VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Qichen Sun
dblp:263/1422
· DBLP profile ↗
9ranked-venue papers
0as first author
9since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · conflict
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 5 · 5 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 3 · 3 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 2 · 2 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | FOCUS: Knowledge-enhanced Adaptive Visual Compression for Few-shot Whole Slide Image ClassificationabstractFew-shot learning presents a critical solution for cancer diagnosis in computational pathology (CPath), addressing fundamental limitations in data availability, particularly the scarcity of expert annotations and patient privacy constraints. A key challenge in this paradigm stems from the inherent disparity between the limited training set of whole slide images (WSIs) and the enormous number of contained patches, where a significant portion of these patches lacks diagnostically relevant information, potentially diluting the model’s ability to learn and focus on critical diagnostic features. While recent works attempt to address this by incorporating additional knowledge, several crucial gaps hinder further progress: (1) despite the emergence of powerful pathology foundation models (FMs), their potential remains largely untapped, with most approaches limiting their use to basic feature extraction; (2) current language guidance mechanisms attempt to align text prompts with vast numbers of WSI patches all at once, struggling to leverage rich pathological semantic information. To this end, we introduce the knowledge-enhanced adaptive visual compression framework, dubbed FOCUS, which uniquely combines pathology FMs with language prior knowledge to enable a focused analysis of diagnostically relevant regions by prioritizing discriminative WSI patches. Our approach implements a progressive three-stage compression strategy: we first leverage FMs for global visual redundancy elimination, and integrate compressed features with language prompts for semantic relevance assessment, then perform neighbor-aware visual token filtering while preserving spatial coherence. Extensive experiments on pathological datasets spanning breast, lung, and ovarian cancers demonstrate its superior performance in few-shot pathology diagnosis. Codes are available at https://github.com/dddavid4real/FOCUS. Zhengrui Guo, Conghao Xiong, Jiabo Ma, Qichen Sun, Lishuang Feng, Jinzhuo Wang, Hao Chen 0011 |
CVPR | 4 |
| 2025 | BLEND: Behavior-guided Neural Population Dynamics Modeling via Privileged Knowledge DistillationabstractModeling the nonlinear dynamics of neuronal populations represents a key pursuit in computational neuroscience. Recent research has increasingly focused on jointly modeling neural activity and behavior to unravel their interconnections. Despite significant efforts, these approaches often necessitate either intricate model designs or oversimplified assumptions. Given the frequent absence of perfectly paired neural-behavioral datasets in real-world scenarios when deploying these models, a critical yet understudied research question emerges: how to develop a model that performs well using only neural activity as input at inference, while benefiting from the insights gained from behavioral signals during training?
To this end, we propose **BLEND**, the **B**ehavior-guided neura**L** population dynamics mod**E**lling framework via privileged k**N**owledge **D**istillation. By considering behavior as privileged information, we train a teacher model that takes both behavior observations (privileged features) and neural activities (regular features) as inputs. A student model is then distilled using only neural activity. Unlike existing methods, our framework is model-agnostic and avoids making strong assumptions about the relationship between behavior and neural activity. This allows BLEND to enhance existing neural dynamics modeling architectures without developing specialized models from scratch. Extensive experiments across neural population activity modeling and transcriptomic neuron identity prediction tasks demonstrate strong capabilities of BLEND, reporting over 50% improvement in behavioral decoding and over 15% improvement in transcriptomic neuron identity prediction after behavior-guided distillation. Furthermore, we empirically explore various behavior-guided distillation strategies within the BLEND framework and present a comprehensive analysis of effectiveness and implications for model performance. Code will be made available at https://github.com/dddavid4real/BLEND. Zhengrui Guo, Fangxu Zhou, Qichen Sun, Lishuang Feng, Jinzhuo Wang, Hao Chen 0011 |
ICLR | 4 |
| 2025 | Context Matters: Query-aware Dynamic Long Sequence Modeling of Gigapixel ImagesabstractWhole slide image (WSI) analysis presents significant computational challenges due to the massive number of patches in gigapixel images. While transformer architectures excel at modeling long-range correlations through self-attention, their quadratic computational complexity makes them impractical for computational pathology applications. Existing solutions like local-global or linear self-attention reduce computational costs but compromise the strong modeling capabilities of full self-attention. In this work, we propose **Querent**, *i.e.*, the **quer**y-awar**e** long co**nt**extual dynamic modeling framework, which achieves a theoretically bounded approximation of full self-attention while delivering practical efficiency. Our method adaptively predicts which surrounding regions are most relevant for each patch, enabling focused yet unrestricted attention computation only with potentially important contexts. By using efficient region-wise metadata computation and importance estimation, our approach dramatically reduces computational overhead while preserving global perception to model fine-grained patch correlations. Through comprehensive experiments on biomarker prediction, gene mutation prediction, cancer subtyping, and survival analysis across over 10 WSI datasets, our method demonstrates superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art approaches. Codes are available at https://github.com/dddavid4real/Querent. Zhengrui Guo, Qichen Sun, Jiabo Ma, Lishuang Feng, Jinzhuo Wang, Hao Chen 0011 |
ICML | 2 |
| 2025 | KINDLE: Knowledge-Guided Distillation for Prior-Free Gene Regulatory Network InferenceabstractGene regulatory network (GRN) inference serves as a cornerstone for deciphering cellular decision-making processes. Early approaches rely exclusively on gene expression data, thus their predictive power remain fundamentally constrained by the vast combinatorial space of potential gene-gene interactions. Subsequent methods integrate prior knowledge to mitigate this challenge by restricting the solution space to biologically plausible interactions. However, we argue that the effectiveness of these approaches is contingent upon the precision of prior information and the reduction in the search space will circumscribe the models' potential for novel biological discoveries. To address these limitations, we introduce KINDLE, a three-stage framework that decouples GRN inference from prior knowledge dependencies. KINDLE trains a teacher model that integrates prior knowledge with temporal gene expression dynamics and subsequently distills this encoded knowledge to a student model, enabling accurate GRN inference solely from expression data without access to any prior. KINDLE achieves state-of-the-art performance across four benchmark datasets. Notably, it successfully identifies key transcription factors governing mouse embryonic development and precisely characterizes their functional roles. In mouse hematopoietic stem cell data, KINDLE accurately predicts fate transition outcomes following knockout of two critical regulators (Gata1 and Spi1). These biological validations demonstrate our framework's dual capability in maintaining topological inference precision while preserving discovery potential for novel biological mechanisms. Rui Peng 0006, Qichen Sun, Yuxing Lu, Ziru Liu, Jinzhuo Wang |
NeurIPS | 3 |
| 2024 | Distributed Temporal Graph Neural Network Learning over Large-Scale Dynamic Graphs
Ziquan Fang, Qichen Sun, Lu Chen 0001, Yunjun Gao |
DASFAA (2) | 2 |
| 2024 | TrajRecovery: An Efficient Vehicle Trajectory Recovery Framework based on Urban-Scale Traffic Camera RecordsabstractAccurate vehicle trajectory recovery enables providing indispensable data foundations in intelligent urban transportation. However, existing methods face two challenges: i) the inability to process city-wide vehicle trajectories, and ii) the dependence on a substantial amount of accurate GPS trajectories for model training, leading to poor generalization ability. To address these issues, we propose a novel trajectory recovery system based on vehicle snapshots captured by traffic cameras, named TrajRecovery. TrajRecovery consists of three main components: i) Preprocessor processes traffic cameras and vehicle snapshots to provide necessary data for trajectory recovery; ii) Spatial Transfer Probabilistic Model (STPM) integrates road conditions and driver behavior to compute turning probability at intersections; iii) Trajectory Generator utilizes the output probabilities from STPM to recover a continuous and most likely complete trajectory. We evaluate TrajRecovery on two real datasets from a city in China, demonstrating substantial performance gains compared to state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, our system is deployed in practical applications at Huawei Company, achieving extraordinary profits in business scenarios. Dongen Wu, Ziquan Fang, Qichen Sun, Lu Chen 0001, Fei Wang 0113, Yunjun Gao |
KDD | 3 |
| 2024 | Accurate and transferable drug-target interaction prediction with DrugLAMPabstractMOTIVATION: Accurate prediction of drug-target interactions (DTIs), especially for novel targets or drugs, is crucial for accelerating drug discovery. Recent advances in pretrained language models (PLMs) and multi-modal learning present new opportunities to enhance DTI prediction by leveraging vast unlabeled molecular data and integrating complementary information from multiple modalities. RESULTS: We introduce DrugLAMP (PLM-assisted multi-modal prediction), a PLM-based multi-modal framework for accurate and transferable DTI prediction. DrugLAMP integrates molecular graph and protein sequence features extracted by PLMs and traditional feature extractors. We introduce two novel multi-modal fusion modules: (i) pocket-guided co-attention (PGCA), which uses protein pocket information to guide the attention mechanism on drug features, and (ii) paired multi-modal attention (PMMA), which enables effective cross-modal interactions between drug and protein features. These modules work together to enhance the model's ability to capture complex drug-protein interactions. Moreover, the contrastive compound-protein pre-training (2C2P) module enhances the model's generalization to real-world scenarios by aligning features across modalities and conditions. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate DrugLAMP's state-of-the-art performance on both standard benchmarks and challenging settings simulating real-world drug discovery, where test drugs/targets are unseen during training. Visualizations of attention maps and application to predict cryptic pockets and drug side effects further showcase DrugLAMP's strong interpretability and generalizability. Ablation studies confirm the contributions of the proposed modules. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Source code and datasets are freely available at https://github.com/Lzcstan/DrugLAMP. All data originate from public sources. Zhengchao Luo, Qichen Sun, Jinzhuo Wang |
Bioinform. | 3 |
| 2024 | Spatio-Temporal Learning for Route-Based Travel Time Estimation
Ziquan Fang, Qichen Sun, Lu Chen 0001, Danlei Hu, Yunjun Gao |
J. Comput. Sci. Technol. | 2 |
| 2023 | A Lightweight Framework for Fast Trajectory SimplificationabstractThe ubiquitous GPS sensors collect massive trajectory data from moving objects, which is useful in data mining applications. However, trajectory data is enormous in volume, and thus, directly storing and processing the raw data is expensive. Using trajectory simplification, a trajectory can be reduced to a set of continuous line segments with acceptable data loss, which is an efficient method. Although many algorithms are proposed, they still suffer from the following issues including (i) non-data driven capability as most studies rely on human-crafted rules or pre-defined parameters, (ii) bound with error measures that yield high computational cost, and (iii) focusing only on the local information preservation in trajectories, but failing in capturing the global mobility patterns for trajectory compression.To address the above issues, we propose a Seq2Seq2Seq framework, abbreviated S3, which consists of two chained Seq2Seq. With differentiable reconstruction learning, S3 enables self-supervised trajectory simplification in a lightweight manner. Besides, we deploy S3 over the graph neural architecture to capture the context-aware mobility patterns and enhance the representation paradigm of trajectories with geographical semantics, where a context-aware distance measure is designed for quality evaluation. An online extension of S3 is also developed to enable streaming trajectory simplifications. Finally, extensive experiments using two real-world datasets in both offline and online scenarios show that S3 achieves much higher efficiency (e.g., it achieves up to one order of magnitude speed-up gains) and comparable compression quality, compared with both non-learning and state-of-the-art learning-based methods. Ziquan Fang, Changhao He, Lu Chen 0001, Danlei Hu, Qichen Sun, Linsen Li 0001, Yunjun Gao |
ICDE | 5 |