Xubin Ren

dblp:318/9196 · DBLP profile ↗
← Back
10ranked-venue papers in the field
5as first author
10since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0003-3332-1073ORCID · verified

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

Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 5 (3 first)Information Retrieval & Web Search · 5 (2 first)
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 VideoRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Extreme Long-Context Videos
abstract
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has demonstrated remarkable success in enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) through external knowledge integration. However, its application has primarily focused on textual content, leaving the rich domain of multi-modal video knowledge predominantly unexplored. This paper introduces VideoRAG, a retrieval-augmented generation framework designed for processing extremely long-context videos. Our core innovation lies in a dual-channel architecture that integrates graph-based textual knowledge grounding for cross-video semantic relationships and multi-modal context encoding for visual feature preservation. This design empowers VideoRAG to process unlimited-length videos by constructing precise knowledge graphs spanning multiple videos. The framework maintains semantic dependencies through specialized multi-modal retrieval paradigms, enabling comprehensive understanding of extended video content. We evaluate VideoRAG on our proposed LongerVideos benchmark, comprising over 160 videos totaling 134+ hours across lecture, documentary, and entertainment categories. VideoRAG demonstrates substantial performance improvements compared to existing RAG alternatives and long video understanding methods. The source code for VideoRAG implementation, along with the benchmark dataset, are available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/VideoRAG.
Xubin Ren, Lingrui Xu, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin 0001, Chao Huang 0001
KDD (1)1
2025 Urban Computing in the Era of Large Language Models
abstract
Urban computing has emerged as a multidisciplinary field that harnesses data-driven technologies to address challenges and improve urban living. Traditional approaches, while beneficial, often face challenges with generalization, scalability, and contextual understanding. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers transformative potential in this domain. This survey explores the intersection of LLMs and urban computing, emphasizing the impact of LLMs in processing and analyzing urban data, enhancing decision-making, and fostering citizen engagement. We provide a concise overview of the evolution and core technologies of LLMs. Additionally, we survey their applications across key urban domains, such as transportation, public safety, and environmental monitoring, summarizing essential tasks and prior works in various urban contexts, while highlighting LLMs’ functional roles and implementation patterns. Building on this, we propose potential LLM-based solutions to address unresolved challenges. To facilitate in-depth research, we compile a list of available datasets and tools applicable to diverse urban scenarios. Finally, we discuss the limitations of current approaches and outline future directions for advancing LLMs in urban computing.
Zhonghang Li, Lianghao Xia, Xubin Ren, Jiabin Tang, Yong Xu 0007, Chao Huang 0001
ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol.3
2024 A Survey of Large Language Models for Graphs
abstract
Graphs are an essential data structure utilized to represent relationships in real-world scenarios. Prior research has established that Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) deliver impressive outcomes in graph-centric tasks, such as link prediction and node classification. Despite these advancements, challenges like data sparsity and limited generalization capabilities continue to persist. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained attention in natural language processing. They excel in language comprehension and summarization. Integrating LLMs with graph learning techniques has attracted interest as a way to enhance performance in graph learning tasks. In this survey, we conduct an in-depth review of the latest state-of-the-art LLMs applied in graph learning and introduce a novel taxonomy to categorize existing methods based on their framework design. We detail four unique designs: i) GNNs as Prefix, ii) LLMs as Prefix, iii) LLMs-Graphs Integration, and iv) LLMs-Only, highlighting key methodologies within each category. We explore the strengths and limitations of each framework, and emphasize potential avenues for future research, including overcoming current integration challenges between LLMs and graph learning techniques, and venturing into new application areas. This survey aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners eager to leverage large language models in graph learning, and to inspire continued progress in this dynamic field. We consistently maintain the related open-source materials at \url{https://github.com/HKUDS/Awesome-LLM4Graph-Papers}.
Xubin Ren, Jiabin Tang, Dawei Yin 0001, Nitesh V. Chawla, Chao Huang 0001
KDD1
2024 SSLRec: A Self-Supervised Learning Framework for Recommendation
abstract
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has gained significant interest in recent years as a solution to address the challenges posed by sparse and noisy data in recommender systems. Despite the growing number of SSL algorithms designed to provide state-of-the-art performance in various recommendation scenarios (e.g., graph collaborative filtering, sequential recommendation, social recommendation, KG-enhanced recommendation), there is still a lack of unified frameworks that integrate recommendation algorithms across different domains. Such a framework could serve as the cornerstone for self-supervised recommendation algorithms, unifying the validation of existing methods and driving the design of new ones. To address this gap, we introduce SSLRec, a novel benchmark platform that provides a standardized, flexible, and comprehensive framework for evaluating various SSL-enhanced recommenders. The SSLRec framework features a modular architecture that allows users to easily evaluate state-of-the-art models and a complete set of data augmentation and self-supervised toolkits to help create SSL recommendation models with specific needs. Furthermore, SSLRec simplifies the process of training and evaluating different recommendation models with consistent and fair settings. Our SSLRec platform covers a comprehensive set of state-of-the-art SSL-enhanced recommendation models across different scenarios, enabling researchers to evaluate these cutting-edge models and drive further innovation in the field. Our implemented SSLRec framework is available at the source code repository https://github.com/HKUDS/SSLRec.
Xubin Ren, Lianghao Xia, Yuhao Yang 0002, Wei Wei 0027, Tianle Wang 0006, Xuheng Cai, Chao Huang 0001
WSDM1
2024 LLMRec: Large Language Models with Graph Augmentation for Recommendation
abstract
The problem of data sparsity has long been a challenge in recommendation systems, and previous studies have attempted to address this issue by incorporating side information. However, this approach often introduces side effects such as noise, availability issues, and low data quality, which in turn hinder the accurate modeling of user preferences and adversely impact recommendation performance. In light of the recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), which possess extensive knowledge bases and strong reasoning capabilities, we propose a novel framework called LLMRec that enhances recommender systems by employing three simple yet effective LLM-based graph augmentation strategies. Our approach leverages the rich content available within online platforms (e.g., Netflix, MovieLens) to augment the interaction graph in three ways: (i) reinforcing user-item interaction egde, (ii) enhancing the understanding of item node attributes, and (iii) conducting user node profiling, intuitively from the natural language perspective. By employing these strategies, we address the challenges posed by sparse implicit feedback and low-quality side information in recommenders. Besides, to ensure the quality of the augmentation, we develop a denoised data robustification mechanism that includes techniques of noisy implicit feedback pruning and MAE-based feature enhancement that help refine the augmented data and improve its reliability. Furthermore, we provide theoretical analysis to support the effectiveness of LLMRec and clarify the benefits of our method in facilitating model optimization. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our LLM-based augmentation approach over state-of-the-art techniques. To ensure reproducibility, we have made our code and augmented data publicly available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/LLMRec.git.
Wei Wei 0027, Xubin Ren, Jiabin Tang, Qinyong Wang, Lixin Su, Suqi Cheng, Junfeng Wang 0009, Dawei Yin 0001, Chao Huang 0001
WSDM2
2024 Representation Learning with Large Language Models for Recommendation
abstract
Recommender systems have seen significant advancements with the influence of deep learning and graph neural networks, particularly in capturing complex user-item relationships. However, these graph-based recommenders heavily depend on ID-based data, potentially disregarding valuable textual information associated with users and items, resulting in less informative learned representations. Moreover, the utilization of implicit feedback data introduces potential noise and bias, posing challenges for the effectiveness of user preference learning. While the integration of large language models (LLMs) into traditional ID-based recommenders has gained attention, challenges such as scalability issues, limitations in text-only reliance, and prompt input constraints need to be addressed for effective implementation in practical recommender systems. To address these challenges, we propose a model-agnostic framework RLMRec that aims to enhance existing recommenders with LLM-empowered representation learning. It proposes a recommendation paradigm that integrates representation learning with LLMs to capture intricate semantic aspects of user behaviors and preferences. RLMRec incorporates auxiliary textual signals, employs LLMs for user/item profiling, and aligns the semantic space of LLMs with collaborative relational signals through cross-view alignment. This work further demonstrates the theoretical foundation of incorporating textual signals through mutual information maximization, which improves the quality of representations. Our evaluation integrates RLMRec with state-of-the-art recommender models, while also analyzing its efficiency and robustness to noise data. Implementation codes are available at https://github.com/HKUDS/RLMRec.
Xubin Ren, Wei Wei 0027, Lianghao Xia, Lixin Su, Suqi Cheng, Junfeng Wang 0009, Dawei Yin 0001, Chao Huang 0001
WWW1
2023 How Expressive are Graph Neural Networks in Recommendation?
abstract
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated superior performance in various graph learning tasks, including recommendation, where they explore user-item collaborative filtering signals within graphs. However, despite their empirical effectiveness in state-of-the-art recommender models, theoretical formulations of their capability are scarce. Recently, researchers have explored the expressiveness of GNNs, demonstrating that message passing GNNs are at most as powerful as the Weisfeiler-Lehman test, and that GNNs combined with random node initialization are universal. Nevertheless, the concept of "expressiveness" for GNNs remains vaguely defined. Most existing works adopt the graph isomorphism test as the metric of expressiveness, but this graph-level task may not effectively assess a model's ability in recommendation, where the objective is to distinguish nodes of different closeness. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the expressiveness of GNNs in recommendation, considering three levels of expressiveness metrics: graph isomorphism (graph-level), node automorphism (node-level), and topological closeness (link-level). We propose the topological closeness metric to evaluate GNNs' ability to capture the structural distance between nodes, which closely aligns with the recommendation objective. To validate the effectiveness of this new metric in evaluating recommendation performance, we introduce a learning-less GNN algorithm that is optimal on the new metric and can be optimal on the node-level metric with suitable modification. We conduct extensive experiments comparing the proposed algorithm against various types of state-of-the-art GNN models to explore the effectiveness of the new metric in the recommendation task. For the sake of reproducibility, implementation codes are available at https://github.com/HKUDS/GTE.
Xuheng Cai, Lianghao Xia, Xubin Ren, Chao Huang 0001
CIKM3
2023 Graph Transformer for Recommendation
abstract
This paper presents a novel approach to representation learning in recommender systems by integrating generative self-supervised learning with graph transformer architecture. We highlight the importance of high-quality data augmentation with relevant self-supervised pretext tasks for improving performance. Towards this end, we propose a new approach that automates the self-supervision augmentation process through a rationale-aware generative SSL that distills informative user-item interaction patterns. The proposed recommender with Graph Transformer (GFormer) that offers parameterized collaborative rationale discovery for selective augmentation while preserving global-aware user-item relationships. In GFormer, we allow the rationale-aware SSL to inspire graph collaborative filtering with task-adaptive invariant rationalization in graph transformer. The experimental results reveal that our GFormer has the capability to consistently improve the performance over baselines on different datasets. Several in-depth experiments further investigate the invariant rationale-aware augmentation from various aspects. The source code for this work is publicly available at: https://github.com/HKUDS/GFormer.
Chaoliu Li, Lianghao Xia, Xubin Ren, Yaowen Ye, Yong Xu 0007, Chao Huang 0001
SIGIR3
2023 Disentangled Contrastive Collaborative Filtering
abstract
Recent studies show that graph neural networks (GNNs) are prevalent to model high-order relationships for collaborative filtering (CF). Towards this research line, graph contrastive learning (GCL) has exhibited powerful performance in addressing the supervision label shortage issue by learning augmented user and item representations. While many of them show their effectiveness, two key questions still remain unexplored: i) Most existing GCL-based CF models are still limited by ignoring the fact that user-item interaction behaviors are often driven by diverse latent intent factors (e.g., shopping for family party, preferred color or brand of products); ii) Their introduced non-adaptive augmentation techniques are vulnerable to noisy information, which raises concerns about the model's robustness and the risk of incorporating misleading self-supervised signals. In light of these limitations, we propose a Disentangled Contrastive Collaborative Filtering framework (DCCF) to realize intent disentanglement with self-supervised augmentation in an adaptive fashion. With the learned disentangled representations with global context, our DCCF is able to not only distill finer-grained latent factors from the entangled self-supervision signals but also alleviate the augmentation-induced noise. Finally, the cross-view contrastive learning task is introduced to enable adaptive augmentation with our parameterized interaction mask generator. Experiments on various public datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to existing solutions. Our model implementation is released at the link https://github.com/HKUDS/DCCF.
Xubin Ren, Lianghao Xia, Jiashu Zhao, Dawei Yin 0001, Chao Huang 0001
SIGIR1
2023 Multi-auxiliary Augmented Collaborative Variational Auto-encoder for Tag Recommendation
abstract
Recommending appropriate tags to items can facilitate content organization, retrieval, consumption, and other applications, where hybrid tag recommender systems have been utilized to integrate collaborative information and content information for better recommendations. In this article, we propose a multi-auxiliary augmented collaborative variational auto-encoder (MA-CVAE) for tag recommendation, which couples item collaborative information and item multi-auxiliary information, i.e., content and social graph, by defining a generative process. Specifically, the model learns deep latent embeddings from different item auxiliary information using variational auto-encoders (VAE), which could form a generative distribution over each auxiliary information by introducing a latent variable parameterized by deep neural network. Moreover, to recommend tags for new items, item multi-auxiliary latent embeddings are utilized as a surrogate through the item decoder for predicting recommendation probabilities of each tag, where reconstruction losses are added in the training phase to constrain the generation for feedback predictions via different auxiliary embeddings. In addition, an inductive variational graph auto-encoder is designed to infer latent embeddings of new items in the test phase, such that item social information could be exploited for new items. Extensive experiments on MovieLens and citeulike datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Jing Yi, Xubin Ren, Zhenzhong Chen 0001
ACM Trans. Inf. Syst.2