EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Yuan Zhong 0002
dblp:20/8000-2
· DBLP profile ↗
7ranked-venue papers in the field
3as first author
7since 2021 · last 2026
0009-0009-4427-5667ORCID · conflict
Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several
Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 4 (3 first)Information Retrieval & Web Search · 3
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | A Cascaded Generative Approach for e-Commerce RecommendationsabstractPersonalized storefronts in large e-commerce marketplaces are often assembled from many independent components: static themes per page section (''placement''), retrieval systems to fetch eligible products per placement, and pointwise rankers to order content. While effective in optimizing for aggregate preferences, this paradigm is rigid and can limit personalization and semantic cohesion across the page. This makes it poorly suited to support dynamic objectives and merchandising requirements over time. To address this, we introduce a cascaded merchandising framework that decomposes storefront construction into two generative tasks: (i) placement-level theme generation and (ii) constrained keyword generation per placement to power product retrieval. Teacher–student fine-tuning is leveraged to improve scalability of this framework under production latency and cost constraints. Fine-tuned model ablations are shown to approach closed-weight LLM performance. We further contribute frameworks for AI-driven content evaluation and quality filtering, enabling safe and automated deployment of dynamic content at scale. Generative output is fused with traditional ranking models to preserve hybrid infrastructure. In online experiments, this framework yields an estimated +2.7% lift in cart adds per page view over a strong baseline. Moein Hasani, Hamidreza Shahidi, Trace Levinson, Yuan Zhong 0002, Guanghua Shu, Vinesh Gudla, Tejaswi Tenneti |
SIGIR | 4 |
| 2026 | GPR: Empowering Generation with Graph-Pretrained Retriever
Xiaochen Wang 0002, Zongyu Wu 0001, Yuan Zhong 0002, Xiang Zhang 0001, Suhang Wang, Fenglong Ma |
WWW | 3 |
| 2025 | MedDiTPro: A Prompt-Guided Diffusion Transformer for Multimodal Longitudinal Medical Data SynthesisabstractDiffusion models have recently emerged as a state-of-the-art approach for synthetic Electronic Health Record (EHR) generation, offering superior fidelity and diversity over traditional generative models. However, existing diffusion-based methods struggle with unique challenges: limited representation learning and modality utilization, where they fail to explicitly capture inter-modality dependencies and fine-grained code-level interactions, and constrained adaptability due to reliance on U-Net-based architectures, which are not well-suited for handling the heterogeneous and evolving nature of EHR data. Furthermore, current evaluation paradigms rely on either perplexity-based sequence modeling or global distributional measures, lacking robustness in assessing both intra-visit code relationships and inter-visit temporal patterns. To address these limitations, we propose MedDiTPro, a diffusion transformer-based framework that enhances multimodal EHR generation by integrating structured modality-aware guidance. Through a unified transformer for intra-visit representation learning, a modality-specific and datawise prompt learner, and a diffusion transformer with structured guidance, MedDiTPro achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating diverse and clinically meaningful synthetic records. Extensive experiments on publicly available datasets demonstrate that MedDiTPro achieves state-of-the-art fidelity, privacy preservation, and utility. Yuan Zhong 0002, Xiaochen Wang 0002, Jiaqi Wang 0002, Xiaokun Zhang 0001, Fenglong Ma |
KDD (2) | 1 |
| 2024 | Synthesizing Multimodal Electronic Health Records via Predictive Diffusion ModelsabstractSynthesizing electronic health records (EHR) data has become a preferred strategy to address data scarcity, improve data quality, and model fairness in healthcare. However, existing approaches for EHR data generation predominantly rely on state-of-the-art generative techniques like generative adversarial networks, variational autoencoders, and language models. These methods typically replicate input visits, resulting in inadequate modeling of temporal dependencies between visits and overlooking the generation of time information, a crucial element in EHR data. Moreover, their ability to learn visit representations is limited due to simple linear mapping functions, thus compromising generation quality. To address these limitations, we propose a novel EHR data generation model called EHRPD. It is a diffusion-based model designed to predict the next visit based on the current one while also incorporating time interval estimation. To enhance generation quality and diversity, we introduce a novel time-aware visit embedding module and a pioneering predictive denoising diffusion probabilistic model (P-DDPM). Additionally, we devise a predictive U-Net (PU-Net) to optimize P-DDPM. We conduct experiments on two public datasets and evaluate EHRPD from fidelity, privacy, and utility perspectives. The experimental results demonstrate the efficacy and utility of the proposed EHRPD in addressing the aforementioned limitations and advancing EHR data generation. Yuan Zhong 0002, Xiaochen Wang 0002, Jiaqi Wang 0002, Xiaokun Zhang 0001, Yaqing Wang 0001, Mengdi Huai, Cao Xiao, Fenglong Ma |
KDD | 1 |
| 2024 | Automated Fusion of Multimodal Electronic Health Records for Better Medical PredictionsabstractThe widespread adoption of Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems in healthcare institutes has generated vast amounts of medical data, offering significant opportunities for improving healthcare services through deep learning techniques. However, the complex and diverse modalities and feature structures in real-world EHR data pose great challenges for deep learning model design. To address the multi-modality challenge in EHR data, current approaches primarily rely on hand-crafted model architectures based on intuition and empirical experiences, leading to sub-optimal model architectures and limited performance. Therefore, to automate the process of model design for mining EHR data, we propose a novel neural architecture search (NAS) framework named AutoFM, which can automatically search for the optimal model architectures for encoding diverse input modalities and fusion strategies. We conduct thorough experiments on real-world multi-modal EHR data and prediction tasks, and the results demonstrate that our framework not only achieves significant performance improvement over existing state-of-the-art methods but also discovers meaningful network architectures effectively. Suhan Cui, Jiaqi Wang 0002, Yuan Zhong 0002, Han Liu 0008, Ting Wang 0006, Fenglong Ma |
SDM | 3 |
| 2024 | MedDiffusion: Boosting Health Risk Prediction via Diffusion-based Data AugmentationabstractHealth risk prediction aims to forecast the potential health risks that patients may face using their historical Electronic Health Records (EHR). Although several effective models have developed, data insufficiency is a key issue undermining their effectiveness. Various data generation and augmentation methods have been introduced to mitigate this issue by expanding the size of the training data set through learning underlying data distributions. However, the performance of these methods is often limited due to their task-unrelated design. To address these shortcomings, this paper introduces a novel, end-to-end diffusion-based risk prediction model, named MedDiffusion. It enhances risk prediction performance by creating synthetic patient data during training to enlarge sample space. Furthermore, MedDiffusion discerns hidden relationships between patient visits using a step-wise attention mechanism, enabling the model to automatically retain the most vital information for generating high-quality data. Experimental evaluation on four real-world medical datasets demonstrates that MedDiffusion outperforms 14 cutting-edge baselines in terms of PR-AUC, F1, and Cohen's Kappa. We also conduct ablation studies and benchmark our model against GAN-based alternatives to further validate the rationality and adaptability of our model design. Additionally, we analyze generated data to offer fresh insights into the model's interpretability. The source code is available via https://shorturl.at/aerT0. Yuan Zhong 0002, Suhan Cui, Jiaqi Wang 0002, Xiaochen Wang 0002, Ziyi Yin 0003, Yaqing Wang 0001, Houping Xiao, Mengdi Huai, Ting Wang 0006, Fenglong Ma |
SDM | 1 |
| 2024 | FineRec: Exploring Fine-grained Sequential RecommendationabstractSequential recommendation is dedicated to offering items of interest for users based on their history behaviors. The attribute-opinion pairs, expressed by users in their reviews for items, provide the potentials to capture user preferences and item characteristics at a fine-grained level. To this end, we propose a novel framework FineRec that explores the attribute-opinion pairs of reviews to finely handle sequential recommendation. Specifically, we utilize a large language model to extract attribute-opinion pairs from reviews. For each attribute, a unique attribute-specific user-opinion-item graph is created, where corresponding opinions serve as the edges linking heterogeneous user and item nodes. Afterwards, we devise a diversity-aware convolution operation to aggregate information within the graphs, enabling attribute-specific user and item representation learning. Ultimately, we present an interaction-driven fusion mechanism to integrate attribute-specific user/item representations across all attributes for generating recommendations. Extensive experiments conducted on several real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our FineRec over existing state-ofthe-art methods. Further analysis also verifies the effectiveness of our fine-grained manner in handling the task. Xiaokun Zhang 0001, Bo Xu 0009, Youlin Wu, Yuan Zhong 0002, Hongfei Lin, Fenglong Ma |
SIGIR | 4 |