Demo Data from SIGIR 2026 / reviewers in the wild / expert
Zhen Wang 0036
dblp:78/6727-36
· DBLP profile ↗
29ranked-venue papers
6as first author
24since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-8140-8782ORCID · conflict
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 21 · 5 first-author · 17 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 18 · 3 first-author · 17 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 4 · 1 first-author · 4 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 3 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Artificial intelligence
22 papers |
Graph learning · 36% Efficient and distributed learning · 34% Trustworthy machine learning · 10% | |
| Databases, data mining, and information retrieval
7 papers |
Recommender systems · 42% Query processing and optimization · 24% Information retrieval · 11% | |
| Network and information security
2 papers |
Privacy and data protection · 69% Security and privacy of machine learning · 31% | |
| Interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and emerging computing
3 papers |
Computational science and engineering · 86% Bioinformatics and computational biology · 14% |
Topics — the 30 heaviest of 67, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Machine learning › Graph learning
graph neural network |
4.1 | 6 | 2025 | Graph Neural Ricci Flow: Evolving Feature from a Curvature Perspective · ICLR 2025 When Transformer Meets Large Graphs: An Expressive and Efficient Two-View Architecture · IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 2024 Exploring Neural Scaling Law and Data Pruning Methods For Node Classification on Large-scale Graphs · WWW 2024 |
Machine learning › Efficient and distributed learning
federated learning |
2.7 | 4 | 2024 | A Swiss Army Knife for Heterogeneous Federated Learning: Flexible Coupling via Trace Norm · NeurIPS 2024 FederatedScope: A Flexible Federated Learning Platform for Heterogeneity · Proc. VLDB Endow. 2023 FedHPO-Bench: A Benchmark Suite for Federated Hyperparameter Optimization · ICML 2023 |
Machine learning › Transfer learning and domain adaptation
meta-learning |
1.6 | 3 | 2022 | KoMen: Domain Knowledge Guided Interaction Recommendation for Emerging Scenarios · WWW 2022 Finding Meta Winning Ticket to Train Your MAML · KDD 2022 AutoML: A Perspective where Industry Meets Academy · KDD 2021 |
Machine learning › Efficient and distributed learning › automated machine learning
neural architecture search |
1.5 | 3 | 2022 | Graph Neural Networks with Node-wise Architecture · KDD 2022 AutoML: A Perspective where Industry Meets Academy · KDD 2021 AdaBERT: Task-Adaptive BERT Compression with Differentiable Neural Architecture Search · IJCAI 2020 |
Machine learning › Trustworthy machine learning
interpretability |
1.4 | 2 | 2025 | Incorporating Retrieval-based Causal Learning with Information Bottlenecks for Interpretable Molecular Graph Learning · KDD (2) 2025 Explainable Neural Rule Learning · WWW 2022 |
Machine learning › Efficient and distributed learning
model compression |
1.0 | 2 | 2022 | Finding Meta Winning Ticket to Train Your MAML · KDD 2022 AdaBERT: Task-Adaptive BERT Compression with Differentiable Neural Architecture Search · IJCAI 2020 |
Machine learning › Graph learning › graph neural network
node classification |
0.9 | 2 | 2024 | Exploring Neural Scaling Law and Data Pruning Methods For Node Classification on Large-scale Graphs · WWW 2024 EvenNet: Ignoring Odd-Hop Neighbors Improves Robustness of Graph Neural Networks · NeurIPS 2022 |
Machine learning › Trustworthy machine learning › interpretability
causal explanation |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Incorporating Retrieval-based Causal Learning with Information Bottlenecks for Interpretable Molecular Graph Learning · KDD (2) 2025 |
Machine learning › Graph learning › graph neural network
continuous graph neural network |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Graph Neural Ricci Flow: Evolving Feature from a Curvature Perspective · ICLR 2025 |
Machine learning › Graph learning › graph neural network › trustworthy graph neural networks
interpretable graph neural network |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Incorporating Retrieval-based Causal Learning with Information Bottlenecks for Interpretable Molecular Graph Learning · KDD (2) 2025 |
Machine learning › Generative modeling › molecular generation
molecular graph generation |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Advancing Retrosynthesis with Retrieval-Augmented Graph Generation · AAAI 2025 |
Machine learning › Graph learning › molecular representation learning
molecular graph learning |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Incorporating Retrieval-based Causal Learning with Information Bottlenecks for Interpretable Molecular Graph Learning · KDD (2) 2025 |
Computational science and engineering › computational chemistry
retrosynthesis prediction |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | Advancing Retrosynthesis with Retrieval-Augmented Graph Generation · AAAI 2025 |
Machine learning › Efficient and distributed learning › federated learning
federated graph learning |
0.8 | 2 | 2024 | FederatedScope-GNN: Towards a Unified, Comprehensive and Efficient Package for Federated Graph Learning · KDD 2022 Is Sharing Neighbor Generator in Federated Graph Learning Safe? · IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 2024 |
Machine learning › Generative modeling › diffusion model
crystal structure generation |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Learning Superconductivity from Ordered and Disordered Material Structures · NeurIPS 2024 |
Machine learning › Generative modeling
diffusion model |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Learning Superconductivity from Ordered and Disordered Material Structures · NeurIPS 2024 |
Machine learning › Efficient and distributed learning › federated learning › personalized federated learning
federated multi-task learning |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | A Swiss Army Knife for Heterogeneous Federated Learning: Flexible Coupling via Trace Norm · NeurIPS 2024 |
Machine learning › Graph learning › graph neural network
graph transformer |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | When Transformer Meets Large Graphs: An Expressive and Efficient Two-View Architecture · IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 2024 |
Machine learning › Graph learning › graph representation learning › scalable graph representation learning
large-scale graph representation learning |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | When Transformer Meets Large Graphs: An Expressive and Efficient Two-View Architecture · IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 2024 |
Machine learning › Efficient and distributed learning › federated learning › heterogeneous federated learning
model heterogeneity |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | A Swiss Army Knife for Heterogeneous Federated Learning: Flexible Coupling via Trace Norm · NeurIPS 2024 |
Machine learning › Graph learning › graph neural network
scalable graph neural network |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | When Transformer Meets Large Graphs: An Expressive and Efficient Two-View Architecture · IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 2024 |
Computational science and engineering
materials informatics |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Learning Superconductivity from Ordered and Disordered Material Structures · NeurIPS 2024 |
Security and privacy of machine learning › privacy attack
data reconstruction attack |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Is Sharing Neighbor Generator in Federated Graph Learning Safe? · IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 2024 |
Privacy and data protection › privacy-preserving machine learning
federated learning privacy |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Is Sharing Neighbor Generator in Federated Graph Learning Safe? · IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 2024 |
Privacy and data protection › privacy-preserving data processing
graph data privacy |
0.8 | 1 | 2024 | Is Sharing Neighbor Generator in Federated Graph Learning Safe? · IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. 2024 |
Machine learning › Optimization for machine learning
hyperparameter optimization |
0.7 | 2 | 2023 | AutoML: A Perspective where Industry Meets Academy · KDD 2021 FedHPO-Bench: A Benchmark Suite for Federated Hyperparameter Optimization · ICML 2023 |
Machine learning › Efficient and distributed learning › federated learning › federated optimization
federated hyperparameter optimization |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | FedHPO-Bench: A Benchmark Suite for Federated Hyperparameter Optimization · ICML 2023 |
Machine learning › Efficient and distributed learning › federated learning › federated learning systems
federated learning platform |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | FederatedScope: A Flexible Federated Learning Platform for Heterogeneity · Proc. VLDB Endow. 2023 |
Machine learning › Efficient and distributed learning › federated learning
heterogeneity handling |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | FederatedScope: A Flexible Federated Learning Platform for Heterogeneity · Proc. VLDB Endow. 2023 |
Query processing and optimization › query optimization › learned query optimization
learned query optimizer |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | BASE: Bridging the Gap between Cost and Latency for Query Optimization · Proc. VLDB Endow. 2023 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
ricci flow · 1.7retrieval-based learning · 1.7retrieval augmentation · 1.7graph information bottleneck · 1.7diffusion model · 1.7differential equations · 1.7causal learning · 1.7equivariant graph attention · 1.5reinforcement learning · 1.0low-rank structure mining · 0.8link prediction · 0.8gradient matching · 0.8diffusion generative models · 0.8diffusion generative model · 0.8reward function transfer · 0.7inverse reinforcement learning · 0.7model auto-tuning · 0.6mixture of experts · 0.6
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Advancing Retrosynthesis with Retrieval-Augmented Graph GenerationabstractDiffusion-based molecular graph generative models have achieved significant success in template-free, single-step retrosynthesis prediction. However, these models typically generate reactants from scratch, often overlooking the fact that the scaffold of a product molecule typically remains unchanged during chemical reactions. To leverage this useful observation, we introduce a retrieval-augmented molecular graph generation framework. Our framework comprises three key components: a retrieval component that identifies similar molecules for the given product, an integration component that learns valuable clues from these molecules about which part of the product should remain unchanged, and a base generative model that is prompted by these clues to generate the corresponding reactants. We explore various design choices for critical and under-explored aspects of this framework and instantiate it as the Retrieval-Augmented RetroBridge (RARB). RARB demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks, achieving a 14.8% relative improvement in top-1 accuracy over its base generative model, highlighting the effectiveness of retrieval augmentation. Additionally, RARB excels in handling out-of-distribution molecules, and its advantages remain significant even with smaller models or fewer denoising steps. These strengths make RARB highly valuable for real-world retrosynthesis applications, where extrapolation to novel molecules and high-throughput prediction are essential. Anjie Qiao, Zhen Wang 0036, Jiahua Rao, Yuedong Yang, Zhewei Wei |
AAAI | 2 |
| 2025 | SAMAG: Structure-Aware Multi-Agent Graph Generation with Large Language Models
Jingcheng Cen, Jiarui Ji, Zhen Wang 0036, Zhewei Wei, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding |
IEEE Big Data | 3 |
| 2025 | Graph Neural Ricci Flow: Evolving Feature from a Curvature PerspectiveabstractDifferential equations provide a dynamical perspective for understanding and designing graph neural networks (GNNs). By generalizing the discrete Ricci flow (DRF) to attributed graphs, we can leverage a new paradigm for the evolution of node features with the help of curvature. We show that in the attributed graphs, DRF guarantees a vital property: The curvature of each edge concentrates toward zero over time. This property leads to two interesting consequences: 1) graph Dirichlet energy with bilateral bounds and 2) data-independent curvature decay rate. Based on these theoretical results, we propose the Graph Neural Ricci Flow (GNRF), a novel curvature-aware continuous-depth GNN. Compared to traditional curvature-based graph learning methods, GNRF is not limited to a specific curvature definition. It computes and adjusts time-varying curvature efficiently in linear time. We also empirically illustrate the operating mechanism of GNRF and verify that it performs excellently on diverse datasets. Bowen Deng 0002, Zhen Wang 0036, Chuan Chen 0001, Zibin Zheng |
ICLR | 3 |
| 2025 | Incorporating Retrieval-based Causal Learning with Information Bottlenecks for Interpretable Molecular Graph LearningabstractGraph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained considerable traction for modeling molecular structures and predicting properties, but their interpretability remains a significant challenge in understanding chemical behaviors. Current interpretation methods often rely on post-hoc explanations, which aim to provide transparency in GNN decisions. However, these approaches struggle with interpreting complex subgraphs and fail to leverage explanations to enhance predictive capabilities. While transparent methods can enhance GNN predictions, they typically compromise on explanation precision. This limitation underscores the need for a new strategy that effectively integrates GNN explanations and predictions. In this study, we have developed a novel interpretable causal GNN framework that combines retrieval-based causal learning with Graph Information Bottleneck (GIB) theory. Our framework semi-parametrically identifies crucial subgraphs through GIB and compresses explanatory subgraphs using a causal module. The framework consistently outperformed state-of-the-art methods, achieving a 32.72% increase in precision for scientific explanation tasks involving diverse substructures. More importantly, the learned explanations were also shown to be able to improve GNN prediction performance. This advancement is particularly vital for molecular graph learning, as it addresses the critical need to interpret how molecular structures influence predicted properties, thereby aiding drug discovery and materials science by providing insights into chemical mechanisms. Jiahua Rao, Hanjing Lin, Jiancong Xie, Zhen Wang 0036, Shuangjia Zheng, Yuedong Yang |
KDD (2) | 4 |
| 2024 | Federated Heterogeneous Contrastive Distillation for Molecular Representation LearningabstractWith the increasing application of deep learning to solve scientific problems in biochemistry, molecular federated learning has become popular due to its ability to offer distributed privacy-preserving solutions. However, most existing molecular federated learning methods rely on joint training with public datasets, which are difficult to obtain in practice. These methods also fail to leverage multi-modal molecular representations effectively. To address the above issues, we propose a novel framework, Federated Heterogeneous Contrastive Distillation (FedHCD), which enables to jointly train global models from clients with heterogeneous data modalities, learning tasks, and molecular models. To aggregate data representations of different modalities in a data-free manner, we design a global multi-modal contrastive strategy to align the representation of clients without public dataset. Utilizing intrinsic characteristics of molecular data in different modalities, we tackle the exacerbation of local model drift and data Non-IIDness caused by multi-modal clients. We introduce a multi-view contrastive knowledge transfer to extract features from atoms, substructures, and molecules, solving the issue of information distillation failure due to dimensional biases in different data modalities. Our evaluations on eight real-world molecular datasets and ablation experiments show that FedHCD outperforms other state-of-the-art FL methods, irrespective of whether or not they use public datasets. Jinjia Feng, Zhen Wang 0036, Zhewei Wei, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Hongteng Xu |
CIKM | 2 |
| 2024 | Learning Superconductivity from Ordered and Disordered Material StructuresabstractSuperconductivity is a fascinating phenomenon observed in certain materials under certain conditions. However, some critical aspects of it, such as the relationship between superconductivity and materials' chemical/structural features, still need to be understood. Recent successes of data-driven approaches in material science strongly inspire researchers to study this relationship with them, but a corresponding dataset is still lacking. Hence, we present a new dataset for data-driven approaches, namely SuperCon3D, containing both 3D crystal structures and experimental superconducting transition temperature (Tc) for the first time. Based on SuperCon3D, we propose two deep learning methods for designing high Tc superconductors. The first is SODNet, a novel equivariant graph attention model for screening known structures, which differs from existing models in incorporating both ordered and disordered geometric content. The second is a diffusion generative model DiffCSP-SC for creating new structures, which enables high Tc-targeted generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that both our proposed dataset and models are advantageous for designing new high Tc superconducting candidates. Pin Chen, Luoxuan Peng, Qing Mo, Zhen Wang 0036, Wenbing Huang 0001, Yang Liu 0005, Yutong Lu |
NeurIPS | 5 |
| 2024 | A Swiss Army Knife for Heterogeneous Federated Learning: Flexible Coupling via Trace NormabstractThe heterogeneity issue in federated learning (FL) has attracted increasing attention, which is attempted to be addressed by most existing methods. Currently, due to systems and objectives heterogeneity, enabling clients to hold models of different architectures and tasks of different demands has become an important direction in FL.
Most existing FL methods are based on the homogeneity assumption, namely, different clients have the same architectural models with the same tasks, which are unable to handle complex and multivariate data and tasks.
To flexibly address these heterogeneity limitations, we propose a novel federated multi-task learning framework with the help of tensor trace norm, FedSAK. Specifically, it treats each client as a task and splits the local model into a feature extractor and a prediction head.
Clients can flexibly choose shared structures based on heterogeneous situations and upload them to the server, which learns correlations among client models by mining model low-rank structures through tensor trace norm.
Furthermore, we derive convergence and generalization bounds under non-convex settings. Evaluated on 6 real-world datasets compared to 13 advanced FL models, FedSAK demonstrates superior performance. Tianchi Liao, Lele Fu, Zhen Wang 0036, Zibin Zheng, Chuan Chen 0001 |
NeurIPS | 4 |
| 2024 | Exploring Neural Scaling Law and Data Pruning Methods For Node Classification on Large-scale GraphsabstractRecently, how the model performance scales with the training sample size has been extensively studied for large models on vision and language related domains. Nevertheless, the ubiquitous node classification tasks on web-scale graphs were ignored, where the traits of these tasks, such as non-IIDness and transductive setting, are likely to cause different scaling laws and motivate novel techniques to beat the law. Therefore, we first explore the neural scaling law for node classification tasks on three large-scale graphs. Then, we benchmark several state-of-the-art data pruning methods on these tasks, not only validating the possibility of improving the original unsatisfactory power law but also gaining insights into a hard-and-representative principle on picking an effective subset of training nodes. Moreover, we leverage the transductive setting to propose a novel data pruning method, which instantiates our principle in a test set-targeted manner. Our method consistently outperforms related methods on all three datasets. Meanwhile, we utilize a PAC-Bayesian framework to analyze our method, extending prior results to account for both hardness and representativeness. In addition to a promising way to ease GNN training on web-scale graphs, our study offers knowledge of the relationship between training nodes and GNN generalization. Zhen Wang 0036, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Yule Li, Zhewei Wei |
WWW | 1 |
| 2024 | When Transformer Meets Large Graphs: An Expressive and Efficient Two-View ArchitectureabstractThe successes of applying Transformer to graphs have been witnessed on small graphs (e.g., molecular graphs), yet two barriers prevent its adoption on large graphs (e.g., citation networks). First, despite the benefit of the global receptive field, enormous distant nodes might distract the necessary attention of each target node from its neighborhood. Second, training a Transformer model on large graphs is costly due to the node-to-node attention mechanism's quadratic computational complexity. To break down these barriers, we propose a two-view architectureCoarformer, wherein a GNN-based module captures fine-grained local information from the original graph, and a Transformer-based module captures coarse yet long-range information on the coarse graph. We further design a cross-view propagation scheme so that these two views can enhance each other. Our graph isomorphism analysis shows the complementary natures of GNN and Transformer, justifying the motivation and design ofCoarformer. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets, whereCoarformersurpasses any single-view method that solely applies a GNN or Transformer. As an ablation,Coarformeroutperforms straightforward combinations of a GNN model and a Transformer-based model, verifying the effectiveness of our coarse global view and the cross-view propagation scheme. Meanwhile,Coarformerconsumes the least runtime and GPU memory than those combinations. Weirui Kuang, Zhen Wang 0036, Zhewei Wei, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding |
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. | 2 |
| 2024 | Is Sharing Neighbor Generator in Federated Graph Learning Safe?abstractNowadays, as privacy concerns continue to rise, federated graph learning (FGL) which generalizes the classic federated learning to graph data has attracted increasing attention. However, while the focus has been on designing collaborative learning algorithms, the potential risks of privacy leakage through the sharing of necessary graph-related information in FGL, such as node embeddings and neighbor generators, have been largely neglected. In this paper, we verify the potential risks of privacy leakage in FGL, and provide insights about the cautions in FGL algorithm design. Specifically, we propose a novel privacy attack algorithm named Privacy Attack on federated Graph learning (PAG) towards reconstructing participants’ private node attributes and the linkage relationships. The participant performing the PAG attack is able to reconstruct the node attributes of the victim by matching the received gradients of the generator, and then train a link prediction model based on its local sub-graph to inductively infer the linkages connected to these reconstructed nodes. We theoretically and empirically demonstrate that under PAG attack, directly sharing the neighbor generators makes the FGL vulnerable to the data reconstruction attack. Furthermore, an investigation into the key factors that can hinder the success of the PAG attack provides insights into corresponding defense strategies and inspires future research into privacy-preserving FGL. Liuyi Yao, Zhen Wang 0036, Yuexiang Xie, Yaliang Li, Weirui Kuang, Daoyuan Chen, Bolin Ding |
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. | 2 |
| 2023 | FedHPO-Bench: A Benchmark Suite for Federated Hyperparameter OptimizationabstractResearch in the field of hyperparameter optimization (HPO) has been greatly accelerated by existing HPO benchmarks. Nonetheless, existing efforts in benchmarking all focus on HPO for traditional learning paradigms while ignoring federated learning (FL), a promising paradigm for collaboratively learning models from dispersed data. In this paper, we first identify some uniqueness of federated hyperparameter optimization (FedHPO) from various aspects, showing that existing HPO benchmarks no longer satisfy the need to study FedHPO methods. To facilitate the research of FedHPO, we propose and implement a benchmark suite FedHPO-Bench that incorporates comprehensive FedHPO problems, enables flexible customization of the function evaluations, and eases continuing extensions. We conduct extensive experiments based on FedHPO-Bench to provide the community with more insights into FedHPO. We open-sourced FedHPO-Bench at https://github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope/tree/master/benchmark/FedHPOBench. Zhen Wang 0036, Weirui Kuang, Ce Zhang 0001, Bolin Ding, Yaliang Li |
ICML | 1 |
| 2023 | BASE: Bridging the Gap between Cost and Latency for Query OptimizationabstractSome recent works have shown the advantages of reinforcement learning (RL) based learned query optimizers. These works often use the cost (i.e., the estimation of cost model) or the latency (i.e., execution time) as guidance signals for training their learned models. However, cost-based learning underperforms in latency and latency-based learning is time-intensive. In order to bypass such a dilemma, researchers attempt to transfer a learned value network from the cost domain to the latency domain. We recognize critical insights in cost/latency-based training, prompting us to transfer the reward function rather than the value network. Based on this idea, we propose a two-stage RL-based framework, BASE , to bridge the gap between cost and latency. After learning a policy based on cost signals in its first stage, BASE formulates transferring the reward function as a variant of inverse reinforcement learning. Intuitively, BASE learns to calibrate the reward function and updates the policy regarding the calibrated one in a mutually-improved manner. Extensive experiments exhibit the superiority of BASE on two benchmark datasets: Our optimizer outperforms traditional DBMS, using 30% less training time than SOTA methods. Meanwhile, our approach can enhance the efficiency of other learning-based optimizers. Xu Chen 0023, Zhen Wang 0036, Shuncheng Liu 0001, Yaliang Li, Kai Zeng 0002, Bolin Ding, Jingren Zhou 0001, Han Su 0001, Kai Zheng 0001 |
Proc. VLDB Endow. | 2 |
| 2023 | FederatedScope: A Flexible Federated Learning Platform for HeterogeneityabstractAlthough remarkable progress has been made by existing federated learning (FL) platforms to provide infrastructures for development, these platforms may not well tackle the challenges brought by various types of heterogeneity. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose a novel FL platform, named FederatedScope, which employs an event-driven architecture to provide users with great flexibility to independently describe the behaviors of different participants. Such a design makes it easy for users to describe participants with various local training processes, learning goals and backends, and coordinate them into an FL course with synchronous or asynchronous training strategies. Towards an easy-to-use and flexible platform, FederatedScope enables rich types of plug-in operations and components for efficient further development, and we have implemented several important components to better help users with privacy protection, attack simulation and auto-tuning. We have released FederatedScope at https://github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope to promote academic research and industrial deployment of federated learning in a wide range of scenarios. Yuexiang Xie, Zhen Wang 0036, Daoyuan Chen, Liuyi Yao, Weirui Kuang, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Jingren Zhou 0001 |
Proc. VLDB Endow. | 2 |
| 2022 | MGMAE: Molecular Representation Learning by Reconstructing Heterogeneous Graphs with A High Mask RatioabstractMasked autoencoder (MAE), as an effective self-supervised learner for computer vision and natural language processing, has been recently applied to molecule representation learning. In this paper, we identify two issues in applying MAE to pre-train Transformer-based models on molecular graphs that existing works have ignored. (1) As only atoms are abstracted as tokens and then reconstructed, the chemical bonds are not decided in the decoded molecule, making molecules with different arrangements of the same atoms indistinguishable. (2) Although a high mask ratio that corresponds to a challenging reconstruction task has been proved beneficial in the vision domain, it cannot be trivially leveraged on molecular graphs as there is less redundancy of information in graph data. To resolve these issues, we propose a novel framework, Molecular Graph Mask AutoEncoder (MGMAE). As the first step in MGMAE, we transform each molecular graph into a heterogeneous atom-bond graph to fully use the bond attributes and design unidirectional position encoding for such graphs. Then we propose a hybrid masking mechanism that exploits the complementary nature between atoms' attributive and spatial features. Meanwhile, we compensate for the mask embedding by a dynamic aggregation representation that exploits the correlations between topologically adjacent tokens. As a result, MGMAE can reconstruct the masked atoms, the masked bonds, and the relative distance among atoms simultaneously, with a high mask ratio. We compare MGMAE with the state-of-the-art methods on various molecular benchmarks and show the competitiveness of MGMAE in both regression and classification tasks. Jinjia Feng, Zhen Wang 0036, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Zhewei Wei, Hongteng Xu |
CIKM | 2 |
| 2022 | iFlood: A Stable and Effective Regularizer
Yuexiang Xie, Zhen Wang 0036, Yaliang Li, Ce Zhang 0001, Jingren Zhou 0001, Bolin Ding |
ICLR | 2 |
| 2022 | Finding Meta Winning Ticket to Train Your MAMLabstractThe lottery ticket hypothesis (LTH) states that a randomly initialized dense network contains sub-networks that can be trained in isolation to the performance of the dense network. In this paper, to achieve rapid learning with less computational cost, we explore LTH in the context of meta learning. First, we experimentally show that there are sparse sub-networks, known as meta winning tickets, which can be meta-trained to few-shot classification accuracy to the original backbone. The application of LTH in meta learning enables the adaptation of meta-trained networks on various IoT devices with fewer computation. However, the status quo to identify winning tickets requires iterative training and pruning, which is particularly expensive for finding meta winning tickets. To this end, then we investigate the inter- and intra-layer patterns among different meta winning tickets, and propose a scheme for early detection of a meta winning ticket. The proposed scheme enables efficient training in resource-limited devices. Besides, it also designs a lightweight solution to search the meta winning ticket. Evaluations on standard few-shot classification benchmarks show that we can find competitive meta winning tickets with 20% weights of the original backbone, while incurring only 8%-14% (Conv-4) and 19%-29% (ResNet-12) computation overhead (measured by FLOPs) of the standard winning ticket finding scheme. Yuexiang Xie, Zimu Zhou, Zhen Wang 0036, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding |
KDD | 4 |
| 2022 | FederatedScope-GNN: Towards a Unified, Comprehensive and Efficient Package for Federated Graph LearningabstractThe incredible development of federated learning (FL) has benefited various tasks in the domains of computer vision and natural language processing, and the existing frameworks such as TFF and FATE has made the deployment easy in real-world applications. However, federated graph learning (FGL), even though graph data are prevalent, has not been well supported due to its unique characteristics and requirements. The lack of FGL-related framework increases the efforts for accomplishing reproducible research and deploying in real-world applications. Motivated by such strong demand, in this paper, we first discuss the challenges in creating an easy-to-use FGL package and accordingly present our implemented package FederatedScope-GNN (FS-G), which provides (1) a unified view for modularizing and expressing FGL algorithms; (2) comprehensive DataZoo and ModelZoo for out-of-the-box FGL capability; (3) an efficient model auto-tuning component; and (4) off-the-shelf privacy attack and defense abilities. We validate the effectiveness of FS-G by conducting extensive experiments, which simultaneously gains many valuable insights about FGL for the community. Moreover, we employ FS-G to serve the FGL application in real-world E-commerce scenarios, where the attained improvements indicate great potential business benefits. We publicly release FS-G, as submodules of FederatedScope, at https://github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope to promote FGL's research and enable broad applications that would otherwise be infeasible due to the lack of a dedicated package. Zhen Wang 0036, Weirui Kuang, Yuexiang Xie, Liuyi Yao, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Jingren Zhou 0001 |
KDD | 1 |
| 2022 | Graph Neural Networks with Node-wise ArchitectureabstractRecently, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) for GNN has received increasing popularity as it can seek an optimal architecture for a given new graph. However, the optimal architecture is applied to all the instances (i.e., nodes, in the context of graph) equally, which might be insufficient to handle the diverse local patterns ingrained in a graph, as shown in this paper and some very recent studies. Thus, we argue the necessity of node-wise architecture search for GNN. Nevertheless, node-wise architecture cannot be realized by trivially applying NAS methods node by node due to the scalability issue and the need for determining test nodes' architectures. To tackle these challenges, we propose a framework wherein the parametric controllers decide the GNN architecture for each node based on its local patterns. We instantiate our framework with depth, aggregator and resolution controllers, and then elaborate on learning the backbone GNN model and the controllers to encourage their cooperation. Empirically, we justify the effects of node-wise architecture through the performance improvements introduced by the three controllers, respectively. Moreover, our proposed framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on five of the ten real-world datasets, where the diversity of these datasets has hindered any graph convolution-based method to lead on them simultaneously. This result further confirms that node-wise architecture can help GNNs become versatile models. Zhen Wang 0036, Zhewei Wei, Yaliang Li, Weirui Kuang, Bolin Ding |
KDD | 1 |
| 2022 | EvenNet: Ignoring Odd-Hop Neighbors Improves Robustness of Graph Neural NetworksabstractGraph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received extensive research attention for their promising performance in graph machine learning. Despite their extraordinary predictive accuracy, existing approaches, such as GCN and GPRGNN, are not robust in the face of homophily changes on test graphs, rendering these models vulnerable to graph structural attacks and with limited capacity in generalizing to graphs of varied homophily levels. Although many methods have been proposed to improve the robustness of GNN models, most of these techniques are restricted to the spatial domain and employ complicated defense mechanisms, such as learning new graph structures or calculating edge attentions. In this paper, we study the problem of designing simple and robust GNN models in the spectral domain. We propose EvenNet, a spectral GNN corresponding to an even-polynomial graph filter. Based on our theoretical analysis in both spatial and spectral domains, we demonstrate that EvenNet outperforms full-order models in generalizing across homophilic and heterophilic graphs, implying that ignoring odd-hop neighbors improves the robustness of GNNs. We conduct experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of EvenNet. Notably, EvenNet outperforms existing defense models against structural attacks without introducing additional computational costs and maintains competitiveness in traditional node classification tasks on homophilic and heterophilic graphs. Runlin Lei, Zhen Wang 0036, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Zhewei Wei |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2022 | Explainable Neural Rule LearningabstractAlthough neural networks have achieved great successes in various machine learning tasks, people can hardly know what neural networks learn from data due to their black-box nature. The lack of such explainability is one of the limitations of neural networks when applied in domains, e.g., healthcare and finance, that demand transparency and accountability. Moreover, explainability is beneficial for guiding a neural network to learn the causal patterns that can extrapolate out-of-distribution (OOD) data, which is critical in real-world applications and has surged as a hot research topic. Shaoyun Shi, Yuexiang Xie, Zhen Wang 0036, Bolin Ding, Yaliang Li, Min Zhang 0006 |
WWW | 3 |
| 2022 | KoMen: Domain Knowledge Guided Interaction Recommendation for Emerging ScenariosabstractUser-User interaction recommendation, or interaction recommendation, is an indispensable service in social platforms, where the system automatically predicts with whom a user wants to interact. In real-world social platforms, we observe that user interactions may occur in diverse scenarios, and new scenarios constantly emerge, such as new games or sales promotions. There are two challenges in these emerging scenarios: (1) The behavior of users on the emerging scenarios could be different from existing ones due to the diversity among scenarios; (2) Emerging scenarios may only have scarce user behavioral data for model learning. Towards these two challenges, we present KoMen, a Domain Knowledge Guided Meta-learning framework for Interaction Recommendation. KoMen first learns a set of global model parameters shared among all scenarios and then quickly adapts the parameters for an emerging scenario based on its similarities with the existing ones. There are two highlights of KoMen: (1) KoMen customizes global model parameters by incorporating domain knowledge of the scenarios (e.g., a taxonomy that organizes scenarios by their purposes and functions), which captures scenario inter-dependencies with very limited training. (2) KoMen learns the scenario-specific parameters through a mixture-of-expert architecture, which reduces model variance resulting from data scarcity while still achieving the expressiveness to handle diverse scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that KoMen achieves state-of-the-art performance on a public benchmark dataset and a large-scale real industry dataset. Remarkably, KoMen improves over the best baseline w.r.t. weighted ROC-AUC by 2.14% and 2.03% on the two datasets, respectively. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Veronicium/koMen. Yiqing Xie, Zhen Wang 0036, Carl Yang 0001, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Hongbo Deng, Jiawei Han 0001 |
WWW | 2 |
| 2021 | AutoML: From Methodology to ApplicationabstractMachine Learning methods have been adopted for a wide range of real-world applications, ranging from social networks, online image/video-sharing platforms, and e-commerce to education, healthcare, etc. However, in practice, a large amount of effort is required to tune several components of machine learning methods, including data representation, hyperparameter, and model architecture, in order to achieve a good performance. To alleviate the required tunning efforts, Automated Machine Learning (AutoML), which can automate the process of applying machine learning methods, has been studied in both academy and industry recently. In this tutorial, we will introduce the main research topics of AutoML, including Hyperparameter Optimization, Neural Architecture Search, and Meta-Learning. Two emerging topics of AutoML, Automatic Feature Generation and Machine Learning Guided Database, will also be discussed since they are important components for real-world applications. For each topic, we will motivate it with application examples from industry, illustrate the state-of-the-art methodologies, and discuss some future research directions based on our experience from industry and the trends in academy. Yaliang Li, Zhen Wang 0036, Yuexiang Xie, Bolin Ding, Kai Zeng 0002, Ce Zhang 0001 |
CIKM | 2 |
| 2021 | AutoML: A Perspective where Industry Meets AcademyabstractMachine learning methods have been adopted for various real-world applications, ranging from social networks, online image/video-sharing platforms, and e-commerce to education, healthcare, etc. However, several components of machine learning methods, including data representation, hyperparameter and model architecture, can largely affect their performance in practice. Moreover, the explosions of data scale and model size make the optimization of these components more and more time-consuming for machine learning developers. To tackle these challenges, Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) aims to automate the process of applying machine learning methods to solve real-world application tasks, reducing the time of tuning machine learning methods while maintaining good performance. In this tutorial, we will introduce the main research topics of AutoML, including Hyperparameter Optimization, Neural Architecture Search and Meta-Learning. Two emerging topics of AutoML, DNN-based Feature Generation and Machine Learning Guided Database, will also be discussed as they are important components for real-world applications. For each topic, we will motivate it with examples from industry, illustrate the state-of-the-art methods, and discuss their pros and cons from both perspectives of industry and academy. We will also discuss some future research directions based on our experience from industry and the trends in academy. Yaliang Li, Zhen Wang 0036, Bolin Ding, Ce Zhang 0001 |
KDD | 2 |
| 2021 | FIVES: Feature Interaction Via Edge Search for Large-Scale Tabular DataabstractHigh-order interactive features capture the correlation between different columns and thus are promising to enhance various learning tasks on ubiquitous tabular data. To automate the generation of interactive features, existing works either explicitly traverse the feature space or implicitly express the interactions via intermediate activations of some designed models. These two kinds of methods show that there is essentially a trade-off between feature interpretability and search efficiency. To possess both of their merits, we propose a novel method named Feature Interaction Via Edge Search (FIVES), which formulates the task of interactive feature generation as searching for edges on the defined feature graph. Specifically, we first present our theoretical evidence that motivates us to search for useful interactive features with increasing order. Then we instantiate this search strategy by optimizing both a dedicated graph neural network (GNN) and the adjacency tensor associated with the defined feature graph. In this way, the proposed FIVES method simplifies the time-consuming traversal as a typical training course of GNN and enables explicit feature generation according to the learned adjacency tensor. Experimental results on both benchmark and real-world datasets show the advantages of FIVES over several state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the interactive features identified by FIVES are deployed on the recommender system of Taobao, a worldwide leading e-commerce platform. Results of an online A/B testing further verify the effectiveness of the proposed method FIVES, and we further provide FIVES as AI utilities for the customers of Alibaba Cloud. Yuexiang Xie, Zhen Wang 0036, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Nezihe Merve Gürel, Ce Zhang 0001, Minlie Huang, Wei Lin 0016, Jingren Zhou 0001 |
KDD | 2 |
| 2020 | AdaBERT: Task-Adaptive BERT Compression with Differentiable Neural Architecture SearchabstractLarge pre-trained language models such as BERT have shown their effectiveness in various natural language processing tasks. However, the huge parameter size makes them difficult to be deployed in real-time applications that require quick inference with limited resources. Existing methods compress BERT into small models while such compression is task-independent, i.e., the same compressed BERT for all different downstream tasks. Motivated by the necessity and benefits of task-oriented BERT compression, we propose a novel compression method, AdaBERT, that leverages differentiable Neural Architecture Search to automatically compress BERT into task-adaptive small models for specific tasks. We incorporate a task-oriented knowledge distillation loss to provide search hints and an efficiency-aware loss as search constraints, which enables a good trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness for task-adaptive BERT compression. We evaluate AdaBERT on several NLP tasks, and the results demonstrate that those task-adaptive compressed models are 12.7x to 29.3x faster than BERT in inference time and 11.5x to 17.0x smaller in terms of parameter size, while comparable performance is maintained. Daoyuan Chen, Yaliang Li, Minghui Qiu, Zhen Wang 0036, Bofang Li, Bolin Ding, Hongbo Deng, Jun Huang 0007, Wei Lin 0016, Jingren Zhou 0001 |
IJCAI | 4 |
| 2019 | AliISA: Creating an Interactive Search Experience in E-commerce PlatformsabstractOnline shopping has been a habit of more and more people, while most users are unable to craft an informative query, and thus it often takes a long search session to satisfy their purchase intents. We present AliISA - a shopping assistant which offers users some tips to further specify their queries during a search session. With such an interactive search, users tend to find targeted items with fewer page requests, which often means a better user experience. Currently, AliISA assists tens of millions of users per day, earns more usage than existing systems, and consequently brings in a 5% improvement in CVR. In this paper, we present our system, describe the underlying techniques, and discuss our experience in stabilizing reinforcement learning under an E-commerce environment. Fei Xiao 0023, Zhen Wang 0036, Haikuan Huang, Jun Huang 0007, Hongbo Deng, Minghui Qiu, Xiaoli Gong |
SIGIR | 2 |
| 2015 | Aligning Knowledge and Text Embeddings by Entity DescriptionsabstractWe study the problem of jointly embedding a knowledge base and a text corpus.The key issue is the alignment model making sure the vectors of entities, relations and words are in the same space.Wang et al. (2014a) rely on Wikipedia anchors, making the applicable scope quite limited.In this paper we propose a new alignment model based on text descriptions of entities, without dependency on anchors.We require the embedding vector of an entity not only to fit the structured constraints in KBs but also to be equal to the embedding vector computed from the text description.Extensive experiments show that, the proposed approach consistently performs comparably or even better than the method of Wang et al. (2014a), which is encouraging as we do not use any anchor information. Huaping Zhong, Zhen Wang 0036, Hai Wan, Zheng Chen 0001 |
EMNLP | 3 |
| 2014 | Knowledge Graph Embedding by Translating on HyperplanesabstractWe deal with embedding a large scale knowledge graph composed of entities and relations into a continuous vector space. TransE is a promising method proposed recently, which is very efficient while achieving state-of-the-art predictive performance. We discuss some mapping properties of relations which should be considered in embedding, such as reflexive, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many. We note that TransE does not do well in dealing with these properties. Some complex models are capable of preserving these mapping properties but sacrifice efficiency in the process. To make a good trade-off between model capacity and efficiency, in this paper we propose TransH which models a relation as a hyperplane together with a translation operation on it. In this way, we can well preserve the above mapping properties of relations with almost the same model complexity of TransE. Additionally, as a practical knowledge graph is often far from completed, how to construct negative examples to reduce false negative labels in training is very important. Utilizing the one-to-many/many-to-one mapping property of a relation, we propose a simple trick to reduce the possibility of false negative labeling. We conduct extensive experiments on link prediction, triplet classification and fact extraction on benchmark datasets like WordNet and Freebase. Experiments show TransH delivers significant improvements over TransE on predictive accuracy with comparable capability to scale up. Zhen Wang 0036, Jianlin Feng, Zheng Chen 0001 |
AAAI | 1 |
| 2014 | Knowledge Graph and Text Jointly EmbeddingabstractWe examine the embedding approach to reason new relational facts from a largescale knowledge graph and a text corpus.We propose a novel method of jointly embedding entities and words into the same continuous vector space.The embedding process attempts to preserve the relations between entities in the knowledge graph and the concurrences of words in the text corpus.Entity names and Wikipedia anchors are utilized to align the embeddings of entities and words in the same space.Large scale experiments on Freebase and a Wikipedia/NY Times corpus show that jointly embedding brings promising improvement in the accuracy of predicting facts, compared to separately embedding knowledge graphs and text.Particularly, jointly embedding enables the prediction of facts containing entities out of the knowledge graph, which cannot be handled by previous embedding methods.At the same time, concerning the quality of the word embeddings, experiments on the analogical reasoning task show that jointly embedding is comparable to or slightly better than word2vec (Skip-Gram). Zhen Wang 0036, Jianlin Feng, Zheng Chen 0001 |
EMNLP | 1 |