VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Mahesh Chandran
dblp:402/7310
· DBLP profile ↗
6ranked-venue papers
0as first author
6since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0003-3997-2301ORCID · reported
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 4 · 4 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 3 · 3 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
4 papers |
Trustworthy machine learning · 47% Graph learning · 39% Learning theory · 11% | |
| Software engineering, system software, and programming languages
1 paper |
Services computing and microservices · 100% |
Topics — the 10 heaviest of 11, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Machine learning › Graph learning
graph neural network |
2.7 | 3 | 2026 | Self-Adaptive Graph Mixture of Models · AAAI 2026 Interpretable and Parameter Efficient Graph Neural Additive Models with Random Fourier Features · NeurIPS 2025 GnnXemplar: Exemplars to Explanations - Natural Language Rules for Global GNN Interpretability · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Learning theory
model selection |
1.0 | 1 | 2026 | Self-Adaptive Graph Mixture of Models · AAAI 2026 |
Machine learning › Trustworthy machine learning › interpretability › model explanation
global explanation |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | GnnXemplar: Exemplars to Explanations - Natural Language Rules for Global GNN Interpretability · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Trustworthy machine learning › interpretability
graph neural network explanation |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | GnnXemplar: Exemplars to Explanations - Natural Language Rules for Global GNN Interpretability · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Trustworthy machine learning
interpretability |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | GnnXemplar: Exemplars to Explanations - Natural Language Rules for Global GNN Interpretability · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Graph learning › graph neural network › trustworthy graph neural networks
interpretable graph neural network |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Interpretable and Parameter Efficient Graph Neural Additive Models with Random Fourier Features · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Trustworthy machine learning › interpretability
natural language explanation |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | GnnXemplar: Exemplars to Explanations - Natural Language Rules for Global GNN Interpretability · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Trustworthy machine learning › interpretability
post-hoc explanation |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | GnnXemplar: Exemplars to Explanations - Natural Language Rules for Global GNN Interpretability · NeurIPS 2025 |
Services computing and microservices
enterprise systems |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Can LLMs Help You at Work? A Sandbox for Evaluating LLM Agents in Enterprise Environments · EMNLP 2025 |
Natural language and speech › Language models and text generation
LLM agents |
0.3 | 1 | 2025 | Can LLMs Help You at Work? A Sandbox for Evaluating LLM Agents in Enterprise Environments · EMNLP 2025 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
data generation pipeline · 1.7benchmark construction · 1.7pruning · 1.0mixture of experts · 1.0attention gating · 1.0prompt engineering · 0.9large language model · 0.9greedy approximation · 0.9gaussian process · 0.9coverage maximization · 0.9
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Self-Adaptive Graph Mixture of ModelsabstractGraph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful tools for learning over graph-structured data, yet recent studies have shown that their performance gains are beginning to plateau. In many cases, well-established models such as GCN and GAT, when appropriately tuned, can match or even exceed the performance of more complex, state-of-the-art architectures. This trend highlights a key limitation in the current landscape: the difficulty of selecting the most suitable model for a given graph task or dataset. To address this, we propose Self-Adaptive Graph Mixture of Models (SAGMM), a modular and practical framework that learns to automatically select and combine the most appropriate GNN models from a diverse pool of architectures. Unlike prior mixture-of-experts approaches that rely on variations of a single base model, SAGMM leverages architectural diversity and a topology-aware attention gating mechanism to adaptively assign experts to each node based on the structure of the input graph. To improve efficiency, SAGMM includes a pruning mechanism that reduces the number of active experts during training and inference without compromising performance. We also explore a training-efficient variant in which expert models are pretrained and frozen, and only the gating and task-specific layers are trained. We evaluate SAGMM on 16 benchmark datasets covering node classification, graph classification, regression, and link prediction tasks, and demonstrate that it consistently outperforms or matches leading GNN baselines and prior mixture-based methods, offering a robust and adaptive solution for real-world graph learning. Mohit Meena, Yash Punjabi, Abhishek A, Mahesh Chandran |
AAAI | 5 |
| 2025 | Gait Recognition via Pristine Feature Learning
Anuj Rathore, Daksh Thapar, Mahesh Chandran |
ACIVS | 3 |
| 2025 | Can LLMs Help You at Work? A Sandbox for Evaluating LLM Agents in Enterprise EnvironmentsabstractEnterprise systems are crucial for enhancing productivity and decision-making among employees and customers.Integrating LLM based systems into enterprise systems enables intelligent automation, personalized experiences, and efficient information retrieval, driving operational efficiency and strategic growth.However, developing and evaluating such systems is challenging due to the inherent complexity of enterprise environments, where data is fragmented across multiple sources and governed by sophisticated access controls.We present Enter-priseBench, a comprehensive benchmark that simulates enterprise settings, featuring 500 diverse tasks across software engineering, HR, finance, and administrative domains.Our benchmark uniquely captures key enterprise characteristics including data source fragmentation, access control hierarchies, and cross-functional workflows.Additionally, we provide a novel data generation pipeline that creates internally consistent enterprise tasks from organizational metadata.Experiments with state-of-the-art LLM agents demonstrate that even the most capable models achieve only 41.8% task completion, highlighting significant opportunities for improvement in enterprise-focused AI systems. Harsh Vishwakarma, Ankush Agarwal, Ojas Patil, Chaitanya Devaguptapu, Mahesh Chandran |
EMNLP | 5 |
| 2025 | GnnXemplar: Exemplars to Explanations - Natural Language Rules for Global GNN InterpretabilityabstractGraph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely used for node classification, yet their opaque decision-making limits trust and adoption. While local explanations offer insights into individual predictions, global explanation methods—those that characterize an entire class—remain underdeveloped. Existing global explainers rely on motif discovery in small graphs, an approach that breaks down in large, real-world settings where subgraph repetition is rare, node attributes are high-dimensional, and predictions arise from complex structure-attribute interactions. We propose GnnXemplar, a novel global explainer inspired from Exemplar Theory from cognitive science. GnnXemplar identifies representative nodes in the GNN embedding space—exemplars—and explains predictions using natural language rules derived from their neighborhoods. Exemplar selection is framed as a coverage maximization problem over reverse $k$-nearest neighbors, for which we provide an efficient greedy approximation. To derive interpretable rules, we employ a self-refining prompt strategy using large language models (LLMs). Experiments across diverse benchmarks show that GnnXemplar significantly outperforms existing methods in fidelity, scalability, and human interpretability, as validated by a user study with 60 participants. Burouj Armgaan, Eshan Jain, Harsh Pandey, Mahesh Chandran, Sayan Ranu |
NeurIPS | 4 |
| 2025 | Interpretable and Parameter Efficient Graph Neural Additive Models with Random Fourier FeaturesabstractGraph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel at jointly modeling node features and topology, yet their black-box nature limits their adoption in real-world applications where interpretability is desired. Inspired by the success of interpretable Neural Additive Models (NAM) for tabular data, Graph Neural Additive Network (GNAN) extends the additive modeling approach to graph data to overcome limitations of GNNs. While being interpretable, GNAN representation learning overlooks the importance of local aggregation and more importantly suffers from parameter complexity. To mitigate the above challenges, we introduce Graph Neural Additive Model with Random Fourier Features (G-NAMRFF), a lightweight, self‐interpretable graph additive architecture. G-NAMRFF represents each node embedding as the sum of feature‐wise contributions where contributions are modeled via a Gaussian process (GP) with a graph- and feature-aware kernel. Specifically, we construct a kernel using Radial Basis Function (RBF) with graph structure induced by Laplacian and learnable Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filter. We approximate the kernel using Random Fourier Features (RFFs) which transforms the GP prior to a Bayesian formulation, which are subsequently learnt using a single layer neural network with size equal to number of RFF features. G-NAMRFF is light weight with $168\times$ fewer parameters compared to GNAN. Despite its compact size, G-NAMRFF matches or outperforms state-of-the-art GNNs and GNAN on node and graph classification tasks, delivering real-time interpretability without sacrificing accuracy. Thummaluru Siddartha Reddy, Vempalli Naga Sai Saketh, Mahesh Chandran |
NeurIPS | 3 |
| 2025 | Elemental Composite Prototypical Network: Few-Shot Object Detection on Outdoor 3D Point Cloud ScenesabstractThis paper introduces the Elemental Composite Prototypical Network (ECPN), a novel approach to few-shot learning (FSL) in outdoor 3D point cloud object detection. Such point clouds are inherently non-uniformly packed and show marked intra-class variations due to aberrations in lidar scanning methods. Due to the limited availability of examples in the FSL setting, the intra-class variations serve as a much more formidable challenge to traditional detection algorithms. ECPN employs a novel prototypical learning method that solves the issues mentioned above. We generate and leverage multiple elemental prototypes for each class to capture essential geometric features from limited examples. These elemental prototypes are then combined in a weighted manner to arrive at composite prototypes that score relevant and irrelevant features in the elemental prototypes with respect to the query point cloud scene. Moreover, we introduce a novel feature-similarity-discrimination loss to refine the model's ability to distinguish between relevant objects and their background, significantly improving object detection accuracy in FSL scenarios. Our extensive testing on the nuScenes dataset demonstrates that ECPN significantly outperforms existing baselines, offering a robust solution to the complexities of outdoor few-shot 3D object detection (O-FS3D) and setting a new standard for future research. Arkadipta De, Vartika Sengar, Daksh Thapar, Mahesh Chandran, Manohar Kaul |
WACV | 4 |