EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Qianru Zhang
dblp:224/0065
· DBLP profile ↗
11ranked-venue papers in the field
9as first author
11since 2021 · last 2026
—ORCID · conflict
Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several
Database Systems & Data Management · 4 (4 first)Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 3 (2 first)Information Retrieval & Web Search · 3 (3 first)Big Data, Cloud & Distributed Data Systems · 1
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Autohformer: Efficient Hierarchical Autoregressive Transformer for Time Series PredictionabstractTime series forecasting requires architectures that simultaneously achieve three competing objectives: (1) strict temporal causality for reliable predictions, (2) sub-quadratic complexity for practical scalability, and (3) multi-scale pattern recognition for accurate long-horizon forecasting. We introduce AutoHFormer, a hierarchical autoregressive transformer that addresses these challenges through three key innovations: 1) Hierarchical Temporal Modeling: Our architecture decomposes predictions into segment-level blocks processed in parallel, followed by intra-segment sequential refinement. This dual-scale approach maintains temporal coherence while enabling efficient computation. 2) Dynamic Windowed Attention: The attention mechanism employs learnable causal windows with exponential decay, reducing complexity while preserving precise temporal relationships. This design avoids both the anti-causal violations of standard transformers and the sequential bottlenecks of RNN hybrids. 3) Adaptive Temporal Encoding: a novel position encoding system is adopted to capture time patterns at multiple scales. It combines fixed oscillating patterns for short-term variations with learnable decay rates for long-term trends. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that AutoHFormer 10.76X faster training and 6.06X memory reduction compared to PatchTST on PEMS08, while maintaining consistent accuracy across 96-720 step horizons in most of cases. These breakthroughs establish new benchmarks for efficient and precise time series modeling. Implementations of our method and all baselines in hierarchical autoregressive mechanism are available at https://github.com/lizzyhku/Autotime. Qianru Zhang, Honggang Wen, Dong Huang 0005, Siu-Ming Yiu, Christian S. Jensen, Pietro Liò |
ICDE | 1 |
| 2026 | HMamba: Hyperbolic Mamba for Sequential RecommendationabstractSequential recommendation systems require both temporal efficiency to handle long interaction histories and hierarchical representation to model complex user–item relationships. Existing approaches face a fundamental tension: Mamba-based methods offer linear-time efficiency ( \(\mathcal{O}(L)\) ) but operate in Euclidean space, which distorts hierarchical patterns; hyperbolic models capture taxonomies well but suffer quadratic complexity ( \(\mathcal{O}(L^{2})\) ). To solve this dual challenge , we propose Hyperbolic Mamba (HMamba), the first architecture that unifies curvature-aware state spaces with hyperbolic geometry. Our key insight is that hyperbolic curvature \(\kappa\) simultaneously governs: (1) state transition granularity through \(\mathbf{\bar{A}}=\exp(\Delta\mathbf{A}\odot\mathbf{K}(\kappa))\) and (2) hierarchical distance preservation via \(d_{\mathcal{L}}\propto\sqrt{\kappa}\log(\cdot)\) . This enables joint optimization of efficiency and hierarchy—addressing the previously unsolved problem of deep-long modeling . Experiments show HMamba achieves 3–11% accuracy gains while maintaining 3.2 \(\times\) faster training than attention-based models, establishing a new paradigm for hierarchy-aware sequential recommendation. The code and datasets accompanying our paper are publicly available at https://github.com/CoderPowerBeyond/HMamba . Qianru Zhang, Honggang Wen, Wei Yuan 0003, Crystal Chen, Menglin Yang 0001, Siu-Ming Yiu, Hongzhi Yin |
ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. | 1 |
| 2025 | HGAurban: Heterogeneous Graph Autoencoding for Urban Spatial-Temporal LearningabstractSpatial-temporal graph representations play a crucial role in urban sensing applications, including traffic analysis, human mobility behavior modeling, and citywide crime prediction. However, a key challenge lies in the noisy and sparse nature of spatial-temporal data, which limits existing neural networks' ability to learn meaningful region representations in the spatial-temporal graph. To overcome these limitations, we propose HGAurban, a novel heterogeneous spatial-temporal graph masked autoencoder that leverages generative self-supervised learning for robust urban data representation. Our framework introduces a spatial-temporal heterogeneous graph encoder that extracts region-wise dependencies from multi-source data, enabling comprehensive modeling of diverse spatial relationships. Within our self-supervised learning paradigm, we implement a masked autoencoder that jointly processes node features and graph structure. This approach automatically learns heterogeneous spatial-temporal patterns across regions, significantly improving the representation of dynamic temporal correlations. Comprehensive experiments across multiple spatiotemporal mining tasks demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and robustly handles real-world urban data challenges, including noise and sparsity in both spatial and temporal dimensions. Qianru Zhang, Xinyi Gao 0001, Haixin Wang 0003, Dong Huang 0005, Siu-Ming Yiu, Hongzhi Yin |
CIKM | 1 |
| 2025 | A Survey on Point-of-Interest Recommendation: Models, Architectures, and SecurityabstractThe widespread adoption of smartphones and Location-Based Social Networks has led to a massive influx of spatio-temporal data, creating unparalleled opportunities for enhancing Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation systems. These advanced POI systems are crucial for enriching user experiences, enabling personalized interactions, and optimizing decision-making processes in the digital landscape. However, existing surveys tend to focus on traditional approaches and few of them delve into cutting-edge developments, emerging architectures, as well as security considerations in POI recommendations. To address this gap, our survey stands out by offering a comprehensive, up-to-date review of POI recommendation systems, covering advancements in models, architectures, and security aspects. We systematically examine the transition from traditional models to advanced techniques such as large language models. Additionally, we explore the architectural evolution from centralized to decentralized and federated learning systems, highlighting the improvements in scalability and privacy. Furthermore, we address the increasing importance of security, examining potential vulnerabilities and privacy-preserving approaches. Our taxonomy provides a structured overview of the current state of POI recommendation, while we also identify promising directions for future research in this rapidly advancing field. Qianru Zhang, Peng Yang 0016, Junliang Yu, Haixin Wang 0003, Xingwei He 0003, Siu-Ming Yiu, Hongzhi Yin |
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. | 1 |
| 2024 | Graph Augmentation for RecommendationabstractGraph augmentation with contrastive learning has gained significant attention in the field of recommendation systems due to its ability to learn expressive user representations, even when labeled data is limited. However, directly applying existing GCL models to real-world recommendation environments poses challenges. There are two primary issues to address. Firstly, the lack of consideration for data noise in contrastive learning can result in noisy self-supervised signals, leading to degraded performance. Secondly, many existing GCL approaches rely on graph neural network (GNN) architectures, which can suffer from over-smoothing problems due to non-adaptive message passing. To address these challenges, we propose a principled framework called GraphAug. This framework introduces a robust data augmentor that generates denoised self-supervised signals, enhancing recommender systems. The GraphAug framework incorporates a graph information bottleneck (GIB)-regularized augmentation paradigm, which automatically distills informative self-supervision information and adaptively adjusts contrastive view generation. Through rigorous experimentation on real-world datasets, we thoroughly assessed the performance of our novel GraphAug model. The outcomes consistently unveil its superiority over existing baseline methods. The source code for our model is publicly available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/GraphAug. Qianru Zhang, Lianghao Xia, Xuheng Cai, Siu-Ming Yiu, Chao Huang 0001, Christian S. Jensen |
ICDE | 1 |
| 2024 | Billiards Sports Analytics: Datasets and TasksabstractNowadays, it becomes a common practice to capture some data of sports games with devices such as GPS sensors and cameras and then use the data to perform various analyses on sports games, including tactics discovery, similar game retrieval, performance study, and so forth. While this practice has been conducted to many sports such as basketball and soccer, it remains largely unexplored on the billiards sports, which is mainly due to the lack of publicly available datasets. Motivated by this, we collect a dataset of billiards sports, which includes the layouts (i.e., locations) of billiards balls after performing break shots, called break shot layouts, the traces of the balls as a result of strikes (in the form of trajectories), and detailed statistics and performance indicators. We then study and develop techniques for three tasks on the collected dataset, including (1) prediction and (2) generation on the layouts data, and (3) similar billiards layout retrieval on the layouts data, which can serve different users such as coaches, players and fans. We conduct extensive experiments on the collected dataset and the results show that our methods perform effectively and efficiently. Qianru Zhang, Zheng Wang 0046, Cheng Long 0001, Siu-Ming Yiu |
ACM Trans. Knowl. Discov. Data | 1 |
| 2023 | Online Anomalous Subtrajectory Detection on Road Networks with Deep Reinforcement LearningabstractDetecting anomalous trajectories has become an important task in many location-based applications. While many approaches have been proposed for this task, they suffer from various issues including (1) incapability of detecting anomalous subtrajectories, which are finer-grained anomalies in trajectory data, and/or (2) non-data driven, and/or (3) requirement of sufficient supervision labels which are costly to collect. In this paper, we propose a novel reinforcement learning based solution called RL4OASD, which avoids all aforementioned issues of existing approaches. RL4OASD involves two networks, one responsible for learning features of road networks and trajectories and the other responsible for detecting anomalous subtrajectories based on the learned features, and the two networks can be trained iteratively without labeled data. Extensive experiments are conducted on two real datasets, and the results show that our solution can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods (with 20-30% improvement) and is efficient for online detection (it takes less than 0.1ms to process each newly generated data point). Qianru Zhang, Zheng Wang 0046, Cheng Long 0001, Chao Huang 0001, Siu-Ming Yiu, Gao Cong, Jieming Shi 0001 |
ICDE | 1 |
| 2023 | Automated Spatio-Temporal Graph Contrastive LearningabstractAmong various region embedding methods, graph-based region relation learning models stand out, owing to their strong structure representation ability for encoding spatial correlations with graph neural networks. Despite their effectiveness, several key challenges have not been well addressed in existing methods: i) Data noise and missing are ubiquitous in many spatio-temporal scenarios due to a variety of factors. ii) Input spatio-temporal data (e.g., mobility traces) usually exhibits distribution heterogeneity across space and time. In such cases, current methods are vulnerable to the quality of the generated region graphs, which may lead to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we tackle the above challenges by exploring the Automated Spatio-Temporal graph contrastive learning paradigm (AutoST) over the heterogeneous region graph generated from multi-view data sources. Our AutoST framework is built upon a heterogeneous graph neural architecture to capture the multi-view region dependencies with respect to POI semantics, mobility flow patterns and geographical positions. To improve the robustness of our GNN encoder against data noise and distribution issues, we design an automated spatio-temporal augmentation scheme with a parameterized contrastive view generator. AutoST can adapt to the spatio-temporal heterogeneous graph with multi-view semantics well preserved. Extensive experiments for three downstream spatio-temporal mining tasks on several real-world datasets demonstrate the significant performance gain achieved by our AutoST over a variety of baselines. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/HKUDS/AutoST. Qianru Zhang, Chao Huang 0001, Lianghao Xia, Zheng Wang 0046, Zhonghang Li, Siu-Ming Yiu |
WWW | 1 |
| 2022 | On Inferring User Socioeconomic Status with Mobility RecordsabstractWhen users move in a physical space (e.g., an urban space), they would have some records called mobility records (e.g., trajectories) generated by devices such as mobile phones and GPS devices. Naturally, mobility records capture essential information of how users work, live and entertain in their daily lives, and therefore, they have been used in a wide range of tasks such as user profile inference, mobility prediction and traffic management. In this paper, we expand this line of research by investigating the problem of inferring user socioeconomic statuses (such as prices of users’ living houses as a proxy of users’ socioeconomic statuses) based on their mobility records, which can potentially be used in real-life applications such as the car loan business. For this task, we propose a socioeconomic-aware deep model called DeepSEI. The DeepSEI model incorporates two networks called deep network and recurrent network, which extract the features of the mobility records from three aspects, namely spatiality, temporality and activity, one at a coarse level and the other at a detailed level. We conduct extensive experiments on real mobility records data, POI data and house prices data. The results verify that the DeepSEI model achieves superior performance than existing studies. All datasets used in this paper will be made publicly available. Zheng Wang 0046, Mingrui Liu 0002, Cheng Long 0001, Qianru Zhang, Jiangneng Li, Chunyan Miao |
IEEE Big Data | 4 |
| 2022 | On Predicting and Generating a Good Break Shot in Billiards SportsabstractWith the proliferation of tracking devices such as cameras and/or GPS sensors, sports data is being generated at an unprecedented speed and the interest in collecting some data from sports games has grown dramatically as well. The collected data facilitates various sports analytic tasks; however, these studies are mainly concerning with sports such as football and basketball. It remains largely unexplored for billiards sports though it is a popular sport of both strategy and physical skill, and this is mainly due to the lack of publicly available datasets. Motivated by this, we collect a dataset of billiards sports, which includes the layouts (i.e., locations) of billiards balls after performing break shots, called break shot layouts, the traces of the balls as a result of strikes (in the form of trajectories), and detailed statistics and performance indicators. On top of the dataset, we investigate several tasks, including prediction and generation on the layouts data and similarity search on the trajectory data, which can serve different users such as coaches, players and fans. We conduct extensive experiments on the collected dataset for the tasks, and the results demonstrate the superior performance of the methods proposed in this paper. Qianru Zhang, Zheng Wang 0046, Cheng Long 0001, Siu-Ming Yiu |
SDM | 1 |
| 2021 | Error-Bounded Online Trajectory Simplification with Multi-Agent Reinforcement LearningabstractTrajectory data has been widely used in various applications, including taxi services, traffic management, mobility analysis, etc. It is usually collected at a sensor's side in real time and corresponds to a sequence of sampled points. Constrained by the storage and/or network bandwidth of a sensor, it is common to simplify raw trajectory data when it is collected by dropping some sampled points. Many algorithms have been proposed for the error-bounded online trajectory simplification (EB-OTS) problem, which is to drop as many points as possible subject to that the error is bounded by an error tolerance. Nevertheless, these existing algorithms rely on pre-defined rules for decision making during the trajectory simplification process and there is no theoretical ground supporting their effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent reinforcement learning method called MARL4TS for EB-OTS. MARL4TS involves two agents for different decision making problems during the trajectory simplification processes. Besides, MARL4TS has its objective equivalent to that of the EB-OTS problem, which provides some theoretical ground of its effectiveness. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world trajectory datasets, which verify that MARL4TS outperforms all existing algorithms in effectiveness and provides competitive efficiency. Zheng Wang 0046, Cheng Long 0001, Gao Cong, Qianru Zhang |
KDD | 4 |