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Jiliang Tang

75 accepted papers

2026

Co-RedTeam: Orchestrated Security Discovery and Exploitation with LLM Agents

ICML 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in assisting cybersecurity tasks, yet existing approaches struggle with automatic vulnerability discovery and exploitation due to limited interaction, weak execution grounding, and a lack of experience reuse. We propose Co-RedTeam, a security-aware mul…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Fix Before Search: Benchmarking Agentic Visual Query Pre-processing in Multimodal Retrieval-augmented Generation

ICML 2026poster

Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MRAG) has emerged as a key paradigm for grounding MLLMs with external knowledge. While query pre-processing (e.g., rewriting) is standard in text-based RAG, existing MRAG pipelines predominantly treat visual inputs as static and immutable, implicitly assumi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Learning the Latent Structure: A Feature-Centric Approach to Graph Data Augmentation

AAAI 2026technical

Graph-structured data plays a pivotal role in modeling complex relationships. However, real-world graphs are often incomplete due to data collection and observational constraints, severely limiting the effectiveness of modern graph learning pipelines. While existing Graph Data Augmentation (GDA) met

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Plain Transformers are Surprisingly Powerful Link Predictors

ICML 2026poster

Link prediction is a core challenge in graph machine learning, demanding models that capture rich and complex topological dependencies. While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are the standard solution, state-of-the-art pipelines often rely on explicit structural heuristics or memory-intensive node embed…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Relatron: Automating Relational Machine Learning over Relational Databases

ICLR 2026poster

Predictive modeling over relational databases (RDBs) powers applications in various domains, yet remains challenging due to the need to capture both cross-table dependencies and complex feature interactions. Recent Relational Deep Learning (RDL) methods automate feature engineering via message passi…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

TRAJECT-Bench:A Trajectory-Aware Benchmark for Evaluating Agentic Tool Use

ICLR 2026poster

Large language model (LLM)-based agents increasingly rely on tool use to complete real-world tasks. While existing works evaluate the LLMs' tool use capability, they largely focus on the final answers yet overlook the detailed tool usage trajectory, i.e., whether tools are selected, parameterized, a…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

When Do Hallucinations Arise? A Graph Perspective on the Evolution of Path Reuse and Path Compression

ICML 2026poster

Reasoning hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) often appear as fluent yet unsupported conclusions that violate either the given context or underlying factual knowledge. Although such failures are widely observed, the mechanisms by which decoder-only Transformers produce them remain poorly …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

A Pre-training Framework for Relational Data with Information-theoretic Principles

NeurIPS 2025poster

Relational databases underpin critical infrastructure across a wide range of domains, yet the design of generalizable pre-training strategies for learning from relational databases remains an open challenge due to task heterogeneity. Specifically, there exist many possible downstream tasks, as tasks…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

A Survey to Recent Progress Towards Understanding In-Context Learning

NAACL 2025findings

In-Context Learning (ICL) empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with the ability to learn from a few examples provided in the prompt, enabling downstream generalization without the requirement for gradient updates. Despite encouragingly empirical success, the underlying mechanism of ICL remains uncl…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

A Theoretical Understanding of Chain-of-Thought: Coherent Reasoning and Error-Aware Demonstration

AISTATS 2025poster

Few-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has demonstrated strong performance in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While theoretical investigations have been conducted to understand CoT, the underlying transformer used in these studies isolates the CoT reasoning p…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Advancing Reasoning with Off-the-Shelf LLMs: A Semantic Structure Perspective

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in zero-shot reasoning and generalization to new tasks. However, the zero-shot performance of general LLMs on complex tasks, such as multi-hop reasoning, remains suboptimal, while reasoning LLMs suffer from hallucinations and unfaithfulness

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

AutoG: Towards automatic graph construction from tabular data

ICLR 2025poster

Recent years have witnessed significant advancements in graph machine learning (GML), with its applications spanning numerous domains. However, the focus of GML has predominantly been on developing powerful models, often overlooking a crucial initial step: constructing suitable graphs from common da…

2025

Cross-Domain Graph Data Scaling: A Showcase with Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Models for natural language and images benefit from data scaling behavior: the more data fed into the model, the better they perform. This 'better with more' phenomenon enables the effectiveness of large-scale pre-training on vast amounts of data. However, current graph pre-training methods struggle…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Empowering GraphRAG with Knowledge Filtering and Integration

EMNLP 2025

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing. However, they often suffer from knowledge gaps and hallucinations. Graph retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG) enhances LLM reasoning by integrating structured knowledge from external grap

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

From Sequence to Structure: Uncovering Substructure Reasoning in Transformers

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recent studies suggest that large language models (LLMs) possess the capability to solve graph reasoning tasks. Notably, even when graph structures are embedded within textual descriptions, LLMs can still effectively answer related questions. This raises a fundamental question: How can a decoder-onl…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

How Do Large Language Models Understand Graph Patterns? A Benchmark for Graph Pattern Comprehension

ICLR 2025poster

Benchmarking the capabilities and limitations of large language models (LLMs) in graph-related tasks is becoming an increasingly popular and crucial area of research. Recent studies have shown that LLMs exhibit a preliminary ability to understand graph structures and node features. However, the pote…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2025

Learning with Less: Knowledge Distillation from Large Language Models via Unlabeled Data

NAACL 2025findings

In real-world NLP applications, Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising solutions due to their extensive training on vast datasets. However, the large size and high computation demands of LLMs limit their practicality in many applications, especially when further fine-tuning is required. To add…

2025

Memory Injection Attacks on LLM Agents via Query-Only Interaction

NeurIPS 2025poster

Agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in a wide range of complex, real-world applications. However, LLM agents with a compromised memory bank may easily produce harmful outputs when the past records retrieved for demonstration are malicious. In this pap…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Mitigating the Privacy Issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) via Pure Synthetic Data

EMNLP 2025

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances the outputs of language models by integrating relevant information retrieved from external knowledge sources. However, when the retrieval process involves private data, RAG systems may face severe privacy risks, potentially leading to the leakage of sens

2025

Mixture of Structural-and-Textual Retrieval over Text-rich Graph Knowledge Bases

ACL 2025finding

Text-rich Graph Knowledge Bases (TG-KBs) have become increasingly crucial for answering queries by providing textual and structural knowledge. However, current retrieval methods often retrieve these two types of knowledge in isolation without considering their mutual reinforcement and existing hybri…

2025

Reasoning with Graphs: Structuring Implicit Knowledge to Enhance LLMs Reasoning

ACL 2025finding

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success across a wide range of tasks; however, they still encounter challenges in reasoning tasks that require understanding and inferring relationships between distinct pieces of information within text sequences. This challenge is particula…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Six-CD: Benchmarking Concept Removals for Text-to-image Diffusion Models

CVPR 2025poster

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have shown exceptional capabilities in generating images that closely correspond to textual prompts. However, the advancement of T2I diffusion models presents significant risks, as the models could be exploited for malicious purposes, such as generating images wi…

2025

Stepwise Perplexity-Guided Refinement for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models

ACL 2025finding

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, which breaks down complex tasks into intermediate reasoning steps, has significantly enhanced the performance of large language models (LLMs) on challenging tasks. However, the detailed reasoning process in CoT often incurs long generation times and high computation…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Superiority of Multi-Head Attention: A Theoretical Study in Shallow Transformers in In-Context Linear Regression

AISTATS 2025poster

We present a theoretical analysis of the performance of transformer with softmax attention in in-context learning with linear regression tasks. While the existing theoretical literature predominantly focuses on providing convergence upper bounds to show that trained transformers with single-/multi-h…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Tabula: A Tabular Self-Supervised Foundation Model for Single-Cell Transcriptomics

NeurIPS 2025poster

Foundation models (FMs) have shown great promise in single-cell genomics, yet current approaches, such as scGPT, Geneformer, and scFoundation, rely on centralized training and language modeling objectives that overlook the tabular nature of single-cell data and raise significant privacy concerns. We…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Towards Knowledge Checking in Retrieval-augmented Generation: A Representation Perspective

NAACL 2025long

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have shown promise in enhancing the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, these systems face challenges in effectively integrating external knowledge with the LLM’s internal knowledge, often leading to issues with misleading or unhelpful i…

2024

A Robust Semantics-based Watermark for Large Language Model against Paraphrasing

NAACL 2024findings

Large language models (LLMs) have show their remarkable ability in various natural language tasks. However, there are concerns that LLMs are possible to be used improperly or even illegally. To prevent the malicious usage of LLMs, detecting LLM-generated text becomes crucial in the deployment of LLM…

2024

Are Large Language Models (LLMs) Good Social Predictors?

EMNLP 2024finding

With the recent advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), efforts have been made to leverage LLMs in crucial social science study methods, including predicting human features of social life such as presidential voting. Existing works suggest that LLMs are capable of generating human-like response…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2024

CellPLM: Pre-training of Cell Language Model Beyond Single Cells

ICLR 2024poster

The current state-of-the-art single-cell pre-trained models are greatly inspired by the success of large language models. They trained transformers by treating genes as tokens and cells as sentences. However, three fundamental differences between single-cell data and natural language data are overlo…

Cited by 24SourcePDFScholar
2024

Exploring Memorization in Fine-tuned Language Models

ACL 2024long

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great capabilities in various tasks but also exhibited memorization of training data, raising tremendous privacy and copyright concerns. While prior works have studied memorization during pre-training, the exploration of memorization during fine-tuning is rath…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar
2024

Feature Distribution on Graph Topology Mediates the Effect of Graph Convolution: Homophily Perspective

ICML 2024poster

How would randomly shuffling feature vectors among nodes from the same class affect graph neural networks (GNNs)? The feature shuffle, intuitively, perturbs the dependence between graph topology and features (A-X dependence) for GNNs to learn from. Surprisingly, we observe a consistent and significa…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2024

Intrinsic Self-correction for Enhanced Morality: An Analysis of Internal Mechanisms and the Superficial Hypothesis

EMNLP 2024main

Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of producing content that perpetuates stereotypes, discrimination, and toxicity.The recently proposed moral self-correction is a computationally efficient method for reducing harmful content in the responses of LLMs. However, the process of how injecting self…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2024

Label-free Node Classification on Graphs with Large Language Models (LLMs)

ICLR 2024poster

In recent years, there have been remarkable advancements in node classification achieved by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, they necessitate abundant high-quality labels to ensure promising performance. In contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive zero-shot proficiency on text…

2024

Mixture of Link Predictors on Graphs

NeurIPS 2024poster

Link prediction, which aims to forecast unseen connections in graphs, is a fundamental task in graph machine learning. Heuristic methods, leveraging a range of different pairwise measures such as common neighbors and shortest paths, often rival the performance of vanilla Graph Neural Networks (GNNs)…

2024

On the Generalization of Training-based ChatGPT Detection Methods

EMNLP 2024finding

Large language models, such as ChatGPT, achieve amazing performance on various language processing tasks. However, they can also be exploited for improper purposes such as plagiarism or misinformation dissemination. Thus, there is an urgent need to detect the texts generated by LLMs. One type of mos…

2024

PDHG-Unrolled Learning-to-Optimize Method for Large-Scale Linear Programming

ICML 2024poster

Solving large-scale linear programming (LP) problems is an important task in various areas such as communication networks, power systems, finance and logistics. Recently, two distinct approaches have emerged to expedite LP solving: (i) First-order methods (FOMs); (ii) Learning to optimize (L2O). In…

2024

Position: Graph Foundation Models Are Already Here

ICML 2024spotlight

Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) are emerging as a significant research topic in the graph domain, aiming to develop graph models trained on extensive and diverse data to enhance their applicability across various tasks and domains. Developing GFMs presents unique challenges over traditional Graph Neu…

2024

Position: TrustLLM: Trustworthiness in Large Language Models

ICML 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) have gained considerable attention for their excellent natural language processing capabilities. Nonetheless, these LLMs present many challenges, particularly in the realm of trustworthiness. This paper introduces TrustLLM, a comprehensive study of trustworthiness in LLM…

Cited by 95SourcePDFScholar
2024

Revisiting Link Prediction: a data perspective

ICLR 2024poster

Link prediction, a fundamental task on graphs, has proven indispensable in various applications, e.g., friend recommendation, protein analysis, and drug interaction prediction. However, since datasets span a multitude of domains, they could have distinct underlying mechanisms of link formation. Evid…

2024

Structural Fairness-aware Active Learning for Graph Neural Networks

ICLR 2024poster

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have seen significant achievements in semi-supervised node classification. Yet, their efficacy often hinges on access to high-quality labeled node samples, which may not always be available in real-world scenarios. While active learning is commonly employed across variou…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Text-space Graph Foundation Models: Comprehensive Benchmarks and New Insights

NeurIPS 2024poster

Given the ubiquity of graph data and its applications in diverse domains, building a Graph Foundation Model (GFM) that can work well across different graphs and tasks with a unified backbone has recently garnered significant interests. A major obstacle to achieving this goal stems from the fact that…

2024

The Good and The Bad: Exploring Privacy Issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

ACL 2024findings

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a powerful technique to facilitate language model generation with proprietary and private data, where data privacy is a pivotal concern. Whereas extensive research has demonstrated the privacy risks of large language models (LLMs), the RAG technique could pote…

2024

Towards Understanding Jailbreak Attacks in LLMs: A Representation Space Analysis

EMNLP 2024main

Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to a type of attack known as jailbreaking, which misleads LLMs to output harmful contents. Although there are diverse jailbreak attack strategies, there is no unified understanding on why some methods succeed and others fail. This paper explores the behav…

2024

Unveiling and Mitigating Memorization in Text-to-image Diffusion Models through Cross Attention

ECCV 2024poster

"Recent advancements in text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have demonstrated their remarkable capability to generate high-quality images from textual prompts. However, increasing research indicates that these models memorize and replicate images from their training data, raising concerns about pot…

2023

Alternately Optimized Graph Neural Networks

ICML 2023poster

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have greatly advanced the semi-supervised node classification task on graphs. The majority of existing GNNs are trained in an end-to-end manner that can be viewed as tackling a bi-level optimization problem. This process is often inefficient in computation and memory usa…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2023

Amazon-M2: A Multilingual Multi-locale Shopping Session Dataset for Recommendation and Text Generation

NeurIPS 2023poster

Modeling customer shopping intentions is a crucial task for e-commerce, as it directly impacts user experience and engagement. Thus, accurately understanding customer preferences is essential for providing personalized recommendations. Session-based recommendation, which utilizes customer session d…

2023

Are Message Passing Neural Networks Really Helpful for Knowledge Graph Completion?

ACL 2023long

Knowledge graphs (KGs) facilitate a wide variety of applications. Despite great efforts in creation and maintenance, even the largest KGs are far from complete. Hence, KG completion (KGC) has become one of the most crucial tasks for KG research. Recently, considerable literature in this space has ce…

2023

Demystifying Structural Disparity in Graph Neural Networks: Can One Size Fit All?

NeurIPS 2023poster

Recent studies on Graph Neural Networks(GNNs) provide both empirical and theoretical evidence supporting their effectiveness in capturing structural patterns on both homophilic and certain heterophilic graphs. Notably, most real-world homophilic and heterophilic graphs are comprised of a mixture of…

2023

Distance-Based Propagation for Efficient Knowledge Graph Reasoning

EMNLP 2023long main

Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to predict unseen edges in knowledge graphs (KGs), resulting in the discovery of new facts. A new class of methods have been proposed to tackle this problem by aggregating path information. These methods have shown tremendous ability in the task of KGC. However…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Empowering Graph Representation Learning with Test-Time Graph Transformation

ICLR 2023poster

As powerful tools for representation learning on graphs, graph neural networks (GNNs) have facilitated various applications from drug discovery to recommender systems. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of GNNs is immensely challenged by issues related to data quality, such as distribution shift, abnor…

2023

Evaluating Graph Neural Networks for Link Prediction: Current Pitfalls and New Benchmarking

NeurIPS 2023poster

Link prediction attempts to predict whether an unseen edge exists based on only a portion of the graph. A flurry of methods has been created in recent years that attempt to make use of graph neural networks (GNNs) for this task. Furthermore, new and diverse datasets have also been created to better…

2023

Generative Diffusion Models on Graphs: Methods and Applications

IJCAI 2023poster

Diffusion models, as a novel generative paradigm, have achieved remarkable success in various image generation tasks such as image inpainting, image-to-text translation, and video generation. Graph generation is a crucial computational task on graphs with numerous real-world applications. It aims to…

2023

Probabilistic Categorical Adversarial Attack and Adversarial Training

ICML 2023poster

The studies on adversarial attacks and defenses have greatly improved the robustness of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Most advanced approaches have been overwhelmingly designed for continuous data such as images. However, these achievements are still hard to be generalized to categorical data. To bri…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2023

Towards Label Position Bias in Graph Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2023poster

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for semi-supervised node classification tasks. However, recent studies have revealed various biases in GNNs stemming from both node features and graph topology. In this work, we uncover a new bias - label position bias, which indicates tha…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2022

A Large Scale Search Dataset for Unbiased Learning to Rank

NeurIPS 2022accept

The unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) problem has been greatly advanced by recent deep learning techniques and well-designed debias algorithms. However, promising results on the existing benchmark datasets may not be extended to the practical scenario due to some limitations of existing datasets. Fir…

2022

Automated Self-Supervised Learning for Graphs

ICLR 2022poster

Graph self-supervised learning has gained increasing attention due to its capacity to learn expressive node representations. Many pretext tasks, or loss functions have been designed from distinct perspectives. However, we observe that different pretext tasks affect downstream tasks differently cross…

2022

Evaluating and Mitigating Inherent Linguistic Bias of African American English through Inference

COLING 2022main

Recent studies show that NLP models trained on standard English texts tend to produce biased outcomes against underrepresented English varieties. In this work, we conduct a pioneering study of the English variety use of African American English (AAE) in NLI task. First, we propose CodeSwitch, a gree…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2022

Graph Condensation for Graph Neural Networks

ICLR 2022poster

Given the prevalence of large-scale graphs in real-world applications, the storage and time for training neural models have raised increasing concerns. To alleviate the concerns, we propose and study the problem of graph condensation for graph neural networks (GNNs). Specifically, we aim to condens…

2022

Toward Annotator Group Bias in Crowdsourcing

ACL 2022long

Crowdsourcing has emerged as a popular approach for collecting annotated data to train supervised machine learning models. However, annotator bias can lead to defective annotations. Though there are a few works investigating individual annotator bias, the group effects in annotators are largely over…

Cited by 18SourcePDFScholar
2022

pyKT: A Python Library to Benchmark Deep Learning based Knowledge Tracing Models

NeurIPS 2022accept

Knowledge tracing (KT) is the task of using students' historical learning interaction data to model their knowledge mastery over time so as to make predictions on their future interaction performance. Recently, remarkable progress has been made of using various deep learning techniques to solve the…

Cited by 63SourcePDFScholar
2021

DEAR: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Online Advertising Impression in Recommender Systems

AAAI 2021technical

With the recent prevalence of Reinforcement Learning (RL), there have been tremendous interests in utilizing RL for online advertising in recommendation platforms (e.g., e-commerce and news feed sites). However, most RL-based advertising algorithms focus on optimizing ads' revenue while ignoring the…

Cited by 131SourcePDFScholar
2021

Graph Neural Networks with Adaptive Residual

NeurIPS 2021poster

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown the power in graph representation learning for numerous tasks. In this work, we discover an interesting phenomenon that although residual connections in the message passing of GNNs help improve the performance, they immensely amplify GNNs' vulnerability agains…

2021

Linear Convergent Decentralized Optimization with Compression

ICLR 2021poster

Communication compression has become a key strategy to speed up distributed optimization. However, existing decentralized algorithms with compression mainly focus on compressing DGD-type algorithms. They are unsatisfactory in terms of convergence rate, stability, and the capability to handle heterog…

Cited by 61SourcePDFScholar
2021

To be Robust or to be Fair: Towards Fairness in Adversarial Training

ICML 2021spotlight

Adversarial training algorithms have been proved to be reliable to improve machine learning models’ robustness against adversarial examples. However, we find that adversarial training algorithms tend to introduce severe disparity of accuracy and robustness between different groups of data. For insta…

Cited by 225SourcePDFScholar
2020

A Double Residual Compression Algorithm for Efficient Distributed Learning

AISTATS 2020poster

Large-scale machine learning models are often trained by parallel stochastic gradient descent algorithms. However, the communication cost of gradient aggregation and model synchronization between the master and worker nodes becomes the major obstacle for efficient learning as the number of workers a…

Cited by 71SourcePDFScholar
2020

Does Gender Matter? Towards Fairness in Dialogue Systems

COLING 2020main

Recently there are increasing concerns about the fairness of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in real-world applications such as computer vision and recommendations. For example, recognition algorithms in computer vision are unfair to black people such as poorly detecting their faces and inappropriately…

2020

Personalized Multimodal Feedback Generation in Education

COLING 2020main

The automatic feedback of school assignments is an important application of AI in education. In this work, we focus on the task of personalized multimodal feedback generation, which aims to generate personalized feedback for teachers to evaluate students’ assignments involving multimodal inputs such…

2016

PPP: Joint Pointwise and Pairwise Image Label Prediction

CVPR 2016accepted

Pointwise label and Pairwise label are both widely used in computer vision tasks. For example, supervised image classification and annotation approaches use pointwise label, while attribute-based image relative learning often adopts pairwise labels. These two types of labels are often considered ind…

Cited by 38SourcePDFScholar