VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Zhe-Rui Yang
dblp:339/0733
· DBLP profile ↗
8ranked-venue papers
4as first author
8since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-4355-9723ORCID · 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 · 4 · 2 first-author · 4 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 2 · 1 first-author · 2 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Erase Then Rectify: A Training-Free Parameter Editing Approach for Cost-Effective Graph UnlearningabstractGraph unlearning, which aims to eliminate the influence of specific nodes, edges, or attributes from a trained Graph Neural Network (GNN), is essential in applications where privacy, bias, or data obsolescence is a concern. However, existing graph unlearning techniques often necessitate additional training on the remaining data, leading to significant computational costs, particularly with large-scale graphs. To address these challenges, we propose a two-stage training-free approach, Erase then Rectify (ETR), designed for efficient and scalable graph unlearning while preserving the model utility. Specifically, we first build a theoretical foundation showing that masking parameters critical for unlearned samples enables effective unlearning. Building on this insight, the Erase stage strategically edits model parameters to eliminate the impact of unlearned samples and their propagated influence on intercorrelated nodes. To further ensure the GNN's utility, the Rectify stage devises a gradient approximation method to estimate the model's gradient on the remaining dataset, which is then used to enhance model performance. Overall, ETR achieves graph unlearning without additional training or full training data access, significantly reducing computational overhead and preserving data privacy. Extensive experiments on seven public datasets demonstrate the consistent superiority of ETR in model utility, unlearning efficiency, and unlearning effectiveness, establishing it as a promising solution for real-world graph unlearning challenges. Zhe-Rui Yang, Jindong Han, Chang-Dong Wang 0001, Hao Liu 0026 |
AAAI | 1 |
| 2025 | GraphLoRA: Structure-Aware Contrastive Low-Rank Adaptation for Cross-Graph Transfer LearningabstractGraph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in handling a range of graph analytical tasks across various domains, such as e-commerce and social networks. Despite their versatility, GNNs face significant challenges in transferability, limiting their utility in real-world applications. Existing research in GNN transfer learning overlooks discrepancies in distribution among various graph datasets, facing challenges when transferring across different distributions. How to effectively adopt a well-trained GNN to new graphs with varying feature and structural distributions remains an under-explored problem. Taking inspiration from the success of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) in adapting large language models to various domains, we propose GraphLoRA, an effective and parameter-efficient method for transferring well-trained GNNs to diverse graph domains. Specifically, we first propose a Structure-aware Maximum Mean Discrepancy (SMMD) to align divergent node feature distributions across source and target graphs. Moreover, we introduce low-rank adaptation by injecting a small trainable GNN alongside the pre-trained one, effectively bridging structural distribution gaps while mitigating the catastrophic forgetting. Additionally, a structure-aware regularization objective is proposed to enhance the adaptability of the pre-trained GNN to target graph with scarce supervision labels. Extensive experiments on eight real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of GraphLoRA against fourteen baselines by tuning only 20% of parameters, even across disparate graph domains. The code is available at https://github.com/AllminerLab/GraphLoRA. Zhe-Rui Yang, Jindong Han, Chang-Dong Wang 0001, Hao Liu 0026 |
KDD (1) | 1 |
| 2025 | Foundation Models for Scientific Discovery: From Paradigm Enhancement to Paradigm TransitionabstractFoundation models (FMs), such as GPT-4 and AlphaFold, are reshaping the landscape of scientific research. Beyond accelerating tasks such as hypothesis generation, experimental design, and result interpretation, they prompt a more fundamental question: Are FMs merely enhancing existing scientific methodologies, or are they redefining the way science is conducted? In this paper, we argue that FMs are catalyzing a transition toward a new scientific paradigm. We introduce a three-stage framework to describe this evolution: (1) Meta-Scientific Integration, where FMs enhance workflows within traditional paradigms; (2) Hybrid Human-AI Co-Creation, where FMs become active collaborators in problem formulation, reasoning, and discovery; and (3) Autonomous Scientific Discovery, where FMs operate as independent agents capable of generating new scientific knowledge with minimal human intervention. Through this lens, we review current applications and emerging capabilities of FMs across existing scientific paradigms. We further identify risks and future directions for FM-enabled scientific discovery. This position paper aims to support the scientific community in understanding the transformative role of FMs and to foster reflection on the future of scientific discovery. Fan Liu 0011, Jindong Han, Tengfei Lyu, Weijia Zhang 0003, Zhe-Rui Yang, Lu Dai 0001, Cancheng Liu, Hao Liu 0026 |
NeurIPS | 5 |
| 2024 | Knowledge-Aware Explainable Reciprocal RecommendationabstractReciprocal recommender systems (RRS) have been widely used in online platforms such as online dating and recruitment. They can simultaneously fulfill the needs of both parties involved in the recommendation process. Due to the inherent nature of the task, interaction data is relatively sparse compared to other recommendation tasks. Existing works mainly address this issue through content-based recommendation methods. However, these methods often implicitly model textual information from a unified perspective, making it challenging to capture the distinct intentions held by each party, which further leads to limited performance and the lack of interpretability. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge-Aware Explainable Reciprocal Recommender System (KAERR), which models metapaths between two parties independently, considering their respective perspectives and requirements. Various metapaths are fused using an attention-based mechanism, where the attention weights unveil dual-perspective preferences and provide recommendation explanations for both parties. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets from diverse scenarios demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, while also delivering compelling reasons for recommendations to both parties. Kai-Huang Lai, Zhe-Rui Yang, Pei-Yuan Lai, Chang-Dong Wang 0001, Mohsen Guizani, Min Chen 0003 |
AAAI | 2 |
| 2024 | BiMuF: a bi-directional recommender system with multi-semantic filter for online recruitment
Pei-Yuan Lai, Zhe-Rui Yang, De-Zhang Liao, Chang-Dong Wang 0001 |
Knowl. Inf. Syst. | 2 |
| 2024 | Collaborative Meta-Path Modeling for Explainable RecommendationabstractAlthough recommender systems have achieved considerable success, sometimes it is difficult to convince users due to the failure to explain the recommendation results. For this reason, explainable recommender systems have drawn a lot of attention in recent years. Among explainable recommendation models, the meta-path-based model plays a significant role because it can reason over the path connecting a user–item pair to achieve explainability. However, it is difficult for the meta-path-based model to achieve such a common explanation in collaborative filtering as “a user similar to you has purchased item$A$” because there is no such meta-path. In this article, we contribute a new model named collaborative meta-path modeling for explainable recommendation (COMPER). It models the similarity of user pairs and item pairs through rating information and constructs collaborative meta-paths for explainability. In addition, we design an attention mechanism to aggregate different paths connecting the target user and the target item. Moreover, the information of the subgraph composed of all paths connecting the target user and the target item is integrated for rating prediction. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that COMPER achieves good performance in a variety of scenarios, achieving improvements over several baselines. Zhe-Rui Yang, Zhenyu He 0009, Chang-Dong Wang 0001, Jian-Huang Lai, Zhihong Tian 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Comput. Soc. Syst. | 1 |
| 2023 | Telecom Fraud Detection Based on Feature Binning and AutoencoderabstractWith the rapid development of modern communication technology, telecom fraud has been increasing year by year. If fraudsters can be accurately identified before they carry out their scams, it can not only protect people from potential losses but also increase trust in telecom operators. Therefore, in recent years, telecom fraud detection has garnered widespread attention in both academia and industry. Although existing methods for telecom fraud detection have achieved good performance, there are still many unresolved issues for real-world telecom operators. First, existing methods only focus on a single telecom scenario, while real-world telecom scenarios are diverse. Utilizing the characteristics of these different telecom scenarios can improve the effectiveness of telecom fraud detection. Second, existing methods usually use Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to aggregate neighbor information. However, real-world telecom operators can’t obtain information of users from other operators, resulting in the lacking destination node attributes, which degenerates the performance of GNNs. To address the above issues, in this paper, we propose a new model for Telecom Fraud Detection Based on Feature binning and Autoencoder (TFD-FA). In TFD-FA, a feature binning framework is designed to partition users into different telecom scenarios in order to reflect their unique characteristics. An autoencoder component is also designed to aggregate neighbor information. Furthermore, an imbalance classifier component is constructed to solve the problem of the significantly lower number of fraudsters compared to normal users. Extensive experiments in a real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of TFD-FA, which outperforms the compared baseline models. Fei-Yao Liang, Fei-Peng Li, Ronghai Xu, Wei Cheng 0008, Shi-Xian Deng, Zhe-Rui Yang, Chang-Dong Wang 0001 |
ICDM | 6 |
| 2022 | A Bi-directional Recommender System for Online RecruitmentabstractMost existing recommendation research has been concentrated on unidirectional recommendation, i.e. only recommending items to users. However, in many real-world scenarios, the platform needs to achieve bi-directional recommendation. For example, in an online recruitment scenario, the recommender system not only needs to recommend positions to candidates, but also recommend candidates to enterprises. In this paper, we first formalize a new recommendation problem called bi-directional recommendation and contribute a new bidirectional recommendation model named BiROR (Bi-directional Recommendation for Online Recruitment). In BiROR, an encoder component is utilized to learn the text embeddings, and a graph learning component is designed to learn the graph embeddings. In addition, a multi-task learning framework is designed to achieve bi-directional recommendation. In the multi-task learning framework, we share the text embeddings and graph embeddings to alleviate the problems of data sparsity and data asymmetry in online recruitment. Extensive experiments in a real-world task show that BiROR outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, verifying the effectiveness of the designs of our model. Zhe-Rui Yang, Zhenyu He 0009, Chang-Dong Wang 0001, Pei-Yuan Lai, De-Zhang Liao |
ICDM | 1 |