EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Zhigang Hua
dblp:76/170
· DBLP profile ↗
10ranked-venue papers in the field
0as first author
9since 2021 · last 2025
0009-0000-2045-0701ORCID · corroborated
Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several
Information Retrieval & Web Search · 6Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 3Big Data, Cloud & Distributed Data Systems · 1
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Staleness-Based Subgraph Sampling for Training GNNs on Large-Scale Graphs
Limei Wang, Hanqing Zeng, Zhigang Hua, Kaveh Hassani, Andrey Malevich, Bo Long, Shuiwang Ji |
IEEE Big Data | 5 |
| 2025 | GSTBench: A Benchmark Study on the Transferability of Graph Self-Supervised LearningabstractSelf-supervised learning (SSL) has shown great promise in graph representation learning. However, most existing graph SSL methods are developed and evaluated under a single-dataset setting, leaving their cross-dataset transferability largely unexplored and limiting their ability to leverage knowledge transfer and large-scale pretraining, factors that are critical for developing generalized intelligence beyond fitting training data. To address this gap and advance foundation model research for graphs, we present GSTBench, the first systematic benchmark for evaluating the transferability of graph SSL methods. We conduct large-scale pretraining on ogbn-papers100M and evaluate five representative SSL methods across a diverse set of target graphs. Our standardized experimental setup decouples confounding factors such as model architecture, dataset characteristics, and adaptation protocols, enabling rigorous comparisons focused solely on pretraining objectives. Surprisingly, we observe that most graph SSL methods struggle to generalize, with some performing worse than random initialization. In contrast, GraphMAE, a masked autoencoder approach, consistently improves transfer performance. We analyze the underlying factors that drive these differences and offer insights to guide future research on transferable graph SSL, laying a solid foundation for the ''pretrain-then-transfer'' paradigm in graph learning. Our code is available at https://github.com/SongYYYY/GSTBench. Yu Song 0007, Zhigang Hua, Jingzhe Liu, Bo Long, Hui Liu 0031 |
CIKM | 2 |
| 2025 | Billion-Scale Graph Deep Learning Framework for Ads RecommendationabstractIn this paper, we systemically disentangle BHG, a graph deep learning framework for daily users' ads recommendations. BHG mainly relies on two pillars: (1) graph tokenization to convert the input temporal heterogeneous graph into sequences of tokens, and (2) graph MLP-Mixer neural architecture to learn node representations on sequences of tokens via a mini-batch manner. In general, BHG embraces three advantages: (1) flexibility, i.e., BHG can be seamlessly integrated with any existing industrial recommendation model by treating the learned node embeddings as additional features that encode interactions, (2) efficiency, i.e., the graph tokenization allows sampling the neighborhood both locally and globally, and reduces the number of nodes considered for aggregations, and (3) model simplicity, i.e., the graph MLP-Mixer does not require self-attention for aggregating nodes and hence enjoys the simplicity. We demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed BHG on two internal datasets and one public dataset. We hope this paper can share insights and explain large-scale graph deep learning deployments for researchers, engineers, and practitioners. Weilin Cong, Dongqi Fu, Andrey Malevich, Baichuan Yuan, Xin Zhou 0029, Kaveh Hassani, Zhigang Hua, Austin Derrow-Pinion, Yinglong Xia, Vena Jia Li, Sem Park, Bo Long |
CIKM | 9 |
| 2025 | A Scalable Pretraining Framework for Link Prediction with Efficient AdaptationabstractLink Prediction (LP) is a critical task in graph machine learning. While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have significantly advanced LP performance recently, existing methods face key challenges including limited supervision from sparse connectivity, sensitivity to initialization, and poor generalization under distribution shifts. We explore pretraining as a solution to address these challenges. Unlike node classification, LP is inherently a pairwise task, which requires the integration of both node- and edge-level information. In this work, we present the first systematic study on the transferability of these distinct modules and propose a late fusion strategy to effectively combine their outputs for improved performance. To handle the diversity of pretraining data and avoid negative transfer, we introduce a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework that captures distinct patterns in separate experts, facilitating seamless application of the pretrained model on diverse downstream datasets. For fast adaptation, we develop a parameter-efficient tuning strategy that allows the pretrained model to adapt to unseen datasets with minimal computational overhead. Experiments on 16 datasets across two domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art performance on low-resource link prediction while obtaining competitive results compared to end-to-end trained methods, with over 10,000x lower computational overhead. Yu Song 0007, Zhigang Hua, Harry Shomer, Jingzhe Liu, Bo Long, Hui Liu 0031 |
KDD (2) | 2 |
| 2025 | MOTTO: A Mixture-of-Experts Framework for Multi-Treatment, Multi-Outcome Treatment Effect EstimationabstractMulti-treatment multi-outcome treatment effect estimation plays a vital role in today's industry-level applications. For example, in social media ads, practitioners simultaneously deploy multiple interventions to users' experience and track multi-faceted metrics (e.g., ad performance, engagement, churn). However, existing methods for estimating treatment effects struggle to simultaneously address the complex interplays and ensure robust counterfactual balancing across treatment-outcome pairs. Yiling Liu, Wei Shi 0011, Ziyang Jiang, Zhigang Hua, David E. Carlson |
KDD (2) | 5 |
| 2025 | Session-Level Dynamic Ad Load Optimization using Offline Robust Reinforcement Learning
Tao Liu 0035, Qi Xu 0005, Wei Shi 0011, Zhigang Hua |
KDD (1) | 4 |
| 2024 | Ads Supply Personalization via Doubly Robust LearningabstractAds supply personalization aims to balance the revenue and user engagement, two long-term objectives in social media ads, by tailoring the ad quantity and density. In the industry-scale system, the challenge for ads supply lies in modeling the counterfactual effects of a conservative supply treatment (e.g., a small density change) over an extended duration. In this paper, we present a streamlined framework for personalized ad supply. This framework optimally utilizes information from data collection policies through the doubly robust learning. Consequently, it significantly improves the accuracy of long-term treatment effect estimates. Additionally, its low-complexity design not only results in computational cost savings compared to existing methods, but also makes it scalable for billion-scale applications. Through both offline experiments and online production tests, the framework consistently demonstrated significant improvements in top-line business metrics over months. The framework has been fully deployed to live traffic in one of the world's largest social media platforms. Wei Shi 0011, Qi Xu 0005, Sanjian Chen, Jizhe Zhang, Qinqin Zhu, Zhigang Hua |
CIKM | 7 |
| 2022 | A Practical Distributed ADMM Solver for Billion-Scale Generalized Assignment ProblemsabstractAssigning items to owners is a common problem found in various real-world applications, for example, audience-channel matching in marketing campaigns, borrower-lender matching in loan management, and shopper-merchant matching in e-commerce. Given an objective and multiple constraints, an assignment problem can be formulated as a constrained optimization problem. Such assignment problems are usually NP-hard [21], so when the number of items or the number of owners is large, solving for exact solutions becomes challenging. In this paper, we are interested in solving constrained assignment problems with hundreds of millions of items. Thus, with just tens of owners, the number of decision variables is at billion-scale. This scale is usually seen in the internet industry, which makes decisions for large groups of users. We relax the possible integer constraint, and formulate a general optimization problem that covers commonly seen assignment problems. Its objective function is convex. Its constraints are either linear, or convex and separable by items. We study to solve our generalized assignment problems in the Bregman Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (BADMM) framework where we exploit Bregman divergence to transform the Augmented Lagrangian into a separable form, and solve many subproblems in parallel. The entire solution can thus be implemented using a MapReduce-style distributed computation framework. We present experiment results on both synthetic and real-world datasets to verify its accuracy and scalability. Jun Zhou 0011, Feng Qi 0005, Zhigang Hua, Daohong Jian |
CIKM | 3 |
| 2021 | AntOpt: A Multi-functional Large-scale Decision Optimization PlatformabstractThe orderly operation and development of any system are indivisible from decision optimization. Several issues in life are applicable to the thought of optimization problems to resolve. In this digital age, the size of information and data is obtaining larger and the potency of problem determination is changing into more demanding. Though there're many solvers for specific optimization problems, in the face of large-scale scenarios, there's no single platform that concurrently addresses usability, solvers' uniformity, and computing efficiency. In this demo, we present AntOpt, a decision optimization platform that integrates large-scale distributed computing engines, optimization algorithm solvers and productized services. Jun Zhou 0011, Yang Bao 0008, Zhigang Hua |
CIKM | 4 |
| 2020 | Solving Billion-Scale Knapsack ProblemsabstractKnapsack problems (KPs) are common in industry, but solving KPs is known to be NP-hard and has been tractable only at a relatively small scale. This paper examines KPs in a slightly generalized form and shows that they can be solved nearly optimally at scale via distributed algorithms. The proposed approach can be implemented fairly easily with off-the-shelf distributed computing frameworks (e.g. MPI, Hadoop, Spark). As an example, our implementation leads to one of the most efficient KP solvers known to date – capable to solve KPs at an unprecedented scale (e.g., KPs with 1 billion decision variables and 1 billion constraints can be solved within 1 hour). The system has been deployed to production and called on a daily basis, yielding significant business impacts at Ant Financial. Xingwen Zhang, Feng Qi 0005, Zhigang Hua |
WWW | 3 |