👋 About Me

Hi, I am Zheng YUAN, a third-year Ph.D. student (since 2023.09) in DEEP Lab at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), Department of Computing, under the supervision of Prof. Xiao HUANG. I received a B.E. from Shenzhen University (SZU), Computer Science and Technology, supervised by Prof. Weike PAN.

My current research interests focus on Large Language Models (LLMs) and their applications in data-driven scenarios, including Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG), Natural Language to SQL Query (Text-to-SQL), and Recommender Systems (RecSys).

📧 yzheng[dot]yuan[at]connect[dot]polyu[dot]hk

🔥 News

• 2025.10: 🎉🎉 Our paper “Knapsack Optimization-based Schema Linking for LLM-based Text-to-SQL Generation” is accepted by ICDE 2026.
• 2025.09: 🎉🎉 Our paper “Neuro-symbolic Entity Alignment via Variational Inference” is accepted by NeurIPS 2025.
• 2025.09: 🎉🎉 Our text-to-SQL survey “Next-Generation Database Interfaces: A Survey of LLM-based Text-to-SQL” is accepted by TKDE 2025.
• 2025.08: 🎉🎉 Our paper “Exploring the Limits of Text-Based Collaborative Filtering Using LLMs: Discoveries and Insights” is accepted by CIKM 2025.
• 2025.02: 🔥🔥 Our GraphRAG survey “A Survey of Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Customized Large Language Models” has been released. Take a look!
• 2024.05: 🎉🎉 Our paper “Knowledge-to-SQL: Enhancing SQL Generation with Data Expert LLM” is accepted by ACL 2024.

⚒️ Projects

• Awesome-GraphRAG
• IDvs.MoRec

📝 Publications

• Probing Latent Knowledge Conflict for Faithful Retrieval-Augmented Generation

  Linfeng Gao, Baolong Bi, Zheng Yuan, Le Wang, Zerui Chen, Zhimin Wei, Shenghua Liu, Qinggang Zhang, Jinsong Su

  arXiv Preprint

• You Don’t Need Pre-built Graphs for RAG: Retrieval Augmented Generation with Adaptive Reasoning Structures

  Shengyuan Chen, Chuang Zhou, Zheng Yuan, Qinggang Zhang, Zeyang Cui, Hao Chen, Yilin Xiao, Jiannong Cao, Xiao Huang

  arXiv Preprint

• Knapsack Optimization-based Schema Linking for LLM-based Text-to-SQL Generation

  Zheng Yuan, Hao Chen, Zijin Hong, Qinggang Zhang, Feiran Huang, Qing Li, Xiao Huang

  The 42nd IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering: ICDE 2026

• Neuro-symbolic Entity Alignment via Variational Inference

  Shengyuan Chen, Zheng Yuan, Qinggang Zhang, Wen Hua, Jiannong Cao, Xiao Huang

  In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems: NeurIPS 2025

• A Survey of Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Customized Large Language Models

  Qinggang Zhang, Shengyuan Chen, Yuanchen Bei, Zheng Yuan, Huachi Zhou, Zijin Hong, Junnan Dong, Hao Chen, Yi Chang, Xiao Huang

  arXiv Preprint

• Next-Generation Database Interfaces: A Survey of LLM-based Text-to-SQL

  Zijin Hong, Zheng Yuan, Qinggang Zhang, Hao Chen, Junnan Dong, Feiran Huang, Xiao Huang

  IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (2025): TKDE 2025

• Knowledge-to-SQL: Enhancing SQL Generation with Data Expert LLM

  Zijin Hong, Zheng Yuan, Hao Chen, Qinggang Zhang, Feiran Huang, Xiao Huang

  In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

• Multi-Behavior Collaborative Filtering with Partial Order Graph Convolutional Networks

  Yijie Zhang, Yuanchen Bei, Hao Chen, Qijie Shen, Zheng Yuan, Huan Gong, Senzhang Wang, Feiran Huang, Xiao Huang

  In Proceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining: KDD 2024

• NineRec: A Benchmark Dataset Suite for Evaluating Transferable Recommendation

  Jiaqi Zhang, Yu Cheng, Yongxin Ni, Yunzhu Pan, Zheng Yuan, Junchen Fu, Youhua Li, Jie Wang, Fajie Yuan

  IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (2024): TPAMI 2024

• Exploring Adapter-based Transfer Learning for Recommender Systems: Empirical Studies and Practical Insights

  Junchen Fu, Fajie Yuan, Yu Song, Zheng Yuan, Mingyue Cheng, Shenghui Cheng, Jiaqi Zhang, Jie Wang, Yunzhu Pan

  In Proceedings of the 17th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining: WSDM 2024

• Exploring the Limits of Text-Based Collaborative Filtering Using LLMs: Discoveries and Insights

  Ruyu Li, Wenhao Deng, Yu Cheng, Zheng Yuan, Jiaqi Zhang, Fajie Yuan

  In Proceedings of the 34th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management: CIKM 2025

• Where to go next for recommender systems? id-vs. modality-based recommender models revisited

  Zheng Yuan, Fajie Yuan, Yu Song, Youhua Li, JunChen Fu, Fei Yang, Yunzhu Pan, YongXin Ni

  In Proceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval: SIGIR 2023

• SQL-Rank++: A Novel Listwise Approach for Collaborative Ranking with Implicit Feedback

  Zheng Yuan, Dugang Liu, Weike Pan, Zhong Ming

  In 2022 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks: IJCNN 2022

💻 Experiences

• 2025.09 - Now, Reseach Intern, Tencent Youtu Lab, Advisor: Di YIN, Shenzhen, China.
• 2023.04 - 2023.09, Reseach Intern, Laboratory for High Performance Data Mining, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT), Advisor: Min YANG, Shenzhen, China.
• 2021.07 - 2023.03, Reseach Assistant, Representation Learning Lab, Westlake University @westlake-repl, Advisor: Fajie YUAN, Hangzhou, China.