EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Pengfei Ding 0001
dblp:133/0163-1
· DBLP profile ↗
12ranked-venue papers
7as first author
11since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-7048-7518ORCID · verified
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 10 · 6 first-author · 9 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 6 · 3 first-author · 5 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 3 · 1 first-author · 3 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 2 · 1 first-author · 2 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Adaptive and Reinforcement-Guided Contrastive Hypergraph DistillationabstractHypergraph-based distillation methods have been proposed to mitigate the high computational cost of Hypergraph Neural Networks (HGNNs) in modeling high-order relationships. However, most existing methods use static and uniform distillation strategies for all nodes and hyperedges, ignoring their individual characteristics. In addition, they neglect the student model's capability to independently extract useful internal features. As a result, they are not effective in transferring higher-order structural knowledge from the teacher. To overcome these limitations, we propose ARCHER, an Adaptive and Reinforcement-Guided Contrastive HypER graph Distillation framework that enables a lightweight MLP student model to outperform its HGNN teacher model. First, we design an adaptive strategy that leverages node- and hyperedge-level confidence to mediate error guidance from the teacher model. Second, we introduce a contrastive learning module that guides the student to learn from both the teacher's outputs and its own internal representations, producing more expressive embeddings. Finally, we propose a multi-armed bandit-based reinforcement learning module that dynamically balances multiple loss objectives during training. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing hypergraph distillation methods. Rongwei Xu 0001, Zitai Qiu, Pengfei Ding 0001, Yan Wang 0002, Jia Wu 0001, Amin Beheshti, Guanfeng Liu 0001 |
WSDM | 3 |
| 2026 | Re-understanding Graph Unlearning through MemorizationabstractGraph unlearning (GU), which removes nodes, edges, or features from trained graph neural networks (GNNs), is crucial in Web applications where graph data may contain sensitive, mislabeled, or malicious information. However, existing GU methods lack a clear understanding of the key factors that determine unlearning effectiveness, leading to three fundamental limitations: (1) impractical and inaccurate GU difficulty assessment due to test-access requirements and invalid assumptions, (2) ineffectiveness on hard-to-unlearn tasks, and (3) misaligned evaluation protocols that overemphasize easy tasks and fail to capture true forgetting capability. To address these issues, we establish GNN memorization as a new perspective for understanding graph unlearning and propose MGU, a Memorization-guided Graph Unlearning framework. MGU achieves three key advances: it provides accurate and practical difficulty assessment across different GU tasks, develops an adaptive strategy that dynamically adjusts unlearning objectives based on difficulty levels, and establishes a comprehensive evaluation protocol that aligns with practical requirements. Extensive experiments on ten real-world graphs demonstrate that MGU consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in forgetting quality, computational efficiency, and utility preservation. Pengfei Ding 0001, Yan Wang 0002, Guanfeng Liu 0001 |
WWW | 1 |
| 2026 | MARCH: Multi-Teacher Contrastive Hypergraph DistillationabstractRecently, hypergraph knowledge distillation has been proposed to alleviate the high computational cost of Hypergraph Neural Networks (HGNNs) when modeling high-order relationships in Web-related graph tasks. Its effectiveness primarily depends on the quality of knowledge transferred from the teacher and the representation capability of the student. However, existing methods remain limited on both sides. On the teacher side, most methods typically rely on a single HGNN teacher, which provides limited structural and semantic knowledge, thereby constraining the upper bound of the student's performance. The potential of exploiting multiple teachers in HGNNs remains largely underexplored. On the student side, existing methods ignore the student's capability to capture high-order semantic and structural information beyond simply imitating teacher outputs, leading to limited representation learning. To address these limitations, we propose MARCH, a framework for Multi-TeAcheR Contrastive Hypergraph Distillation, which advances semantic modeling and distillation for Web-scale structured data. Specifically, MARCH proposes a multi-teacher distillation strategy that adaptively transfers complementary knowledge from multiple teachers at both node and hyperedge levels, empowering the student model to learn richer and more discriminative representations and even outperform its teachers. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of MARCH. Rongwei Xu 0001, Zitai Qiu, Pengfei Ding 0001, Jia Wu 0001, Yan Wang 0002, Amin Beheshti, Guanfeng Liu 0001 |
WWW | 3 |
| 2026 | Cross-Domain Fake News Detection on Unseen Domains via LLM-Based Domain-Aware User ModelingabstractCross-domain fake news detection (CD-FND) transfers knowledge from a source domain to a target domain and is crucial for real-world fake news mitigation. This task becomes particularly important yet more challenging when the target domain is previously unseen (e.g., the COVID-19 outbreak or the Russia-Ukraine war). However, existing CD-FND methods overlook such scenarios and consequently suffer from the following two key limitations: (1) insufficient modeling of high-level semantics in news and user engagements; and (2) scarcity of labeled data in unseen domains. Targeting these limitations, we find that large language models (LLMs) offer strong potential for CD-FND on unseen domains, yet their effective use remains non-trivial. Nevertheless, two key challenges arise: (1) how to capture high-level semantics from both news content and user engagements using LLMs; and (2) how to make LLM-generated features more reliable and transferable for CD-FND on unseen domains. To tackle these challenges, we propose DAUD, a novel LLM-based Domain-Aware framework for fake news detection on Unseen Domains. DAUD employs LLMs to extract high-level semantics from news content. It models users' single- and cross-domain engagements to generate domain-aware behavioral representations. In addition, DAUD captures the relations between original data-driven features and LLM-derived features of news, users, and user engagements. This allows it to extract more reliable domain-shared representations that improve knowledge transfer to unseen domains. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that DAUD outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both general and unseen-domain CD-FND settings. Xuankai Yang 0001, Yan Wang 0002, Jiajie Zhu 0001, Pengfei Ding 0001, Xiuzhen Zhang 0001, Huan Liu 0001 |
WWW | 4 |
| 2025 | Exploring Causal Relationships Across Shale Gas Wells: Granger Causality-Based Temporal Production Prediction
Jiajie Zhu 0001, Pengfei Ding 0001, Yan Wang 0002 |
ADMA (1) | 3 |
| 2025 | Adaptive Graph UnlearningabstractGraph unlearning, which deletes graph elements such as nodes and edges from trained graph neural networks (GNNs), is crucial for real-world applications where graph data may contain outdated, inaccurate, or privacy-sensitive information. However, existing methods often suffer from (1) incomplete or over unlearning due to neglecting the distinct objectives of different unlearning tasks, and (2) inaccurate identification of neighbors affected by deleted elements across various GNN architectures. To address these limitations, we propose AGU, a novel Adaptive Graph Unlearning framework that flexibly adapts to diverse unlearning tasks and GNN architectures. AGU ensures the complete forgetting of deleted elements while preserving the integrity of the remaining graph. It also accurately identifies affected neighbors for each GNN architecture and prioritizes important ones to enhance unlearning performance. Extensive experiments on seven real-world graphs demonstrate that AGU outperforms existing methods in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and unlearning capability. Pengfei Ding 0001, Yan Wang 0002, Guanfeng Liu 0001, Jiajie Zhu 0001 |
IJCAI | 1 |
| 2025 | Towards Comprehensive and Prerequisite-Free Explainer for Graph Neural NetworksabstractTo enhance the reliability and credibility of graph neural networks (GNNs) and improve the transparency of their decision logic, a new field of explainability of GNNs (XGNN) has emerged. However, two major limitations severely degrade the performance and hinder the generalizability of existing XGNN methods: they (a) fail to capture the complete decision logic of GNNs across diverse distributions in the entire dataset's sample space, and (b) impose strict prerequisites on edge properties and GNN internal accessibility. To address these limitations, we propose OPEN, a novel cOmprehensive and Prerequisite-free Explainer for GNNs. OPEN, as the first work in the literature, can infer and partition the entire dataset's sample space into multiple environments, each containing graphs that follow a distinct distribution. OPEN further learns the decision logic of GNNs across different distributions by sampling subgraphs from each environment and analyzing their predictions, thus eliminating the need for strict prerequisites. Experimental results demonstrate that OPEN captures nearly complete decision logic of GNNs, outperforms state-of-the-art methods in fidelity while maintaining similar efficiency, and enhances robustness in real-world scenarios. Yan Wang 0002, Guanfeng Liu 0001, Pengfei Ding 0001, Huaxiong Wang, Kwok-Yan Lam |
IJCAI | 4 |
| 2025 | Few-Shot Causal Representation Learning for Out-of-Distribution Generalization on Heterogeneous GraphsabstractTo address the issue of label sparsity in heterogeneous graphs (HGs), heterogeneous graph few-shot learning (HGFL) has recently emerged. HGFL aims to extract meta-knowledge from source HGs with rich-labeled data and transfers it to a target HG, facilitating learning new classes with few-labeled training data and improving predictions on unlabeled testing data. Existing methods typically assume the same distribution across the source HG, training data, and testing data. However, in practice, distribution shifts in HGFL are inevitable due to (1) the scarcity of source HGs that match the target HG's distribution, and (2) the unpredictable data generation mechanism of the target HG. Such distribution shifts can degrade the performance of existing methods, leading to a novel problem of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization in HGFL. To address this challenging problem, we propose COHF, aCausalOODHeterogeneous graphFew-shot learning model. In COHF, we first adopt a bottom-up data generative perspective to identify the invariance principle for OOD generalization. Then, based on this principle, we design a novel variational autoencoder-based heterogeneous graph neural network (VAE-HGNN) to mitigate the impact of distribution shifts. Finally, we propose a novel meta-learning framework that incorporates VAE-HGNN to effectively transfer meta-knowledge in OOD environments. Extensive experiments on seven real-world datasets have demonstrated the superior performance of COHF over the state-of-the-art methods. Pengfei Ding 0001, Yan Wang 0002, Guanfeng Liu 0001, Nan Wang 0009, Xiaofang Zhou 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. | 1 |
| 2023 | Cross-heterogeneity Graph Few-shot LearningabstractIn recent years, heterogeneous graph few-shot learning has been proposed to address the label sparsity issue in heterogeneous graphs (HGs), which contain various types of nodes and edges. The existing methods have achieved good performance by transferring generalized knowledge extracted from rich-labeled classes in source HG(s) to few-labeled classes in a target HG. However, these methods only consider the single-heterogeneity scenario where the source and target HGs share a fixed set of node/edge types, ignoring the more general scenario of cross-heterogeneity, where each HG can have a different and non-fixed set of node/edge types. To this end, we focus on the unexplored cross-heterogeneity scenario and propose a novel model for Cross-heterogeneity Graph Few-shot Learning, namely CGFL. In CGFL, we first extract meta-patterns to capture heterogeneous information and propose a multi-view heterogeneous graph neural network (MHGN) to learn meta-patterns across HGs. Then, we propose a score module to measure the informativeness of labeled samples and determine the transferability of each source HG. Finally, by integrating MHGN and the score module into a meta-learning mechanism, CGFL can effectively transfer generalized knowledge to predict new classes with few-labeled data. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets have demonstrated the superior performance of CGFL over the state-of-the-art methods. Pengfei Ding 0001, Yan Wang 0002, Guanfeng Liu 0001 |
CIKM | 1 |
| 2023 | A-MCTS: Adaptive Monte Carlo Tree Search for Temporal Path DiscoveryabstractAn Attributed Dynamic Graph (ADG) contains multiple dynamic attributes associated with each edge in the graph, where people usually can specify multiple constraints in the attributes to illustrate their requirements, such as the total cost, the total travel time and the stopover interval of a flight between two cities. This inspires the Multi-Constrained Temporal Path (MCTP) discovery in ADGs, which is a challenging NP-Complete problem. The existing methods adopt Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) in MCTP discovery. However, they require a certain degree of discovery experience to obtain better results, which can lead to the expensive cost of query time and storage space, and thus are not applicable in real-time applications. This motivates us to develop a new Adaptive Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm (A-MCTS). A-MCTS dynamically adjusts the priority of historical records that are used in MCTS to improve the performance and reduce the size of required discovery experience. The experimental results on ten real-world dynamic graphs demonstrate that our proposed A-MCTS outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. Pengfei Ding 0001, Guanfeng Liu 0001, Yan Wang 0002, Kai Zheng 0001, Xiaofang Zhou 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. | 1 |
| 2023 | Few-Shot Semantic Relation Prediction Across Heterogeneous GraphsabstractSemantic relation prediction aims to mine the implicit relationships between objects in heterogeneous graphs, which consist of different types of objects and different types of links. In real-world scenarios, new semantic relations constantly emerge and they typically appear with only a few labeled data. Since a variety of semantic relations exist in multiple heterogeneous graphs, the transferable knowledge can be mined from some existing semantic relations to help predict the new semantic relations with few labeled data. This inspires a novel problem of few-shot semantic relation prediction across heterogeneous graphs. However, the existing methods cannot solve this problem because they not only require a large number of labeled samples as input, but also focus on a single graph with a fixed heterogeneity. Targeting this novel and challenging problem, in this paper, we propose a Meta-learning based Graph neural network for Semantic relation prediction, named MetaGS. First, MetaGS decomposes the graph structure between objects into multiple normalized subgraphs, then adopts a two-view graph neural network to capture local heterogeneous information and global structure information of these subgraphs. Second, MetaGS aggregates the information of these subgraphs with a hyper-prototypical network, which can learn from existing semantic relations and adapt to new semantic relations. Third, using the well-initialized two-view graph neural network and hyper-prototypical network, MetaGS can effectively learn new semantic relations from different graphs while overcoming the limitation of few labeled data. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets have demonstrated the superior performance of MetaGS over the state-of-the-art methods. Pengfei Ding 0001, Yan Wang 0002, Guanfeng Liu 0001, Xiaofang Zhou 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. | 1 |
| 2019 | Reinforcement Learning Based Monte Carlo Tree Search for Temporal Path DiscoveryabstractAn Attributed Dynamic Graph (ADG) contains multiple dynamic attributes associated with each edge. In ADG based applications, people usually can specify multiple constrains in the attributes to illustrate their requirements, such as the total cost, the total travel time and the stopover interval of a flight between two cities. This inspires a type of Multi-Constrained Temporal Path (MCTP) discovery in ADGs, which is a challenging NP-Complete problem. In order to deliver an efficient and effective temporal path discovery method to be used in real-time environment, we propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based, Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm (RLMCTS). RL-MCTS uses a newly designed memory structure to address the challenges of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) in MCTP discovery. To the best of our knowledge, RL-MCTS is the first RL algorithm that supports path discovery in ADGs. The experimental results on ten real dynamic graphs demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. Pengfei Ding 0001, Guanfeng Liu 0001, Pengpeng Zhao 0001, An Liu 0002, Zhixu Li, Kai Zheng 0001 |
ICDM | 1 |