Qinglin Zhu <br /> (祝清麟)

Qinglin Zhu
(祝清麟)

King's College London
伦敦国王学院

👨‍🎓 About Me

I am a 3rd-year PhD student at King’s College London. I am fortunate to be supervised by Lecturer Lin Gui and Professor Yulan He. My current research focuses on Large Language Model Reasoning and Narrative Understanding in Natural Language Processing (NLP).

I completed both my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science and Technology at Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), under the guidance of Professor Ruifeng Xu. During my master’s studies, I engaged in research focused on Stance Detection and Argument Mining.

Besides research, I have interned at Tencent Music Entertainment for nine months and Shopee for four months, and worked at Baidu for five months as a Natural Language Processing Algorithm Engineer. I am currently interning at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing.

🔥 News

📝 Publications

(* Equal contribution, † Corresponding author)

🤔 LLM Reasoning, Decoding & Code Intelligence

ICML-2025 Spotlight
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Soft Reasoning: Navigating Solution Spaces in Large Language Models through Controlled Embedding Exploration GitHub
Qinglin Zhu, Runcong Zhao, Hanqi Yan, Yulan He, Yudong Chen, Lin Gui.

  • Proposes an embedding-based search framework that guides LLM generation by optimising the first token’s embedding.
  • Combines embedding perturbation for controlled exploration with Bayesian optimisation via a verifier-guided objective, balancing exploration and exploitation.
ACL-2024
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Mirror: A Multiple-perspective Self-Reflection Method for Knowledge-rich Reasoning
Hanqi Yan*, Qinglin Zhu* , Xinyu Wang, Lin Gui, Yulan He. GitHub

  • Proposes Mirror, enabling LLMs to reflect from multiple perspectives via Navigator–Reasoner cooperation.
  • Encourages both diverse and consistent reasoning to overcome self-reflection traps.
Preprint
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Latent Refinement Decoding: Enhancing Diffusion-Based Language Models by Refining Belief States
Qinglin Zhu, Yizhen Yao, Runcong Zhao, Yanzheng Xiang, Amrutha Saseendran, Chen Jin, Philip Alexander Teare, Bin Liang, Yulan He, Lin Gui.

  • Proposes Latent Refinement Decoding (LRD), a two-stage framework that tackles information loss and premature commitment in diffusion-based language models via latent refinement and predictive feedback.
  • Enables faster, globally consistent parallel generation as a principled alternative to autoregressive decoding.
Preprint
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Pull Requests as a Training Signal for Repo-Level Code Editing
Qinglin Zhu, Tianyu Chen, Shuai Lu, Lei Ji, Runcong Zhao, Murong Ma, Xiangxiang Dai, Yulan He, Lin Gui, Yeyun Gong.

  • Introduces Clean-PR, a pipeline that converts noisy PR diffs into structured edit blocks, yielding 2M training samples across 12 languages.
  • Achieves +13.6% on SWE-bench Lite and +12.3% on SWE-bench Verified, demonstrating the value of real-world PRs for repo-level code editing.

🤖 Multi-Agent Systems & Narrative Understanding

ACL-2024 Findings
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Large Language Models Fall Short: Understanding Complex Relationships in Detective Narratives
Runcong Zhao*, Qinglin Zhu* , Hainiu Xu, Jiazheng Li, Yuxiang Zhou, Yulan He, Lin Gui. GitHub

  • Existing datasets for narrative understanding often fail to represent the complexity and uncertainty of relationships in real-life social scenarios.
  • To address this gap, we introduce a new benchmark, Conan, designed for extracting and analysing intricate character relation graphs from detective narratives.
Preprint
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SymbolicThought: Integrating Language Models and Symbolic Reasoning for Consistent and Interpretable Human Relationship Understanding
Runcong Zhao, Qinglin Zhu*, Hainiu Xu, Bin Liang, Yulan He, Lin Gui.

  • Proposes SymbolicThought, a human-in-the-loop system combining LLM extraction and symbolic reasoning for character relationship understanding.
  • Supports editable relationship graphs, logical constraints, and interactive conflict resolution.
Preprint
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PLAYER*: Enhancing LLM-based Multi-Agent Communication and Interaction in Murder Mystery Games
Qinglin Zhu, Runcong Zhao, Jinhua Du, Lin Gui, Yulan He.

  • We propose PLAYER*, a novel framework for Murder Mystery Games (剧本杀) using an anytime sampling-based planner and a questioning-driven search framework.

🔍 Retrieval-Augmented Generation & Agent Memory

AAAI-2026 Oral
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Spectrum Projection Score: Aligning Retrieved Summaries with Reader Models in Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Zhanghao Hu, Qinglin Zhu, Siya Qi, Yulan He, Hanqi Yan, Lin Gui.

  • Proposes SPS, a supervision-free metric to assess semantic alignment between retrieved summaries and LLM representations.
  • Introduces xCompress, an inference-time controller that ranks and compresses retrievals to improve generation and clarify retrieval–generation interaction.
ACL-2025
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Beyond Prompting: An Efficient Embedding Framework for Open-Domain Question Answering
Zhanghao Hu, Hanqi Yan, Qinglin Zhu†, Zhenyi Shen, Yulan He, Lin Gui.

  • Proposes EmbQA, an embedding-level framework for open-domain QA that optimizes retrieval with unsupervised contrastive learning and improves answer diversity via exploratory embeddings.
Preprint
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Beyond RAG for Agent Memory: Retrieval by Decoupling and Aggregation
Zhanghao Hu, Qinglin Zhu, Hanqi Yan, Yulan He, Lin Gui.

  • Proposes xMemory, which decouples agent memories into semantic components and organises them hierarchically.
  • Retrieves via top-down aggregation to capture diverse themes, outperforming standard RAG on long-horizon agent tasks.

😆 Sentiment Analysis and Stance Detection

🗣️ Argumentation Mining and Sequence Labeling

🏅 Honors and Awards

  • 2023.03 Outstanding Master’s Graduate & Outstanding Dissertation for Master’s Degree, HIT (3%)
  • 2023.03 Sailvan Times Scholarship (2%), Harbin Institute of Technology
  • 2021.10 National Scholarship (for Graduate Student, 2%)
  • 2021.10 Pacemaker to Merit Student (2%), Harbin Institute of Technology
  • 2021.03 NLPCC-2021 Shared Task: Argument Pair Extraction (Top 1)
  • 2021.02 SemEval-2021 Task 5 Competition: Toxic Spans Detection (Top 1, Team Leader)
  • 2020.06 Outstanding Bachelor’s Graduate & Outstanding Dissertation for Bachelor’s Degree, HIT (3%)
  • 2019.10 National Scholarship (for Undergraduate Student, 2%)

📖 Educations

💻 Works and Internships

  • 2025.05 - Present, Microsoft Research Asia , Beijing, China.(Internship)
  • 2023.04 - 2023.08, Baidu , Shanghai, China.
  • 2022.06 - 2022.09, Shopee , Shanghai, China.(Internship)
  • 2021.08 - 2022.04, Tencent Music Entertainment Group , Shenzhen, China.(Internship)

🫡 Service

  • Reviewer: ICLR, ICML, ACL, AAAI, EMNLP, NAACL, NLPCC.

🗺️ Visitor Map

Last Updated:

Mar 31, 2026