Songwei Zhao

dblp:297/6288 · DBLP profile ↗
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6ranked-venue papers in the field
3as first author
6since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-6149-3214ORCID · corroborated

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

Knowledge Engineering, Semantic Web & Information Systems · 3 (1 first)Database Systems & Data Management · 2 (2 first)Information Retrieval & Web Search · 1
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 TGSBM: Transformer-Guided Stochastic Block Model for Link Prediction
abstract
Link prediction is a cornerstone of the Web ecosystem, powering applications from recommendation and search to knowledge graph completion and collaboration forecasting. However, large-scale networks present unique challenges: they contain hundreds of thousands of nodes and edges with heterogeneous and overlapping community structures that evolve over time. Existing approaches face notable limitations: traditional graph neural networks struggle to capture global structural dependencies, while recent graph transformers achieve strong performance but incur quadratic complexity and lack interpretable latent structure. We propose TGSBM (Transformer-Guided Stochastic Block Model), a framework that integrates the principled generative structure of Overlapping Stochastic Block Models with the representational power of sparse Graph Transformers. TGSBM comprises three main components: (i) expander-augmented sparse attention that enables near-linear complexity and efficient global mixing, (ii) a neural variational encoder that infers structured posteriors over community memberships and strengths, and (iii) a neural edge decoder that reconstructs links via OSBM's generative process, preserving interpretability. Experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate competitive performance (mean rank 1.6 under HeaRT protocol), superior scalability (up to 6× faster training), and interpretable community structures. These results position TGSBM as a practical approach that strikes a balance between accuracy, efficiency, and transparency for large-scale link prediction.
Zhejian Yang, Songwei Zhao, Zilin Zhao, Hechang Chen
WWW2
2025 A Flexible Diffusion Convolution for Graph Neural Networks
abstract
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been gaining more attention due to their excellent performance in modeling various graph-structured data. However, most of the current GNNs only consider fixed-neighbor discrete message-passing, disregarding the importance of the local structure of different nodes and the implicit information between nodes for smoothing features. Previous approaches either focus on adaptive selection for aggregation structures or treat discrete graph convolution as a continuous diffusion process, but none of them comprehensively considered the above issues, significantly limiting the model's performance. To this end, we present a novel approach called Flexible Diffusion Convolution (Flexi-DC), which exploits the neighborhood information of nodes to set a particular continuous diffusion for each node to smooth features. Specifically, Flexi-DC first extracts the local structure knowledge based on the degrees of nodes in the graph data and then injects it into the diffusion convolution module to smooth features. Additionally, we utilize the extracted knowledge to smooth labels. Flexi-DC is an efficient framework that can significantly improve the performance of most GNN architectures. Experimental results demonstrate that Flexi-DC outperforms their vanilla implementations by an average accuracy of 13.24% (GCN), 16.37% (JKNet), and 11.98% (ARMA) on nine graph datasets with different homophily ratios.
Songwei Zhao, Bo Yu 0013, Sinuo Zhang, Jifeng Hu, Yuan Jiang 0007, Philip S. Yu, Hechang Chen
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.1
2025 EGNN: Exploring Structure-Level Neighborhoods in Graphs With Varying Homophily Ratios
abstract
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have garnered significant attention for their competitive performance on graph-structured data. However, many existing methods are commonly constrained by the homophily assumption, making them overly reliant on the uniform neighbor propagation, which limits their ability to generalize to heterophilous graphs. Although some approaches extend aggregation to multi-hop neighbors, adapting neighborhood sizes on a per-node basis remains a significant challenge. In view of this, we propose an Evolutionary Graph Neural Network (EGNN) with adaptive structure-level aggregation and label smoothing, offering a novel solution to the aforementioned drawback. The core innovation of EGNN lies in assigning each node apersonalizedneighborhood structure utilizingbehavior-levelcrossover and mutation. Specifically, we first adaptively search for the optimal structure-level neighborhoods for nodes within the solution space, leveraging the exploratory capabilities of evolutionary computation. This approach enhances the exchange of information between the target node and surrounding nodes, achieving a smooth vector representation. Subsequently, we adopt the optimal structure obtained through evolutionary search to perform label smoothing, further boosting the robustness of the framework. We conduct experiments on nine real-world networks with different homophily ratios, where outstanding performance demonstrates that the ability of EGNN can match or surpass SOTA baselines.
Songwei Zhao, Bo Yu 0013, Sinuo Zhang, Zhejian Yang, Jifeng Hu, Philip S. Yu, Hechang Chen
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.1
2023 HRL4EC: Hierarchical reinforcement learning for multi-mode epidemic control
Xinqi Du, Hechang Chen, Bo Yang 0002, Cheng Long 0001, Songwei Zhao
Inf. Sci.5
2022 District-Coupled Epidemic Control via Deep Reinforcement Learning
Xinqi Du, Songwei Zhao, Jiuman Song, Hechang Chen
KSEM (2)3
2022 Intervention-Aware Epidemic Prediction by Enhanced Whale Optimization
Songwei Zhao, Jiuman Song, Xinqi Du, Huiling Chen 0001, Hechang Chen
KSEM (2)1