Yuhan Li 0001

dblp:116/8661-1 · DBLP profile ↗
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10ranked-venue papers in the field
3as first author
10since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0003-1324-5819ORCID · verified

Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several

Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 4 (2 first)Information Retrieval & Web Search · 3 (1 first)Database Systems & Data Management · 2Knowledge Engineering, Semantic Web & Information Systems · 1
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 GraphRAG-R1: Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Process-Constrained Reinforcement Learning
abstract
Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) has shown great effectiveness in enhancing the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by leveraging graph structures for knowledge representation and modeling complex real-world relationships. However, existing GraphRAG methods still face significant bottlenecks when handling complex problems that require multi-hop reasoning, as their query and retrieval phases are largely based on pre-defined heuristics and do not fully utilize the reasoning potentials of LLMs. To address this problem, we propose GraphRAG-R1, an adaptive GraphRAG framework by training LLMs with process-constrained outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the multi-hop reasoning ability. Our method can decompose complex problems, autonomously invoke retrieval tools to acquire necessary information, and perform effective reasoning. Specifically, we utilize a modified version of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) that supports rollout-with-thinking capability to train the model. Next, we design two process-constrained reward functions. To handle the shallow retrieval problem, we design a Progressive Retrieval Attenuation (PRA) reward to encourage essential retrievals. Then, to handle the over-thinking problem, we design a Cost-Aware F1 (CAF) reward to balance the model performance with computational costs. We further design a phase-dependent training strategy, containing three training stages corresponding to cold start and these two rewards. These stages empower GraphRAG with format following, behavior shaping, and smartness optimization abilities, respectively. Lastly, our method adopts a hybrid graph-textual retrieval to improve the reasoning capacity. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GraphRAG-R1 significantly boosts LLM capabilities in solving complex reasoning problems compared to state-of-the-art GraphRAG methods on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets. Furthermore, our framework can be flexibly integrated with various existing retrieval methods, consistently delivering performance improvements.
Chuanyue Yu, Kuo Zhao, Yuhan Li 0001, Heng Chang, Mingjian Feng, Xiangzhe Jiang, Jia Li 0009, Qingyun Sun, Jianxin Li 0002, Ziwei Zhang 0001
WWW3
2025 GCoder: Improving Large Language Model for Generalized Graph Reasoning
Qifan Zhang 0001, Xiaobin Hong 0002, Nuo Chen 0001, Yuhan Li 0001, Jing Tang 0004, Jia Li 0009
CIKM5
2025 Advancing Graph Foundation Models: A Data-Centric Perspective
abstract
Recently, Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) have emerged as a significant research topic in graph machine learning. Compared with traditional graph neural networks, GFMs demonstrate impressive zero-shot generalization across different domains and tasks through large-scale pre-training on extensive and diverse graph data. Despite the initial success of pre-training, existing GFMs face challenges such as extreme time consumption and the presence of redundancy and noise in pre-training data. To alleviate these issues, we present the first exploration of data-centric GFM, which aims to optimize pre-training data (i.e., a set of subgraphs) to establish a more efficient GFM while maintaining robust performance across various downstream tasks. We propose DCGFM, a plug-and-play approach for Data-Centric GFM that incorporates the idea of data pruning to remove redundant and less informative subgraphs from the pre-training data, thereby improving both efficiency and effectiveness. Specifically, DCGFM consists of two components: (1) a model-agnostic hard pruning module that filters out subgraphs with lower informativity scores by considering both the semantics and structures of subgraphs; and (2) a model-aware soft pruning module that dynamically prunes subgraphs with lower loss values in each pre-training epoch with a gradient rescaling strategy. Extensive experiments on representative GFM backbones demonstrate DCGFM's efficiency and effectiveness. Remarkably, DCGFM achieves even better performance using only 30% of the pre-training data. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/Yuhan1i/DCGFM.
Yuhan Li 0001, Heng Chang, Yuxiang Ren, Jia Li 0009
KDD (2)1
2025 G-Refer: Graph Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model for Explainable Recommendation
abstract
Explainable recommendation has demonstrated significant advantages in informing users about the logic behind recommendations, thereby increasing system transparency, effectiveness, and trustworthiness. To provide personalized and interpretable explanations, existing works often combine the generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) with collaborative filtering (CF) information. CF information extracted from the user-item interaction graph captures the user behaviors and preferences, which is crucial for providing informative explanations. However, due to the complexity of graph structure, effectively extracting the CF information from graphs still remains a challenge. Moreover, existing methods often struggle with the integration of extracted CF information with LLMs due to its implicit representation and the modality gap between graph structures and natural language explanations. To address these challenges, we propose G-Refer, a framework using Graph Retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs) for explainable recommendation. Specifically, we first employ a hybrid graph retrieval mechanism to retrieve explicit CF signals from both structural and semantic perspectives. The retrieved CF information is explicitly formulated as human-understandable text by the proposed graph translation and accounts for the explanations generated by LLMs. To bridge the modality gap, we introduce knowledge pruning and retrieval-augmented fine-tuning to enhance the ability of LLMs to process and utilize the retrieved CF information to generate explanations. Extensive experiments show that G-Refer achieves superior performance compared with existing methods in both explainability and stability. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/Yuhan1i/G-Refer.
Yuhan Li 0001, Xinni Zhang, Linhao Luo, Heng Chang, Yuxiang Ren, Irwin King, Jia Li 0009
WWW1
2025 LSketch: A label-enabled graph stream sketch toward time-sensitive queries
abstract
Heterogeneous graph streams represent data interactions in real-world applications and are characterized by dynamic and heterogeneous properties including varying node labels, edge labels and edge weights. The mining of graph streams is critical in fields such as network security , social network analysis , and traffic control. However, the sheer volume and high dynamics of graph streams pose significant challenges for efficient storage and accurate query analysis. To address these challenges, we propose LSketch, a novel sketch technique designed for heterogeneous graph streams. Unlike traditional methods, LSketch effectively preserves the diverse label information inherent in these streams, enhancing the expressive ability of sketches. Furthermore, as graph streams evolve over time, some edges may become outdated and lose their relevance. LSketch incorporates a sliding window model that eliminates expired edges, ensuring that the analysis remains focused on the most current and relevant data automatically. LSketch operates with sub-linear storage space and supports both structure-based and time-sensitive queries with high accuracy. We perform extensive experiments over four real datasets, demonstrating that LSketch outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of query accuracy and time efficiency.
Yiling Zeng, Chuanfeng Jian, Chunyao Song, Tingjian Ge, Yuhan Li 0001
Inf. Sci.5
2024 GraphWiz: An Instruction-Following Language Model for Graph Computational Problems
abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive success across various domains, but their capability in understanding and resolving complex graph problems is less explored. To bridge this gap, we introduce GraphInstruct, a novel instruction-tuning dataset aimed at enabling language models to tackle a broad spectrum of graph problems through explicit reasoning paths. Utilizing GraphInstruct, we build GraphWiz, an open-source language model capable of solving various graph computational problems while generating clear reasoning processes. To further enhance the model's performance and reliability, we integrate the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) framework within the graph problem-solving context. The improved model, GraphWiz-DPO, achieves an average accuracy of 65% across nine tasks with different complexity levels, surpassing GPT-4 which has an average accuracy of 43.8%. Our study also investigates the relationship between training data volume and model performance, emphasizing the risk of overfitting as data volume increases. Additionally, we explore the transferability of the proposed model across different tasks and datasets, demonstrating its robust zero-shot generalization capability. GraphWiz offers a new blueprint and valuable insights for developing LLMs specialized in graph reasoning and problem-solving.
Nuo Chen 0001, Yuhan Li 0001, Jia Li 0009
KDD2
2024 ZeroG: Investigating Cross-dataset Zero-shot Transferability in Graphs
abstract
With the development of foundation models such as large language models, zero-shot transfer learning has become increasingly significant. This is highlighted by the generative capabilities of NLP models like GPT-4, and the retrieval-based approaches of CV models like CLIP, both of which effectively bridge the gap between seen and unseen data. In the realm of graph learning, the continuous emergence of new graphs and the challenges of human labeling also amplify the necessity for zero-shot transfer learning, driving the exploration of approaches that can generalize across diverse graph data without necessitating dataset-specific and label-specific fine-tuning. In this study, we extend such paradigms to Zero-shot transferability in Graphs by introducing ZeroG, a new framework tailored to enable cross-dataset generalization. Addressing the inherent challenges such as feature misalignment, mismatched label spaces, and negative transfer, we leverage a language model to encode both node attributes and class semantics, ensuring consistent feature dimensions across datasets. We also propose a prompt-based subgraph sampling module that enriches the semantic information and structure information of extracted subgraphs using prompting nodes and neighborhood aggregation, respectively. We further adopt a lightweight fine-tuning strategy that reduces the risk of overfitting and maintains the zero-shot learning efficacy of the language model. The results underscore the effectiveness of our model in achieving significant cross-dataset zero-shot transferability, opening pathways for the development of graph foundation models.
Yuhan Li 0001, Peisong Wang 0002, Zhixun Li, Jeffrey Xu Yu, Jia Li 0009
KDD1
2024 Graph Intelligence with Large Language Models and Prompt Learning
abstract
Graph plays a significant role in representing and analyzing complex relationships in real-world applications such as citation networks, social networks, and biological data. Graph intelligence is rapidly becoming a crucial aspect of understanding and exploiting the intricate interconnections within graph data. Recently, large language models (LLMs) and prompt learning techniques have pushed graph intelligence forward, outperforming traditional Graph Neural Network (GNN) pre-training methods and setting new benchmarks for performance. In this tutorial, we begin by offering a comprehensive review and analysis of existing methods that integrate LLMs with graphs. We introduce existing works based on a novel taxonomy that classifies them into three distinct categories according to the roles of LLMs in graph tasks: as enhancers, predictors, or alignment components. Secondly, we introduce a new learning method that utilizes prompting on graphs, offering substantial potential to enhance graph transfer capabilities across diverse tasks and domains. We discuss existing works on graph prompting within a unified framework and introduce our developed tool for executing a variety of graph prompting tasks. Additionally, we discuss the applications of combining Graphs, LLMs, and prompt learning across various tasks, such as urban computing, recommendation systems, and anomaly detection. This lecture-style tutorial is an extension of our original work published in IJCAI 2024[44] and arXiv[77] with the invitation of KDD24.
Jia Li 0009, Xiangguo Sun, Yuhan Li 0001, Zhixun Li, Hong Cheng 0001, Jeffrey Xu Yu
KDD3
2023 Learning Entity Linking Features for Emerging Entities
abstract
Entity linking (EL) is the process of linking entity mentions appearing in text with their corresponding entities in a knowledge base. EL features of entities (e.g., prior probability, relatedness score, and entity embedding) are usually estimated based on Wikipedia. However, for newly emerging entities (EEs) which have just been discovered in news, they may still not be included in Wikipedia yet. As a consequence, it is unable to obtain required EL features for those EEs from Wikipedia and EL models will always fail to link ambiguous mentions with those EEs correctly as the absence of their EL features. To deal with this problem, in this paper we focus on a new task of learning EL features for emerging entities in a general way. We propose a novel approach called STAMO to learn high-quality EL features for EEs automatically, which needs just a small number of labeled documents for each EE collected from the Web, as it could further leverage the knowledge hidden in the unlabeled data. STAMO is mainly based on self-training, which makes it flexibly integrated with any EL feature or EL model, but also makes it easily suffer from the error reinforcement problem caused by the mislabeled data. Instead of some common self-training strategies that try to throw the mislabeled data away explicitly, we regard self-training as a multiple optimization process with respect to the EL features of EEs, and propose both intra-slot and inter-slot optimizations to alleviate the error reinforcement problem implicitly. We construct two EL datasets involving selected EEs to evaluate the quality of obtained EL features for EEs, and the experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms other baseline methods of learning EL features.
Chenwei Ran, Wei Shen 0004, Yuhan Li 0001, Jianyong Wang 0001, Yantao Jia
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.4
2023 Entity Linking Meets Deep Learning: Techniques and Solutions
abstract
Entity linking (EL) is the process of linking entity mentions appearing in web text with their corresponding entities in a knowledge base. EL plays an important role in the fields of knowledge engineering and data mining, underlying a variety of downstream applications such as knowledge base population, content analysis, relation extraction, and question answering. In recent years, deep learning (DL), which has achieved tremendous success in various domains, has also been leveraged in EL methods to surpass traditional machine learning based methods and yield the state-of-the-art performance. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review and analysis of existing DL based EL methods. First of all, we propose a new taxonomy, which organizes existing DL based EL methods using three axes: embedding, feature, and algorithm. Then we systematically survey the representative EL methods along the three axes of the taxonomy. Later, we introduce ten commonly used EL data sets and give a quantitative performance analysis of DL based EL methods over these data sets. Finally, we discuss the remaining limitations of existing methods and highlight some promising future directions.
Wei Shen 0004, Yuhan Li 0001, Yinan Liu 0001, Jiawei Han 0001, Jianyong Wang 0001, Xiaojie Yuan
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.2