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Hanghang Tong

59 accepted papers

2026

$\mathbb{R}^{2k}$ is Theoretically Large Enough for Embedding-based Top-$k$ Retrieval

ICML 2026poster

This paper studies the minimal dimension required to embed subset memberships ($m$ elements and ${m\choose k}$ subsets of at most $k$ elements) into vector spaces, denoted as Minimal Embeddable Dimension (MED). The tight bounds of MED are derived theoretically and supported empirically for various n…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

AvAtar: Learning to Align via Active Optimal Transport

ICML 2026poster

Alignment plays a fundamental role in many machine learning problems, such as multi-network analysis, multimodal learning, and point cloud registration. Recent works increasingly leverage optimal transport (OT) for distributional alignment, whose effectiveness largely depends on sparse supervision t…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Beyond Log Likelihood: Probability-Based Objectives for Supervised Fine-Tuning across the Model Capability Continuum

ICML 2026spotlight

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the standard approach for post-training large language models (LLMs), yet it often shows limited generalization. We trace this limitation to its default training objective: negative log likelihood (NLL). While NLL is classically optimal when training from scratch, pos…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Continual Low-Rank Adapters for LLM-based Generative Recommender Systems

ICLR 2026poster

While large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance in recommendation, they face challenges in continual learning as users, items, and user preferences evolve over time. Existing LoRA-based continual methods primarily focus on preserving performance on previous tasks, but this overlooks th…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Graph homophily booster: Reimagining the role of discrete features in heterophilic graph learning

ICLR 2026poster

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for modeling graph-structured data, demonstrating remarkable success in many real-world applications such as complex biological network analysis, neuroscientific analysis, and social network analysis. However, existing GNNs often struggle…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Language in the Flow of Time: Time-Series-Paired Texts Weaved into a Unified Temporal Narrative

ICLR 2026poster

While many advances in time series models focus exclusively on numerical data, research on multimodal time series, particularly those involving contextual textual information, remains in its infancy. With recent progress in large language models and time series learning, we revisit the integration o…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Latent Collaboration in Multi-Agent Systems

ICML 2026spotlight

Multi-agent systems (MAS) extend large language models (LLMs) from independent single-model reasoning to coordinative system-level intelligence. While existing LLM agents depend on text-based mediation for reasoning and communication, we take a step forward by enabling models to collaborate directly…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

MC-Search: Evaluating and Enhancing Multimodal Agentic Search with Structured Long Reasoning Chains

ICLR 2026oral

With the increasing demand for step-wise, cross-modal, and knowledge-grounded reasoning, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are evolving beyond the traditional fixed retrieve-then-generate paradigm toward more sophisticated agentic multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (MM-RAG). Existing b…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

MORALISE: A Structured Benchmark for Moral Alignment in Visual Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Recently, vision-language models have demonstrated increasing influence in morally sensitive domains such as autonomous driving and medical analysis, owing to their powerful multimodal reasoning capabilities. As these models are deployed in high-stakes real-world applications, it is of paramount imp…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

PLANETALIGN: A Comprehensive Python Library for Benchmarking Network Alignment

ICLR 2026poster

Network alignment (NA) aims to identify node correspondence across different networks and serves as a critical cornerstone behind various downstream multi-network learning tasks. Despite growing research in NA, there lacks a comprehensive library that facilitates the systematic development and bench…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Seeing but Not Believing: Probing the Disconnect Between Visual Attention and Answer Correctness in VLMs

ICLR 2026poster

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieve strong results on multimodal tasks such as visual question answering, yet they can still fail even when the correct visual evidence is present. In this work, we systematically investigate whether these failures arise from not perceiving the evidence or from not…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Ask, and it shall be given: On the Turing completeness of prompting

ICLR 2025poster

Since the success of GPT, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized machine learning and have initiated the so-called *LLM prompting* paradigm. In the era of LLMs, people train a single general-purpose LLM and provide the LLM with different *prompts* to perform different tasks. However, such…

2025

Breaking Silos: Adaptive Model Fusion Unlocks Better Time Series Forecasting

ICML 2025poster

Time-series forecasting plays a critical role in many real-world applications. Although increasingly powerful models have been developed and achieved superior results on benchmark datasets, through a fine-grained sample-level inspection, we find that (i) no single model consistently outperforms othe…

2025

CLIMB: Class-imbalanced Learning Benchmark on Tabular Data

NeurIPS 2025poster

Class-imbalanced learning (CIL) on tabular data is important in many real-world applications where the minority class holds the critical but rare outcomes. In this paper, we present CLIMB, a comprehensive benchmark for class-imbalanced learning on tabular data. CLIMB includes 73 real-world dataset…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Harnessing Vision Models for Time Series Analysis: A Survey

IJCAI 2025

Time series analysis has evolved from traditional autoregressive models to deep learning, Transformers, and Large Language Models (LLMs). While vision models have also been explored along the way, their contributions are less recognized due to the predominance of sequence modeling. However, challeng

2025

Hephaestus: Mixture Generative Modeling with Energy Guidance for Large-scale QoS Degradation

NeurIPS 2025poster

We study the Quality of Service Degradation (QoSD) problem, in which an adversary perturbs edge weights to degrade network performance. This setting arises in both network infrastructures and distributed ML systems, where communication quality, not just connectivity, determines functionality. While…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

How efficient is LLM-generated code? A rigorous & high-standard benchmark

ICLR 2025poster

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has significantly pushed the frontiers of program synthesis. Advancement of LLM-based program synthesis calls for a thorough evaluation of LLM-generated code. Most evaluation frameworks focus on the (functional) correctness of generated code; efficiency,…

2025

Latte: Collaborative Test-Time Adaptation of Vision-Language Models in Federated Learning

ICCV 2025poster

Test-time adaptation with pre-trained vision-language models has gained increasing attention for addressing distribution shifts during testing. Among these approaches, memory-based algorithms stand out due to their training-free nature and ability to leverage historical test data. However, existing…

2025

Matcha: Mitigating Graph Structure Shifts with Test-Time Adaptation

ICLR 2025poster

Powerful as they are, graph neural networks (GNNs) are known to be vulnerable to distribution shifts. Recently, test-time adaptation (TTA) has attracted attention due to its ability to adapt a pre-trained model to a target domain, without re-accessing the source domain. However, existing TTA algorit…

2025

SelfElicit: Your Language Model Secretly Knows Where is the Relevant Evidence

ACL 2025long

Providing Language Models (LMs) with relevant evidence in the context (either via retrieval or user-provided) can significantly improve their ability to provide better-grounded responses. However, recent studies have found that LMs often struggle to fully comprehend and utilize key evidence from the…

2025

Temporal Heterogeneous Graph Generation with Privacy, Utility, and Efficiency

ICLR 2025spotlight

Nowadays, temporal heterogeneous graphs attract much research and industrial attention for building the next-generation Relational Deep Learning models and applications, due to their informative structures and features. While providing timely and precise services like personalized recommendations an…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

To Answer or Not to Answer (TAONA): A Robust Textual Graph Understanding and Question Answering Approach

EMNLP 2025

Recently, textual graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG) has gained popularity for addressing hallucinations in large language models when answering domain-specific questions. Most existing studies assume that generated answers should comprehensively integrate all relevant information

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

BackTime: Backdoor Attacks on Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Multivariate Time Series (MTS) forecasting is a fundamental task with numerous real-world applications, such as transportation, climate, and epidemiology. While a myriad of powerful deep learning models have been developed for this task, few works have explored the robustness of MTS forecasting mode…

2024

Class-Imbalanced Graph Learning without Class Rebalancing

ICML 2024poster

Class imbalance is prevalent in real-world node classification tasks and poses great challenges for graph learning models. Most existing studies are rooted in a class-rebalancing (CR) perspective and address class imbalance with class-wise reweighting or resampling. In this work, we approach the roo…

2024

Conversational Question Answering with Language Models Generated Reformulations over Knowledge Graph

ACL 2024findings

Conversational question answering (ConvQA) over knowledge graphs (KGs) involves answering multi-turn natural language questions about information contained in a KG. State-of-the-art methods of ConvQA often struggle with inexplicit question-answer pairs. These inputs are easy for human beings to unde…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Deceptive Fairness Attacks on Graphs via Meta Learning

ICLR 2024poster

We study deceptive fairness attacks on graphs to answer the following question: How can we achieve poisoning attacks on a graph learning model to exacerbate the bias deceptively? We answer this question via a bi-level optimization problem and propose a meta learning-based framework named FATE. FATE…

2024

Discrete-state Continuous-time Diffusion for Graph Generation

NeurIPS 2024poster

Graph is a prevalent discrete data structure, whose generation has wide applications such as drug discovery and circuit design. Diffusion generative models, as an emerging research focus, have been applied to graph generation tasks. Overall, according to the space of states and time steps, diffusion…

2024

Generate-on-Graph: Treat LLM as both Agent and KG for Incomplete Knowledge Graph Question Answering

EMNLP 2024main

To address the issues of insufficient knowledge and hallucination in Large Language Models (LLMs), numerous studies have explored integrating LLMs with Knowledge Graphs (KGs). However, these methods are typically evaluated on conventional Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) with complete KGs,…

2024

Gradient Compressed Sensing: A Query-Efficient Gradient Estimator for High-Dimensional Zeroth-Order Optimization

ICML 2024poster

We study nonconvex zeroth-order optimization (ZOO) in a high-dimensional space $\mathbb R^d$ for functions with approximately $s$-sparse gradients. To reduce the dependence on the dimensionality $d$ in the query complexity, high-dimensional ZOO methods seek to leverage gradient sparsity to design gr…

2024

Graph Mixup on Approximate Gromov–Wasserstein Geodesics

ICML 2024poster

Mixup, which generates synthetic training samples on the data manifold, has been shown to be highly effective in augmenting Euclidean data. However, finding a proper data manifold for graph data is non-trivial, as graphs are non-Euclidean data in disparate spaces. Though efforts have been made, most…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2024

Hierarchical Multi-Marginal Optimal Transport for Network Alignment

AAAI 2024technical

Finding node correspondence across networks, namely multi-network alignment, is an essential prerequisite for joint learning on multiple networks. Despite great success in aligning networks in pairs, the literature on multi-network alignment is sparse due to the exponentially growing solution space…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2024

Neural Active Learning Beyond Bandits

ICLR 2024poster

We study both stream-based and pool-based active learning with neural network approximations. A recent line of works proposed bandit-based approaches that transformed active learning into a bandit problem, achieving both theoretical and empirical success. However, the performance and computational c…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

PageRank Bandits for Link Prediction

NeurIPS 2024poster

Link prediction is a critical problem in graph learning with broad applications such as recommender systems and knowledge graph completion. Numerous research efforts have been directed at solving this problem, including approaches based on similarity metrics and Graph Neural Networks (GNN). However,…

2024

Rethinking the Bounds of LLM Reasoning: Are Multi-Agent Discussions the Key?

ACL 2024long

Recent progress in LLMs discussion suggests that multi-agent discussion improves the reasoning abilities of LLMs. In this work, we reevaluate this claim through systematic experiments, where we propose a novel group discussion framework to enrich the set of discussion mechanisms. Interestingly, our…

2024

SLOG: An Inductive Spectral Graph Neural Network Beyond Polynomial Filter

ICML 2024poster

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have exhibited superb power in many graph related tasks. Existing GNNs can be categorized into spatial GNNs and spectral GNNs. The spatial GNNs primarily capture the local information around each node, while the spectral GNNs are able to operate on the frequency signals…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2024

Sterling: Synergistic Representation Learning on Bipartite Graphs

AAAI 2024technical

A fundamental challenge of bipartite graph representation learning is how to extract informative node embeddings. Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) is a promising paradigm to address this challenge. Most recent bipartite graph SSL methods are based on contrastive learning which learns embeddings by dis…

Cited by 23SourcePDFScholar
2023

Do We Really Need Complicated Model Architectures For Temporal Networks?

ICLR 2023top-5%

Recurrent neural network (RNN) and self-attention mechanism (SAM) are the de facto methods to extract spatial-temporal information for temporal graph learning. Interestingly, we found that although both RNN and SAM could lead to a good performance, in practice neither of them is always necessary. In…

Cited by 156SourcePDFScholar
2023

From Trainable Negative Depth to Edge Heterophily in Graphs

NeurIPS 2023poster

Finding the proper depth $d$ of a graph convolutional network (GCN) that provides strong representation ability has drawn significant attention, yet nonetheless largely remains an open problem for the graph learning community. Although noteworthy progress has been made, the depth or the number of…

Cited by 27SourcePDFScholar
2023

Logical Entity Representation in Knowledge-Graphs for Differentiable Rule Learning

ICLR 2023poster

Probabilistic logical rule learning has shown great strength in logical rule mining and knowledge graph completion. It learns logical rules to predict missing edges by reasoning on existing edges in the knowledge graph. However, previous efforts have largely been limited to only modeling chain-like…

2023

Noisy Positive-Unlabeled Learning with Self-Training for Speculative Knowledge Graph Reasoning

ACL 2023findings

This paper studies speculative reasoning task on real-world knowledge graphs (KG) that contain both false negative issue (i.e., potential true facts being excluded) and false positive issue (i.e., unreliable or outdated facts being included). State-of-the-art methods fall short in the speculative re…

2023

Reconciling Competing Sampling Strategies of Network Embedding

NeurIPS 2023poster

Network embedding plays a significant role in a variety of applications. To capture the topology of the network, most of the existing network embedding algorithms follow a sampling training procedure, which maximizes the similarity (e.g., embedding vectors' dot product) between positively sampled no…

2022

A Deep Learning Dataloader with Shared Data Preparation

NeurIPS 2022accept

Executing a family of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) training jobs on the same or similar datasets in parallel is typical in current deep learning scenarios. It is time-consuming and resource-intensive because each job repetitively prepares (i.e., loads and preprocesses) the data independently, causing…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2022

An Invisible Black-Box Backdoor Attack through Frequency Domain

ECCV 2022poster

"Backdoor attacks have been shown to be a serious threat against deep learning systems such as biometric authentication and autonomous driving. An effective backdoor attack could enforce the model misbehave under certain predefined conditions, i.e., triggers, but behave normally otherwise. The trigg…

2022

Batch Active Learning with Graph Neural Networks via Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning

AAAI 2022technical

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved tremendous success in many graph learning tasks such as node classification, graph classification and link prediction. For the classification task, GNNs' performance often highly depends on the number of labeled nodes and thus could be significantly hampere…

Cited by 25SourcePDFScholar
2022

Deep Active Learning by Leveraging Training Dynamics

NeurIPS 2022accept

Active learning theories and methods have been extensively studied in classical statistical learning settings. However, deep active learning, i.e., active learning with deep learning models, is usually based on empirical criteria without solid theoretical justification, thus suffering from heavy dou…

Cited by 39SourcePDFScholar
2022

Improved Algorithms for Neural Active Learning

NeurIPS 2022accept

We improve the theoretical and empirical performance of neural-network(NN)-based active learning algorithms for the non-parametric streaming setting. In particular, we introduce two regret metrics by minimizing the population loss that are more suitable in active learning than the one used in state-…

2021

Event Time Extraction and Propagation via Graph Attention Networks

NAACL 2021long

Grounding events into a precise timeline is important for natural language understanding but has received limited attention in recent work. This problem is challenging due to the inherent ambiguity of language and the requirement for information propagation over inter-related events. This paper firs…

2021

EventKE: Event-Enhanced Knowledge Graph Embedding

EMNLP 2021finding

Relations in most of the traditional knowledge graphs (KGs) only reflect static and factual connections, but fail to represent the dynamic activities and state changes about entities. In this paper, we emphasize the importance of incorporating events in KG representation learning, and propose an eve…

2021

Multiplex Graph Neural Network for Extractive Text Summarization

EMNLP 2021main

Extractive text summarization aims at extracting the most representative sentences from a given document as its summary. To extract a good summary from a long text document, sentence embedding plays an important role. Recent studies have leveraged graph neural networks to capture the inter-sententia…

Cited by 45SourcePDFScholar
2020

CooBa: Cross-project Bug Localization via Adversarial Transfer Learning

IJCAI 2020poster

Bug localization plays an important role in software quality control. Many supervised machine learning models have been developed based on historical bug-fix information. Despite being successful, these methods often require sufficient historical data (i.e., labels), which is not always available es…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2020

Trading Personalization for Accuracy: Data Debugging in Collaborative Filtering

NeurIPS 2020poster

Collaborative filtering has been widely used in recommender systems. Existing work has primarily focused on improving the prediction accuracy mainly via either building refined models or incorporating additional side information, yet has largely ignored the inherent distribution of the input rating…

2019

PC-Fairness: A Unified Framework for Measuring Causality-based Fairness

NeurIPS 2019poster

A recent trend of fair machine learning is to define fairness as causality-based notions which concern the causal connection between protected attributes and decisions. However, one common challenge of all causality-based fairness notions is identifiability, i.e., whether they can be uniquely measur…

Cited by 151SourcePDFScholar