VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Yukuo Cen
dblp:241/4994
· DBLP profile ↗
14ranked-venue papers in the field
4as first author
11since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-5682-2810ORCID · verified
Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several
Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 9 (2 first)Database Systems & Data Management · 3 (1 first)Information Retrieval & Web Search · 2 (1 first)
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | LPS-GNN: Deploying Graph Neural Networks on Graphs with 100-Billion EdgesabstractGraph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful tools for various graph mining tasks, yet existing scalable solutions often struggle to balance execution efficiency with prediction accuracy. These difficulties stem from iterative message-passing techniques, which place significant computational demands and require extensive GPU memory, particularly when dealing with the neighbor explosion issue inherent in large-scale graphs. This paper introduces a scalable, low-cost, flexible, and efficient GNN framework called LPS-GNN, which can perform representation learning on 100 billion graphs with a single GPU in 10 hours and shows a 13.8% improvement in User Acquisition scenarios. We examine existing graph partitioning methods and design a superior graph partition algorithm named LPMetis. In particular, LPMetis outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches on various evaluation metrics. In addition, our paper proposes a subgraph augmentation strategy to enhance the model's predictive performance. It exhibits excellent compatibility, allowing the entire framework to accommodate various GNN algorithms. Successfully deployed on the Tencent platform, LPS-GNN has been tested on public and real-world datasets, achieving performance lifts of 8. 24% to 13. 89% over SOTA models in online applications. Yukuo Cen, Wenzheng Feng, Hongyun Cai 0001, Jie Tang 0001 |
ACM Trans. Knowl. Discov. Data | 4 |
| 2026 | Generalizing Graph Transformers Across Diverse Graphs and Tasks via Pre-TrainingabstractGraph pre-training has been concentrated on graph-level tasks involving small graphs (e.g., molecular graphs) or learning node representations on a fixed graph. Extending graph pre-trained models to web-scale graphs with billions of nodes in industrial scenarios, while avoiding negative transfer across graphs or tasks, remains a challenge. We aim to develop a general graph pre-trained model with inductive ability that can make predictions for unseen new nodes and even new graphs. In this work, we introduce a scalable transformer-based graph pre-training framework called (Pre-trained Graph Transformer). Based on the masked autoencoder architecture, we design two pre-training tasks: one for reconstructing node features and the other for reconstructing local structures. Unlike the original autoencoder architecture where the pre-trained decoder is discarded, we propose a novel strategy that utilizes the decoder for feature augmentation. Our framework, tested on the publicly available ogbn-papers100M dataset with 111 million nodes and 1.6 billion edges, achieves state-of-the-art performance, showcasing scalability and efficiency. We have deployed our framework on Tencent's online game data, confirming its capability to pre-train on real-world graphs with over 540 million nodes and 12 billion edges and to generalize effectively across diverse static and dynamic downstream tasks. Yukuo Cen, Jun Hu 0016, Jie Tang 0001, Bryan Hooi |
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. | 3 |
| 2024 | OAG-Bench: A Human-Curated Benchmark for Academic Graph MiningabstractWith the rapid proliferation of scientific literature, versatile academic knowledge services increasingly rely on comprehensive academic graph mining. Despite the availability of public academic graphs, benchmarks, and datasets, these resources often fall short in multi-aspect and fine-grained annotations, are constrained to specific task types and domains, or lack underlying real academic graphs. In this paper, we present OAG-Bench, a comprehensive, multi-aspect, and fine-grained human-curated benchmark based on the Open Academic Graph (OAG). OAG-Bench covers 10 tasks, 20 datasets, 70+ baselines, and 120+ experimental results to date. We propose new data annotation strategies for certain tasks and offer a suite of data pre-processing codes, algorithm implementations, and standardized evaluation protocols to facilitate academic graph mining. Extensive experiments reveal that even advanced algorithms like large language models (LLMs) encounter difficulties in addressing key challenges in certain tasks, such as paper source tracing and scholar profiling. We also introduce the Open Academic Graph Challenge (OAG-Challenge) to encourage community input and sharing. We envisage that OAG-Bench can serve as a common ground for the community to evaluate and compare algorithms in academic graph mining, thereby accelerating algorithm development and advancement in this field. OAG-Bench is accessible at https://www.aminer.cn/data/. Fanjin Zhang, Yifan Zhu 0001, Bo Chen 0026, Yukuo Cen, Jifan Yu, Yelin Chen, Lulu Wang 0011, Qingfei Zhao, Yuqing Cheng, Yuwei An, Weng Lam Tam, Yunhe Pang 0001, Huihui Yuan, Jian Song 0016, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang 0001 |
KDD | 5 |
| 2024 | Pre-Training and Prompting for Few-Shot Node Classification on Text-Attributed GraphsabstractThe text-attributed graph (TAG) is one kind of important real-world graph-structured data with each node associated with raw texts. For TAGs, traditional few-shot node classification methods directly conduct training on the pre-processed node features and do not consider the raw texts. The performance is highly dependent on the choice of the feature pre-processing method. In this paper, we propose P2TAG, a framework designed for few-shot node classification on TAGs with graph pre-training and prompting. P2TAG first pre-trains the language model (LM) and graph neural network (GNN) on TAGs with self-supervised loss. To fully utilize the ability of language models, we adapt the masked language modeling objective for our framework. The pre-trained model is then used for the few-shot node classification with a mixed prompt method, which simultaneously considers both text and graph information. We conduct experiments on six real-world TAGs, including paper citation networks and product co-purchasing networks. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed framework outperforms existing graph few-shot learning methods on these datasets with +18.98% ~ +32.14% improvements. Huanjing Zhao, Beining Yang, Yukuo Cen, Junyu Ren, Yuxiao Dong, Evgeny Kharlamov, Shu Zhao 0005, Jie Tang 0001 |
KDD | 3 |
| 2023 | BatchSampler: Sampling Mini-Batches for Contrastive Learning in Vision, Language, and GraphsabstractIn-Batch contrastive learning is a state-of-the-art self-supervised method that brings semantically-similar instances close while pushing dissimilar instances apart within a mini-batch. Its key to success is the negative sharing strategy, in which every instance serves as a negative for the others within the mini-batch. Recent studies aim to improve performance by sampling hard negatives within the current mini-batch, whose quality is bounded by the mini-batch itself. In this work, we propose to improve contrastive learning by sampling mini-batches from the input data. We present BatchSampler\footnoteThe code is available at BatchSampler to sample mini-batches of hard-to-distinguish (i.e., hard and true negatives to each other) instances. To make each mini-batch have fewer false negatives, we design the proximity graph of randomly-selected instances. To form the mini-batch, we leverage random walk with restart on the proximity graph to help sample hard-to-distinguish instances. BatchSampler is a simple and general technique that can be directly plugged into existing contrastive learning models in vision, language, and graphs. Extensive experiments on datasets of three modalities show that BatchSampler can consistently improve the performance of powerful contrastive models, as shown by significant improvements of SimCLR on ImageNet-100, SimCSE on STS (language), and GraphCL and MVGRL on graph datasets. Zhen Yang 0034, Tinglin Huang 0001, Ming Ding 0004, Yuxiao Dong, Rex Ying, Yukuo Cen, Jie Tang 0001 |
KDD | 6 |
| 2023 | CogDL: A Comprehensive Library for Graph Deep LearningabstractGraph neural networks (GNNs) have attracted tremendous attention from the graph learning community in recent years. It has been widely adopted in various real-world applications from diverse domains, such as social networks and biological graphs. The research and applications of graph deep learning present new challenges, including the sparse nature of graph data, complicated training of GNNs, and non-standard evaluation of graph tasks. To tackle the issues, we present CogDL1, a comprehensive library for graph deep learning that allows researchers and practitioners to conduct experiments, compare methods, and build applications with ease and efficiency. In CogDL, we propose a unified design for the training and evaluation of GNN models for various graph tasks, making it unique among existing graph learning libraries. By utilizing this unified trainer, CogDL can optimize the GNN training loop with several training techniques, such as mixed precision training. Moreover, we develop efficient sparse operators for CogDL, enabling it to become the most competitive graph library for efficiency. Another important CogDL feature is its focus on ease of use with the aim of facilitating open and reproducible research of graph learning. We leverage CogDL to report and maintain benchmark results on fundamental graph tasks, which can be reproduced and directly used by the community. Yukuo Cen, Yan Wang 0120, Yizhen Luo, Zhongming Yu, Xingcheng Yao, Aohan Zeng, Shiguang Guo, Yuxiao Dong, Yang Yang 0009, Peng Zhang 0077, Guohao Dai 0001, Yu Wang 0002, Chang Zhou 0005, Hongxia Yang, Jie Tang 0001 |
WWW | 1 |
| 2023 | GraphMAE2: A Decoding-Enhanced Masked Self-Supervised Graph LearnerabstractGraph self-supervised learning (SSL), including contrastive and generative approaches, offers great potential to address the fundamental challenge of label scarcity in real-world graph data. Among both sets of graph SSL techniques, the masked graph autoencoders (e.g., GraphMAE)—one type of generative methods—have recently produced promising results. The idea behind this is to reconstruct the node features (or structures)—that are randomly masked from the input—with the autoencoder architecture. However, the performance of masked feature reconstruction naturally relies on the discriminability of the input features and is usually vulnerable to disturbance in the features. In this paper, we present a masked self-supervised learning framework1 GraphMAE2 with the goal of overcoming this issue. The idea is to impose regularization on feature reconstruction for graph SSL. Specifically, we design the strategies of multi-view random re-mask decoding and latent representation prediction to regularize the feature reconstruction. The multi-view random re-mask decoding is to introduce randomness into reconstruction in the feature space, while the latent representation prediction is to enforce the reconstruction in the embedding space. Extensive experiments show that GraphMAE2 can consistently generate top results on various public datasets, including at least 2.45% improvements over state-of-the-art baselines on ogbn-Papers100M with 111M nodes and 1.6B edges. Yukuo Cen, Xiao Liu 0036, Yuxiao Dong, Evgeny Kharlamov, Jie Tang 0001 |
WWW | 3 |
| 2023 | Automated Unsupervised Graph Representation LearningabstractGraph data mining has largely benefited from the recent developments of graph representation learning. Most attempts to improve graph representations have thus far focused on designing new network embedding or graph neural network (GNN) architectures. Inspired by the SGC and ProNE models, we instead focus on enhancing any existing or learned graph representations by further smoothing them via graph filters. In this paper, we introduce an automated framework AutoProNE to achieve this. Specifically, AutoProNE automatically searches for a unique optimal set of graph filters for any input dataset, and its existing representations are then smoothed via the selected filters. To make AutoProNE more general, we adopt self-supervised loss functions to guide the optimization of the automated search process. Extensive experiments on eight commonly used datasets demonstrate that the AutoProNE framework can consistently improve the expressive power of graph representations learned by existing network embedding and GNN methods by up to 44%. Yukuo Cen, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Zhang 0078, Jie Tang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. | 2 |
| 2022 | GraphMAE: Self-Supervised Masked Graph AutoencodersabstractSelf-supervised learning (SSL) has been extensively explored in recent years. Particularly, generative SSL has seen emerging success in natural language processing and other fields, such as the wide adoption of BERT and GPT. Despite this, contrastive learning---which heavily relies on structural data augmentation and complicated training strategies---has been the dominant approach in graph SSL, while the progress of generative SSL on graphs, especially graph autoencoders (GAEs), has thus far not reached the potential as promised in other fields. In this paper, we identify and examine the issues that negatively impact the development of GAEs, including their reconstruction objective, training robustness, and error metric. We present a masked graph autoencoder GraphMAE (code is publicly available at https://github.com/THUDM/GraphMAE) that mitigates these issues for generative self-supervised graph learning. Instead of reconstructing structures, we propose to focus on feature reconstruction with both a masking strategy and scaled cosine error that benefit the robust training of GraphMAE. We conduct extensive experiments on 21 public datasets for three different graph learning tasks. The results manifest that GraphMAE---a simple graph autoencoder with our careful designs---can consistently generate outperformance over both contrastive and generative state-of-the-art baselines. This study provides an understanding of graph autoencoders and demonstrates the potential of generative self-supervised learning on graphs. Xiao Liu 0036, Yukuo Cen, Yuxiao Dong, Hongxia Yang, Jie Tang 0001 |
KDD | 3 |
| 2022 | Mask and Reason: Pre-Training Knowledge Graph Transformers for Complex Logical QueriesabstractKnowledge graph (KG) embeddings have been a mainstream approach for reasoning over incomplete KGs. However, limited by their inherently shallow and static architectures, they can hardly deal with the rising focus on complex logical queries, which comprise logical operators, imputed edges, multiple source entities, and unknown intermediate entities. In this work, we present the Knowledge Graph Transformer (kgTransformer) with masked pre-training and fine-tuning strategies. We design a KG triple transformation method to enable Transformer to handle KGs, which is further strengthened by the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) sparse activation. We then formulate the complex logical queries as masked prediction and introduce a two-stage masked pre-training strategy to improve transferability and generalizability.Extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that kgTransformer can consistently outperform both KG embedding-based baselines and advanced encoders on nine in-domain and out-of-domain reasoning tasks. Additionally, kgTransformer can reason with explainability via providing the full reasoning paths to interpret given answers. Xiao Liu 0036, Yukuo Cen, Jiezhong Qiu, Mengdi Zhang 0002, Wei Wu 0014, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang 0001 |
KDD | 4 |
| 2021 | Graph Representation Learning: Foundations, Methods, Applications and SystemsabstractGraphs such as social networks and molecular graphs are ubiquitous data structures in the real world. Due to their prevalence, it is of great research importance to extract meaningful patterns from graph structured data so that downstream tasks can be facilitated. Instead of designing hand-engineered features, graph representation learning has emerged to learn representations that can encode the abundant information about the graph. It has achieved tremendous success in various tasks such as node classification, link prediction, and graph classification and has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Wei Jin 0009, Yao Ma 0001, Yiqi Wang 0001, Jiliang Tang, Yukuo Cen, Jiezhong Qiu, Jie Tang 0001, Chuan Shi 0001, Yanfang Ye 0001, Jiawei Zhang 0001, Philip S. Yu |
KDD | 6 |
| 2020 | Controllable Multi-Interest Framework for RecommendationabstractRecently, neural networks have been widely used in e-commerce recommender systems, owing to the rapid development of deep learning. We formalize the recommender system as a sequential recommendation problem, intending to predict the next items that the user might be interacted with. Recent works usually give an overall embedding from a user's behavior sequence. However, a unified user embedding cannot reflect the user's multiple interests during a period. In this paper, we propose a novel controllable multi-interest framework for the sequential recommendation, called ComiRec. Our multi-interest module captures multiple interests from user behavior sequences, which can be exploited for retrieving candidate items from the large-scale item pool. These items are then fed into an aggregation module to obtain the overall recommendation. The aggregation module leverages a controllable factor to balance the recommendation accuracy and diversity. We conduct experiments for the sequential recommendation on two real-world datasets, Amazon and Taobao. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art models. Our framework has also been successfully deployed on the offline Alibaba distributed cloud platform. Yukuo Cen, Jianwei Zhang 0012, Xu Zou 0001, Chang Zhou 0005, Hongxia Yang, Jie Tang 0001 |
KDD | 1 |
| 2020 | Trust Relationship Prediction in Alibaba E-Commerce PlatformabstractThis paper introduces how to infer trust relationships from billion-scale networked data to benefit Alibaba E-Commerce business. To effectively leverage the network correlations between labeled and unlabeled relationships to predict trust relationships, we formalize trust into multiple types and propose a graphical model to incorporate type-based dyadic and triadic correlations, namely eTrust. We also present a fast learning algorithm in order to handle billion-scale networks. Systematically, we evaluate the proposed methods on four different genres of datasets with labeled trust relationships: Alibaba, Epinions, Ciao, and Advogato. Experimental results show that the proposed methods achieve significantly better performance than several comparison methods (+1.7-32.3% by accuracy; p <; <; 0:01, with t-test). Most importantly, when handling the real large networked data with over 1,200,000,000 edges (Ali-large), our method achieves 2,000× speedup to infer trust relationships, comparing with the traditional graph learning algorithms. Finally, we have applied the inferred trust relationships to Alibaba E-commerce platform: Taobao, and achieved 2.75 percent improvement on gross merchandise volume (GMV). Yukuo Cen, Jing Zhang 0001, Gaofei Wang, Yujie Qian, Chuizheng Meng, Zonghong Dai, Hongxia Yang, Jie Tang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. | 1 |
| 2019 | Representation Learning for Attributed Multiplex Heterogeneous NetworkabstractNetwork embedding (or graph embedding) has been widely used in many real-world applications. However, existing methods mainly focus on networks with single-typed nodes/edges and cannot scale well to handle large networks. Many real-world networks consist of billions of nodes and edges of multiple types, and each node is associated with different attributes. In this paper, we formalize the problem of embedding learning for the Attributed Multiplex Heterogeneous Network and propose a unified framework to address this problem. The framework supports both transductive and inductive learning. We also give the theoretical analysis of the proposed framework, showing its connection with previous works and proving its better expressiveness. We conduct systematical evaluations for the proposed framework on four different genres of challenging datasets: Amazon, YouTube, Twitter, and Alibaba. Experimental results demonstrate that with the learned embeddings from the proposed framework, we can achieve statistically significant improvements (e.g., 5.99-28.23% lift by F1 scores; p<<0.01, t-test) over previous state-of-the-art methods for link prediction. The framework has also been successfully deployed on the recommendation system of a worldwide leading e-commerce company, Alibaba Group. Results of the offline A/B tests on product recommendation further confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of the framework in practice. Yukuo Cen, Xu Zou 0001, Jianwei Zhang 0012, Hongxia Yang, Jingren Zhou 0001, Jie Tang 0001 |
KDD | 1 |