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I am a PhD student in Data System Group at the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. I am so fortunate to be advised by Prof. M. Tamer Özsu. I am also a visiting researcher at ServiceNow Research. My research is on LLM applications for data management, which generally consists of two parts, 1) Structured or Semi-structured data like relational tables and knowledge graphs, and 2) Unstructured data like images and videos. I did my master degree in Data Science at City University of Hong Kong, advised by Prof. Yu Yang, working on data mining and graph learning. One thing needs to be mentioned here: I am a big fan of Manchester City FC.

Education

• Ph.D in Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 2027 (expected)
• M.S. in Data Science, City University of Hong Kong, 2021
• B.Eng. in Engineering, Tongji University, 2019

News

• [Sept 2025] Three papers accepted by NeurIPS 2025: “Paper2Poster: Towards Multimodal Poster Automation from Scientific Papers” (Oral at MAS Workshop ICML 2025, 2.6k⭐ on GitHub), “The Underappreciated Power of Vision Models for Graph Structural Understanding”, and “AlignVLM: Aligning Vision-Language Models for Improved Document Understanding”
• [May 2025] Paper “UI-Vision: A Desktop-centric GUI Benchmark for Visual Perception and Interaction” accepted by ICML 2025
• [Jan 2025] Paper “BigDocs: An Open Dataset for Training Multimodal Models on Document and Code Tasks” accepted by ICLR 2025
• [Jan 2025] Paper “Rethinking Spectral Augmentation for Contrast-based Graph Self-Supervised Learning” accepted by TMLR 2025
• [Apr 2024] Started visiting researcher internship at ServiceNow Research in Montreal, focusing on multimodal learning and GUI understanding (Extended to May 2025)
• [Oct 2023] Two papers accepted by EMNLP 2023: “Balance Act: Mitigating Hubness in Cross-Modal Retrieval with Query and Gallery Banks” (Oral) and “InvGC: Robust Cross-Modal Retrieval by Inverse Graph Convolution” (Findings)
• [Aug 2023] Paper on neural network loss landscapes accepted by IEEE BigData 2023 (Oral)
• [Jul 2023] Paper “Communication-Efficient Decentralized Online Continuous DR-Submodular Maximization” accepted by CIKM 2023

Work experience

• Research Intern @ ServiceNow Research, 2024.04 - now.
  • Working on the vision-language model (VLM) for text-rich documents. The work is accepted by RBFM workshop @ Neurips 2024 and accepted by ICLR 2025.
  • Mentor: I feel very fortunate to work with Sai Rajeswar and Joao Monteiro
• Research Assistant @ City University of Hong Kong & Hong Kong Institute of Data Science, 2021.10 - 2022.07.
  • Working on non-convex/submodular optimization and data mining. The Works accepted by CIKM 2023 and IEEE BigData 2023.
  • Supervisor: Prof. Yu Yang
• Teaching Assistant @ University of Waterloo, 2022.09 - now.
  • Working as a teaching assistant for courses related to database.

Publications

Please find my full set of publications on my Google Scholar page.