Hongzhi Yin

Prof. Hongzhi Yin works as an ARC Future Fellow and Professor and director of the Responsible Big Data & Intelligence Lab (RBDI) at The University of Queensland, Australia. He has made notable contributions to recommendation systems, structured foundation model, spatial-temporal prediction, LLM and ChatBI, and decentralized and edge intelligence. He has received numerous awards and recognition for his research achievements. He has been named to IEEE Computer Society’s AI’s 10 to Watch 2022 and Field Leader of Data Mining & Analysis in The Australian's Research 2020 magazine. In addition, he has received the prestigious 2023 Young Tall Poppy Science Awards, Australian Research Council Future Fellowship 2021, the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award 2016, UQ Foundation Research Excellence Award 2019, 2024 and 2025 Computer Science in Australia Leader Award, AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Awards in Data Mining (2022-2026) and Information Retrieval and Recommendation (2025-2026), 2024 and 2025 ScholarGPS Highly Ranked Scholar (top 0.05%). His research has won 8 international and national Best Paper Awards, including Best Student Full Paper Award at CIKM 2024, Best Paper Award - Honorable Mention at WSDM 2023, Best Paper Award at ICDE 2019, Best Student Paper Award at DASFAA 2020, Best Paper Award Nomination at ICDM 2018, ACM Computing Reviews' 21 Annual Best of Computing Notable Books and Articles, Best Paper Award at ADC 2018 and 2016. His Ph.D. thesis won Peking University Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award 2014 and CCF Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award (Nomination) 2014. He has ten conference papers recognized as the Most Influential Papers in Paper Digest, including KDD 2021 and 2013, AAAI 2021, SIGIR 2022, WWW 2023 and 2021, CIKM 2021, 2019, 2016, and 2015. He has published 300+ papers in CCF A/CORE A* ranked venues, such as ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, KDD, SIGIR, WWW, ACL, ICDM, SIGMOD, VLDB, ICDE, AAAI, IJCAI, ACM Multimedia, ECCV, IEEE TKDE, VLDB Journal, and ACM TOIS, achieving an H-index of 93 with over 30,000 citations. He serves as the PC Co-Chair for the top confernces ICDM 2027 and ADMA 2026, and Track Chair/Senior Area Chair for KDD 2027, AAAI 2027, WWW 2027, WWW 2025 and IEEE SSCI 2027. He has also served extensively as an Area Chair/SPC member for many top conferences, such as NeurIPS, KDD, ICDE, SIGIR, WWW, ACL, AAAI, IJCAI, ICDM, ICMR, and CIKM. In addition, he has been serving as Associate Editor/Guest Editor/Editorial Board for Neural Networks (JCR Q1, CCF B, 中科院一区), Science China Information Sciences (JCR Q1, CCF A, 中科院一区), Data Science and Engineering (JCR Q1, 中科院一区), Journal of Computer Science and Technology (JCST, CCF B), Journal of Social Computing, ACM Transactions on Information Systems 2022-2023 (JCR Q1, CCF A, CORE A, 中科院一区), ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology 2020-2021 (JCR Q1), Information Systems 2020-2021 (CORE A*), and World Wide Web 2020-2021 and 2017-2018 (CORE A, CCF B). Dr. Yin has also been attracting wide media coverage, such as The Australian, The Australian Institute of Policy & Science (AIPS), Queensland Government, SBS Radio, UQ News, Sohu News, IEEE Computer Society, ACM Computing Reviews.

I am now looking for highly motivated Ph.D. students. The University of Queensland ranks in the top 50 as measured by the Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities. The University also ranks 40 in the QS World University Rankings and 41 in the US News Best Global Universities Rankings. The University of Queensland is the best in Australia according to the Australian Financial Review (AFR), which has now ranked UQ in the #1 position for 2 consecutive years. Please find the following three PhD scholarships.

• https://study.uq.edu.au/study-options/phd-mphil-professional-doctorate/projects/advancing-federated-learning-unified-urban-spatio-temporal-predictions (2 positions available for this project)

• https://study.uq.edu.au/study-options/phd-mphil-professional-doctorate/projects/building-trustworthy-information-recommendation-system (one position limited to domestic student)

Latest News

1. [30 August 2026] Our research work "Proxy Model-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Client Selection in Federated Recommendation" was accepted by the top journal TKDE (CCF A, CORE A*).

2. [17 August 2026] We have four research papers accpeted by the top conference ICDM 2026 (CORE A*).

   • Empowering Compact LLMs with Fusion of Layer-wise Exits for Recommendation

   • Enhancing Group Recommendation with Memory-Augmented Reasoning in LLM Agent

   • An Efficient and Effective Agentic Group Shilling Attack on Recommender Systems

   • Denoising-Aware Inversion: Revealing Privacy Risks in Noise-Protected Text Embeddings

3. [12 August 2026] We have two research papers accpeted by the top conference CIKM 2026 (CORE A, CCF B).

   • QA-Merging: Query-Adaptive Reasoning via Layer Selective Model Merging

   • On Mitigating Data Sparsity in Conversational Recommender Systems

4. [11 August 2026] Our research work "RuleAgent: Discovering Rules for Recommendation Denoising with Autonomous Language Agents" was accepted by the top journal ACM TOIS (CCF A).

5. [4 August 2026] I was invited to serve as Research Track Chair for ACM Web Conference 2027 (ACM Web 2027).

6. [28 July 2026] I have been included in the "2026 AI 2000 Global Artificial Intelligence Scholars List" and awarded the "2026 AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Award Honorable Mention" in both areas of "Data Mining" and "IR and Recommendation".

7. [8 July 2026] I was honored to be invited to serve as a Senior Area Chair for the KDD 2027 conference.

8. [1 July 2026] I was invited to serve as Symposium Chair for 2027 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI).

9. [20 May 2026] Our ARC Linkage Project 2025 "AI-Powered Design Co-Pilot for Reimagining Australian Single-Family Homes" has been successfully granted and funded.

10. [16 May 2026] We have three research papers accepted by the top conference KDD 2026 Research Track (CORE A*, CCF A, Acceptance Rate ~18%).

    • ProEx: A Unified Framework Leveraging Large Language Model with Profile Extrapolation for Recommendation

    • LEFT: Learnable Fusion of Tri-view Tokens for Unsupervised Time Series Anomaly Detection

    • Learning to Evaluate: Cost-Effective Model Evaluation on Unlabeled Data with Meta-Learning

11. [12 May 2026] I have been recognised in 2026 Edition of Best Scientists in the field of Computer Science and ranked 42 in Australia on Research.com, a leading academic platform.

12. [8 May 2026] Our research paper "Efficient Prompt Learning for Traffic Forecasting" has been accepted by VLDB Journal (CORE A*, CCF A)

13. [3 April 2026] We have 3 research papers accepted by the top conference SIGIR 2026.

    • Prompt-Unknown Promotion Attacks against LLM-based Sequential Recommender Systems

    • ProMax: Exploring the Potential of LLM-derived Profiles with Distribution Shaping for Recommender Systems

    • ProEchoMem: Enhancing Long Video Understanding via Multi-Trace Probe-Echo Memory

14. [27 March 2026] We have successfully secured the opportunity to host the top-tier conference ICDM 2027 in Brisbane.

15. [24 Feb 2026] We have 3 research papers on ChatBI accepted by the top conferences ICLR 2026 (CORE A*, CCF A) and ICDE 2026 (CORE A*, CCF A).

    • TableDART: Dynamic Adaptive Multi-Modal Routing for Table Understanding (ICLR 2026)

    • Boosting Small Language Models for Text-to-SQL with Fine-Grained Execution Feedback and Cost-Efficient Rewards (ICDE 2026)

    • An Efficient and Effective Evaluator for Text2SQL Models on Unseen and Unlabeled Data (ICDE 2026)

16. [21 Feb 2026] I’m pleased to join the Organizing Committee of the premier conference WSDM 2027 as the Conference Awards Co-Chair.

17. [18 Feb 2026] I’m pleased to join the Organizing Committee of the data mining flagship conference ADMA 2026 as the PC Co-Chair.

18. [5 Feb 2026] We are organizing a workshop "LLM-UP: LLM-powered User Profiling for Search and Recommendation" at SIGIR 2026.

19. [26 January 2026] We have 3 papers accepted by the top conference ICLR 2026 (CORE A*).

    • TableDART: Dynamic Adaptive Multi-Modal Routing for Table Understanding

    • Towards Anomaly-Aware Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning for Graph Anomaly Detection

    • TrustGen: A Platform of Dynamic Benchmarking on the Trustworthiness of Generative Foundation Models

20. [20 January 2026] I was invited to serve as Area Chair in the top conference KDD 2026 (CORE A*, CCF A), IJCAI 2026 (CORE A*, CCF A), ARR-ACL 2026 (CORE A*, CCF A) and ICDM 2026 (CORE A*, CCF B).

21. [14 January] We have two research papers accepted by the top conference WWW 2026 (CORE A*, CCF A). Congratulations to Xinyi and Hung.

    • Relational Database Distillation: From Structured Tables to Condensed Graph Data

    • Efficient Content-based Recommendation Model Training via Noise-aware Coreset Selection

22. [13 January 2025] We have two research papers recognized as ESI Hot Papers and five research papers recognized as ESI Highly Cited Papers.

    • XSimGCL: Towards Extremely Simple Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation

    • Self-Supervised Learning for Recommender Systems: A Survey

    • Teaching MLPs to Master Heterogeneous Graph-Structured Knowledge for Efficient and Accurate Inference

    • Manipulating Recommender Systems: A Survey of Poisoning Attacks and Countermeasures

    • Enhancing Social Recommendation With Adversarial Graph Convolutional Networks

23. [19 December 2025] I was invited to serve as Area Chair in the top conference SIGIR 2026 (CORE A*, CCF A) and senior PC member at the top conference ICMR 2026 (CORE A, CCF B).

24. [9 December 2025] I have been recognized as 2025 ScholarGPS Highly Ranked Scholar (top 0.05% of all scholars), #3 in Data Mining, #8 in Information Engineering.

25. [8 November 2025] Our research paper "SmartAgent: Chain-of-User-Thought for Embodied Personalized Agent in Cyber World" was accepted by the top conference AAAI 2026 (CCF A and CORE A*). Congratulations to Jiaqi.

26. [4 November 2025] We have released the first survey on Reasoning-Aware Recommender Systems in the LLM Era.

27. [28 October 2025] My ARC Discovery Project 2026 "Advancing Federated Learning for Unified Urban Spatio-Temporal Predictions" has been successfully granted and funded.

28. [13 October 2025] I was invited to be Area Chair for ACL Rolling Review (ARR).

29. [1 October 2025] I have been recognised in the Stanford/Elsevier Top 2% Scientists List Career Long (2022-2025) and Single Year (2020-2025).