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Chengqi Zhang

37 accepted papers

2026

A Survey of Personalized Federated Foundation Models for Privacy-Preserving Recommendation

IJCAI 2026

Integrating Foundation Models (FMs) into recommendation systems is an emerging and promising research direction. However, centralized paradigms face growing pressure from privacy concerns and strict regulatory requirements. Federated learning offers a viable solution that enables collaborative model

Cited by 0Scholar
2026

Assemble Your Crew: Automatic Multi-agent Communication Topology Design via Autoregressive Graph Generation

AAAI 2026technical

Multi-agent systems (MAS) based on large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a powerful solution for dealing with complex problems across diverse domains. The effectiveness of MAS is critically dependent on its collaboration topology, which has become a focal point for automated design research.

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

FedMerge: Federated Model Merging for Personalization

AAAI 2026technical

One global model in federated learning (FL) might not be sufficient to serve many clients with non-IID tasks and distributions. Despite recent advances in FL to train multiple global models for better personalization, they only provide limited model choices to clients, so local finetuning of multipl

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Federated Vision-Language-Recommendation with Personalized Fusion

AAAI 2026technical

Applying large pre-trained Vision-Language Models to recommendation is a burgeoning field, a direction we term Vision-Language-Recommendation (VLR). Bringing VLR to user-oriented on-device intelligence within a federated learning framework is a crucial step for enhancing user privacy and delivering

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

JailbreakLoRA: Your Downloaded LoRA from Sharing Platforms might be Unsafe

ICLR 2026poster

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) benefits from its plug-and-play nature, enabling large language models (LLMs) to achieve significant performance gains at low cost, has driven the development of LoRA-sharing platforms. However, the jailbreak and backdoor concerns associated with LoRA-sharing platforms rem…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Paradigm Shift of GNN Explainer from Label Space to Prototypical Representation Space

ICLR 2026poster

Post-hoc instance-level graph neural network (GNN) explainers are developed to identify a compact subgraph (i.e., explanation) that encompasses the most influential components for each input graph. A fundamental limitation of existing methods lies in the insufficient utilization of structural inform…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Personalized Additive Modeling for Multi-level Federated Learning

ICML 2026poster

Contemporary AI faces the challenge of balancing generality with user-specific personalization. In federated learning (FL), this challenge is amplified by highly heterogeneous client data with complex non-IID patterns beyond standard modeling assumptions. Many existing FL methods are designed for re…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Rel-MOSS: Towards Imbalanced Relational Deep Learning on Relational Databases

ICML 2026poster

In recent advances, to enable a fully data-driven learning paradigm on relational databases (RDB), relational deep learning (RDL) is proposed to structure the RDB as a heterogeneous entity graph and adopt the graph neural network (GNN) as the predictive model. However, existing RDL methods neglect t…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Biologically Plausible Brain Graph Transformer

ICLR 2025poster

State-of-the-art brain graph analysis methods fail to fully encode the small-world architecture of brain graphs (accompanied by the presence of hubs and functional modules), and therefore lack biological plausibility to some extent. This limitation hinders their ability to accurately represent the b…

2025

Efficient Personalized Adaptation for Physiological Signal Foundation Model

ICML 2025poster

Time series analysis is crucial across various fields like energy, environment, transportation, finance and health. Deep learning has significantly advanced this field, particularly, the Time Series Foundation Model (TSFM) excels in multiple domains due to extensive pre-training. In this work, we fo…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Exploring Criteria of Loss Reweighting to Enhance LLM Unlearning

ICML 2025poster

Loss reweighting has shown significant benefits for machine unlearning with large language models (LLMs). However, their exact functionalities are left unclear and the optimal strategy remains an open question, thus impeding the understanding and improvement of existing methodologies. In this paper,…

2025

Federated Foundation Models on Heterogeneous Time Series

AAAI 2025technical

Training a general-purpose time series foundation models with robust generalization capabilities across diverse applications from scratch is still an open challenge. Efforts are primarily focused on fusing cross-domain time series datasets to extract shared subsequences as tokens for training models…

2025

Federated Low-Rank Adaptation for Foundation Models: A Survey

IJCAI 2025

Effectively leveraging private datasets remains a significant challenge in developing foundation models. Federated Learning (FL) has recently emerged as a collaborative framework that enables multiple users to fine-tune these models while mitigating data privacy risks. Meanwhile, Low-Rank Adaptation

2025

Personalized Federated Collaborative Filtering: A Variational AutoEncoder Approach

AAAI 2025technical

Federated Collaborative Filtering (FedCF) is an emerging field focused on developing a new recommendation framework with preserving privacy in a federated setting. Existing FedCF methods typically combine distributed Collaborative Filtering (CF) algorithms with privacy-preserving mechanisms, and the…

2025

WALL-E: World Alignment by NeuroSymbolic Learning improves World Model-based LLM Agents

NeurIPS 2025poster

Can we build accurate world models out of large language models (LLMs)? How can world models benefit LLM agents? The gap between the prior knowledge of LLMs and the specified environment's dynamics usually bottlenecks LLMs' performance as world models. To bridge the gap, we propose a training-free "…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

ARC: A Generalist Graph Anomaly Detector with In-Context Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Graph anomaly detection (GAD), which aims to identify abnormal nodes that differ from the majority within a graph, has garnered significant attention. However, current GAD methods necessitate training specific to each dataset, resulting in high training costs, substantial data requirements, and limi…

2024

Federated Prompt Learning for Weather Foundation Models on Devices

IJCAI 2024poster

On-device intelligence for weather forecasting uses local deep learning models to analyze weather patterns without centralized cloud computing, holds significance for supporting human activates. Federated Learning is a promising solution for such forecasting by enabling collaborative model training…

2024

Mind the Gap Between Prototypes and Images in Cross-domain Finetuning

NeurIPS 2024poster

In _cross-domain few-shot classification_ (CFC), recent works mainly focus on adapting a simple transformation head on top of a frozen pre-trained backbone with few labeled data to project embeddings into a task-specific metric space where classification can be performed by measuring similarities be…

2024

Personalized Adapter for Large Meteorology Model on Devices: Towards Weather Foundation Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

This paper demonstrates that pre-trained language models (PLMs) are strong foundation models for on-device meteorological variable modeling. We present LM-Weather, a generic approach to taming PLMs, that have learned massive sequential knowledge from the universe of natural language databases, to ac…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2024

What Hides behind Unfairness? Exploring Dynamics Fairness in Reinforcement Learning

IJCAI 2024poster

In sequential decision-making problems involving sensitive attributes like race and gender, reinforcement learning (RL) agents must carefully consider long-term fairness while maximizing returns. Recent works have proposed many different types of fairness notions, but how unfairness arises in RL pro…

2023

Does Continual Learning Equally Forget All Parameters?

ICML 2023poster

Distribution shift (e.g., task or domain shift) in continual learning (CL) usually results in catastrophic forgetting of previously learned knowledge. Although it can be alleviated by repeatedly replaying buffered data, the every-step replay is time-consuming. In this paper, we study which modules i…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2023

Dual Personalization on Federated Recommendation

IJCAI 2023poster

Federated recommendation is a new Internet service architecture that aims to provide privacy-preserving recommendation services in federated settings. Existing solutions are used to combine distributed recommendation algorithms and privacy-preserving mechanisms. Thus it inherently takes the form of…

2023

Federated Learning on Non-IID Graphs via Structural Knowledge Sharing

AAAI 2023technical

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown their superiority in modeling graph data. Owing to the advantages of federated learning, federated graph learning (FGL) enables clients to train strong GNN models in a distributed manner without sharing their private data. A core challenge in federated systems…

2023

Improving the Robustness of Summarization Systems with Dual Augmentation

ACL 2023long

A robust summarization system should be able to capture the gist of the document, regardless of the specific word choices or noise in the input. In this work, we first explore the summarization models’ robustness against perturbations including word-level synonym substitution and noise. To create se…

2023

Structured Federated Learning through Clustered Additive Modeling

NeurIPS 2023poster

Heterogeneous federated learning without assuming any structure is challenging due to the conflicts among non-identical data distributions of clients. In practice, clients often comprise near-homogeneous clusters so training a server-side model per cluster mitigates the conflicts. However, FL with c…

Cited by 18SourcePDFScholar
2022

EAT-C: Environment-Adversarial sub-Task Curriculum for Efficient Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2022spotlight

Reinforcement learning (RL) is inefficient on long-horizon tasks due to sparse rewards and its policy can be fragile to slightly perturbed environments. We address these challenges via a curriculum of tasks with coupled environments, generated by two policies trained jointly with RL: (1) a co-operat…

2022

FedProto: Federated Prototype Learning across Heterogeneous Clients

AAAI 2022technical

Heterogeneity across clients in federated learning (FL) usually hinders the optimization convergence and generalization performance when the aggregation of clients' knowledge occurs in the gradient space. For example, clients may differ in terms of data distribution, network latency, input/output sp…

2022

Perceiving the World: Question-guided Reinforcement Learning for Text-based Games

ACL 2022long

Text-based games provide an interactive way to study natural language processing. While deep reinforcement learning has shown effectiveness in developing the game playing agent, the low sample efficiency and the large action space remain to be the two major challenges that hinder the DRL from being…

2021

Generalization in Text-based Games via Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

EMNLP 2021finding

Deep reinforcement learning provides a promising approach for text-based games in studying natural language communication between humans and artificial agents. However, the generalization still remains a big challenge as the agents depend critically on the complexity and variety of training tasks. I…

2021

Isometric Propagation Network for Generalized Zero-shot Learning

ICLR 2021poster

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to classify images of an unseen class only based on a few attributes describing that class but no access to any training sample. A popular strategy is to learn a mapping between the semantic space of class attributes and the visual space of images based on the seen clas…

Cited by 49SourcePDFScholar
2020

Cooperative Heterogeneous Deep Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2020poster

Numerous deep reinforcement learning agents have been proposed, and each of them has its strengths and flaws. In this work, we present a Cooperative Heterogeneous Deep Reinforcement Learning (CHDRL) framework that can learn a policy by integrating the advantages of heterogeneous agents. Specifically…

2020

Deep Reinforcement Learning with Stacked Hierarchical Attention for Text-based Games

NeurIPS 2020poster

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for text-based games, which are interactive simulations in the context of natural language. While different methods have been developed to represent the environment information and language actions, existing RL agents are not empowered with any reasoning capabili…

2020

Effective Search of Logical Forms for Weakly Supervised Knowledge-Based Question Answering

IJCAI 2020poster

Many algorithms for Knowledge-Based Question Answering (KBQA) depend on semantic parsing, which translates a question to its logical form. When only weak supervision is provided, it is usually necessary to search valid logical forms for model training. However, a complex question typically involves…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2020

Improving Long-Tail Relation Extraction with Collaborating Relation-Augmented Attention

COLING 2020main

Wrong labeling problem and long-tail relations are two main challenges caused by distant supervision in relation extraction. Recent works alleviate the wrong labeling by selective attention via multi-instance learning, but cannot well handle long-tail relations even if hierarchies of the relations a…

2020

RatE: Relation-Adaptive Translating Embedding for Knowledge Graph Completion

COLING 2020main

Many graph embedding approaches have been proposed for knowledge graph completion via link prediction. Among those, translating embedding approaches enjoy the advantages of light-weight structure, high efficiency and great interpretability. Especially when extended to complex vector space, they show…

2019

Learning to Propagate for Graph Meta-Learning

NeurIPS 2019poster

Meta-learning extracts the common knowledge from learning different tasks and uses it for unseen tasks. It can significantly improve tasks that suffer from insufficient training data, e.g., few-shot learning. In most meta-learning methods, tasks are implicitly related by sharing parameters or optimize…

2018

Bi-Directional Block Self-Attention for Fast and Memory-Efficient Sequence Modeling

ICLR 2018poster

Recurrent neural networks (RNN), convolutional neural networks (CNN) and self-attention networks (SAN) are commonly used to produce context-aware representations. RNN can capture long-range dependency but is hard to parallelize and not time-efficient. CNN focuses on local dependency but does not per…