Junchen Fu - Homepage

Junchen Fu (付俊臣)

Pronunciation: Joon-chen Foo (/ˈdʒuːn tʃən fuː/)

University of Glasgow

PhD Candidate

School of Computing Science, IDA-section

Member of GAIR Lab

Email: j.fu.3@research.gla.ac.uk

About Me

I am a final-year PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow, advised by Prof. Joemon M. Jose, and have also been fortunate to be mentored by Dr. Alexandros Karatzoglou and Dr. Ioannis Arapakis. I was a visiting PhD student at Leiden University, advised by Prof. Zhaochun Ren and Prof. Suzan Verberne. Previously, I worked as a Research Assistant at Westlake University under the supervision of Prof. Fajie Yuan, focusing on modality-based recommender systems. I received my MSc in Computer Science from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, where I graduated with Dean’s List honors. I have authored more than 10 papers as a first, co-first, or corresponding author in leading AI and IR conferences and journals, including SIGIR, MM, WSDM, RecSys, CIKM, ECIR, and IEEE TKDE, etc. I enjoy tackling non-trivial research questions with simple yet effective solutions.

My research focuses on Recommendation-Oriented Multimodal Foundation Models, with the central question of how to transform general-purpose multimodal foundation models into systems that can represent, generate, and personalize multimodal information for recommendation. Specifically, I study how representation and generation foundation models can be adapted into recommendation-oriented systems that better understand users, represent items, and support personalized information ecosystems.

Research Overview

Research framework for recommendation-oriented multimodal foundation models

My work mainly explores this direction from two perspectives:

Recommendation-Oriented Representation
I study how to adapt multimodal foundation models into recommendation-aligned representations in both continuous and discrete spaces. My work includes efficient continuous multimodal representation adaptation [ Adapter4Rec (WSDM'24), IISAN (SIGIR'24), IISAN-Versa (TKDE'25), CROSSAN (ArXiv'25), Stresa (MM'26) ], and discrete Semantic ID learning for generative recommendation [ DIGER (SIGIR'26) ].
Recommendation-Oriented Generation
I also explore how generative models can support recommender systems from the user and platform sides, including popular content generation on user side [ LLMPopcorn (ICASSP'26) ] and missing modality completion for item understanding on platform side [ MMPCBench (PR'26) ].

I am seeking to collaborate on a research project with self-motivated MSc students from UofG, particularly those interested in pursuing a PhD. the students who are interested in research towards premier AI conferences/journals are welcome to drop me an email.

Oral Presentation/Invited Talk:

Leveraging Foundation Models for Multimodal Recommendation.
- Guest Lecture at Leiden University
[SLIDES]
Efficient and Effective Joint Optimization of Multimodal Item Representations for Recommendation.
- Glasgow IR Seminar
[SLIDES]
Advancing Efficient and Effective Adaptation of Multimodal Foundation Models for Recommender Systems.
- The 22nd Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop (DIR2025)
[SLIDES]

Workshop Summary:

Junchen Fu, Xuri Ge, Xin Xin, Alexandros Karatzoglou, Ioannis Arapakis, Xi Wang, Qijiong Liu, Qian Li, Joemon M. Jose
The 2nd EReL@MIR Workshop on Efficient Representation Learning for Multimodal Information Retrieval.
- Accepted by ACM MM'2026
Haitao Yu, Yubo Fang, Xuri Ge, Xin Xin, Zihan Wang, Junchen Fu, Joemon M. Jose, Weizhi Ma, and Zhaochun Ren.
R3AG 2025: Workshop on Refined and Reliable Retrieval-Augmented Generation.
- ACM SIGIR-AP'2025
Junchen Fu, Xuri Ge, Xin Xin, Haitao Yu, Yue Feng, Alexandros Karatzoglou, Ioannis Arapakis and Joemon Jose.
The 1st EReL@MIR Workshop on Efficient Representation Learning for Multimodal Information Retrieval.
- ACM WWW'2025

Selected Publications

Note: Corresponding-author papers come from MSc/Undergraduate supervision at UofG or other universities.

2026

Junchen Fu, Xuri Ge, Alexandros Karatzoglou, Ioannis Arapakis, Suzan Verberne, Joemon M. Jose, Zhaochun Ren.
Differentiable Semantic ID for Generative Recommendation. [CODE]
- SIGIR 2026 (CORE Rank A^*, CCF-A)
Junchen Fu, Kaiwen Zheng, Ioannis Arapakis, Wenhao Deng, Xin Xin, Joemon M. Jose, Xuri Ge.
Stream-aware Side Adaptation for Large Pre-trained Multimodal Embedding Models in Sequential Recommendation. [CODE]
- Accepted by ACM MM 2026 (CORE Rank A^*, CCF-A)
Kaiwen Zheng^*, Junchen Fu^*(co-first authors), Wenhao Deng, Hu Han, Joemon M. Jose, Xuri Ge.
Do We Really Need Multimodal Emotion Language Models Larger Than 1B Parameters?. [CODE]
- Accepted by ACM MM 2026 (CORE Rank A^*, CCF-A)
Wenhao Deng, Junchen Fu^# (corresponding author), Hanwen Du, Alexandros Karatzoglou, Ioannis Arapakis, Hangjun Guo, Kaiwen Zheng, Yongxin Ni, Joemon M. Jose.
RecRec: Latent Interests Recursive Reasoning for Sequential Recommendation.
- Accepted by RecSys 2026 (CORE Rank A, CCF-B)
Junchen Fu, Wenhao Deng, Kaiwen Zheng, Ioannis Arapakis, Yu Ye, Yongxin Ni, Joemon M. Jose, Xuri Ge.
Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Missing Modality Completion in Product Catalogues. [CODE]
- Pattern Recognition 2026 (CORE Rank A*, CCF-B, JCR Q1, IF=7.6)
Junchen Fu, Xuri Ge, Kaiwen Zheng, Alexandros Karatzoglou, Ioannis Arapakis, Xin Xin, Yongxin Ni, Joemon M. Jose.
LLMPopcorn: Exploring LLMs as Assistants for Popular Micro-video Generation. [CODE]
- ICASSP 2026 (CCF-B)
Abdisalam Abukar, Junchen Fu^# (corresponding author), Chengli Zhai, Joemon M. Jose.
Role of Personality in Conversational Information Seeking.
- CIKM2026 (CORE Rank A, CCF-B)
Zichen Yuan, Xiaoxuan Dong, Linkun Dai, Jinwei Yang, Jining Luan, Dexu Yu, Chunxiao Li, Joemon Jose, Youhua Li, Hanwen Du ^# and Junchen Fu ^# (corresponding author).
Recommender System as Slow and Fast Thinkers.
- CIKM2026 (CORE Rank A, CCF-B)
Yu Ye, Junchen Fu^# (corresponding author), Yu Song, Kaiwen Zheng, Joemon M. Jose.
Are Multimodal Embeddings Truly Beneficial for Recommendation? A Deep Dive into Whole vs. Individual Modalities. [CODE]
- ECIR 2026 (CORE Rank A)

2025

Junchen Fu, Xuri Ge, Xin Xin, Alexandros Karatzoglou, Ioannis Arapakis, Kaiwen Zheng, Yongxin Ni, and Joemon M. Jose
Efficient and Effective Adaptation of Multimodal Foundation Models in Sequential Recommendation. [CODE]
- TKDE2025 (CORE Rank A^*, CCF-A, JCR Q1, IF=10.4)
Ziyi Zhuang, Hongji Li, Junchen Fu^# (corresponding author), Jiacheng Liu, Joemon M. Jose, Youhua Li, Yongxin Ni.
Frequency-Decoupled Distillation for Efficient Multimodal Recommendation.
- CIKM2025 (CORE Rank A, CCF-B)
Yaoqin He^*, Junchen Fu^*(co-first authors), Kaiwen Zheng, Songpei Xu, Fuhai Chen, Jie Li, Joemon M. Jose, and Xuri Ge.
Double-Filter: Efficient Fine-tuning of Pre-trained Vision-Language Models via Patch&Layer Filtering.
- ICML2025 (CORE Rank A*, CCF-A)

2024

Xuri Ge^*, Junchen Fu^*(co-first authors), Fuhai Chen, Shan An, Nicu Sebe, Joemon Jose.
Towards End-to-End Explainable Facial Action Unit Recognition via Vision-Language Joint Learning.
- ACM MM'2024 (CORE Rank A^*, CCF-A).
Junchen Fu, Xuri Ge, Xin Xin, Alexandros Karatzoglou, Ioannis Arapakis, Jie Wang, Joemon Jose.
IISAN: Efficiently Adapting Multimodal Representation for Sequential Recommendation with Decoupled PEFT. [CODE]
- SIGIR'2024 (CORE Rank A^*, CCF-A).
Junchen Fu, Fajie Yuan, Yu Song, Zheng Yuan, Mingyue Cheng, Shenghui Cheng, Jiaqi Zhang, Jie Wang, Yunzhu Pan.
Exploring Adapter-based Transfer Learning for Recommender Systems: Empirical Studies and Practical Insights. [CODE]
- WSDM'2024 (CORE Rank A, CCF-B).

Full Publication List

2026

Junchen Fu, Xuri Ge, Alexandros Karatzoglou, Ioannis Arapakis, Suzan Verberne, Joemon M. Jose, Zhaochun Ren.
Differentiable Semantic ID for Generative Recommendation. [CODE]
- SIGIR 2026 (CORE Rank A^*, CCF-A)
Junchen Fu, Kaiwen Zheng, Ioannis Arapakis, Wenhao Deng, Xin Xin, Joemon M. Jose, Xuri Ge.
Stream-aware Side Adaptation for Large Pre-trained Multimodal Embedding Models in Sequential Recommendation. [CODE]
- Accepted by ACM MM 2026 (CORE Rank A^*, CCF-A)
Kaiwen Zheng^*, Junchen Fu^*(co-first authors), Wenhao Deng, Hu Han, Joemon M. Jose, Xuri Ge.
Do We Really Need Multimodal Emotion Language Models Larger Than 1B Parameters?. [CODE]
- Accepted by ACM MM 2026 (CORE Rank A^*, CCF-A)
Wenhao Deng, Junchen Fu^# (corresponding author), Hanwen Du, Alexandros Karatzoglou, Ioannis Arapakis, Hangjun Guo, Kaiwen Zheng, Yongxin Ni, Joemon M. Jose.
RecRec: Latent Interests Recursive Reasoning for Sequential Recommendation.
- Accepted by RecSys 2026 (CORE Rank A, CCF-B)
Junchen Fu, Wenhao Deng, Kaiwen Zheng, Ioannis Arapakis, Yu Ye, Yongxin Ni, Joemon M. Jose, Xuri Ge.
Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Missing Modality Completion in Product Catalogues. [CODE]
- Accepted by PR 2026 (CORE Rank A*, CCF-B, JCR Q1, IF=7.6)
Junchen Fu, Xuri Ge, Kaiwen Zheng, Alexandros Karatzoglou, Ioannis Arapakis, Xin Xin, Yongxin Ni, Joemon M. Jose.
LLMPopcorn: Exploring LLMs as Assistants for Popular Micro-video Generation. [CODE]
- ICASSP 2026 (CCF-B)
Kaiwen Zheng, Junchen Fu, Songpei Xu, Yaoqing He, Joemon M.Jose, Han Hu, Xuri Ge
Focal-RegionFace: Generating Fine-Grained Multi-attribute Descriptions for Arbitrarily Selected Face Focal Regions.
- Accepted by ICMR 2026 (CCF-B)
Yu Ye, Junchen Fu^# (corresponding author), Yu Song, Kaiwen Zheng, Joemon M. Jose.
A Reproducibility Study of Multimodal Embeddings for Recommender Systems. [CODE]
- Accepted by IJMIR 2026 (JCR Q2, IF=2.9), Extension of ECIR2026
Yu Ye, Junchen Fu^# (corresponding author), Yu Song, Kaiwen Zheng, Joemon M. Jose.
Are Multimodal Embeddings Truly Beneficial for Recommendation? A Deep Dive into Whole vs. Individual Modalities. [CODE]
- ECIR 2026 (CORE Rank A)
Abdisalam Abukar, Junchen Fu^# (corresponding author), Chengli Zhai, Joemon M. Jose.
Role of Personality in Conversational Information Seeking.
- CIKM2026 (CORE Rank A, CCF-B)
Zichen Yuan, Xiaoxuan Dong, Linkun Dai, Jinwei Yang, Jining Luan, Dexu Yu, Chunxiao Li, Joemon Jose, Youhua Li, Hanwen Du ^# and Junchen Fu ^# (corresponding author).
Recommender System as Slow and Fast Thinkers.
- CIKM2026 (CORE Rank A, CCF-B)
Qinfei Li, Xiaoxuan Dong, Jin Zhang, Dexu Yu, Wenhao Deng, Junchen Fu, Youhua Li, Hanwen Du and Chunxiao Li.
Risk-Aware Reranking for Agentic Tool Retrieval.
- CIKM2026 (CORE Rank A, CCF-B)
Hui Ye, Xuri Ge, Junqi Wang, Junchen Fu, Xin Xin, Jiao Xue, Yao Chen, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen.
Beyond efficient fine-tuning: Efficient hybrid fine-tuning of CLIP models guided by explainable ViT attention. [CODE]
- Accepted by IPM 2026 (CORE Rank A, CCF-B, JCR Q1, IF=6.9)

2025

Junchen Fu, Xuri Ge, Xin Xin, Alexandros Karatzoglou, Ioannis Arapakis, Kaiwen Zheng, Yongxin Ni, and Joemon M. Jose
Efficient and Effective Adaptation of Multimodal Foundation Models in Sequential Recommendation. [CODE]
- TKDE2025 (CORE Rank A^*, CCF-A, JCR Q1, IF=10.4)
Zichen Yuan, Lifan Sun, Yucen Zhuang, Yue Wang, Xinyuan Song, Tianqi Xu, Siyuan Li, Junchen Fu, Youhua Li, Sirui Hong, Jiaqi Chen, Joemon M. Jose, Yongxin Ni.
SOLAR: Serendipity Optimized Language Model Aligned for Recommendation [CODE].
- EMNLP 2025 (Finding)
Yongxin Ni, Yu Cheng, Xiangyan Liu, Junchen Fu, Youhua Li, Xiangnan He, Yongfeng Zhang, Fajie Yuan.
A Content-Driven Micro-Video Recommendation Dataset at Scale. [CODE]
- CIKM2025 (CORE Rank A, CCF-B)
Ziyi Zhuang, Hongji Li, Junchen Fu^# (corresponding author), Jiacheng Liu, Joemon M. Jose, Youhua Li, Yongxin Ni.
Frequency-Decoupled Distillation for Efficient Multimodal Recommendation.
- CIKM2025 (CORE Rank A, CCF-B)
Yaoqin He^*, Junchen Fu^*(co-first authors), Kaiwen Zheng, Songpei Xu, Fuhai Chen, Jie Li, Joemon M. Jose, and Xuri Ge.
Double-Filter: Efficient Fine-tuning of Pre-trained Vision-Language Models via Patch&Layer Filtering.
- ICML2025 (CORE Rank A*, CCF-A)
Junchen Fu, Yongxin Ni, Joemon M. Jose, Ioannis Arapakis, Kaiwen Zheng, Youhua Li, and Xuri Ge.
CROSSAN: Towards Efficient and Effective Adaptation of Multiple Multimodal Foundation Models for Sequential Recommendation.
-Arxiv 2025 (Preprint)
Youhua Li, Ersheng Ni, Yihao Liu, Sibo Xu, Tianyi Xu, Mingxuan Wu, Junchen Fu, Yucheng Zhang, Yuanqi He, Xinyuan Song, Yongxin Ni.
Bridging NIP and MLM: A Unified Meta-Learning Framework for Sequential Recommendation.
- TKDD2025 (CCF-B, JCR Q1, IF=4.8)
Kaiwen Zheng, Xuri Ge, Junchen Fu, Jun Peng, Joemon M. Jose.
Multimodal Representation Learning Techniques for Comprehensive Facial State Analysis.
- ICME2025 (CORE Rank A, CCF-B)
Hui Han, Siyuan Li, Jiaqi Chen, Yiwen Yuan, Yuling Wu, Yufan Deng, Chak Tou Leong, Hanwen Du, Junchen Fu, Youhua Li, Jie Zhang, Chi Zhang, Li-jia Li, Yongxin Ni.
Video-Bench: Human-Aligned Video Generation Benchmark.
- CVPR'2025 (CORE Rank A^*, CCF-A)
Ziyi Zhuang, Hanwen Du, Hui Han, Youhua Li, Junchen Fu, Joemon M. Jose, Yongxin Ni.
Bridging the Gap: Teacher-Assisted Wasserstein Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Multi-Modal Recommendation.
- ACM WWW'2025 (CORE Rank A^*, CCF-A)
Zhiyu Liu, Junchen Fu^# (corresponding author), Kaiwen Zheng, Joemon M. Jose.
Exploring Multimodal Pre-trained Models for Speech Emotion Recognition.
- ACM WWW'2025 Workshop
Hongji Li, Hanwen Du, Youhua li, Junchen Fu, Chunxiao Li, Ziyi Zhuang, Jiakang Li, Yongxin Ni.
Teach Me How to Denoise: a Universal Framework for Denoising Multi-modal Recommender Systems via Guided Calibration [CODE].
- ACM WSDM'2025 (CORE Rank A, CCF-B, Best of WSDM)

2024

Xuri Ge^*, Junchen Fu^*(co-first authors), Fuhai Chen, Shan An, Nicu Sebe, Joemon Jose.
Towards End-to-End Explainable Facial Action Unit Recognition via Vision-Language Joint Learning.
- ACM MM'2024 (CORE Rank A^*, CCF-A).
Junchen Fu, Xuri Ge, Xin Xin, Alexandros Karatzoglou, Ioannis Arapakis, Jie Wang, Joemon Jose.
IISAN: Efficiently Adapting Multimodal Representation for Sequential Recommendation with Decoupled PEFT. [CODE]
- SIGIR'2024 (CORE Rank A^*, CCF-A).
Junchen Fu, Fajie Yuan, Yu Song, Zheng Yuan, Mingyue Cheng, Shenghui Cheng, Jiaqi Zhang, Jie Wang, Yunzhu Pan.
Exploring Adapter-based Transfer Learning for Recommender Systems: Empirical Studies and Practical Insights. [CODE]
- WSDM'2024 (CORE Rank A, CCF-B).
Jiaqi Zhang, Yu Cheng, Yongxin Ni, Yunzhu Pan, Zheng Yuan, Junchen Fu, Youhua Li, Jie Wang, Fajie Yuan.
NineRec: A Benchmark Dataset Suite for Evaluating Transferable Recommendation. [CODE]
- TPAMI2024 (CORE Rank A^*, CCF-A, JCR Q1, IF=20.8)

2023

Zheng Yuan, Fajie Yuan, Yu Song, Youhua Li, Junchen Fu, Fei Yang, Yunzhu Pan, and Yongxin Ni.
Where to Go Next for Recommender Systems? ID- vs. Modality-based Recommender Models Revisited. [CODE]
- SIGIR'2023 (CORE Rank A^*, CCF-A)

2022

Junchen Fu and Zhaohui Qi.
A TDF-WNSP-WLFM algorithm for product recommendation based on multiple types of implicit user behavior.
- The Journal of Supercomputing 2022 (CORE Rank B, CCF-C, JCR Q2, IF=2.5)

Datasets

MicroLens: a large-scale multimodal micro-video recommendation dataset for studying content-aware recommendation with user interactions and rich video-side information.
Paper | Code/Data
NineRec: a multimodal benchmark dataset suite for evaluating transferable recommendation across different recommendation domains and content modalities.
Paper | Code/Data

Work Experience

Jun. 2026 - Sep. 2026, Research Intern, Brave Software (Brave Research), London, United Kingdom
Sep. 2025 - Dec. 2025, Visting Scholar, The Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science at Leiden University (LU), Leiden, The Netherlands
Sep. 2024 - Present, Graduate Teaching Assistant, School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom
Mar. 2025 - Aug. 2025, Web Support Officer Intern, School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom
May. 2022 - Jun. 2023, Research Assistant, Representation Learning Lab at Westlake University, Hangzhou, China
Aug. 2020 - Nov. 2020, Data Analyst Intern, Sandalwood Advisors Limited, Changsha, China

Education Background

Oct. 2023 - Present, PhD in Computing Science, University of Glasgow (UofG), Glasgow, United Kingdom
Aug. 2021 - Nov. 2022, MSc in Computer Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), Hong Kong, China
Sep. 2017 - Jun. 2021, BEng in Computer Science and Technology (Minor in Applied Psychology), Hunan Normal University (HNNU), Changsha, China

MSc Supervision

2025-Present, "Exploring the Personality Profiles of Large Language Models through the Big Five Model", Aravindhan Ashok.
2025-Present, "Are Multimodal Embeddings Truly Beneficial for Recommendation? A Deep Dive into Whole vs. Individual Modalities" (MSC CS+ Project Prize), Yu Ye.
2024-2025, "Exploring Multimodal Pre-trained Models for Speech Emotion Recognition", Zhiyu Liu, Now at Insta360.

Graduate Teaching Assistant

2025 Spring, COMPSCI4077&COMPSCI5078&COMPSCI5107 Web Science
2024 Fall, COMPSCI5107 Introduction to Data Science and Systems (IDSS)

Professional Activities

Session Chair:
- ICASSP2026
Organizers/Volunteers:
- Organizer of the R3AG Workshop at SIGIR-AP2025
- Organizer of the EReL@MIR Workshop at (WWW2025,MM2026)
- Volunteer of BMVC 2024
Served as a Reviewer/PC Member:
- Conferences:
  - ICLR (2025,2026)
  - ACM SIGIR (2025,2026)
  - ACM SIGKDD (2024, GenAIRecP 2024, 2025, 2026)
  - ACM WWW (2024-Workshops, 2025, 2026)
  - CVPR 2026
  - AAAI 2026
  - IJCAI 2026
  - ACM WSDM (2025, GenAIRecP 2026, 2026)
  - ACM Multimedia (2023, 2024, 2025)
  - ACM CIKM 2025
  - ACM ICMR (2026)
  - IEEE ICASSP (2026)
  - IEEE ICME (2026, 2025, 2024-Workshops)
  - ACML (2025, 2024)
  - ACM SIGIR-AP 2024
  - ACM MM-Asia 2025
- Journals:
  - IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM)
  - IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)
  - ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
  - Information Processing and Management (IP&M)
  - ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems (TORS)

Honors and Awards

2026, UofG CDSAI Conference & Training Fund
2023, SIGMOD Student Travel Awards
2023, China Scholarship Council (CSC) Scholarships
2022, CUHK Dean's List Scholarship
2022, CUHK Distinguished Academic Performance Scholarship
2021, CUHK Entrance Scholarship
2021, HNNU Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award (Advised by Prof. Zhaohui Qi)
2020, HNNU First Class Scholarship (Overall Score ranked 1st out of 55)
2020, Oustanding Student in International Graduate Summer School on Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in Hunan Province
2019, First Prize of Contemporary Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling (CUMCM) in Hunan Province

Junchen Fu (付俊臣)

Pronunciation: Joon-chen Foo (/ˈdʒuːn tʃən fuː/)

University of Glasgow

About Me

Oral Presentation/Invited Talk:

Workshop Summary:

Selected Publications

2026

2025

2024

2026

2025

2024

2023

2022

Datasets

Work Experience

Education Background

MSc Supervision

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Professional Activities

Session Chair:

Organizers/Volunteers:

Served as a Reviewer/PC Member:

Conferences:

Journals:

Honors and Awards