VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Wei Chow
dblp:367/7310
· DBLP profile ↗
10ranked-venue papers
3as first author
10since 2021 · last 2025
0009-0007-6075-6749ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 8 · 3 first-author · 8 since 2021Computer networks · 1 · 1 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
9 papers |
Graph learning · 29% Vision and language · 24% Generative modeling · 21% | |
| Computer graphics and multimedia
2 papers |
Visual content generation and editing · 100% | |
| Databases, data mining, and information retrieval
2 papers |
Information retrieval · 100% |
Topics — the 24 heaviest of 26, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Computer vision › Vision and language › vision-language model
multimodal large language model |
1.8 | 3 | 2025 | Unified Generative and Discriminative Training for Multi-modal Large Language Models · NeurIPS 2024 Auto-Encoding Morph-Tokens for Multimodal LLM · ICML 2024 MERIT: Multilingual Semantic Retrieval with Interleaved Multi-Condition Query · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Graph learning
graph neural network |
1.1 | 2 | 2025 | KAA: Kolmogorov-Arnold Attention for Enhancing Attentive Graph Neural Networks · ICLR 2025 Exploring Correlations of Self-Supervised Tasks for Graphs · ICML 2024 |
Machine learning › Graph learning › graph neural network
attention-based graph neural network |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | KAA: Kolmogorov-Arnold Attention for Enhancing Attentive Graph Neural Networks · ICLR 2025 |
Machine learning › Generative modeling
diffusion model |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | AnyEdit: Mastering Unified High-Quality Image Editing for Any Idea · CVPR 2025 |
Machine learning › Graph learning
dynamic graph |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Enhancing Cross-domain Link Prediction via Evolution Process Modeling · WWW 2025 |
Machine learning › Deep learning architectures and training › feedforward neural network
kolmogorov-arnold networks |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | KAA: Kolmogorov-Arnold Attention for Enhancing Attentive Graph Neural Networks · ICLR 2025 |
Machine learning › Graph learning
link prediction |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Enhancing Cross-domain Link Prediction via Evolution Process Modeling · WWW 2025 |
Machine learning › Representation and self-supervised learning › representation learning › unsupervised representation learning › self-supervised representation learning › masked modeling
masked image modeling |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Meissonic: Revitalizing Masked Generative Transformers for Efficient High-Resolution Text-to-Image Synthesis · ICLR 2025 |
Computer vision › 3D vision › 3d scene understanding
physical scene understanding |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | PhysBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Vision-Language Models for Physical World Understanding · ICLR 2025 |
Machine learning › Generative modeling › diffusion model › text-to-image generation
text-to-image diffusion model |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | AnyEdit: Mastering Unified High-Quality Image Editing for Any Idea · CVPR 2025 |
Information retrieval
cross-language information retrieval |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | MERIT: Multilingual Semantic Retrieval with Interleaved Multi-Condition Query · NeurIPS 2025 |
Information retrieval › search engines
semantic search |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | MERIT: Multilingual Semantic Retrieval with Interleaved Multi-Condition Query · NeurIPS 2025 |
Visual content generation and editing
image editing |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | AnyEdit: Mastering Unified High-Quality Image Editing for Any Idea · CVPR 2025 |
Visual content generation and editing › image editing › text-guided image editing
instruction-based image editing |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | AnyEdit: Mastering Unified High-Quality Image Editing for Any Idea · CVPR 2025 |
Visual content generation and editing › image generation
text-to-image generation |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Meissonic: Revitalizing Masked Generative Transformers for Efficient High-Resolution Text-to-Image Synthesis · ICLR 2025 |
Machine learning › Graph learning
graph self-supervised learning |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Exploring Correlations of Self-Supervised Tasks for Graphs · ICML 2024 |
Machine learning › Generative modeling
image generation |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Auto-Encoding Morph-Tokens for Multimodal LLM · ICML 2024 |
Machine learning › Generative modeling
image tokenization |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Auto-Encoding Morph-Tokens for Multimodal LLM · ICML 2024 |
Machine learning › Learning paradigms
multi-task learning |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Exploring Correlations of Self-Supervised Tasks for Graphs · ICML 2024 |
Machine learning › Learning paradigms › multi-task learning
task relationship modeling |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Exploring Correlations of Self-Supervised Tasks for Graphs · ICML 2024 |
Computer vision › Vision and language
vision-language model |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Unified Generative and Discriminative Training for Multi-modal Large Language Models · NeurIPS 2024 |
Computer vision › Vision and language › vision-language model › multimodal large language model
multimodal instruction following |
0.3 | 1 | 2025 | AnyEdit: Mastering Unified High-Quality Image Editing for Any Idea · CVPR 2025 |
Information retrieval
cross-modal retrieval |
0.2 | 1 | 2024 | Unified Generative and Discriminative Training for Multi-modal Large Language Models · NeurIPS 2024 |
Information retrieval › document retrieval
fine-grained retrieval |
0.2 | 1 | 2024 | Unified Generative and Discriminative Training for Multi-modal Large Language Models · NeurIPS 2024 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
contrastive learning · 3.3transformer · 1.7task-aware routing · 1.7stable diffusion · 1.7masked image modeling · 1.7learnable task embedding · 1.7vision-language model · 0.9vision models · 0.9multimodal large language model · 0.9kolmogorov-arnold network · 0.9embedding reconstruction · 0.9b-spline · 0.9retrieval-augmented generation · 0.8dynamic time warping · 0.8
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | AnyEdit: Mastering Unified High-Quality Image Editing for Any IdeaabstractInstruction-based image editing aims to modify specific image elements with natural language instructions. However, current models in this domain often struggle to execute complex user instructions accurately, as they are trained on low-quality data with limited editing types. We present AnyEdit, a comprehensive multi-modal instruction editing dataset, comprising 2.5 million high-quality editing pairs spanning over 20 editing types and five domains. We ensure the diversity and quality of the AnyEdit collection through three aspects: initial data diversity, adaptive editing process, and automated selection of editing results. Using the dataset, we further train a novel AnyEdit Stable Diffusion with task-aware routing and learnable task embedding for unified image editing. Comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that AnyEdit consistently boosts the performance of diffusion-based editing models. This presents prospects for developing instruction-driven image editing models that support human creativity. Wei Chow, Zhongqi Yue, Kaihang Pan, Xiaoyang Wan, Juncheng Li 0006, Siliang Tang, Hanwang Zhang, Yueting Zhuang |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2025 | Meissonic: Revitalizing Masked Generative Transformers for Efficient High-Resolution Text-to-Image SynthesisabstractWe present Meissonic, which elevates non-autoregressive text-to-image Masked Image Modeling (MIM) to a level comparable with state-of-the-art diffusion models like SDXL. By incorporating a comprehensive suite of architectural innovations, advanced positional encoding strategies, and optimized sampling conditions, Meissonic substantially improves MIM's performance and efficiency. Additionally, we leverage high-quality training data, integrate micro-conditions informed by human preference scores, and employ feature compression layers to further enhance image fidelity and resolution. Our model not only matches but often exceeds the performance of existing methods in generating high-quality, high-resolution images. Extensive experiments validate Meissonic’s capabilities, demonstrating its potential as a new standard in text-to-image synthesis. Jinbin Bai, Tian Ye 0001, Wei Chow, Enxin Song, Xiangtai Li, Zhen Dong 0003, Lei Zhu 0003, Shuicheng Yan |
ICLR | 3 |
| 2025 | PhysBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Vision-Language Models for Physical World UnderstandingabstractUnderstanding the physical world is a fundamental challenge in embodied AI, critical for enabling agents to perform complex tasks and operate safely in real-world environments. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown great promise in reasoning and task planning for embodied agents, their ability to comprehend physical phenomena remains extremely limited.
To close this gap, we introduce PhysBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs' physical world understanding capability across a diverse set of tasks.
PhysBench contains 10,002 entries of interleaved video-image-text data, categorized into four major domains: physical object properties, physical object relationships, physical scene understanding, and physics-based dynamics, further divided into 19 subclasses and 8 distinct capability dimensions.
Our extensive experiments, conducted on 75 representative VLMs, reveal that while these models excel in common-sense reasoning, they struggle with understanding the physical world---likely due to the absence of physical knowledge in their training data and the lack of embedded physical priors.
To tackle the shortfall, we introduce PhysAgent, a novel framework that combines the generalization strengths of VLMs with the specialized expertise of vision models, significantly enhancing VLMs' physical understanding across a variety of tasks, including an 18.4\% improvement on GPT-4o.
Furthermore, our results demonstrate that enhancing VLMs' physical world understanding capabilities can help embodied agents such as MOKA.
We believe that PhysBench and PhysAgent offer valuable insights and contribute to bridging the gap between VLMs and physical world understanding. [Project Page is here](https://physbench.github.io/) Wei Chow, Jiageng Mao, Boyi Li 0001, Daniel Seita, Vitor Campagnolo Guizilini, Yue Wang 0041 |
ICLR | 1 |
| 2025 | KAA: Kolmogorov-Arnold Attention for Enhancing Attentive Graph Neural NetworksabstractGraph neural networks (GNNs) with attention mechanisms, often referred to as attentive GNNs, have emerged as a prominent paradigm in advanced GNN models in recent years. However, our understanding of the critical process of scoring neighbor nodes remains limited, leading to the underperformance of many existing attentive GNNs. In this paper, we unify the scoring functions of current attentive GNNs and propose Kolmogorov-Arnold Attention (KAA), which integrates the Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) architecture into the scoring process. KAA enhances the performance of scoring functions across the board and can be applied to nearly all existing attentive GNNs. To compare the expressive power of KAA with other scoring functions, we introduce Maximum Ranking Distance (MRD) to quantitatively estimate their upper bounds in ranking errors for node importance. Our analysis reveals that, under limited parameters and constraints on width and depth, both linear transformation-based and MLP-based scoring functions exhibit finite expressive power. In contrast, our proposed KAA, even with a single-layer KAN parameterized by zero-order B-spline functions, demonstrates nearly infinite expressive power. Extensive experiments on both node-level and graph-level tasks using various backbone models show that KAA-enhanced scoring functions consistently outperform their original counterparts, achieving performance improvements of over 20% in some cases. Taoran Fang, Tianhong Gao, Chunping Wang 0001, Yihao Shang, Wei Chow, Lei Chen 0082, Yang Yang 0009 |
ICLR | 5 |
| 2025 | mmExpert: Integrating Large Language Models for Comprehensive mmWave Data Synthesis and UnderstandingabstractMillimeter-wave (mmWave) sensing technology holds significant value in human-centric applications, yet the high costs associated with data acquisition and annotation limit its widespread adoption in our daily lives. Concurrently, the rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has opened up opportunities for addressing complex human needs. This paper presents mmExpert, an innovative mmWave understanding framework consisting of a data generation flywheel that leverages LLMs to automate the generation of synthetic mmWave radar datasets for specific application scenarios, thereby training models capable of zero-shot generalization in real-world environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the data synthesized by mmExpert significantly enhances the performance of downstream models and facilitates the successful deployment of large language models for mmWave understanding. Xiuzhen Guo, Xiangguang Wang, Wei Chow, Yuanchao Shu, Shibo He |
MobiHoc | 5 |
| 2025 | MERIT: Multilingual Semantic Retrieval with Interleaved Multi-Condition QueryabstractSemantic retrieval is crucial for modern applications yet remains underexplored in current research.
Existing datasets are limited to single languages, single images, or singular retrieval conditions, often failing to fully exploit the expressive capacity of visual information as evidenced by maintained performance when images are replaced with captions.
However, practical retrieval scenarios frequently involve interleaved multi-condition queries with multiple images.
Hence, this paper introduces MERIT, the first multilingual dataset for interleaved multi-condition semantic retrieval, comprising 320,000 queries with 135,000 products
in 5 languages, covering 7 distinct product categories.
Extensive experiments on MERIT identify existing models's critical limitation: focusing solely on global semantic information while neglecting specific conditional elements in queries.
Consequently, we propose Coral, a novel fine-tuning framework that adapts pre-trained MLLMs by integrating embedding reconstruction to preserve fine-grained conditional elements and contrastive learning to extract comprehensive global semantics.
Experiments demonstrate that Coral achieves a 45.9% performance improvement over conventional approaches on MERIT, with strong generalization capabilities validated across 8 established retrieval benchmarks.
Collectively, our contributions—a novel dataset, identification of critical limitations in existing approaches, and an innovative fine-tuning framework—establish a foundation for future research in interleaved multi-condition semantic retrieval.
**Data & Code**: [MERIT-2025.github.io](https://merit-2025.github.io) Wei Chow, Lingdong Kong, Yidong Cai, Botian Jiang, Shilin Xu 0001, Minghui Qiu, Xiangtai Li, Siliang Tang, Juncheng Li 0006 |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2025 | Enhancing Cross-domain Link Prediction via Evolution Process ModelingabstractThis paper proposes CrossLink, a novel framework for cross-domain link prediction. CrossLink learns the evolution pattern of a specific downstream graph and subsequently makes pattern-specific link predictions. It employs a technique called conditioned link generation, which integrates both evolution and structure modeling to perform evolution-specific link prediction. This conditioned link generation is carried out by a transformer-decoder architecture, enabling efficient parallel training and inference. CrossLink is trained on extensive dynamic graphs across diverse domains, encompassing 6 million dynamic edges. Extensive experiments on eight untrained graphs demonstrate that CrossLink achieves state-of-the-art performance in cross-domain link prediction. Compared to advanced baselines under the same settings, CrossLink shows an average improvement of 11.40% in Average Precision across eight graphs. Impressively, it surpasses the fully supervised performance of 8 advanced baselines on 6 untrained graphs. Project Page is https://zjunet.github.io/CrossLink/ Xuanwen Huang, Wei Chow, Yize Zhu, Ziwei Chai, Chunping Wang 0001, Lei Chen 0082, Yang Yang 0009 |
WWW | 2 |
| 2024 | Exploring Correlations of Self-Supervised Tasks for GraphsabstractGraph self-supervised learning has sparked a research surge in training informative representations without accessing any labeled data. However, our understanding of graph self-supervised learning remains limited, and the inherent relationships between various self-supervised tasks are still unexplored. Our paper aims to provide a fresh understanding of graph self-supervised learning based on task correlations. Specifically, we evaluate the performance of the representations trained by one specific task on other tasks and define correlation values to quantify task correlations. Through this process, we unveil the task correlations between various self-supervised tasks and can measure their expressive capabilities, which are closely related to downstream performance. By analyzing the correlation values between tasks across various datasets, we reveal the complexity of task correlations and the limitations of existing multi-task learning methods. To obtain more capable representations, we propose Graph Task Correlation Modeling (GraphTCM) to illustrate the task correlations and utilize it to enhance graph self-supervised training. The experimental results indicate that our method significantly outperforms existing methods across various downstream tasks. Taoran Fang, Wei Chow, Yifei Sun 0002, Kaiqiao Han, Lvbin Ma, Yang Yang 0009 |
ICML | 2 |
| 2024 | Auto-Encoding Morph-Tokens for Multimodal LLMabstractFor multimodal LLMs, the synergy of visual comprehension (textual output) and generation (visual output) presents an ongoing challenge. This is due to a conflicting objective: for comprehension, an MLLM needs to abstract the visuals; for generation, it needs to preserve the visuals as much as possible. Thus, the objective is a dilemma for visual-tokens. To resolve the conflict, we propose encoding images into morph-tokens to serve a dual purpose: for comprehension, they act as visual prompts instructing MLLM to generate texts; for generation, they take on a different, non-conflicting role as complete visual-tokens for image reconstruction, where the missing visual cues are recovered by the MLLM. Extensive experiments show that morph-tokens can achieve a new SOTA for multimodal comprehension and generation simultaneously. Our project is available at https://github.com/DCDmllm/MorphTokens. Kaihang Pan, Siliang Tang, Juncheng Li 0006, Zhaoyu Fan 0002, Wei Chow, Shuicheng Yan, Tat-Seng Chua, Yueting Zhuang, Hanwang Zhang |
ICML | 5 |
| 2024 | Unified Generative and Discriminative Training for Multi-modal Large Language ModelsabstractIn recent times, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been trained under two predominant paradigms. Generative training has enabled Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to tackle various complex tasks, yet issues such as hallucinations and weak object discrimination persist. Discriminative training, exemplified by models like CLIP, excels in zero-shot image-text classification and retrieval, yet struggles with complex scenarios requiring fine-grained semantic differentiation. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a unified approach that integrates the strengths of both paradigms. Considering interleaved image-text sequences as the general format of input samples, we introduce a structure-induced training strategy that imposes semantic relationships between input samples and the MLLM’s hidden state. This approach enhances the MLLM’s ability to capture global semantics and distinguish fine-grained semantics. By leveraging dynamic sequence alignment within the Dynamic Time Warping framework and integrating a novel kernel for fine-grained semantic differentiation, our method effectively balances generative and discriminative tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art results in multiple generative tasks, especially those requiring cognitive and discrimination abilities. Additionally, our method surpasses discriminative benchmarks in interleaved and fine-grained retrieval tasks. By employing a retrieval-augmented generation strategy, our approach further enhances performance in some generative tasks within one model, offering a promising direction for future research in vision-language modeling. Wei Chow, Juncheng Li 0006, Kaihang Pan, Hao Fei 0001, Zhiqi Ge, Siliang Tang, Hanwang Zhang, Qianru Sun |
NeurIPS | 1 |