Yinlin Zhu

dblp:351/1109 · DBLP profile ↗
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13ranked-venue papers
3as first author
13since 2021 · last 2026
0009-0009-9181-6972ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 11 · 3 first-author · 11 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 4 · 1 first-author · 4 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 4 · 1 first-author · 4 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 PAGE: A Unified Approach for Federated Graph Unlearning
abstract
Federated graph learning (FGL) is a distributive framework for graph representation learning that prioritizes privacy preservation. The right to be forgotten embodies the ethical principle of prioritizing user autonomy over data usage. In the context of FGL, upholding this right requires the method to remove specific entities and their associated knowledge within local subgraphs (Meta Unlearning) and the complete erasure of the entire client (Client Unlearning). We are the first to systematically define the above two unlearn requests in federated graph unlearning. Several studies have attempted to address this challenge, but key limitations persist: incomplete unlearning support and residual knowledge permeation. To this end, we propose a Prototype-guided Adversarial Graph Eraser for universal federated graph unlearning (PAGE), the first unified federated graph unlearning framework that extend to comprehensive unlearning requests. For meta unlearning, we employ the prototype gradients guide initial local unlearn, while adversarial graphs eliminate residual knowledge across the influenced clients. For client unlearning, PAGE exclusively utilizes adversarial graph generation to purge a departed client's influence from the remaining participants. PAGE outperforms existing methods on 8 benchmark datasets. It improves prediction accuracy by 5.08% (client unlearn) and 1.50% (meta-unlearn), with up to 11.84% gain on large-scale graphs. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm its efficacy as a plug-in for other meta unlearn methods, boosting prediction performance up to 4.49% and unlearning performance up to 7.22%.
Yuming Ai, Xunkai Li, Jiaqi Chao, Bowen Fan, Zhengyu Wu, Yinlin Zhu, Rong-Hua Li 0001, Guoren Wang
AAAI6
2026 Rethinking Multimodal Point Cloud Completion: A Completion-by-Correction Perspective
abstract
Point cloud completion aims to reconstruct complete 3D shapes from partial observations, which is a challenging problem due to severe occlusions and missing geometry. Despite recent advances in multimodal techniques that leverage complementary RGB images to compensate for missing geometry, most methods still follow a Completion-by-Inpainting paradigm, synthesizing missing structures from fused latent features. We empirically show that this paradigm often results in structural inconsistencies and topological artifacts due to limited geometric and semantic constraints. To address this, we rethink the task and propose a more robust paradigm, termed Completion-by-Correction, which begins with a topologically complete shape prior generated by a pretrained image-to-3D model and performs feature-space correction to align it with the partial observation. This paradigm shifts completion from unconstrained synthesis to guided refinement, enabling structurally consistent and observation-aligned reconstruction. Building upon this paradigm, we introduce PGNet, a multi-stage framework that conducts dual-feature encoding to ground the generative prior, synthesizes a coarse yet structurally aligned scaffold, and progressively refines geometric details via hierarchical correction. Experiments on the ShapeNetViPC dataset demonstrate the superiority of PGNet over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of average Chamfer Distance (-23.5%) and F-score (+7.1%).
Di Wu 0001, Hengyuan Na, Yinlin Zhu, Miao Hu 0001, Guocong Quan
AAAI4
2026 Towards effective few-shot OOD detection for text-attributed graphs via topology-Text consensus modeling
Yinlin Zhu, Xunkai Li, Meixia Qu
Knowl. Based Syst.2
2026 FedSA-GCL: A semi-asynchronous federated graph learning framework with personalized aggregation and cluster-aware broadcasting
Zhongzheng Yuan, Lianshuai Guo, Xunkai Li, Yinlin Zhu, Meixia Qu
Knowl. Based Syst.4
2025 Rethinking Client-oriented Federated Graph Learning
abstract
As a new distributed graph learning paradigm, Federated Graph Learning (FGL) facilitates collaborative model training across local systems while preserving data privacy. We review existing FGL approaches and categorize their optimization mechanisms into: (1) Server-Client (S-C), where clients upload local model parameters for server-side aggregation and global updates; (2) Client-Client (C-C), which allows direct exchange of information between clients and customizing their local training process. We reveal that C-C shows superior potential due to its refined communication structure. However, existing C-C methods broadcast redundant node representations, incurring high communication costs and privacy risks at the node level. To this end, we propose FedC4, which combines graph Condensation with C-C Collaboration optimization. Specifically, FedC4 employs graph condensation technique to refine the knowledge of each client's graph into a few synthetic embeddings instead of transmitting node-level knowledge. Moreover, FedC4 introduces three novel modules that allow the source client to send distinct node representations tailored to the target client's graph properties. Experiments on eight public real-world datasets show that FedC4 outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both task performance and communication cost. Our code is now available on https://github.com/Ereshkigal1/FedC4.
Zekai Chen 0007, Xunkai Li, Yinlin Zhu, Rong-Hua Li 0001, Guoren Wang
CIKM3
2025 Rethinking Federated Graph Learning: A Data Condensation Perspective
abstract
Federated graph learning is a widely recognized technique that promotes collaborative training of graph neural networks (GNNs) by multi-client graphs.However, existing approaches heavily rely on the communication of model parameters or gradients for federated optimization and fail to adequately address the data heterogeneity introduced by intricate and diverse graph distributions. Although some methods attempt to share additional messages among the server and clients to improve federated convergence during communication, they introduce significant privacy risks and increase communication overhead. To address these issues, we introduce the concept of a condensed graph as a novel optimization carrier to address FGL data heterogeneity and propose a new FGL paradigm called FedGM. Specifically, we utilize a generalized condensation graph consensus to aggregate comprehensive knowledge from distributed graphs, while minimizing communication costs and privacy risks through a single transmission of the condensed data. Extensive experiments on six public datasets consistently demonstrate the superiority of FedGM over state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting its potential for a novel FGL paradigm.
Hao Zhang 0098, Xunkai Li, Yinlin Zhu, Lianglin Hu
IJCAI3
2025 Federated Continual Graph Learning
abstract
Managing evolving graph data presents substantial challenges in storage and privacy, and training graph neural networks (GNNs) on such data often leads to catastrophic forgetting, impairing performance on earlier tasks.Despite existing continual graph learning (CGL) methods mitigating this to some extent, they rely on centralized architectures and ignore the potential of distributed graph databases to leverage collective intelligence.To this end, we propose Federated Continual Graph Learning (FCGL) to adapt GNNs across multiple evolving graphs under storage and privacy constraints.Our empirical study highlights two core challenges: local graph forgetting (LGF), where clients lose prior knowledge when adapting to new tasks, and global expertise conflict (GEC), where the global GNN exhibits sub-optimal performance in both adapting to new tasks and retaining old ones, arising from inconsistent client expertise during server-side parameter aggregation.To address these, we introduce POWER, a framework that preserves experience nodes with maximum local-global coverage locally to mitigate LGF, and leverages pseudo-prototype reconstruction with trajectory-aware knowledge transfer to resolve GEC.Experiments on various graph datasets demonstrate POWER's superiority over federated adaptations of CGL baselines and vision-centric federated continual learning approaches.
Yinlin Zhu, Miao Hu 0001, Di Wu 0001
KDD (2)1
2025 Towards Effective Federated Graph Foundation Model via Mitigating Knowledge Entanglement
abstract
Recent advances in graph machine learning have shifted to data-centric paradigms, driven by two emerging research fields: (1) Federated graph learning (FGL) facilitates multi-client collaboration but struggles with data and task heterogeneity, resulting in limited practicality; (2) Graph foundation model (GFM) enables desirable domain generalization but is typically confined to single-machine training, neglecting the potential of cross-silo data and computational resources. It is evident that these two paradigms are complementary, and their integration offers substantial advantages. Motivated by this, we present a pioneering study about the federated graph foundation model (FedGFM), a novel decentralized GFM training paradigm. Despite the promising vision of FedGFM, knowledge entanglement has emerged as a critical challenge, where multi-domain knowledge is encoded into indistinguishable representations, thereby limiting downstream adaptation. To this end, we propose FedGFM+, an effective FedGFM framework with two key modules to mitigate knowledge entanglement in a dual-pronged manner. (1) AncDAI: From a global perspective, we introduce a novel anchor-based domain-aware initialization strategy. Before pre-training, each client encodes its local graph into a domain-specific prototypes, which serve as semantic anchors in the representation space. Around each anchor, we construct synthetic embeddings to initialize the global model. We theoretically show that these prototypes are distinguishable across domains, and the initialization provides a strong inductive bias that facilitates disentanglement of domain-specific knowledge. (2) AdaDPP: From a local perspective, during pre-training, each client independently learns a lightweight graph prompt that captures domain semantic preferences. During fine-tuning, prompts from all clients are aggregated into an adaptive domain-sensitive prompt pool, from which the GFM selects relevant prompts to augment the target graph’s attributes, thereby improving the downstream adaptation. FedGFM+ is extensively evaluated on 8 diverse benchmarks spanning multiple domains and tasks, outperforming 20 baselines from isolated supervised learning, FGL, and federated variants of centralized GFM paradigms.
Yinlin Zhu, Xunkai Li, Jishuo Jia, Miao Hu 0001, Di Wu 0001, Meikang Qiu
NeurIPS1
2025 FedPPD: Towards effective subgraph federated learning via pseudo prototype distillation
Jishuo Jia, Yinlin Zhu, Xunkai Li, Bin Jiang 0011, Meixia Qu
Neural Networks3
2025 OpenFGL: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Federated Graph Learning
abstract
Federated graph learning (FGL) is a promising distributed training paradigm for graph neural networks across multiple local systems without direct data sharing. This approach inherently involves large-scale distributed graph processing, which closely aligns with the challenges and research focuses of graph-based data systems. Despite the proliferation of FGL, the diverse motivations from real-world applications, spanning various research backgrounds and settings, pose a significant challenge to fair evaluation. To fill this gap, we propose OpenFGL, a unified benchmark designed for the primary FGL scenarios: Graph-FL and Subgraph-FL. Specifically, OpenFGL includes 42 graph datasets from 18 application domains, 8 federated data simulation strategies that emphasize different graph properties, and 5 graph-based downstream tasks. Additionally, it offers 18 recently proposed SOTA FGL algorithms through a user-friendly API, enabling a thorough comparison and comprehensive evaluation of their effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency. Our empirical results demonstrate the capabilities of FGL while also highlighting its potential limitations, providing valuable insights for future research in this growing field, particularly in fostering greater interdisciplinary collaboration between FGL and data systems.
Xunkai Li, Yinlin Zhu, Boyang Pang, Guochen Yan, Yeyu Yan, Zening Li, Zhengyu Wu, Wentao Zhang 0001, Rong-Hua Li 0001, Guoren Wang
Proc. VLDB Endow.2
2024 FedTAD: Topology-aware Data-free Knowledge Distillation for Subgraph Federated Learning
Yinlin Zhu, Xunkai Li, Zhengyu Wu, Di Wu 0001, Miao Hu 0001, Rong-Hua Li 0001
IJCAI1
2023 LoyalDE: Improving the performance of Graph Neural Networks with loyal node discovery and emphasis
Haotong Wei, Yinlin Zhu, Xunkai Li, Bin Jiang 0011
Neural Networks2
2023 FedGTA: Topology-aware Averaging for Federated Graph Learning
abstract
Federated Graph Learning (FGL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm that enables collaborative training on large-scale subgraphs across multiple local systems. Existing FGL studies fall into two categories: (i) FGL Optimization, which improves multi-client training in existing machine learning models; (ii) FGL Model, which enhances performance with complex local models and multi-client interactions. However, most FGL optimization strategies are designed specifically for the computer vision domain and ignore graph structure, presenting dissatisfied performance and slow convergence. Meanwhile, complex local model architectures in FGL Models studies lack scalability for handling large-scale subgraphs and have deployment limitations. To address these issues, we propose Federated Graph Topology-aware Aggregation (FedGTA), a personalized optimization strategy that optimizes through topology-aware local smoothing confidence and mixed neighbor features. During experiments, we deploy FedGTA in 12 multi-scale real-world datasets with the Louvain and Metis split. This allows us to evaluate the performance and robustness of FedGTA across a range of scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedGTA achieves state-of-the-art performance while exhibiting high scalability and efficiency. The experiment includes ogbn-papers100M, the most representative large-scale graph database so that we can verify the applicability of our method to large-scale graph learning. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to bridge large-scale graph learning with FGL using this optimization strategy, contributing to the development of efficient and scalable FGL methods.
Xunkai Li, Zhengyu Wu, Wentao Zhang 0001, Yinlin Zhu, Rong-Hua Li 0001, Guoren Wang
Proc. VLDB Endow.4