Yichen Xu 0008

dblp:177/6703-8 · DBLP profile ↗
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7ranked-venue papers
3as first author
7since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0003-2089-6767ORCID · conflict

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

Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 4 · 1 first-author · 4 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 3 · 2 first-author · 3 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1 · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 What's in the Box: Ergonomic and Expressive Capture Tracking over Generic Data Structures
abstract
Capturing types in Scala unify static effect and resource tracking with object capabilities, enabling lightweight effect polymorphism with minimal notational overhead. However, their expressiveness has been insufficient for tracking capabilities embedded in generic data structures, preventing them from scaling to the standard collections library - an essential prerequisite for broader adoption. This limitation stems from the inability to name capabilities within the system's notion of box types. This paper develops System Capless, a new foundation for capturing types that provides the theoretical basis for reach capabilities (rcaps), a novel mechanism for naming "what's in the box". The calculus refines the universal capability notion into a new scheme with existential and universal capture set quantification. Intuitively, rcaps witness existentially quantified capture sets inside the boxes of generic types in a way that does not require exposing existential capture types in the surface language. We have fully mechanized the formal metatheory of System Capless in Lean, including proofs of type soundness and scope safety. System Capless supports the same lightweight notation of capturing types plus rcaps, as certified by a type-preserving translation, and also enables fully optional explicit capture-set quantification to increase expressiveness. Finally, we present a full reimplementation of capture checking in Scala 3 based on System Capless and migrate the entire Scala collections library and an asynchronous programming library to evaluate its practicality and ergonomics. Our results demonstrate that reach capabilities enable the adoption of capture checking in production code with minimal changes and minimal-to-zero notational overhead in a vast majority of cases.
Yichen Xu 0008, Oliver Bracevac, Cao Nguyen Pham, Martin Odersky
Proc. ACM Program. Lang.1
2024 Degrees of Separation: A Flexible Type System for Safe Concurrency
abstract
Data races have long been a notorious problem in concurrent programming. They are hard to detect, and lead to non-deterministic behaviours. There has been a lot of interest in type systems that statically guarantee data race freedom. Significant progress has been made in this area, and these type systems are increasingly usable and practical. However, their adoption in mainstream programming languages is still limited, which is largely attributed to their strict alias prevention principles that obstruct the usage of existing programming patterns. This is a deterrent to the migration of existing code bases. To tackle this problem, we propose Capture Separation Calculus (System CSC), a calculus that models fork-join parallelism and statically prevents data races while being compatible with established programming patterns. It follows a control-as-you-need philosophy: by default, aliases are allowed, but they are tracked in the type system. When data races are a concern, the tracked aliases are controlled to prevent data-race-prone patterns. We study the formal properties of System CSC. Type soundness is proven via the standard progress and preservation theorems. Additionally, we formally verify the data race freedom property of System CSC by proving that the reduction of a well-typed program is confluent.
Yichen Xu 0008, Aleksander Boruch-Gruszecki, Martin Odersky
Proc. ACM Program. Lang.1
2023 Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning with Cluster-aware Self-training and Refining
abstract
Unsupervised graph representation learning aims to learn low-dimensional node embeddings without supervision while preserving graph topological structures and node attributive features. Previous Graph Neural Networks (GNN) require a large number of labeled nodes, which may not be accessible in real-world applications. To this end, we present a novel unsupervised graph neural network model with Cluster-aware Self-training and Refining ( CLEAR ). Specifically, in the proposed CLEAR model, we perform clustering on the node embeddings and update the model parameters by predicting the cluster assignments. To avoid degenerate solutions of clustering, we formulate the graph clustering problem as an optimal transport problem and leverage a balanced clustering strategy. Moreover, we observe that graphs often contain inter-class edges, which mislead the GNN model to aggregate noisy information from neighborhood nodes. Therefore, we propose to refine the graph topology by strengthening intra-class edges and reducing node connections between different classes based on cluster labels, which better preserves cluster structures in the embedding space. We conduct comprehensive experiments on two benchmark tasks using real-world datasets. The results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed model over baseline methods. Notably, our model gains over 7% improvements in terms of accuracy on node clustering over state-of-the-arts.
Yanqiao Zhu 0001, Yichen Xu 0008, Feng Yu 0001, Qiang Liu 0006
ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol.2
2022 Structure-Enhanced Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Learning
abstract
Recent years have seen a growing interest in Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL), which trains Graph Neural Network (GNN) model to discriminate similar and dissimilar pairs of nodes without human annotations. Most prior GCL work focuses on homogeneous graphs and little attention has been paid to Heterogeneous Graphs (HGs) that involve different types of nodes and edges. Moreover, earlier studies reveal that the explicit use of structure information of underlying graphs is useful for learning representations. Conventional GCL methods merely measure the likelihood of contrastive pairs according to node representations, which may not align with the true semantic similarities. How to leverage such structure information for GCL is not yet well-understood. To address the aforementioned challenges, this paper presents a novel method dubbed STructure-EnhaNced heterogeneous graph ContrastIve Learning, STENCIL for brevity. At first, we generate multiple semantic views for HGs based on metapaths. Unlike most methods that maximize the consistency among these views, we propose a novel multiview contrastive aggregation objective to adaptively distill information from each view. In addition, we advocate the explicit use of structure embedding, which enriches the model with local structural patterns of the underlying HGs, so as to better mine true and hard negatives for GCL. Empirical studies on three real-world datasets show that our proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods and even surpasses several supervised counterparts.
Yanqiao Zhu 0001, Yichen Xu 0008, Hejie Cui, Carl Yang 0001, Qiang Liu 0006
SDM2
2022 A case for DOT: theoretical foundations for objects with pattern matching and GADT-style reasoning
abstract
Many programming languages in the OO tradition now support pattern matching in some form. Historical examples include Scala and Ceylon, with the more recent additions of Java, Kotlin, TypeScript, and Flow. But pattern matching on generic class hierarchies currently results in puzzling type errors in most of these languages. Yet this combination of features occurs naturally in many scenarios, such as when manipulating typed ASTs. To support it properly, compilers needs to implement a form of subtyping reconstruction: the ability to reconstruct subtyping information uncovered at runtime during pattern matching. We introduce cDOT, a new calculus in the family of Dependent Object Types (DOT) intended to serve as a formal foundation for subtyping reconstruction. Being descended from pDOT, itself a formal foundation for Scala, cDOT can be used to encode advanced object-oriented features such as generic inheritance, type constructor variance, F-bounded polymorphism, and first-class recursive modules. We demonstrate that subtyping reconstruction subsumes GADTs by encoding λ 2, G µ , a classical constraint-based GADT calculus, into cDOT.
Aleksander Boruch-Gruszecki, Radoslaw Wasko, Yichen Xu 0008, Lionel Parreaux
Proc. ACM Program. Lang.3
2021 Disentangled Self-Attentive Neural Networks for Click-Through Rate Prediction
abstract
Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction, whose aim is to predict the probability of whether a user will click on an item, is an essential task for many online applications. Due to the nature of data sparsity and high dimensionality of CTR prediction, a key to making effective prediction is to model high-order feature interaction. An efficient way to do this is to perform inner product of feature embeddings with self-attentive neural networks. To better model complex feature interaction, in this paper we propose a novel DisentanglEd Self-atTentIve NEtwork (DESTINE) framework for CTR prediction that explicitly decouples the computation of unary feature importance from pairwise interaction. Specifically, the unary term models the general importance of one feature on all other features, whereas the pairwise interaction term contributes to learning the pure impact for each feature pair. We conduct extensive experiments using two real-world benchmark datasets. The results show that DESTINE not only maintains computational efficiency but achieves consistent improvements over state-of-the-art baselines.
Yichen Xu 0008, Yanqiao Zhu 0001, Feng Yu 0001, Qiang Liu 0006
CIKM1
2021 Graph Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentation
abstract
Recently, contrastive learning (CL) has emerged as a successful method for unsupervised graph representation learning. Most graph CL methods first perform stochastic augmentation on the input graph to obtain two graph views and maximize the agreement of representations in the two views. Despite the prosperous development of graph CL methods, the design of graph augmentation schemes—a crucial component in CL—remains rarely explored. We argue that the data augmentation schemes should preserve intrinsic structures and attributes of graphs, which will force the model to learn representations that are insensitive to perturbation on unimportant nodes and edges. However, most existing methods adopt uniform data augmentation schemes, like uniformly dropping edges and uniformly shuffling features, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel graph contrastive representation learning method with adaptive augmentation that incorporates various priors for topological and semantic aspects of the graph. Specifically, on the topology level, we design augmentation schemes based on node centrality measures to highlight important connective structures. On the node attribute level, we corrupt node features by adding more noise to unimportant node features, to enforce the model to recognize underlying semantic information. We perform extensive experiments of node classification on a variety of real-world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines and even surpasses some supervised counterparts, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed contrastive framework with adaptive augmentation.
Yanqiao Zhu 0001, Yichen Xu 0008, Feng Yu 0001, Qiang Liu 0006, Liang Wang 0001
WWW2