VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Lecheng Kong
dblp:319/5576
· DBLP profile ↗
7ranked-venue papers
3as first author
7since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0001-9427-8799ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 6 · 3 first-author · 6 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1 · 1 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
6 papers |
Graph learning · 72% Representation and self-supervised learning · 15% Language models and text generation · 7% | |
| Theoretical computer science
4 papers |
Graph algorithms and graph theory · 44% Algorithmic game theory and mechanism design · 34% Computational complexity · 17% |
Topics — the 19 heaviest of 23, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Machine learning › Graph learning
graph neural network |
1.9 | 3 | 2023 | MAG-GNN: Reinforcement Learning Boosted Graph Neural Network · NeurIPS 2023 Extending the Design Space of Graph Neural Networks by Rethinking Folklore Weisfeiler-Lehman · NeurIPS 2023 Geodesic Graph Neural Network for Efficient Graph Representation Learning · NeurIPS 2022 |
Machine learning › Graph learning
graph foundation model |
1.6 | 2 | 2025 | GOFA: A Generative One-For-All Model for Joint Graph Language Modeling · ICLR 2025 One For All: Towards Training One Graph Model For All Classification Tasks · ICLR 2024 |
Machine learning › Graph learning › graph foundation model
graph language model |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | GOFA: A Generative One-For-All Model for Joint Graph Language Modeling · ICLR 2025 |
Machine learning › Representation and self-supervised learning › representation learning › unsupervised representation learning
self-supervised representation learning |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | GOFA: A Generative One-For-All Model for Joint Graph Language Modeling · ICLR 2025 |
Machine learning › Graph learning › graph neural network › node classification
few-shot node classification |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Graph Contrastive Learning Meets Graph Meta Learning: A Unified Method for Few-shot Node Tasks · WWW 2024 |
Machine learning › Graph learning
graph classification |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | One For All: Towards Training One Graph Model For All Classification Tasks · ICLR 2024 |
Machine learning › Representation and self-supervised learning › contrastive learning
graph contrastive learning |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Graph Contrastive Learning Meets Graph Meta Learning: A Unified Method for Few-shot Node Tasks · WWW 2024 |
Machine learning › Graph learning
graph meta-learning |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Graph Contrastive Learning Meets Graph Meta Learning: A Unified Method for Few-shot Node Tasks · WWW 2024 |
Machine learning › Reinforcement learning
reinforcement learning for combinatorial optimization |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | MAG-GNN: Reinforcement Learning Boosted Graph Neural Network · NeurIPS 2023 |
Machine learning › Graph learning › graph neural network › subgraph learning
subgraph GNN |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | MAG-GNN: Reinforcement Learning Boosted Graph Neural Network · NeurIPS 2023 |
Graph algorithms and graph theory
graph isomorphism |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | Extending the Design Space of Graph Neural Networks by Rethinking Folklore Weisfeiler-Lehman · NeurIPS 2023 |
Graph algorithms and graph theory › graph isomorphism
weisfeiler-leman algorithm |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | Extending the Design Space of Graph Neural Networks by Rethinking Folklore Weisfeiler-Lehman · NeurIPS 2023 |
Machine learning › Graph learning › graph neural network
expressive power |
0.6 | 1 | 2022 | Geodesic Graph Neural Network for Efficient Graph Representation Learning · NeurIPS 2022 |
Machine learning › Graph learning › graph representation learning
structural encoding |
0.6 | 1 | 2022 | Geodesic Graph Neural Network for Efficient Graph Representation Learning · NeurIPS 2022 |
Algorithmic game theory and mechanism design › social choice › computational social choice
election control |
0.6 | 1 | 2022 | Manipulating Elections by Changing Voter Perceptions · IJCAI 2022 |
Machine learning › Representation and self-supervised learning
contrastive learning |
0.2 | 1 | 2024 | Graph Contrastive Learning Meets Graph Meta Learning: A Unified Method for Few-shot Node Tasks · WWW 2024 |
Machine learning › Graph learning
text-attributed graph |
0.2 | 1 | 2024 | One For All: Towards Training One Graph Model For All Classification Tasks · ICLR 2024 |
Mathematical optimization
combinatorial optimization |
0.2 | 1 | 2023 | MAG-GNN: Reinforcement Learning Boosted Graph Neural Network · NeurIPS 2023 |
Graph algorithms and graph theory
shortest path |
0.2 | 1 | 2022 | Geodesic Graph Neural Network for Efficient Graph Representation Learning · NeurIPS 2022 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
expressiveness hierarchy · 1.3equivariant set aggregation · 1.3next-word prediction · 0.9instruction fine-tuning · 0.9graph neural network · 0.9language model encoding · 0.8in-context learning · 0.8graph prompting · 0.8graph meta learning · 0.8graph contrastive learning · 0.8subgraph search · 0.7reinforcement learning · 0.7combinatorial optimization · 0.7spatial voting · 0.6geodesic representation · 0.6conditional message passing · 0.6complexity analysis · 0.6
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | GOFA: A Generative One-For-All Model for Joint Graph Language ModelingabstractFoundation models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs) or Large Vision Models (LVMs), have emerged as one of the most powerful tools in the respective fields. However, unlike text and image data, graph data do not have a definitive structure, posing great challenges to developing a Graph Foundation Model (GFM). For example, current attempts at designing general graph models either transform graph data into a language format for LLM-based prediction or still train a GNN model with LLM as an assistant. The former can handle unlimited tasks, while the latter captures graph structure much better---yet, no existing work can achieve both simultaneously. In this paper, we first identify three key desirable properties of a GFM: self-supervised pretraining, fluidity in tasks, and graph awareness. To account for these properties, we extend the conventional language modeling to the graph domain and propose a novel generative graph language model GOFA. The model interleaves randomly initialized GNN layers into a frozen pre-trained LLM so that the semantic and structural modeling abilities are organically combined. GOFA is pre-trained on newly proposed graph-level next-word prediction, question-answering, structural understanding, and information retrieval tasks to obtain the above GFM properties. The pre-trained model is further instruction fine-tuned to obtain the task-solving ability. Our GOFA model is evaluated on various downstream datasets unseen during the pre-training and fine-tuning phases, demonstrating a strong ability to solve structural and contextual problems in zero-shot scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/JiaruiFeng/GOFA. Lecheng Kong, Jiarui Feng, Hao Liu 0057, Chengsong Huang, Jiaxin Huang 0001, Muhan Zhang |
ICLR | 1 |
| 2024 | One For All: Towards Training One Graph Model For All Classification TasksabstractDesigning a single model to address multiple tasks has been a long-standing objective in artificial intelligence. Recently, large language models have demonstrated exceptional capability in solving different tasks within the language domain. However, a unified model for various graph tasks remains underexplored, primarily due to the challenges unique to the graph learning domain. First, graph data from different areas carry distinct attributes and follow different distributions. Such discrepancy makes it hard to represent graphs in a single representation space. Second, tasks on graphs diversify into node, link, and graph tasks, requiring distinct embedding strategies. Finally, an appropriate graph prompting paradigm for in-context learning is unclear. We propose **One for All (OFA)**, the first general framework that can use a single graph model to address the above challenges. Specifically, OFA proposes text-attributed graphs to unify different graph data by describing nodes and edges with natural language and uses language models to encode the diverse and possibly cross-domain text attributes to feature vectors in the same embedding space. Furthermore, OFA introduces the concept of nodes-of-interest to standardize different tasks with a single task representation. For in-context learning on graphs, OFA introduces a novel graph prompting paradigm that appends prompting substructures to the input graph, which enables it to address varied tasks without fine-tuning. We train the OFA model using graph data from multiple domains (including citation networks, molecular graphs, knowledge graphs, etc.) simultaneously and evaluate its ability in supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot learning scenarios. OFA performs well across different tasks, making it the first general-purpose across-domains classification model on graphs. Hao Liu 0057, Jiarui Feng, Lecheng Kong, Ningyue Liang, Dacheng Tao, Yixin Chen 0001, Muhan Zhang |
ICLR | 3 |
| 2024 | Graph Contrastive Learning Meets Graph Meta Learning: A Unified Method for Few-shot Node Tasks
Hao Liu 0057, Jiarui Feng, Lecheng Kong, Dacheng Tao, Yixin Chen 0001, Muhan Zhang |
WWW | 3 |
| 2023 | Extending the Design Space of Graph Neural Networks by Rethinking Folklore Weisfeiler-LehmanabstractMessage passing neural networks (MPNNs) have emerged as the most popular framework of graph neural networks (GNNs) in recent years. However, their expressive power is limited by the 1-dimensional Weisfeiler-Lehman (1-WL) test. Some works are inspired by $k$-WL/FWL (Folklore WL) and design the corresponding neural versions. Despite the high expressive power, there are serious limitations in this line of research. In particular, (1) $k$-WL/FWL requires at least $O(n^k)$ space complexity, which is impractical for large graphs even when $k=3$; (2) The design space of $k$-WL/FWL is rigid, with the only adjustable hyper-parameter being $k$. To tackle the first limitation, we propose an extension, $(k, t)$-FWL. We theoretically prove that even if we fix the space complexity to $O(n^k)$ (for any $k \geq 2$) in $(k, t)$-FWL, we can construct an expressiveness hierarchy up to solving the graph isomorphism problem. To tackle the second problem, we propose $k$-FWL+, which considers any equivariant set as neighbors instead of all nodes, thereby greatly expanding the design space of $k$-FWL. Combining these two modifications results in a flexible and powerful framework $(k, t)$-FWL+. We demonstrate $(k, t)$-FWL+ can implement most existing models with matching expressiveness. We then introduce an instance of $(k,t)$-FWL+ called Neighborhood$^2$-FWL (N$^2$-FWL), which is practically and theoretically sound. We prove that N$^2$-FWL is no less powerful than 3-WL, and can encode many substructures while only requiring $O(n^2)$ space. Finally, we design its neural version named **N$^2$-GNN** and evaluate its performance on various tasks. N$^2$-GNN achieves record-breaking results on ZINC-Subset (**0.059**), outperforming previous SOTA results by 10.6\%. Moreover, N$^2$-GNN achieves new SOTA results on the BREC dataset (**71.8\%**) among all existing high-expressive GNN methods. Jiarui Feng, Lecheng Kong, Hao Liu 0057, Dacheng Tao, Fuhai Li 0001, Muhan Zhang, Yixin Chen 0001 |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2023 | MAG-GNN: Reinforcement Learning Boosted Graph Neural NetworkabstractWhile Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) recently became powerful tools in graph learning tasks, considerable efforts have been spent on improving GNNs' structural encoding ability. A particular line of work proposed subgraph GNNs that use subgraph information to improve GNNs' expressivity and achieved great success. However, such effectivity sacrifices the efficiency of GNNs by enumerating all possible subgraphs. In this paper, we analyze the necessity of complete subgraph enumeration and show that a model can achieve a comparable level of expressivity by considering a small subset of the subgraphs. We then formulate the identification of the optimal subset as a combinatorial optimization problem and propose Magnetic Graph Neural Network (MAG-GNN), a reinforcement learning (RL) boosted GNN, to solve the problem. Starting with a candidate subgraph set, MAG-GNN employs an RL agent to iteratively update the subgraphs to locate the most expressive set for prediction. This reduces the exponential complexity of subgraph enumeration to the constant complexity of a subgraph search algorithm while keeping good expressivity. We conduct extensive experiments on many datasets, showing that MAG-GNN achieves competitive performance to state-of-the-art methods and even outperforms many subgraph GNNs. We also demonstrate that MAG-GNN effectively reduces the running time of subgraph GNNs. Lecheng Kong, Jiarui Feng, Hao Liu 0057, Dacheng Tao, Yixin Chen 0001, Muhan Zhang |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2022 | Manipulating Elections by Changing Voter PerceptionsabstractThe integrity of elections is central to democratic systems. However, a myriad of malicious actors aspire to influence election outcomes for financial or political benefit. A common means to such ends is by manipulating perceptions of the voting public about select candidates, for example, through misinformation. We present a formal model of the impact of perception manipulation on election outcomes in the framework of spatial voting theory, in which the preferences of voters over candidates are generated based on their relative distance in the space of issues. We show that controlling elections in this model is, in general, NP-hard, whether issues are binary or real-valued. However, we demonstrate that critical to intractability is the diversity of opinions on issues exhibited by the voting public. When voter views lack diversity, and we can instead group them into a small number of categories---for example, as a result of political polarization---the election control problem can be solved in polynomial time in the number of issues and candidates for arbitrary scoring rules. Junlin Wu 0001, Andrew Estornell, Lecheng Kong, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik |
IJCAI | 3 |
| 2022 | Geodesic Graph Neural Network for Efficient Graph Representation LearningabstractGraph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently been applied to graph learning tasks and achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) results. However, many competitive methods run GNNs multiple times with subgraph extraction and customized labeling to capture information that is hard for normal GNNs to learn. Such operations are time-consuming and do not scale to large graphs. In this paper, we propose an efficient GNN framework called Geodesic GNN (GDGNN) that requires only one GNN run and injects conditional relationships between nodes into the model without labeling. This strategy effectively reduces the runtime of subgraph methods. Specifically, we view the shortest paths between two nodes as the spatial graph context of the neighborhood around them. The GNN embeddings of nodes on the shortest paths are used to generate geodesic representations. Conditioned on the geodesic representations, GDGNN can generate node, link, and graph representations that carry much richer structural information than plain GNNs. We theoretically prove that GDGNN is more powerful than plain GNNs. We present experimental results to show that GDGNN achieves highly competitive performance with SOTA GNN models on various graph learning tasks while taking significantly less time. Lecheng Kong, Yixin Chen 0001, Muhan Zhang |
NeurIPS | 1 |