VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Menglin Yang 0001
dblp:249/8541-1
· DBLP profile ↗
16ranked-venue papers in the field
7as first author
15since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0003-2510-5282ORCID · conflict
Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several
Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 10 (5 first)Information Retrieval & Web Search · 4 (1 first)Database Systems & Data Management · 2 (1 first)
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | HMamba: Hyperbolic Mamba for Sequential RecommendationabstractSequential recommendation systems require both temporal efficiency to handle long interaction histories and hierarchical representation to model complex user–item relationships. Existing approaches face a fundamental tension: Mamba-based methods offer linear-time efficiency ( \(\mathcal{O}(L)\) ) but operate in Euclidean space, which distorts hierarchical patterns; hyperbolic models capture taxonomies well but suffer quadratic complexity ( \(\mathcal{O}(L^{2})\) ). To solve this dual challenge , we propose Hyperbolic Mamba (HMamba), the first architecture that unifies curvature-aware state spaces with hyperbolic geometry. Our key insight is that hyperbolic curvature \(\kappa\) simultaneously governs: (1) state transition granularity through \(\mathbf{\bar{A}}=\exp(\Delta\mathbf{A}\odot\mathbf{K}(\kappa))\) and (2) hierarchical distance preservation via \(d_{\mathcal{L}}\propto\sqrt{\kappa}\log(\cdot)\) . This enables joint optimization of efficiency and hierarchy—addressing the previously unsolved problem of deep-long modeling . Experiments show HMamba achieves 3–11% accuracy gains while maintaining 3.2 \(\times\) faster training than attention-based models, establishing a new paradigm for hierarchy-aware sequential recommendation. The code and datasets accompanying our paper are publicly available at https://github.com/CoderPowerBeyond/HMamba . Qianru Zhang, Honggang Wen, Wei Yuan 0003, Crystal Chen, Menglin Yang 0001, Siu-Ming Yiu, Hongzhi Yin |
ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. | 5 |
| 2025 | Lorentzian Residual Neural NetworksabstractHyperbolic neural networks have emerged as a powerful tool for modeling hierarchical data structures prevalent in real-world datasets. Notably, residual connections, which facilitate the direct flow of information across layers, have been instrumental in the success of deep neural networks. However, current methods for constructing hyperbolic residual networks suffer from limitations such as increased model complexity, numerical instability, and errors due to multiple mappings to and from the tangent space. To address these limitations, we introduce LResNet, a novel Lorentzian residual neural network based on the weighted Lorentzian centroid in the Lorentz model of hyperbolic geometry. Our method enables the efficient integration of residual connections in Lorentz hyperbolic neural networks while preserving their hierarchical representation capabilities. We demonstrate that our method can theoretically derive previous methods while offering improved stability, efficiency, and effectiveness. Extensive experiments on both graph and vision tasks showcase the superior performance and robustness of our method compared to state-of-the-art Euclidean and hyperbolic alternatives. Our findings highlight the potential of LResNet for building more expressive neural networks in hyperbolic embedding space as a generally applicable method to multiple architectures, including CNNs, GNNs, and graph Transformers. Neil He, Menglin Yang 0001, Rex Ying |
KDD (1) | 2 |
| 2025 | Hyperbolic Deep Learning for Foundation Models: A SurveyabstractFoundation models pre-trained on massive datasets, including large language models (LLMs), vision-language models (VLMs), and large multimodal models, have demonstrated remarkable success in diverse downstream tasks. However, recent studies have shown fundamental limitations of these models: (1) limited representational capacity(2) lower adaptability, and (3) diminishing scalability. These shortcomings raise a critical question: is Euclidean geometry truly the optimal inductive bias for all foundation models, or could incorporating alternative geometric spaces enable models to better align with the intrinsic structure of real-world data and improve reasoning processes? Hyperbolic spaces, a class of non-Euclidean manifolds characterized by exponential volume growth with respect to distance, offer a mathematically grounded solution. These spaces enable low-distortion embeddings of hierarchical structures (e.g., trees, taxonomies) and power-law distributions with substantially fewer dimensions compared to Euclidean counterparts. Recent advances have leveraged these properties to enhance foundation models, including improving LLMs' complex reasoning ability, VLMs' zero-shot generalization, and cross-modal semantic alignment, while maintaining parameter efficiency. This paper provides a comprehensive review of hyperbolic neural networks and their recent development for foundation models. We further outline key challenges and research directions to advance the field. Neil He, Hiren Madhu, Ngoc Bui, Menglin Yang 0001, Rex Ying |
KDD (2) | 4 |
| 2025 | Understanding and Mitigating Hyperbolic Dimensional Collapse in Graph Contrastive Learning
Hao Zhu 0010, Menglin Yang 0001, Jiahong Liu 0001, Rex Ying, Irwin King, Piotr Koniusz |
KDD (1) | 3 |
| 2024 | Hypformer: Exploring Efficient Transformer Fully in Hyperbolic SpaceabstractHyperbolic geometry have shown significant potential in modeling complex structured data, particularly those with underlying tree-like and hierarchical structures. Despite the impressive performance of various hyperbolic neural networks across numerous domains, research on adapting the Transformer to hyperbolic space remains limited. Previous attempts have mainly focused on modifying self-attention modules in the Transformer. However, these efforts have fallen short of developing a complete hyperbolic Transformer. This stems primarily from: (i) the absence of well-defined modules in hyperbolic space, including linear transformation layers, LayerNorm layers, activation functions, dropout operations, etc. (ii) the quadratic time complexity of the existing hyperbolic self-attention module w.r.t the number of input tokens, which hinders its scalability. To address these challenges, we propose, Hypformer, a novel hyperbolic Transformer based on the Lorentz model of hyperbolic geometry. In Hypformer, we introduce two foundational blocks that define the essential modules of the Transformer in hyperbolic space. Furthermore, we develop a linear self-attention mechanism in hyperbolic space, enabling hyperbolic Transformer to process billion-scale graph data and long-sequence inputs for the first time. Our experimental results confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of \method across various datasets, demonstrating its potential as an effective and scalable solution for large-scale data representation and large models. Menglin Yang 0001, Harshit Verma, Delvin Ce Zhang, Jiahong Liu 0001, Irwin King, Rex Ying |
KDD | 1 |
| 2023 | κHGCN: Tree-likeness Modeling via Continuous and Discrete Curvature LearningabstractThe prevalence of tree-like structures, encompassing hierarchical structures and power law distributions, exists extensively in real-world applications, including recommendation systems, ecosystems, financial networks, social networks, etc. Recently, the exploitation of hyperbolic space for tree-likeness modeling has garnered considerable attention owing to its exponential growth volume. Compared to the flat Euclidean space, the curved hyperbolic space provides a more amenable and embeddable room, especially for datasets exhibiting implicit tree-like architectures. However, the intricate nature of real-world tree-like data presents a considerable challenge, as it frequently displays a heterogeneous composition of tree-like, flat, and circular regions. The direct embedding of such heterogeneous structures into a homogeneous embedding space (i.e., hyperbolic space) inevitably leads to heavy distortions. To mitigate the aforementioned shortage, this study endeavors to explore the curvature between discrete structure and continuous learning space, aiming at encoding the message conveyed by the network topology in the learning process, thereby improving tree-likeness modeling. To the end, a curvature-aware hyperbolic graph convolutional neural network, κHGCN, is proposed, which utilizes the curvature to guide message passing and improve long-range propagation. Extensive experiments on node classification and link prediction tasks verify the superiority of the proposal as it consistently outperforms various competitive models by a large margin. Menglin Yang 0001, Min Zhou 0006, Lujia Pan, Irwin King |
KDD | 1 |
| 2023 | Hyperbolic Graph Neural Networks: A Tutorial on Methods and ApplicationsabstractGraph Neural Networks (GNNs) generalize conventional neural networks to graph-structured data and have received considerable attention owing to their impressive performance. In spite of the notable successes, the performance of Euclidean models is inherently bounded and limited by the representation ability of Euclidean geometry, especially when it comes to datasets with highly non-Euclidean latent anatomy. Recently, hyperbolic spaces have emerged as a promising alternative for processing graph data with tree-like structure or power-law distribution and a surge of works on either methods or novel applications have been seen. Unlike Euclidean space, which expands polynomially, hyperbolic space grows exponentially with its radius, making it more suitable for modeling complex real-world data. Hence, it gains natural advantages in abstracting tree-like graphs with a hierarchical organization or power-law distribution. Min Zhou 0006, Menglin Yang 0001, Bo Xiong 0001, Hui Xiong 0001, Irwin King |
KDD | 2 |
| 2023 | WSFE: Wasserstein Sub-graph Feature Encoder for Effective User Segmentation in Collaborative FilteringabstractMaximizing the user-item engagement based on vectorized embeddings is a standard procedure of recent recommender models. Despite the superior performance for item recommendations, these methods however implicitly deprioritize the modeling of user-wise similarity in the embedding space; consequently, identifying similar users is underperforming, and additional processing schemes are usually required otherwise. To avoid thorough model re-training, we propose WSFE, a model-agnostic and training-free representation encoder, to be flexibly employed on the fly for effective user segmentation. Underpinned by the optimal transport theory, the encoded representations from WSFE present a matched user-wise similarity/distance measurement between the realistic and embedding space. We incorporate WSFE into six state-of-the-art recommender models and conduct extensive experiments on six real-world datasets. The empirical analyses well demonstrate the superiority and generality of WSFE to fuel multiple downstream tasks with diverse underlying targets in recommendation. Yankai Chen 0001, Menglin Yang 0001, Zixing Song, Chen Ma 0001, Irwin King |
SIGIR | 3 |
| 2023 | Hyperbolic Temporal Network EmbeddingabstractTemporal networks arise in various real-world scenarios, including social networks, user-item networks, traffic networks, financial transaction networks, etc. Modeling the dynamics of temporal networks is of importance as it describes how the networks evolve, which helps to understand and predict the behavior of the systems. There has been a lot of research on temporal network representation learning so far. Nonetheless, most of them are based on euclidean geometry, which fails to encode the underlying hierarchical layout or scale-free property of the real-world temporal network. Encouragingly, hyperbolic geometry excels in preserving both node similarity and network hierarchies. In the preliminary work, we proposed a hyperbolic temporal graph network (HTGN) on the Poincaré ball model, taking advantage of the exponential capacity and hierarchical awareness of hyperbolic geometry. HTGN moves the temporal network embedding into hyperbolic space and employs the hyperbolic graph neural network and hyperbolic gated recurrent neural network to capture spatial and temporal dynamics, respectively. In addition, two modules were further put forward to advance the performance: (1) hyperbolic temporal contextual self-attention to watch historical states and (2) hyperbolic temporal consistency to enforce the embeddings changing gradually. In this work, we further design a lightweight and efficient hyperbolic graph convolutional module that enables HTGN to scale to large-size graphs easily and flexibly handle datasets with different densities. Moreover, we investigate the hyperbolic temporal network embedding in the Lorentz model of hyperbolic geometry with regard to its numerical stability and optimization advantages. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposals as they consistently outperform the competing baselines on small-, medium-, and large-scale datasets. Menglin Yang 0001, Min Zhou 0006, Hui Xiong 0001, Irwin King |
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. | 1 |
| 2022 | Discovering Representative Attribute-stars via Minimum Description LengthabstractGraphs are a popular data type found in many domains. Numerous techniques have been proposed to find interesting patterns in graphs to help understand the data and support decision-making. However, there are generally two limitations that hinder their practical use: (1) they have multiple parameters that are hard to set but greatly influence results, (2) and they generally focus on identifying complex subgraphs while ignoring relationships between attributes of nodes. Graphs are a popular data type found in many domains. Numerous techniques have been proposed to find interesting patterns in graphs to help understand the data and support decision-making. However, there are generally two limitations that hinder their practical use: (1) they have multiple parameters that are hard to set but greatly influence results, (2) and they generally focus on identifying complex subgraphs while ignoring relationships between attributes of nodes. To address these problems, we propose a parameter-free algorithm named CSPM (Compressing Star Pattern Miner) which identifies star-shaped patterns that indicate strong correlations among attributes via the concept of conditional entropy and the minimum description length principle. Experiments performed on several benchmark datasets show that CSPM reveals insightful and interpretable patterns and is efficient in runtime. Moreover, quantitative evaluations on two real-world applications show that CSPM has broad applications as it successfully boosts the accuracy of graph attribute completion models by up to 30.68% and uncovers important patterns in telecommunication alarm data. Jiahong Liu 0001, Min Zhou 0006, Philippe Fournier-Viger, Menglin Yang 0001, Lujia Pan, Mourad Nouioua |
ICDE | 4 |
| 2022 | HICF: Hyperbolic Informative Collaborative FilteringabstractConsidering the prevalence of the power-law distribution in user-item networks, hyperbolic space has attracted considerable attention and achieved impressive performance in the recommender system recently. The advantage of hyperbolic recommendation lies in that its exponentially increasing capacity is well-suited to describe the power-law distributed user-item network whereas the Euclidean equivalent is deficient. Nonetheless, it remains unclear which kinds of items can be effectively recommended by the hyperbolic model and which cannot. To address the above concerns, we take the most basic recommendation technique, collaborative filtering, as a medium, to investigate the behaviors of hyperbolic and Euclidean recommendation models. The results reveal that (1) tail items get more emphasis in hyperbolic space than that in Euclidean space, but there is still ample room for improvement; (2) head items receive modest attention in hyperbolic space, which could be considerably improved; (3) and nonetheless, the hyperbolic models show more competitive performance than Euclidean models. Driven by the above observations, we design a novel learning method, named hyperbolic informative collaborative learning (HICF), aiming to compensate for the recommendation effectiveness of the head item while at the same time improving the performance of the tail item. The main idea is to adapt the hyperbolic margin ranking learning, making its pull and push procedure geometric-aware, and providing informative guidance for the learning of both head and tail items. Extensive experiments back up the analytic findings and also show the effectiveness of the proposed method. The work is valuable for personalized recommendations since it reveals that the hyperbolic space facilitates modeling the tail item, which often represents user-customized preferences or new products. Menglin Yang 0001, Zhihao Li 0004, Min Zhou 0006, Jiahong Liu 0001, Irwin King |
KDD | 1 |
| 2022 | BSAL: A Framework of Bi-component Structure and Attribute Learning for Link PredictionabstractGiven the ubiquitous existence of graph-structured data, learning the representations of nodes for the downstream tasks ranging from node classification, link prediction to graph classification is of crucial importance. Regarding missing link inference of diverse networks, we revisit the link prediction techniques and identify the importance of both the structural and attribute information. However, the available techniques either heavily count on the network topology which is spurious in practice, or cannot integrate graph topology and features properly. To bridge the gap, we propose a bicomponent structural and attribute learning framework (BSAL) that is designed to adaptively leverage information from topology and feature spaces. Specifically, BSAL constructs a semantic topology via the node attributes and then gets the embeddings regarding the semantic view, which provides a flexible and easy-to-implement solution to adaptively incorporate the information carried by the node attributes. Then the semantic embedding together with topology embedding are fused together using attention mechanism for the final prediction. Extensive experiments show the superior performance of our proposal and it significantly outperforms baselines on diverse research benchmarks. Bisheng Li, Min Zhou 0006, Shengzhong Zhang, Menglin Yang 0001, Defu Lian, Zengfeng Huang |
SIGIR | 4 |
| 2022 | Modeling Scale-free Graphs with Hyperbolic Geometry for Knowledge-aware RecommendationabstractAiming to alleviate data sparsity and cold-start problems of tradi- tional recommender systems, incorporating knowledge graphs (KGs) to supplement auxiliary information has recently gained considerable attention. Via unifying the KG with user-item interactions into a tripartite graph, recent works explore the graph topologies to learn the low-dimensional representations of users and items with rich semantics. These real-world tripartite graphs are usually scale-free, however, the intrinsic hierarchical graph structures of which are underemphasized in existing works, consequently, leading to suboptimal recommendation performance. To address this issue and provide more accurate recommendation, we propose a knowledge-aware recommendation method with Lorentz model of the hyperbolic geometry, namely Lorentzian Knowledge-enhanced Graph convolutional networks for Recommendation (LKGR). LKGR facilitates better modeling of scale-free tripartite graphs after the data unification. Specifically, we employ different information propagation strategies in the hyperbolic space to explicitly encode heterogeneous information from historical interactions and KGs. Additionally, our proposed knowledge-aware attention mechanism enables the model to automatically measure the information contribution, producing the coherent information aggregation in the hyperbolic space. Extensive experiments on three real-world benchmarks demonstrate that LKGR outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 3.6-15.3% of [email protected] on Top-K recommendation. Yankai Chen 0001, Menglin Yang 0001, Yingxue Zhang 0001, Mengchen Zhao, Ziqiao Meng, Jianye Hao, Irwin King |
WSDM | 2 |
| 2022 | HRCF: Enhancing Collaborative Filtering via Hyperbolic Geometric RegularizationabstractIn large-scale recommender systems, the user-item networks are generally scale-free or expand exponentially. For the representation of the user and item, the latent features (a.k.a, embeddings) depend on how well the embedding space matches the data distribution. Hyperbolic space offers a spacious room to learn embeddings with its negative curvature and metric properties, which can well fit data with tree-like structures. Recently, several hyperbolic approaches have been proposed to learn high-quality representations for the users and items. However, most of them concentrate upon developing the hyperbolic similitude by designing appropriate projection operations, whereas many advantageous and exciting geometric properties of hyperbolic space have not been explicitly explored. For example, one of the most notable properties of hyperbolic space is that its capacity space increases exponentially with the radius, which indicates the area far away from the hyperbolic origin is much more embeddable. Regarding the geometric properties of hyperbolic space, we bring up a Hyperbolic Regularization powered Collaborative Filtering (HRCF) and design a geometric-aware hyperbolic regularizer. Specifically, the proposal boosts optimization procedure via the root alignment and origin-aware penalty, which is simple yet impressively effective. Through theoretical analysis, we further show that our proposal is able to tackle the over-smoothing problem caused by the hyperbolic aggregation and also brings the models a better discriminative ability. We conduct extensive empirical analysis, comparing our proposal against a large set of baselines on several public benchmarks. The empirical results show that our approach achieves highly competitive performance and surpasses both the leading Euclidean and hyperbolic baselines by considerable margins. Further analysis verifies the rationality and effectiveness of the proposal for robust, deeper, and lightweight neural graph collaborative filtering. Menglin Yang 0001, Min Zhou 0006, Jiahong Liu 0001, Defu Lian, Irwin King |
WWW | 1 |
| 2021 | Discrete-time Temporal Network Embedding via Implicit Hierarchical Learning in Hyperbolic SpaceabstractRepresentation learning over temporal networks has drawn considerable attention in recent years. Efforts are mainly focused on modeling structural dependencies and temporal evolving regularities in Euclidean space which, however, underestimates the inherent complex and hierarchical properties in many real-world temporal networks, leading to sub-optimal embeddings. To explore these properties of a complex temporal network, we propose a hyperbolic temporal graph network (HTGN) that fully takes advantage of the exponential capacity and hierarchical awareness of hyperbolic geometry. More specially, HTGN maps the temporal graph into hyperbolic space, and incorporates hyperbolic graph neural network and hyperbolic gated recurrent neural network, to capture the evolving behaviors and implicitly preserve hierarchical information simultaneously. Furthermore, in the hyperbolic space, we propose two important modules that enable HTGN to successfully model temporal networks: (1) hyperbolic temporal contextual self-attention (HTA) module to attend to historical states and (2) hyperbolic temporal consistency (HTC) module to ensure stability and generalization. Experimental results on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of HTGN for temporal graph embedding, as it consistently outperforms competing methods by significant margins in various temporal link prediction tasks. Specifically, HTGN achieves AUC improvement up to 9.98% for link prediction and 11.4% for new link prediction. Moreover, the ablation study further validates the representational ability of hyperbolic geometry and the effectiveness of the proposed HTA and HTC modules. Menglin Yang 0001, Min Zhou 0006, Marcus Kalander, Zengfeng Huang, Irwin King |
KDD | 1 |
| 2020 | FeatureNorm: L2 Feature Normalization for Dynamic Graph EmbeddingabstractDynamic graphs arise in a plethora of practical scenarios such as social networks, communication networks, and financial transaction networks. Given a dynamic graph, it is fundamental and essential to learn a graph representation that is expected not only to preserve structural proximity but also jointly capture the time-evolving patterns. Recently, graph convolutional network (GCN) has been widely explored and used in non-Euclidean application domains. The main success of GCN, especially in handling dependencies and passing messages within nodes, lies in its approximation to Laplacian smoothing. As a matter of fact, this smoothing technique can not only encourage must-link node pairs to get closer but also push cannot-link pairs to shrink together, which potentially cause serious feature shrink or oversmoothing problem, especially when stacking graph convolution in multiple layers or steps. For learning time-evolving patterns, a natural solution is to preserve historical state and combine it with the current interactions to obtain the most recent representation. Then the serious feature shrink or oversmoothing problem could happen when stacking graph convolution explicitly or implicitly according to current prevalent methods, which would make nodes too similar to distinguish each other. To solve this problem in dynamic graph embedding, we analyze the shrinking properties in the node embedding space at first, and then design a simple yet versatile method, which exploits L2 feature normalization constraint to rescale all nodes to hypersphere of a unit ball so that nodes would not shrink together, and yet similar nodes can still get closer. Extensive experiments on four real-world dynamic graph datasets compared with competitive baseline models demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Menglin Yang 0001, Ziqiao Meng, Irwin King |
ICDM | 1 |