Zeang Sheng

dblp:298/0674 · DBLP profile ↗
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12ranked-venue papers
3as first author
12since 2021 · last 2026
0009-0002-4427-3038ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 8 · 1 first-author · 8 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 8 · 3 first-author · 8 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 QA-GraphRAG: Query-Adaptive Plug-and-Play Retrieval Integration for Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Zeang Sheng, Ruihong Sun, Hanmei Luo, Wentao Zhang 0001, Bin Cui 0001
Proc. VLDB Endow.1
2025 Towards Scalable and Deep Graph Neural Networks via Noise Masking
abstract
In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success in many graph mining tasks. However, scaling them to large graphs is challenging due to the high computational and storage costs of repeated feature propagation and non-linear transformation during training. One commonly employed approach to address this challenge is model-simplification, which only executes the Propagation (P) once in the pre-processing, and Combine (C) these receptive fields in different ways and then feed them into a simple model for better performance. Despite their high predictive performance and scalability, these methods still face two limitations. First, existing approaches mainly focus on exploring different C methods from the model perspective, neglecting the crucial problem of performance degradation with increasing P depth from the data-centric perspective, known as the over-smoothing problem. Second, pre-processing overhead takes up most of the end-to-end processing time, especially for large-scale graphs. To address these limitations, we present random walk with noise masking (RMask), a plug-and-play module compatible with the existing model-simplification works. This module enables the exploration of deeper GNNs while preserving their scalability. Unlike the previous model-simplification works, we focus on continuous P and found that the noise existing inside each P is the cause of the over-smoothing issue, and use the efficient masking mechanism to eliminate them. Experimental results on six real-world datasets demonstrate that model-simplification works equipped with RMask yield superior performance compared to their original version and can make a good trade-off between accuracy and efficiency.
Yuxuan Liang 0002, Wentao Zhang 0001, Zeang Sheng, Ling Yang 0006, Quanqing Xu, Jiawei Jiang 0001, Yunhai Tong, Bin Cui 0001
AAAI3
2025 Can LLMs be Good Graph Judge for Knowledge Graph Construction?
abstract
In real-world scenarios, most of the data obtained from the information retrieval (IR) system is unstructured.Converting natural language sentences into structured Knowledge Graphs (KGs) remains a critical challenge.We identified three limitations with respect to existing KG construction methods: (1) There could be a large amount of noise in real-world documents, which could result in extracting messy information.(2) Naive LLMs usually extract inaccurate knowledge from some domainspecific documents.(3) Hallucination phenomenon cannot be overlooked when directly using LLMs to construct KGs.In this paper, we propose GraphJudge, a KG construction framework to address the aforementioned challenges.In this framework, we designed an entity-centric strategy to eliminate the noise information in the documents.And we fine-tuned a LLM as a graph judge to finally enhance the quality of generated KGs.Experiments conducted on two general and one domain-specific text-graph pair datasets demonstrate state-ofthe-art performance against various baseline methods with strong generalization abilities.
Zeang Sheng
EMNLP3
2025 LLMs Are Noisy Oracles! LLM-based Noise-aware Graph Active Learning for Node Classification
Zeang Sheng, Weiyang Guo, Yingxia Shao, Wentao Zhang 0001, Bin Cui 0001
KDD (2)1
2025 Acceleration Algorithms in GNNs: A Survey
abstract
Graph Neural Networks have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in various graph-based tasks, but their inefficiency in training and inference poses significant challenges for scaling to real-world, large-scale applications. To address these challenges, a plethora of algorithms have been developed to accelerate GNN training and inference, garnering substantial interest from the research community. This paper presents a systematic review of these acceleration algorithms, categorizing them into three main topics: training acceleration, inference acceleration, and execution acceleration. For training acceleration, we discuss techniques like graph sampling and GNN simplification. In inference acceleration, we focus on knowledge distillation, GNN quantization, and GNN pruning. For execution acceleration, we explore GNN binarization and graph condensation. Additionally, we review several libraries related to GNN acceleration, including our Scalable Graph Learning library, and propose future research directions.
Zeang Sheng, Xunkai Li, Xinyi Gao 0001, Zhezheng Hao, Ling Yang 0006, Xiaonan Nie, Jiawei Jiang 0001, Wentao Zhang 0001, Bin Cui 0001
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.2
2024 HGAMLP: Heterogeneous Graph Attention MLP with De-Redundancy Mechanism
abstract
Heterogeneous graphs contain rich semantic information that can be exploited by heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs). However, scaling HGNNs to large graphs is challenging due to the high computational cost. Existing non-parametric HGNNs use general subgraphs construction method and mean aggregator before training to reduce the complexity. Despite their success, they ignore two key characteristics of heterogeneous graphs, leading to low predictive performance. First, they adopt fixed local and global knowledge extractor for the feature aggregation and the semantic fusion. Besides, they bury the graph structure information of the higher-order meta-paths and fail to explore deeper graph structure information. In this paper, we address these two limitations and propose a new non-parametric HGNN framework called Heterogeneous Graph Attention Multi-Layer Perceptron (HGAMLP). Our framework employs the local multi-knowledge extractor to enhance the node representation, and leverages the de-redundancy mechanism to extract the pure graph structure information from higher-order meta-paths. Besides, it adopts a node-adaptive weight adjustment mechanism as an efficiency training model to fuse global knowledge and local knowledge. We evaluate our framework on ten commonly used heterogeneous graph datasets and show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in both accuracy and speed. Notably, our framework achieves the best performance on the large public heterogeneous graph dataset (i.e., Ogbn-mag) of Open Graph Benchmark11https://ogb.stanford.edu/docs/leader_nodeprop.
Yuxuan Liang 0002, Wentao Zhang 0001, Zeang Sheng, Ling Yang 0006, Jiawei Jiang 0001, Yunhai Tong, Bin Cui 0001
ICDE3
2024 OUTRE: An OUT-of-core De-REdundancy GNN Training Framework for Massive Graphs within A Single Machine
abstract
Sampling-based Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become the de facto standard for handling various graph learning tasks on large-scale graphs. As the graph size grows larger and even exceeds the standard host memory size of a single machine, out-of-core sampling-based GNN training has gained attention from the community. For out-of-core sampling-based GNN training, the performance bottleneck is the data preparation process that includes sampling neighbor lists and gathering node features from external storage. Based on this observation, existing out-of-core GNN training frameworks try to accomplish larger percentages of data requests without inquiring the external storage by designing better in-memory caches. However, the enormous overall requested data volume is unchanged under this approach. In this paper, we present a new perspective on reducing the overall requested data volume. Through a quantitative analysis, we find that Neighborhood Redundancy and Temporal Redundancy exist in out-of-core sampling-based GNN training. To reduce these two kinds of data redundancies, we propose OUTRE, an OUT-of-core de-REdundancy GNN training framework. OUTRE incorporates two new designs, partition-based batch construction and historical embedding cache , to reduce the corresponding data redundancies. Moreover, we propose automatic cache space management to automatically organize available memory for different caches. Evaluation results on four public large-scale graph datasets show that OUTRE achieves 1.52× to 3.51× speedup against the SOTA framework.
Zeang Sheng, Wentao Zhang 0001, Yangyu Tao, Bin Cui 0001
Proc. VLDB Endow.1
2022 NAFS: A Simple yet Tough-to-beat Baseline for Graph Representation Learning
abstract
Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown prominent performance in graph representation learning by leveraging knowledge from both graph structure and node features. However, most of them have two major limitations. First, GNNs can learn higher-order structural information by stacking more layers but can not deal with large depth due to the over-smoothing issue. Second, it is not easy to apply these methods on large graphs due to the expensive computation cost and high memory usage. In this paper, we present node-adaptive feature smoothing (NAFS), a simple non-parametric method that constructs node representations without parameter learning. NAFS first extracts the features of each node with its neighbors of different hops by feature smoothing, and then adaptively combines the smoothed features. Besides, the constructed node representation can further be enhanced by the ensemble of smoothed features extracted via different smoothing strategies. We conduct experiments on four benchmark datasets on two different application scenarios: node clustering and link prediction. Remarkably, NAFS with feature ensemble outperforms the state-of-the-art GNNs on these tasks and mitigates the aforementioned two limitations of most learning-based GNN counterparts.
Wentao Zhang 0001, Zeang Sheng, Yang Li 0106, Yu Shen 0003, Zhi Yang 0001, Bin Cui 0001
ICML2
2022 Model Degradation Hinders Deep Graph Neural Networks
abstract
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in various graph mining tasks. However, drastic performance degradation is always observed when a GNN is stacked with many layers. As a result, most GNNs only have shallow architectures, which limits their expressive power and exploitation of deep neighborhoods. Most recent studies attribute the performance degradation of deep GNNs to the over-smoothing issue. In this paper, we disentangle the conventional graph convolution operation into two independent operations: Propagation (P) and Transformation (T). Following this, the depth of a GNN can be split into the propagation depth (Dp) and the transformation depth (Dt). Through extensive experiments, we find that the major cause for the performance degradation of deep GNNs is the model degradation issue caused by large Dt rather than the over-smoothing issue mainly caused by large Dp. Further, we present Adaptive Initial Residual (AIR), a plug-and-play module compatible with all kinds of GNN architectures, to alleviate the model degradation issue and the over-smoothing issue simultaneously. Experimental results on six real-world datasets demonstrate that GNNs equipped with AIR outperform most GNNs with shallow architectures owing to the benefits of both large DD_p$ and Dt, while the time costs associated with AIR can be ignored.
Wentao Zhang 0001, Zeang Sheng, Yuezihan Jiang, Yikuan Xia, Jun Gao 0003, Zhi Yang 0001, Bin Cui 0001
KDD2
2022 Graph Attention Multi-Layer Perceptron
abstract
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in many graph-based applications. However, the enormous size and high sparsity level of graphs hinder their applications under industrial scenarios. Although some scalable GNNs are proposed for large-scale graphs, they adopt a fixed K-hop neighborhood for each node, thus facing the over-smoothing issue when adopting large propagation depths for nodes within sparse regions. To tackle the above issue, we propose a new GNN architecture --- Graph Attention Multi-Layer Perceptron (GAMLP), which can capture the underlying correlations between different scales of graph knowledge. We have deployed GAMLP in Tencent with the Angel platform, and we further evaluate GAMLP on both real-world datasets and large-scale industrial datasets. Extensive experiments on these 14 graph datasets demonstrate that GAMLP achieves state-of-the-art performance while enjoying high scalability and efficiency. Specifically, it outperforms GAT by 1.3% regarding predictive accuracy on our large-scale Tencent Video dataset while achieving up to 50x training speedup. Besides, it ranks top-1 on both the leaderboards of the largest homogeneous and heterogeneous graph (i.e., ogbn-papers100M and ogbn-mag) of Open Graph Benchmark.
Wentao Zhang 0001, Zeang Sheng, Yang Li 0106, Wen Ouyang, Xiaosen Li, Yangyu Tao, Zhi Yang 0001, Bin Cui 0001
KDD3
2021 ROD: Reception-aware Online Distillation for Sparse Graphs
abstract
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used in many graph-based tasks such as node classification, link prediction, and node clustering. However, GNNs gain their performance benefits mainly from performing the feature propagation and smoothing across the edges of the graph, thus requiring sufficient connectivity and label information for effective propagation. Unfortunately, many real-world networks are sparse in terms of both edges and labels, leading to sub-optimal performance of GNNs. Recent interest in this sparse problem has focused on the self-training approach, which expands supervised signals with pseudo labels. Nevertheless, the self-training approach inherently cannot realize the full potential of refining the learning performance on sparse graphs due to the unsatisfactory quality and quantity of pseudo labels.
Wentao Zhang 0001, Yuezihan Jiang, Yang Li 0106, Zeang Sheng, Yu Shen 0003, Xupeng Miao, Liang Wang 0001, Zhi Yang 0001, Bin Cui 0001
KDD4
2021 Node Dependent Local Smoothing for Scalable Graph Learning
abstract
Recent works reveal that feature or label smoothing lies at the core of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Concretely, they show feature smoothing combined with simple linear regression achieves comparable performance with the carefully designed GNNs, and a simple MLP model with label smoothing of its prediction can outperform the vanilla GCN. Though an interesting finding, smoothing has not been well understood, especially regarding how to control the extent of smoothness. Intuitively, too small or too large smoothing iterations may cause under-smoothing or over-smoothing and can lead to sub-optimal performance. Moreover, the extent of smoothness is node-specific, depending on its degree and local structure. To this end, we propose a novel algorithm called node-dependent local smoothing (NDLS), which aims to control the smoothness of every node by setting a node-specific smoothing iteration. Specifically, NDLS computes influence scores based on the adjacency matrix and selects the iteration number by setting a threshold on the scores. Once selected, the iteration number can be applied to both feature smoothing and label smoothing. Experimental results demonstrate that NDLS enjoys high accuracy -- state-of-the-art performance on node classifications tasks, flexibility -- can be incorporated with any models, scalability and efficiency -- can support large scale graphs with fast training.
Wentao Zhang 0001, Zeang Sheng, Yang Li 0106, Wen Ouyang, Yangyu Tao, Zhi Yang 0001, Bin Cui 0001
NeurIPS3