang, Prof. Zhen Fang, and Prof. Ling Chen. Before that, I received my M.S. degree in Applied Statistics from Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, supervised by Prof. Riquan Zhang.

My research goal is to achieve the reliable 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] Awarded the National Scholarship! Thanks for you guys!
Research Experience
2026.3 - 2026.8
2024.12 - 2026.2

Research Assistant

University of Technology Sydney
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.