VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Wenyi Xiao
dblp:173/0886
· DBLP profile ↗
16ranked-venue papers
9as first author
13since 2021 · last 2026
—ORCID · conflict
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 11 · 5 first-author · 9 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 7 · 6 first-author · 5 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 3 · 1 first-author · 3 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | FUSE: Fine-Grained and Semantic-Aware Learning for Unified Image Understanding and Generation
Wanggui He, Mushui Liu, Wenyi Xiao, Siyu Zou, Yanpeng Liu, Weilong Dai, Shuyi Ying, Ruikai Zhou, Yubo Tao, Hao Jiang 0062 |
AAAI | 4 |
| 2026 | REVEALER: Reinforcement-Guided Visual Reasoning for Element-Level Text-Image Alignment EvaluationabstractEvaluating the alignment between textual prompts and generated images is critical for ensuring the reliability and usability of textto-image (T2I) models.However, most existing evaluation methods rely on coarsegrained metrics or static Question Answering (QA) pipelines, which lack fine-grained interpretability and struggle to reflect human preferences.To address this, we propose REVEALER, a reinforcement-guided visual reasoning framework for element-level textto-image alignment evaluation.Adopting a structured "grounding-reasoning-conclusion" paradigm, our method enables Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to explicitly localize semantic elements and derive interpretable alignment judgments.We optimize the model via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) using a multi-dimensional reward function that targets format compliance, localization precision, and alignment accuracy.Extensive experiments confirm that RE-VEALER achieves state-of-the-art results across four benchmarks.Notably, on EvalMuse-40K, it surpasses the strong proprietary Gemini 3 Pro and Training-based baselines with absolute accuracy gains of +4.2% and +13.3%, respectively.Ablation studies further demonstrate the efficacy of our method, contributing a cumulative 19.6% improvement over the base model. Fulin Shi, Wenyi Xiao, Leilei Gan |
ACL (1) | 2 |
| 2026 | VL-Calibration: Decoupled Confidence Calibration for Large Vision-Language Models ReasoningabstractLarge Vision Language Models (LVLMs) achieve strong multimodal reasoning but frequently exhibit hallucinations and incorrect responses with high certainty, which hinders their usage in high-stakes domains. Existing verbalized confidence calibration methods, largely developed for text-only LLMs, typically optimize a single holistic confidence score using binary answer-level correctness. This design is mismatched to LVLMs: an incorrect prediction may arise from perceptual failures or from reasoning errors given correct perception, and a single confidence conflates these sources while visual uncertainty is often dominated by language priors. To address these issues, we propose VL-Calibration, a reinforcement learning framework that explicitly decouples confidence into visual and reasoning confidence. To supervise visual confidence without ground-truth perception labels, we introduce an intrinsic visual certainty estimation that combines (i) visual grounding measured by KL-divergence under image perturbations and (ii) internal certainty measured by token entropy. We further propose token-level advantage reweighting to focus optimization on tokens based on visual certainty, suppressing ungrounded hallucinations while preserving valid perception. Experiments on thirteen benchmarks show that VL-Calibration effectively improves calibration while boosting visual reasoning accuracy, and it generalizes to out-of-distribution benchmarks across model scales and architectures. Wenyi Xiao, Xinchi Xu, Leilei Gan |
ACL (1) | 1 |
| 2026 | Point-Patch Transformer for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting
Wenyi Xiao, DeJiao Niu, Tao Cai 0003, Yikang Deng, Liushan Zhang, Qiujing Huang |
DASFAA (6) | 1 |
| 2025 | MARS: Mixture of Auto-Regressive Models for Fine-grained Text-to-image SynthesisabstractAuto-regressive models have made significant progress in the realm of text-to-image synthesis, yet devising an appropriate model architecture and training strategy to achieve a satisfactory level remains an important avenue of exploration. In this work, we introduce MARS, a novel framework for T2I generation that incorporates a specially designed Semantic Vision-Language Integration Expert (SemVIE). This innovative component integrates pre-trained LLMs by independently processing linguistic and visual information—freezing the textual component while fine-tuning the visual component. This methodology preserves the NLP capabilities of LLMs while imbuing them with exceptional visual understanding. Building upon the powerful base of the pre-trained Qwen-7B, MARS stands out with its bilingual generative capabilities corresponding to both English and Chinese language prompts and the capacity for joint image and text generation. The flexibility of this framework lends itself to migration towards any-to-any task adaptability. Furthermore, MARS employs a multi-stage training strategy that first establishes robust image-text alignment through complementary bidirectional tasks and subsequently concentrates on refining the T2I generation process, significantly augmenting text-image synchrony and the granularity of image details. Notably, MARS requires only 9% of the GPU days needed by SD1.5, yet it achieves remarkable results across a variety of benchmarks, illustrating the training efficiency and the potential for swift deployment in various applications. Wanggui He, Siming Fu, Mushui Liu, Xierui Wang, Wenyi Xiao, Fangxun Shu, Yi Wang 0068, Lei Zhang 0006, Zhelun Yu, Haoyuan Li 0002, Ziwei Huang 0005, Leilei Gan, Hao Jiang 0014 |
AAAI | 5 |
| 2025 | Detecting and Mitigating Hallucination in Large Vision Language Models via Fine-Grained AI FeedbackabstractThe rapidly developing Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) still face the hallucination phenomena where the generated responses do not align with the given contexts, significantly restricting the usages of LVLMs. Most previous work detects and mitigates hallucination at the coarse-grained level or requires expensive annotation (e.g., labeling by human experts or proprietary models). To address these issues, we propose detecting and mitigating hallucinations in LVLMs via fine-grained AI feedback. The basic idea is that we generate a small-size sentence-level hallucination annotation dataset by proprietary models, whereby we train a detection model which can perform sentence-level hallucination detection. Then, we propose a detect-then-rewrite pipeline to automatically construct preference dataset for hallucination mitigation training. Furthermore, we propose differentiating the severity of hallucinations, and introducing a Hallucination Severity-Aware Direct Preference Optimization (HSA-DPO) which prioritizes the mitigation of critical hallucination in LVLMs by incorporating the severity of hallucinations into preference learning. Extensive experiments on hallucination detection and mitigation benchmarks demonstrate that our method sets a new state-of-the-art in hallucination detection on MHaluBench, surpassing GPT-4V and Gemini, and reduces the hallucination rate by 36.1% on AMBER and 76.3% on Object HalBench compared to the base model. Wenyi Xiao, Ziwei Huang 0005, Leilei Gan, Wanggui He, Haoyuan Li 0002, Zhelun Yu, Fangxun Shu, Hao Jiang 0014, Linchao Zhu |
AAAI | 1 |
| 2025 | Fine-tuning Large Language Models for Improving Factuality in Legal Question AnsweringabstractHallucination, or the generation of incorrect or fabricated information, remains a critical challenge in large language models (LLMs), particularly in high-stake domains such as legal question answering (QA). In order to mitigate the hallucination rate in legal QA, we first introduce a benchmark called LegalHalBench and three automatic metrics to evaluate the common hallucinations when LLMs answer legal questions. We then propose a hallucination mitigation method that integrates behavior cloning and a novel Hard Sample-aware Iterative Direct Preference Optimization (HIPO). We conduct extensive real-data experiments to validate the effectiveness of our approach. Our results demonstrate remarkable improvements in various metrics, including the newly proposed Non-Hallucinated Statute Rate, Statute Relevance Rate, Legal Claim Truthfulness, as well as traditional metrics such as METEOR, BERTScore, ROUGE-L, and win rates. Yinghao Hu 0001, Leilei Gan, Wenyi Xiao, Kun Kuang 0001, Fei Wu 0001 |
COLING | 3 |
| 2025 | Fast-Slow Thinking GRPO for Large Vision-Language Model ReasoningabstractWhen applying reinforcement learning—typically through GRPO—to large vision-language model reasoning struggles to effectively scale reasoning length or generates verbose outputs across all tasks with only marginal gains in accuracy.
To address this issue, we present FAST-GRPO, a variant of GRPO that dynamically adapts reasoning depth based on question characteristics.
Through empirical analysis, we establish the feasibility of fast-slow thinking in LVLMs by investigating how response length and data distribution affect performance.
Inspired by these observations, we introduce two complementary metrics to estimate the difficulty of the questions, guiding the model to determine when fast or slow thinking is more appropriate.
Next, we incorporate adaptive length-based rewards and difficulty-aware KL divergence into the GRPO algorithm.
Experiments across seven reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that FAST achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with over 10% relative improvement compared to the base model, while reducing token usage by 32.7-67.3% compared to previous slow-thinking approaches, effectively balancing reasoning length and accuracy. Wenyi Xiao, Leilei Gan |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2025 | Meta-path based proximity learning in heterogeneous information networks
Wenyi Xiao, Huan Zhao 0002, Vincent Wenchen Zheng, Yangqiu Song |
Data Min. Knowl. Discov. | 1 |
| 2025 | HDLdebugger: Streamlining HDL debugging with Large Language ModelsabstractIn the domain of chip design, hardware description languages (HDLs) play a pivotal role. However, due to the inherent complexity of HDLs and the scarcity of high-quality debugging resources, HDL bug fixing remains a challenging and time-consuming task, even for seasoned engineers. Consequently, there is a pressing need to develop automated HDL code debugging models, which can alleviate the burden on hardware engineers. Despite the strong capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in generating, completing, and debugging software code, their utilization in the specialized field of HDL debugging has been limited and, to date, has not yielded satisfactory results. In this paper, we propose an LLM-assisted HDL debugging framework, namely HDLdebugger, which consists of HDL debugging data generation via a reverse engineering approach, a search engine for retrieval-augmented generation, and a retrieval-augmented LLM fine-tuning approach. Through the integration of these components, HDLdebugger can automate and streamline HDL debugging for chip design. Our comprehensive experiments, conducted on an HDL code dataset sourced from Industry, reveal that HDLdebugger outperforms 13 cutting-edge LLM baselines, displaying exceptional effectiveness in HDL code debugging. Xufeng Yao, Haoyang Li 0002, Tsz Ho Chan, Wenyi Xiao, Mingxuan Yuan, Yu Huang 0005, Lei Chen 0002, Bei Yu 0001 |
ACM Trans. Design Autom. Electr. Syst. | 4 |
| 2024 | GraSS: Combining Graph Neural Networks with Expert Knowledge for SAT Solver SelectionabstractBoolean satisfiability (SAT) problems are routinely solved by SAT solvers in real-life applications, yet solving time can vary drastically between solvers for the same instance.This has motivated research into machine learning models that can predict, for a given SAT instance, which solver to select among several options.Existing SAT solver selection methods all rely on some hand-picked instance features, which are costly to compute and ignore the structural information in SAT graphs.In this paper we present GraSS, a novel approach for automatic SAT solver selection based on tripartite graph representations of instances and a heterogeneous graph neural network (GNN) model.While GNNs have been previously adopted in other SAT-related tasks, they do not incorporate any domain-specific knowledge and ignore the runtime variation introduced by different clause orders.We enrich the graph representation with domain-specific decisions, such as novel node feature design, positional encodings for clauses in the graph, a GNN architecture tailored to our tripartite graphs and a runtime-sensitive loss function.Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that this combination of raw representations and domain-specific choices leads to improvements in runtime for a pool of seven state-of-theart solvers on both an industrial circuit design benchmark, and Zhanguang Zhang, Didier Chételat, Joseph Cotnareanu, Amur Ghose, Wenyi Xiao, Hui-Ling Zhen, Yingxue Zhang 0001, Jianye Hao, Mark Coates, Mingxuan Yuan |
KDD | 5 |
| 2021 | Neural PathSim for Inductive Similarity Search in Heterogeneous Information NetworksabstractPathSim is a widely used meta-path-based similarity in heterogeneous information networks. Numerous applications rely on the computation of PathSim, including similarity search and clustering. Computing PathSim scores on large graphs is computationally challenging due to its high time and storage complexity. In this paper, we propose to transform the problem of approximating the ground truth PathSim scores into a learning problem. We design an encoder-decoder based framework, NeuPath, where the algorithmic structure of PathSim is considered. Specifically, the encoder module identifies Top T optimized path instances, which can approximate the ground truth PathSim, and maps each path instance to an embedding vector. The decoder transforms each embedding vector into a scalar respectively, which identifies the similarity score. We perform extensive experiments on two real-world datasets in different domains, ACM and IMDB. Our results demonstrate that NeuPath performs better than state-of-the-art baselines in the PathSim approximation task and similarity search task. Wenyi Xiao, Huan Zhao 0002, Vincent Wenchen Zheng, Yangqiu Song |
CIKM | 1 |
| 2021 | Social explorative attention based recommendation for content distribution platforms
Wenyi Xiao, Huan Zhao 0002, Haojie Pan, Yangqiu Song, Vincent Wenchen Zheng, Qiang Yang 0001 |
Data Min. Knowl. Discov. | 1 |
| 2020 | Vertex-reinforced Random Walk for Network EmbeddingabstractIn this paper, we study the fundamental problem of random walk for network embedding. We propose to use non-Markovian random walk, variants of vertex-reinforced random walk (VRRW), to fully use the history of a random walk path. To solve the getting stuck problem of VRRW, we introduce an exploitation-exploration mechanism to help the random walk jump out of the stuck set. The new random walk algorithms share the same convergence property of VRRW and thus can be used to learn stable network embeddings. Experimental results on two link prediction benchmark datasets and three node classification benchmark datasets show that our proposed approach reinforce2vec can outperform state-of-the-art random walk based embedding methods by a large margin. Wenyi Xiao, Huan Zhao 0002, Vincent Wenchen Zheng, Yangqiu Song |
SDM | 1 |
| 2019 | Beyond Personalization: Social Content Recommendation for Creator Equality and Consumer SatisfactionabstractAn effective content recommendation in modern social media platforms should benefit both creators to bring genuine benefits to them and consumers to help them get really interesting content. In this paper, we propose a model called Social Explorative Attention Network (SEAN) for content recommendation. SEAN uses a personalized content recommendation model to encourage personal interests driven recommendation. Moreover, SEAN allows the personalization factors to attend to users' higher-order friends on the social network to improve the accuracy and diversity of recommendation results. Constructing two datasets from a popular decentralized content distribution platform, Steemit, we compare SEAN with state-of-the-art CF and content based recommendation approaches. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of SEAN in terms of both Gini coefficients for recommendation equality and F1 scores for recommendation performance. Wenyi Xiao, Huan Zhao 0002, Haojie Pan, Yangqiu Song, Vincent Wenchen Zheng, Qiang Yang 0001 |
KDD | 1 |
| 2016 | Predicting potential side effects of drugs by recommender methods and ensemble learning
Wen Zhang 0008, Hua Zou 0002, Longqiang Luo, Qianchao Liu, Weijian Wu, Wenyi Xiao |
Neurocomputing | 6 |