VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Yingji Zhang
dblp:248/5540
· DBLP profile ↗
3ranked-venue papers
2as first author
3since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0003-1499-3309ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 2 · 2 first-author · 2 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 2 · 1 first-author · 2 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Artificial intelligence
3 papers |
Language models and text generation · 34% Vision and language · 22% Machine translation · 17% |
Topics — the 7 heaviest of 9, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Natural language and speech › Language models and text generation › large language model reasoning › inference-time reasoning
latent reasoning |
1.0 | 1 | 2026 | Learning to Disentangle Latent Reasoning Rules with Language VAEs: A Systematic Study · AAAI 2026 |
Natural language and speech › Speech recognition and synthesis
automatic speech recognition |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | NEXUS-O: An Omni-Perceptive and -Interactive Model for Language, Audio, and Vision · ACM Multimedia 2025 |
Computer vision › Vision and language › vision-language model
multimodal large language model |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | NEXUS-O: An Omni-Perceptive and -Interactive Model for Language, Audio, and Vision · ACM Multimedia 2025 |
Natural language and speech › Machine translation › speech translation
speech-to-speech translation |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | NEXUS-O: An Omni-Perceptive and -Interactive Model for Language, Audio, and Vision · ACM Multimedia 2025 |
Machine learning › Generative modeling
variational autoencoder |
0.3 | 1 | 2026 | Learning to Disentangle Latent Reasoning Rules with Language VAEs: A Systematic Study · AAAI 2026 |
Computer vision › Vision and language
vision-language model |
0.3 | 1 | 2025 | NEXUS-O: An Omni-Perceptive and -Interactive Model for Language, Audio, and Vision · ACM Multimedia 2025 |
Machine learning › Representation and self-supervised learning › representation learning
disentangled representation learning |
0.2 | 1 | 2024 | Learning Disentangled Semantic Spaces of Explanations via Invertible Neural Networks · ACL (1) 2024 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
variational autoencoder · 1.0audio-language alignment · 0.9audio synthesis · 0.9transformer autoencoder · 0.8invertible neural network · 0.8flow-based models · 0.8
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Learning to Disentangle Latent Reasoning Rules with Language VAEs: A Systematic Study
Yingji Zhang, Marco Valentino, Danilo S. Carvalho, André Freitas |
AAAI | 1 |
| 2025 | NEXUS-O: An Omni-Perceptive and -Interactive Model for Language, Audio, and VisionabstractHuman beings perceive the real world through a spectrum of sensory modalities, encompassing auditory, visual, and linguistic faculties. This work proposes an industry-level omni-modal large language model (LLM) pipeline that integrates auditory, visual, and linguistic modalities to overcome challenges such as limited tri-modal datasets, high computational costs, and complex feature alignments. Our pipeline consists of three main components: First, a modular, end-to-end framework enabling flexible configuration of various encoder-LLM-decoder architectures. Second, a lightweight training strategy that pre-trains audio-language alignment on the state-of-the-art vision-language model Qwen2.5-VL, thus avoiding the costly pre-training of vision-specific modalities. Third, an audio synthesis pipeline that generates high-quality audio-text data from diverse real-world scenarios, supporting applications such as Automatic Speech Recognition and Speech-to-Speech chat. To this end, we introduce an industry-level omni-modal LLM, NEXUS-O. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our pipeline, yielding the following key findings: (1) In the visual understanding task, NEXUSO exhibits superior performance compared with its backbone model - Qwen2.5-VL-7B, validating the efficiency of our training strategy. (2) Within the English Spoken Question-Answering task, the model achieves better accuracy than the same-period competitor (i.e, MiniCPM-o2.6-7B) in the LLaMA Q. benchmark. (3) In our realworld ASR testset, NEXUS-O achieves outstanding performance, indicating its robustness in real scenarios. (4) In the Speech-to-Text Translation task, our model outperforms Qwen2-Audio-Instruct-7B. (5) In the Text-to-Speech task, based on pretrained vocoder (e.g., Fishspeech1.4 or CosyVoice2.0), NEXUS-O is comparable to its backbone vocoder on Seed-TTS benchmark. (6) An in-depth analysis of tri-modal alignment reveals that incorporating the audio modality enhances representational alignment between vision and language. Che Liu 0002, Yingji Zhang, Chenggong Gong, Yu Lu 0020, Shilin Zhou 0002, Ziliang Gan, Haipang Wu, Ji Liu 0003, André Freitas, Qifan Wang 0001, Zenglin Xu, Rongjunchen Zhang, Yong Dai 0001 |
ACM Multimedia | 2 |
| 2024 | Learning Disentangled Semantic Spaces of Explanations via Invertible Neural NetworksabstractDisentangled latent spaces usually have better semantic separability and geometrical properties, which leads to better interpretability and more controllable data generation. While this has been well investigated in Computer Vision, in tasks such as image disentanglement, in the NLP domain, sentence disentanglement is still comparatively under-investigated. Most previous work have concentrated on disentangling task-specific generative factors, such as sentiment, within the context of style transfer. In this work, we focus on a more general form of sentence disentanglement, targeting the localised modification and control of more general sentence semantic features. To achieve this, we contribute to a novel notion of sentence semantic disentanglement and introduce a flow-based invertible neural network (INN) mechanism integrated with a transformer-based language Autoencoder (AE) in order to deliver latent spaces with better separability properties. Experimental results demonstrate that the model can conform the distributed latent space into a better semantically disentangled sentence space, leading to improved language interpretability and controlled generation when compared to the recent state-of-the-art language VAE models. Yingji Zhang, Danilo S. Carvalho, André Freitas |
ACL (1) | 1 |