VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Ling Ding 0001
dblp:19/5147-1
· DBLP profile ↗
30ranked-venue papers
5as first author
30since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-3208-2528ORCID · conflict
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 21 · 5 first-author · 21 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 8 · 8 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 5 · 2 first-author · 5 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | ARNS: Adaptive Relation-Aware Negative Sampling with Curriculum Learning for Inductive Knowledge Graph CompletionabstractInductive knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to predict missing links involving unseen entities, making it a particularly challenging task for knowledge representation learning. Traditional embedding-based methods often fall short in this setting due to their limited structural reasoning capabilities. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) offer a promising alternative by explicitly modeling the graph topology. However, their performance heavily relies on the quality of negative samples during training, which significantly influences the learned representations and generalization ability. To tackle this issue, we propose Adaptive Relation-Aware Negative Sampling (ARNS), a negative sampling approach specifically tailored for GNN-based inductive KGC. It integrates three key strategies: (1) High-quality negatives via Linear WD for discriminative learning, (2) Relation-aware negatives utilizing relation graphs to preserve structural patterns, as well as (3) Adaptive curriculum learning that dynamically adjusts sampling ratios based on performance feedback. Our key innovation lies in a performance-driven adaptation mechanism that monitors training dynamics and modulates negative sample difficulty. This approach starts with easier samples for stability, and progressively introduces challenging negatives. Experiments demonstrate that ARNS outperforms state-of-the-art methods with significant MRR improvements while maintaining training stability. The adaptive design is particularly beneficial in inductive scenarios, where models can infer structural patterns from limited observations. Ling Ding 0001, Zhizhi Yu, Di Jin 0001 |
AAAI | 1 |
| 2026 | SynC: Synergistic Boosting of Structure and Representation for Deep Graph ClusteringabstractEmploying graph neural networks (GNNs) for graph clustering has shown promising results in deep graph clustering (DGC). However, existing methods disregard the reciprocal relationship between representation learning and structure augmentation: the more homogeneous the graph, the more cohesive the node representations; the more cohesive the node representations, the more reliable the structure augmentation becomes. Moreover, the generalization ability of existing GNN-based models on the low homophily graph is relatively poor. To this end, we propose a graph clustering framework named synergistic deep graph clustering network (SynC). SynC employs a transform input graph autoencoder (TIGAE) to obtain high-quality embeddings via mitigating the representation collapse issue of GAE for guiding structure augmentation. Then, we recapture neighborhood representations on the refined graph to obtain clustering-friendly embeddings and conduct self-supervised clustering. Notably, these two stages share weights, resulting in synergistic boosting while significantly reducing the number of model parameters. Additionally, we introduce a structure fine-tuning (SF) strategy to improve the model's generalization on the low homophily graph. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of SynC. The code is released at https://github.com/Marigoldwu/SynC. Shifei Ding, Benyu Wu, Xiao Xu 0006, Ling Ding 0001, Xindong Wu 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Neural Networks Learn. Syst. | 4 |
| 2025 | Towards Global-Topology Relation Graph for Inductive Knowledge Graph CompletionabstractKnowledge Graphs (KGs) are structured data presented as directed graphs. Due to the common issues of incompleteness and inaccuracy encountered during construction and maintenance, completing KGs becomes a critical task. Inductive Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) excels at inferring patterns or models from seen data to be applied to unseen data. However, existing methods mainly focus on new entities, while relations are usually randomly initialized. To this end, we propose TARGI, a simple yet effective inductive method for KGC. Specifically, we first construct a global relation graph for each topology from a global graph perspective, thus leveraging the in-variance of relation structures. We then utilize this graph to aggregate the rich embeddings of new relations and new entities, thereby performing KGC robustly in inductive scenarios. This successfully addresses the excessive reliance on the degree of relations and resolves the high complexity and limited scope of enclosing subgraph sampling in existing fully inductive algorithms. We conduct KGC experiments on six inductive datasets using inference data where entities are entirely new and new relations at 100 percent, 50 percent, and 0 percent radios. Extensive results demonstrate that our model accurately learns the topological structures and embeddings of new relations, and guides the embedding learning of new entities. Notably, our model outperforms 15 SOTA methods, especially in two fully inductive datasets. Ling Ding 0001, Zhizhi Yu, Di Jin 0001, Dongxiao He |
AAAI | 1 |
| 2025 | Triple-view graph clustering network based on high-confidence contrastive learning strategy
Shifei Ding, Zhe Li 0071, Xiao Xu 0006, Lili Guo 0001, Ling Ding 0001 |
Knowl. Based Syst. | 5 |
| 2025 | Robust Density Peaks Clustering for Manifold Data With Multiple PeaksabstractDensity peaks clustering (DPC) is an excellent clustering algorithm that does not need any prior knowledge. However, DPC still has the following shortcomings: (1) The Euclidean distance used by it is not applicable to manifold data with multiple peaks. (2) The local density calculation for DPC is too simple, and the final results may fluctuate due to the cutoff-distancedc. (3) Manually selected centers by decision-graph may lead to a wrong number of clusters and poor performance. To address these shortcomings and improve the performance, a robust density peaks clustering algorithm for manifold data with multiple peaks (RDPCM) is proposed to reduce the sensitivity of clustering results to parameters. Motivated by DPC-GD, RDPCM replaces the Euclidean distance with geodesic distance, which is optimized by the improved mutual K-nearest neighbors. It better considers the local manifold structure of the datasets and obtains excellent results. In addition, the Davies-Bouldin Index based on Minimum Spanning Tree (MDBI) is proposed to select the ideal number of classes adaptively. Numerous experiments have established that RDPCM is more effective and superior than other advanced clustering algorithms. Ling Ding 0001, Chao Li 0102, Shifei Ding, Xiao Xu 0006, Lili Guo 0001, Xindong Wu 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 1 |
| 2025 | Multi-channel set polynomial based label regularized graph neural networks against extreme data scarcity
Jingxiao Zhang, Shifei Ding, Jian Zhang 0019, Lili Guo 0001, Ling Ding 0001 |
Pattern Recognit. | 5 |
| 2025 | Fast Density Peaks Clustering Algorithm Based on Approximate k-Nearest NeighborsabstractDensity peaks clustering (DPC) is one of the density-based clustering algorithms and has been widely studied and applied in recent years because of its unique parameter, non-iteration and good robustness. However, it cannot effectively identify the cluster centers, and time and space complexities are too high. To this end, this paper proposes a fast density peaks clustering algorithm based on approximatek-nearest neighbors (FDPAN). Firstly, it uses Balanced K-means based Hierarchical K-means (BKHK) method to partition the data and quickly find the approximatek-nearest neighbors (AKNN), improving the algorithm’s efficiency on large-scale high-dimensional data. Meanwhile, three-way clustering is used to improve the neighbor search of the boundary points of the partition. Then, the local density and relative distance of DPC are recalculated by AKNN. Finally, according to the similar density chain, the connected high-density points are labeled while searching for the cluster center, and the remaining points are assigned to the clusters where their nearest higher-density points are located. Theoretical analysis and experiments on synthetic and real datasets show that FDPAN can obtain higher clustering results and shorten the operation time on large-scale high-dimensional data compared with DPC and its variants. Shifei Ding, Chao Li 0102, Xiao Xu 0006, Lili Guo 0001, Ling Ding 0001, Xindong Wu 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. | 5 |
| 2025 | Vertical Federated Density Peaks Clustering Under Nonlinear MappingabstractAs the representative density-based clustering algorithm, density peaks clustering (DPC) has wide recognition, and many improved algorithms and applications have been extended from it. However, the DPC involving privacy protection has not been deeply studied. In addition, there is still room for improvement in the selection of centers and allocation methods of DPC. To address these issues, vertical federated density peaks clustering under nonlinear mapping (VFDPC) is proposed to address privacy protection issues in vertically partitioned data. Firstly, a hybrid encryption privacy protection mechanism is proposed to protect the merging process of distance matrices generated by client data. Secondly, according to the merged distance matrix, a more effective cluster merging under nonlinear mapping is proposed to ameliorate the process of DPC. Results on man-made, real, and multi-view data fully prove the improvement of VFDPC on clustering accuracy. Chao Li 0102, Shifei Ding, Xiao Xu 0006, Lili Guo 0001, Ling Ding 0001, Xindong Wu 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. | 5 |
| 2025 | Parameter-Adaptive Border Peeling Clustering AlgorithmabstractMost clustering algorithms require setting one or more parameters, which rely on prior knowledge or are constantly adjusted based on external indicators. To address the issues of requiring external index guidance, blindness, and time-consuming parameter setting for clustering algorithms on complex data, we propose a novel Parameter-Adaptive Border Peeling clustering algorithm (PABP). The PABP algorithm initially employs the maximum number of neighbors identified through natural neighbor search to automatically ascertain the number of local neighborhoods. At the same time, the Gaussian kernel bandwidth can be adaptively obtained in density measurement, which can highlight high-density areas. Secondly, the number of peels is adaptively determined by the coefficient of variation of density during the iterative border peeling process. Lastly, labels are assigned to core points based on graph connections, while the clustering of border points is accomplished via label propagation. PABP does not require users to adjust parameters based on prior knowledge or external indicators throughout the entire process. In the experiment, PABP was compared with seven other advanced clustering algorithms on 13 synthetic datasets, 10 UCI datasets, and Olivetti Face and MNIST datasets. The results indicate that the clustering performance of PABP is superior to the compared algorithms. Hui Tu, Shifei Ding, Xiao Xu 0006, Lili Guo 0001, Ling Ding 0001, Xindong Wu 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. | 5 |
| 2025 | Multiagent Reinforcement Learning With Graphical Mutual Information MaximizationabstractCommunication learning is an important research direction in the multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) domain. Graph neural networks (GNNs) can aggregate the information of neighbor nodes for representation learning. In recent years, several MARL methods leverage GNN to model information interactions between agents to coordinate actions and complete cooperative tasks. However, simply aggregating the information of neighboring agents through GNNs may not extract enough useful information, and the topological relationship information is ignored. To tackle this difficulty, we investigate how to efficiently extract and utilize the rich information of neighbor agents as much as possible in the graph structure, so as to obtain high-quality expressive feature representation to complete the cooperation task. To this end, we present a novel GNN-based MARL method with graphical mutual information (MI) maximization to maximize the correlation between input feature information of neighbor agents and output high-level hidden feature representations. The proposed method extends the traditional idea of MI optimization from graph domain to multiagent system, in which the MI is measured from two aspects: agent features information and agent topological relationships. The proposed method is agnostic to specific MARL methods and can be flexibly integrated with various value function decomposition methods. Considerable experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that the performance of our proposed method is superior to the existing MARL methods. Shifei Ding, Wei Du 0010, Ling Ding 0001, Jian Zhang 0019, Lili Guo 0001, Bo An 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Neural Networks Learn. Syst. | 3 |
| 2025 | Horizontal Federated Density Peaks ClusteringabstractDensity peaks clustering (DPC) is a popular clustering algorithm, which has been studied and favored by many scholars because of its simplicity, fewer parameters, and no iteration. However, in previous improvements of DPC, the issue of privacy data leakage was not considered, and the "Domino" effect caused by the misallocation of noncenters has not been effectively addressed. In view of the above shortcomings, a horizontal federated DPC (HFDPC) is proposed. First, HFDPC introduces the idea of horizontal federated learning and proposes a protection mechanism for client parameter transmission. Second, DPC is improved by using similar density chain (SDC) to alleviate the "Domino" effect caused by multiple local peaks in the flow pattern dataset. Finally, a novel data dimension reduction and image encryption are used to improve the effectiveness of data partitioning. The experimental results show that compared with DPC and some of its improvements, HFDPC has a certain degree of improvement in accuracy and speed. Shifei Ding, Chao Li 0102, Xiao Xu 0006, Lili Guo 0001, Ling Ding 0001, Xindong Wu 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Neural Networks Learn. Syst. | 5 |
| 2024 | Learning Efficient and Robust Multi-Agent Communication via Graph Information BottleneckabstractEfficient communication learning among agents has been shown crucial for cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), as it can promote the action coordination of agents and ultimately improve performance. Graph neural network (GNN) provide a general paradigm for communication learning, which consider agents and communication channels as nodes and edges in a graph, with the action selection corresponding to node labeling. Under such paradigm, an agent aggregates information from neighbor agents, which can reduce uncertainty in local decision-making and induce implicit action coordination. However, this communication paradigm is vulnerable to adversarial attacks and noise, and how to learn robust and efficient communication under perturbations has largely not been studied. To this end, this paper introduces a novel Multi-Agent communication mechanism via Graph Information bottleneck (MAGI), which can optimally balance the robustness and expressiveness of the message representation learned by agents. This communication mechanism is aim at learning the minimal sufficient message representation for an agent by maximizing the mutual information (MI) between the message representation and the selected action, and simultaneously constraining the MI between the message representation and the agent feature. Empirical results demonstrate that MAGI is more robust and efficient than state-of-the-art GNN-based MARL methods. Shifei Ding, Wei Du 0010, Ling Ding 0001, Lili Guo 0001, Jian Zhang 0019 |
AAAI | 3 |
| 2024 | Expressive Multi-Agent Communication via Identity-Aware LearningabstractInformation sharing through communication is essential for tackling complex multi-agent reinforcement learning tasks. Many existing multi-agent communication protocols can be viewed as instances of message passing graph neural networks (GNNs). However, due to the significantly limited expressive ability of the standard GNN method, the agent feature representations remain similar and indistinguishable even though the agents have different neighborhood structures. This further results in the homogenization of agent behaviors and reduces the capability to solve tasks effectively. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent communication protocol via identity-aware learning (IDEAL), which explicitly enhances the distinguishability of agent feature representations to break the diversity bottleneck. Specifically, IDEAL extends existing multi-agent communication protocols by inductively considering the agents' identities during the message passing process. To obtain expressive feature representations for a given agent, IDEAL first extracts the ego network centered around that agent and then performs multiple rounds of heterogeneous message passing, where different parameter sets are applied to the central agent and the other surrounding agents within the ego network. IDEAL fosters expressive communication between agents and generates distinguishable feature representations, which promotes action diversity and individuality emergence. Experimental results on various benchmarks demonstrate IDEAL can be flexibly integrated into various multi-agent communication methods and enhances the corresponding performance. Wei Du 0010, Shifei Ding, Lili Guo 0001, Jian Zhang 0019, Ling Ding 0001 |
AAAI | 5 |
| 2024 | Non-iterative border-peeling clustering algorithm based on swap strategy
Hui Tu, Shifei Ding, Xiao Xu 0006, Haiwei Hou, Chao Li 0102, Ling Ding 0001 |
Inf. Sci. | 6 |
| 2024 | A novel image denoising algorithm combining attention mechanism and residual UNet network
Shifei Ding, Qidong Wang, Lili Guo 0001, Jian Zhang 0019, Ling Ding 0001 |
Knowl. Inf. Syst. | 5 |
| 2024 | Robust Multi-Agent Communication With Graph Information Bottleneck OptimizationabstractRecent research on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown that action coordination of multi-agents can be significantly enhanced by introducing communication learning mechanisms. Meanwhile, graph neural network (GNN) provides a promising paradigm for communication learning of MARL. Under this paradigm, agents and communication channels can be regarded as nodes and edges in the graph, and agents can aggregate information from neighboring agents through GNN. However, this GNN-based communication paradigm is susceptible to adversarial attacks and noise perturbations, and how to achieve robust communication learning under perturbations has been largely neglected. To this end, this paper explores this problem and introduces a robust communication learning mechanism with graph information bottleneck optimization, which can optimally realize the robustness and effectiveness of communication learning. We introduce two information-theoretic regularizers to learn the minimal sufficient message representation for multi-agent communication. The regularizers aim at maximizing the mutual information (MI) between the message representation and action selection while minimizing the MI between the agent feature and message representation. Besides, we present a MARL framework that can integrate the proposed communication mechanism with existing value decomposition methods. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is more robust and efficient than state-of-the-art GNN-based MARL methods. Shifei Ding, Wei Du 0010, Ling Ding 0001, Jian Zhang 0019, Lili Guo 0001, Bo An 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 3 |
| 2024 | Survey of spectral clustering based on graph theory
Ling Ding 0001, Chao Li 0102, Di Jin 0001, Shifei Ding |
Pattern Recognit. | 1 |
| 2024 | Better value estimation in Q-learning-based multi-agent reinforcement learning
Ling Ding 0001, Wei Du 0010, Jian Zhang 0019, Lili Guo 0001, Chenglong Zhang 0001, Di Jin 0001, Shifei Ding |
Soft Comput. | 1 |
| 2024 | Wavelet and Adaptive Coordinate Attention Guided Fine-Grained Residual Network for Image DenoisingabstractConvolutional neural networks (CNN) have achieved remarkable performance in image denoising. However, most existing CNNs cannot accurately capture and remove tiny noises during the denoising process and lose edge detail information easily. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained residual network guided by wavelet and adaptive coordinate attention (WACAFRN) for image denoising. Firstly, we propose an adaptive coordinate attention mechanism and combine it with cascaded Res2Net residual blocks to form an encoder network for more accurate noise removal. Secondly, we propose a wavelet attention mechanism that combines global and local residual blocks to form a decoder network, aiming to address the problem of edge detail information loss. At last, we complement the noise information through a noise estimation block to further enhance the model’s ability to adapt to noise. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing denoising methods in both qualitative and quantitative aspects. Notably, our method significantly improves real-world noise removal tasks on the CC dataset, with an average increase of 2.08 dB in PSNR and 0.0264 in SSIM over the state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, WACAFRN exhibits faster inference speeds, underscoring its efficiency in real-world applications. Shifei Ding, Qidong Wang, Lili Guo 0001, Xuan Li 0004, Ling Ding 0001, Xindong Wu 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol. | 5 |
| 2024 | Towards Faster Deep Graph Clustering via Efficient Graph Auto-EncoderabstractDeep graph clustering (DGC) has been a promising method for clustering graph data in recent years. However, existing research primarily focuses on optimizing clustering outcomes by improving the quality of embedded representations, resulting in slow-speed complex models. Additionally, these methods do not consider changes in node similarity and corresponding adjustments in the original structure during the iterative optimization process after updating node embeddings, which easily falls into the representation collapse issue. We introduce an Efficient Graph Auto-Encoder (EGAE) and a dynamic graph weight updating strategy to address these issues, forming the basis for our proposed Fast DGC (FastDGC) network. Specifically, we significantly reduce feature dimensions using a linear transformation that preserves the original node similarity. We then employ a single-layer graph convolutional filtering approximation to replace multiple layers of graph convolutional neural network, reducing computational complexity and parameter count. During iteration, we calculate the similarity between nodes using the linearly transformed features and periodically update the original graph structure to reduce edges with low similarity, thereby enhancing the learning of discriminative and cohesive representations. Theoretical analysis confirms that EGAE has lower computational complexity. Extensive experiments on standard datasets demonstrate that our proposed method improves clustering performance and achieves a speedup of 2–3 orders of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art methods, showcasing outstanding performance. The code for our model is available at https://github.com/Marigoldwu/FastDGC . Furthermore, we have organized a portion of the DGC code into a unified framework, available at https://github.com/Marigoldwu/A-Unified-Framework-for-Deep-Attribute-Graph-Clustering . Shifei Ding, Benyu Wu, Ling Ding 0001, Xiao Xu 0006, Lili Guo 0001, Hongmei Liao, Xindong Wu 0001 |
ACM Trans. Knowl. Discov. Data | 3 |
| 2024 | Graph-Based Semi-Supervised Deep Image Clustering With Adaptive Adjacency MatrixabstractImage clustering is a research hotspot in machine learning and computer vision. Existing graph-based semi-supervised deep clustering methods suffer from three problems: 1) because clustering uses only high-level features, the detailed information contained in shallow-level features is ignored; 2) most feature extraction networks employ the step odd convolutional kernel, which results in an uneven distribution of receptive field intensity; and 3) because the adjacency matrix is precomputed and fixed, it cannot adapt to changes in the relationship between samples. To solve the above problems, we propose a novel graph-based semi-supervised deep clustering method for image clustering. First, the parity cross-convolutional feature extraction and fusion module is used to extract high-quality image features. Then, the clustering constraint layer is designed to improve the clustering efficiency. And, the output layer is customized to achieve unsupervised regularization training. Finally, the adjacency matrix is inferred by actual network prediction. A graph-based regularization method is adopted for unsupervised training networks. Experimental results show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on USPS, MNIST, street view house numbers (SVHN), and fashion MNIST (FMNIST) datasets in terms of ACC, normalized mutual information (NMI), and ARI. Shifei Ding, Haiwei Hou, Xiao Xu 0006, Jian Zhang 0019, Lili Guo 0001, Ling Ding 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Neural Networks Learn. Syst. | 6 |
| 2023 | Fast density peaks clustering algorithm based on improved mutual K-nearest-neighbor and sub-cluster merging
Chao Li 0102, Shifei Ding, Xiao Xu 0006, Haiwei Hou, Ling Ding 0001 |
Inf. Sci. | 5 |
| 2023 | Multi-agent dueling Q-learning with mean field and value decomposition
Shifei Ding, Wei Du 0010, Ling Ding 0001, Lili Guo 0001, Jian Zhang 0019, Bo An 0001 |
Pattern Recognit. | 3 |
| 2023 | A Sampling-Based Density Peaks Clustering Algorithm for Large-Scale Data
Shifei Ding, Chao Li 0102, Xiao Xu 0006, Ling Ding 0001, Jian Zhang 0019, Lili Guo 0001, Tianhao Shi |
Pattern Recognit. | 4 |
| 2023 | Graph clustering network with structure embedding enhanced
Shifei Ding, Benyu Wu, Xiao Xu 0006, Lili Guo 0001, Ling Ding 0001 |
Pattern Recognit. | 5 |
| 2023 | A novel clustering algorithm based on multi-layer features and graph attention networks
Haiwei Hou, Shifei Ding, Xiao Xu 0006, Ling Ding 0001 |
Soft Comput. | 4 |
| 2023 | A novel capsule network based on deep routing and residual learning
Jian Zhang 0019, Qinghai Xu, Lili Guo 0001, Ling Ding 0001, Shifei Ding |
Soft Comput. | 4 |
| 2022 | Value function factorization with dynamic weighting for deep multi-agent reinforcement learning
Wei Du 0010, Shifei Ding, Lili Guo 0001, Jian Zhang 0019, Chenglong Zhang 0001, Ling Ding 0001 |
Inf. Sci. | 6 |
| 2021 | A community detection algorithm based on Quasi-Laplacian centrality peaks clustering
Tianhao Shi, Shifei Ding, Xiao Xu 0006, Ling Ding 0001 |
Appl. Intell. | 4 |
| 2021 | Chameleon algorithm based on mutual k-nearest neighbors
Shifei Ding, Ling Ding 0001 |
Appl. Intell. | 5 |