Yao Cheng 0009

dblp:14/8823-9 · DBLP profile ↗
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10ranked-venue papers
4as first author
10since 2021 · last 2026
0009-0003-1241-7188ORCID · conflict

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 7 · 2 first-author · 7 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 6 · 3 first-author · 6 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1 · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 Human Cognition Inspired RAG with Knowledge Graph for Complex Problem Solving
abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential across various domains. However, they often struggle with integrating external knowledge and performing complex reasoning, leading to hallucinations and unreliable outputs. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising paradigm to mitigate these issues by incorporating external knowledge. Yet, conventional RAG approaches, especially those based on vector similarity, fail to effectively capture relational dependencies and support multi-step reasoning. In this work, we propose CogGRAG, a human cognition-inspired, graph-based RAG framework designed for Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA). CogGRAG models the reasoning process as a tree-structured mind map that decomposes the original problem into interrelated subproblems and explicitly encodes their semantic relationships. This structure not only provides a global view to guide subsequent retrieval and reasoning but also enables self-consistent verification across reasoning paths. The framework operates in three stages: (1) top-down problem decomposition via mind map construction, (2) structured retrieval of both local and global knowledge from external Knowledge Graphs (KGs), and (3) bottom-up reasoning with dual-process self-verification. Unlike previous tree-based decomposition methods such as MindMap or Graph-CoT, CogGRAG unifies problem decomposition, knowledge retrieval, and reasoning under a single graph-structured cognitive framework, allowing early integration of relational knowledge and adaptive verification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CogGRAG achieves superior accuracy and reliability compared to existing methods.
Yao Cheng 0009, Yibo Zhao 0005, Jiapeng Zhu 0002, Xiang Li 0067
AAAI1
2026 A survey on learning from graphs with heterophily: recent advances and future directions
abstract
Abstract Graphs are structured data that models complex relations between real-world entities. Heterophilic graphs, where linked nodes trend to have different labels or dissimilar features, have recently attracted significant attention and found many real-world applications. Meanwhile, increasing efforts have been made to advance learning from graphs with heterophily. Various graph heterophily measures, benchmark datasets, and learning paradigms are emerging rapidly. In this survey, we comprehensively review existing works on learning from graphs with heterophily. First, we overview over 500 publications, of which more than 300 are directly related to heterophilic graphs. After that, we survey existing metrics of graph heterophily and list recent benchmark datasets. Further, we systematically categorize existing methods based on a hierarchical taxonomy including GNN models, learning paradigms and practical applications. In addition, broader topics related to graph heterophily are also included. Finally, we discuss the primary challenges of existing studies and highlight promising avenues for future research.
Cheng-Hua Gong, Yao Cheng 0009, Jian-Xiang Yu, Can Xu 0005, Siqiang Luo, Xiang Li 0067
Frontiers Comput. Sci.2
2025 Can Large Language Models Act as Ensembler for Multi-GNNs?
abstract
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful models for learning from graphstructured data.However, GNNs lack the inherent semantic understanding capability of rich textual node attributes, limiting their effectiveness in applications.On the other hand, we empirically observe that for existing GNN models, no one can consistently outperforms others across diverse datasets.In this paper, we study whether LLMs can act as an ensembler for multi-GNNs and propose the LensGNN model.The model first aligns multiple GNNs, mapping the representations of different GNNs into the same space.Then, through LoRA fine-tuning, it aligns the space between the GNN and the LLM, injecting graph tokens and textual information into LLMs.This allows LensGNN to ensemble multiple GNNs and take advantage of the strengths of LLM, leading to a deeper understanding of both textual semantic information and graph structural information.The experimental results show that LensGNN outperforms existing models.This research advances text-attributed graph ensemble learning by providing a robust and superior solution for integrating semantic and structural information.We provide our code and data here: https: //github.com/AquariusAQ/LensGNN.
Hanqi Duan, Yao Cheng 0009, Jianxiang Yu 0001, Xiang Li 0067
EMNLP2
2025 Learning Prioritized Node-Wise Message Propagation in Graph Neural Networks (Extended Abstract)
abstract
Graphs are ubiquitous in the real world, in graphs, nodes represent entities and edges capture their relationships. Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) [3]–[6] have been proposed to integrate these two sources of information. In GNNs, a node's embedding is learned by aggregating messages from its neighbors.
Yao Cheng 0009, Xiang Li 0067
ICDE1
2025 Variational Graph Autoencoder for Heterogeneous Information Networks with Missing and Inaccurate Attributes
abstract
Heterogeneous Information Networks (HINs), which consist of various types of nodes and edges, have recently witnessed excellent performance in graph mining. However, most existing heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) fail to simultaneously handle the problems of missing attributes, inaccurate attributes and scarce node labels, which limits their expressiveness. In this paper, we propose a generative self-supervised model GraMI to address these issues simultaneously. Specifically, GraMI first initializes all the nodes in the graph with a low-dimensional representation matrix. After that, based on the variational graph autoencoder framework, GraMI learns both node-level and attribute-level embeddings in the encoder, which can provide fine-grained semantic information to construct node attributes. In the decoder, GraMI reconstructs both links and attributes. Instead of directly reconstructing raw features for attributed nodes, GraMI generates the initial low-dimensional representation matrix for all the nodes, based on which raw features of attributed nodes are further reconstructed. In this way, GraMI can not only complete informative features for non-attributed nodes, but rectify inaccurate ones for attributed nodes. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to show the superiority of GraMI in tackling HINs with missing and inaccurate attributes. Our code and data can be found here: https://github.com/See-r/GraMI.
Yige Zhao, Jianxiang Yu 0001, Yao Cheng 0009, Chengcheng Yu, Xiang Li 0067, Shuaiqiang Wang
KDD (1)3
2024 Resurrecting Label Propagation for Graphs with Heterophily and Label Noise
abstract
Label noise is a common challenge in large datasets, as it can significantly degrade the generalization ability of deep neural networks. Most existing studies focus on noisy labels in computer vision; however, graph models encompass both node features and graph topology as input, and become more susceptible to label noise through message-passing mechanisms. Recently, only a few works have been proposed to tackle the label noise on graphs. One significant limitation is that they operate under the assumption that the graph exhibits homophily and that the labels are distributed smoothly. However, real-world graphs can exhibit varying degrees of heterophily, or even be dominated by heterophily, which results in the inadequacy of the current methods.
Yao Cheng 0009, Yifei Shen 0004, Xiang Li 0067, Siqiang Luo, Dongsheng Li 0002
KDD1
2024 Self-pro: A Self-prompt and Tuning Framework for Graph Neural Networks
Chenghua Gong, Xiang Li 0067, Jianxiang Yu 0001, Yao Cheng 0009, Jiaqi Tan 0006, Chengcheng Yu
ECML/PKDD (2)4
2024 Learning Prioritized Node-Wise Message Propagation in Graph Neural Networks
abstract
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have recently received significant attention. Learning node-wise message propagation in GNNs aims to set personalized propagation steps for different nodes in the graph. Despite the success, existing methods ignore node priority that can be reflected by node influence and heterophily. In this paper, we propose a versatile framework PriPro, which can be integrated with most existing GNN models and aim to learn prioritized node-wise message propagation in GNNs. Specifically, the framework consists of three components: a backbone GNN model, a propagation controller to determine the optimal propagation steps for nodes, and a weight controller to compute the priority scores for nodes. We design a mutually enhanced mechanism to compute node priority, optimal propagation step and label prediction. We also propose an alternative optimization strategy to learn the parameters in the backbone GNN model and two parametric controllers. We conduct extensive experiments to compare our framework with other 12 state-of-the-art competitors on 10 benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that our framework can lead to superior performance in terms of propagation strategies and node representations.
Yao Cheng 0009, Xiang Li 0067
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.1
2023 Graph Self-Contrast Representation Learning
abstract
Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has recently emerged as a promising approach for graph representation learning. Some existing methods adopt the 1-vs-K scheme to construct one positive and K negative samples for each graph, but it is difficult to set K. For those methods that do not use negative samples, it is often necessary to add additional strategies to avoid model collapse, which could only alleviate the problem to some extent. All these drawbacks will undoubtedly have an adverse impact on the generalizability and efficiency of the model. In this paper, to address these issues, we propose a novel graph self-contrast framework GraphSC, which only uses one positive and one negative sample, and chooses triplet loss as the objective. Specifically, self-contrast has two implications. First, GraphSC generates both positive and negative views of a graph sample from the graph itself via graph augmentation functions of various intensities, and use them for self-contrast. Second, GraphSC uses Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) to factorize the representations into multiple factors and proposes a masked self-contrast mechanism to better separate positive and negative samples. Further, Since the triplet loss only optimizes the relative distance between the anchor and its positive/negative samples, it is difficult to ensure the absolute distance between the anchor and positive sample. Therefore, we explicitly reduced the absolute distance between the anchor and positive sample to accelerate convergence. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the performance of GraphSC against 19 other state-of-the-art methods in both unsupervised and transfer learning settings.
Yao Cheng 0009, Xiang Li 0067, Ming Gao 0001
ICDM2
2022 Finding Global Homophily in Graph Neural Networks When Meeting Heterophily
abstract
We investigate graph neural networks on graphs with heterophily. Some existing methods amplify a node’s neighborhood with multi-hop neighbors to include more nodes with homophily. However, it is a significant challenge to set personalized neighborhood sizes for different nodes. Further, for other homophilous nodes excluded in the neighborhood, they are ignored for information aggregation. To address these problems, we propose two models GloGNN and GloGNN++, which generate a node’s embedding by aggregating information from global nodes in the graph. In each layer, both models learn a coefficient matrix to capture the correlations between nodes, based on which neighborhood aggregation is performed. The coefficient matrix allows signed values and is derived from an optimization problem that has a closed-form solution. We further accelerate neighborhood aggregation and derive a linear time complexity. We theoretically explain the models’ effectiveness by proving that both the coefficient matrix and the generated node embedding matrix have the desired grouping effect. We conduct extensive experiments to compare our models against 11 other competitors on 15 benchmark datasets in a wide range of domains, scales and graph heterophilies. Experimental results show that our methods achieve superior performance and are also very efficient.
Xiang Li 0067, Renyu Zhu, Yao Cheng 0009, Siqiang Luo, Dongsheng Li 0002, Weining Qian
ICML3