Zhongtian Sun

dblp:266/3353 · DBLP profile ↗
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4ranked-venue papers in the field
3as first author
4since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0003-0489-5203ORCID · corroborated

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

Information Retrieval & Web Search · 2 (1 first)Big Data, Cloud & Distributed Data Systems · 2 (2 first)
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 Heterophily-Agnostic Hypergraph Neural Networks with Riemannian Local Exchanger
abstract
Hypergraphs are the natural description of higher-order interactions among objects, widely applied in social network analysis, cross-modal retrieval, etc. Hypergraph Neural Networks (HGNNs) have become the dominant solution for learning on hypergraphs. Traditional HGNNs are extended from message passing graph neural networks, following the homophily assumption, and thus struggle with the prevalent heterophilic hypergraphs that call for long-range dependence modeling. Existing solutions enlarge the message flow through the hypergraph bottleneck, mitigating the oversquashing issue and capturing long-range dependence. However, they often accelerate the loss of representation distinguishability in the repeated aggregations, leading to oversmoothing. This dilemma motivates an interesting question: Can we develop a unified mechanism that is agnostic to both homophilic and heterophilic hypergraphs? In this paper, we achieve the best of both worlds through the lens of Riemannian geometry, which provides the potential to adjust the message passing behavior in different regions. The key insight lies in the connection between oversquashing and hypergraph bottleneck within the framework of Riemannian manifold heat flow. Building on this, we propose the novel idea of locally adapting the bottlenecks of different subhypergraphs. The core innovation of the proposed mechanism is the design of an adaptive local (heat) exchanger. Specifically, it captures the rich long-range dependencies via the Robin condition, and preserves the representation distinguishability via source terms, thereby enabling heterophily-agnostic message passing with theoretical guarantees. Based on this theoretical foundation, we present a novel Heat-Exchanger with Adaptive Locality for Hypergraph Neural Network (HealHGNN), designed as a node-hyperedge bidirectional systems with linear complexity in the number of nodes and hyperedges. Extensive experiments on both homophilic and heterophilic cases show that HealHGNN achieves the state-of-the-art performance.
Li Sun 0008, Ming Zhang 0034, Wenxin Jin, Zhongtian Sun, Zhenhao Huang 0001, Hao Peng 0001, Sen Su, Philip S. Yu
WWW4
2025 RicciFlowRec: A Geometric Root Cause Recommender Using Ricci Curvature on Financial Graphs
abstract
We propose RicciFlowRec, a geometric recommendation framework that performs root cause attribution via Ricci curvature and flow on dynamic financial graphs.By modelling evolving interactions among stocks, macroeconomic indicators, and news, we quantify local stress using discrete Ricci curvature and trace shock propagation via Ricci flow.Curvature gradients reveal causal substructures, informing a structural risk-aware ranking function.Preliminary results on S&P 500 data with FinBERT-based sentiment show improved robustness and interpretability under synthetic perturbations.This ongoing work supports curvature-based attribution and early-stage risk-aware ranking, with plans for portfolio optimization and return forecasting.To our knowledge, RicciFlowRec is the first recommender to apply geometric flow-based reasoning in financial decision support.
Zhongtian Sun, Anoushka Harit
RecSys1
2023 A Rewiring Contrastive Patch PerformerMixer Framework for Graph Representation Learning
abstract
Integrating transformers with graph representation learning has emerged as a research focal point. However, recent studies showed that positional encoding in Transformers does not capture enough structural information between nodes. Additionally, existing graph neural network (GNN) models face the oversquashing issue, impeding information retention from distant nodes. To address, we transform graphs into regular structures, such as tokens, to enhance positional understanding and leverage transformer strengths. Inspired by the visual transformer (ViT) model, we propose partitioning graphs into patches and apply GNN models obtain fixed size vectors. Notably, our approach adopts contrastive learning for in-depth graph structure and incorporate more topological information via Ricci curvature to alleviate over-squashing problem by attenuating the effects of negatively curved edges while preserving the original graph structure. Unlike existing graph rewiring methods that directly modify graph structure by adding or removing edges, this approach is potentially more suitable for applications such as molecular learning where structural preservation is important. Our innovative pipeline subsequently introduces the PerformerMixer, a transformer variant with linear complexity, ensuring efficient computation. Evaluations on real-world benchmarks demonstrate our framework’s superior performance, like Peptides-func and achieve 3-WL expressiveness.
Zhongtian Sun, Anoushka Harit, Alexandra I. Cristea, Jingyun Wang 0003, Pietro Liò
IEEE Big Data1
2022 Is Unimodal Bias Always Bad for Visual Question Answering? A Medical Domain Study with Dynamic Attention
abstract
Medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) is to answer medical questions based on clinical images provided. This field is still in its infancy due to the complexity of the trio formed of questions, multimodal features and expert knowledge. In this paper, we tackle, a ’myth’ in the Natural Language Processing area - that unimodal bias is always considered undesirable in learning models. Additionally, we study the effect of integrating a novel dynamic attention mechanism into such models, inspired by a recent graph deep learning study.Unlike traditional attention, dynamic attention scores are conditioned on different query words in a question and thus enhance the representation learning ability of texts. We propose that some questions are answered more accurately with a reinforcement of question embedding after fusing multimodal features. Extensive experiments have been implemented on the VQA-RAD datasets and demonstrate that our proposed model, reinforCe unimOdal dynamiC Attention (COCA), outperforms the state-of-the-art methods overall and performs competitively at open-ended question answering.
Zhongtian Sun, Anoushka Harit, Alexandra I. Cristea, Jialin Yu 0001, Noura Al Moubayed, Lei Shi 0003
IEEE Big Data1