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Ying Sun

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Dr. Ying Sun is currently an assistant professor at Artificial Intelligence Thrust, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). She received the Ph.D. degree from the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. Prior to that, she received her B.E. degree from Beijing Institute of Technology, China. She won two second runner ups in ACM-ICPC Asian regional contest and was an ACM-ICPC world finalist. Her general research interests include data mining and machine learning, with a focus on explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) for supporting real-world decision-making scenarios. She has published prolifically in prestigious refereed journals and top-tier conference Proceedings such as Nature Cities, Nature Communications (NCOMMS), IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), SIGKDD, NeurIPS, SIGIR, TheWebConf, IEEE ICDM, etc. These works have been covered by authoritative medias such as China Daily and Guangming Net. She serves as program committee members in numerous top conferences such as IJCAI and AAAI. Some of the honors Dr. Ying Sun has won include CCF Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Incentive Program（CCF优博）, Zhuliyuehua Award of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Baidu scholarships top 20 candidates, etc.

E-mail: sunyinggilly@gmail.com

Professional Experiences

  • Assistant Professor. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Jul 2022 - Now

  • Research Intern. Talent Intelligence Center (TIC), Baidu Inc., Aug 2018 - Jun 2022

Education

  • Ph.D. in Computer Science. Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

  • B.Eng. in Software Engineering. Beijing Institute of Technology.

Research Interest

My current research interest focuses on developing explainable machine learning models for cross-displinary studies, relevant topics include:

  • Explainable Artificial Intelligence (Intepretable Nerual Networks, Explainability in LLMs, etc)

  • AI for Science/Social Science (AI4Labor Economics, AI4Talent Analytics, etc)

  • Data Mining (Graph Modeling, Spatio-Temporal Modeling, Recommender Systems, etc)

News

  1. 01/2025: 1 paper accepted by WWW. Congrats to all the collaborators!

  2. 01/2025: 1 paper accepted by TOIS. Congrats to all the collaborators!

  3. 11/2024: 1 paper accepted by TOIS. Congrats to all the collaborators!

  4. 11/2024: Honored to be selected as candidate of ICDM Young Female Scholar Award.

  5. 11/2024: First-year undergraduate students from our HKUST-GZ Algorithm Competition Association won a Gold Medal at ICPC (Nanjing). Congrats to all the students!

  6. 09/2024: 3 papers accepted by NeurIPS. Congrats to all the collaborators!

  7. 07/2024: 1 papers accepted by ACM MM. Congrats to all the collaborators!

  8. 05/2024: 2 papers accepted by KDD. Congrats to all the collaborators!

  9. 03/2024: 1 paper accepted by SIGIR. Congrats to all the collaborators!

  10. 03/2024: 1 paper accepted by DASFAA. Congrats to all the collaborators!

  11. 02/2024: 1 paper accepted by TOIS. Congrats to all the collaborators!

  12. 01/2024: 1 paper accepted by WWW-2024. Congrats to the collaborators!

  13. 12/2023: Honored to receive the Best Innovation Cooperation award of Huawei.

  14. 12/2023: Honored to be selected in the “CCF Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Incentive Program”（CCF博士学位论文激励计划（原CCF优博））[link]

  15. 12/2023: 1 paper accepted by Nature Cities. Congrats to all the collaborators!

  16. 10/2023: 1 paper accepted by TOIS. Congrats to all the collaborators!

  17. 08/2023: 1 project funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China!

  18. 08/2023: 1 paper accepted by 《计算机研究与发展》. Congrats to all the collaborators!

  19. 07/2023: 1 paper accepted by ACM MM. Congrats to all the collaborators!

  20. 06/2023: 1 paper accepted by RecSys. Congrats to all the collaborators! [link]

  21. 06/2023: 1 paper accepted by TOIS. Congrats to all the collaborators![link]

  22. 04/2023: 1 paper accepted by IJCAI. Congrats to all the collaborators!

  23. 03/2023: Honored to be added in AI List of Young Chinese Female Scholars [link]

  24. 02/2023: Honored to receive the Huohua award of Huawei [link]

Recent Publications

  1. Zheng Gong, Shuheng Shen, Changhua Meng, Ying Sun*, Exploring Hypergraph Condensation via Variational Hyperedge Generation and Multi-Aspectual Amelioration, In Proceedings of The Web Conference 2025 (WWW-2025), 2025

  2. Haoran Xin, Ying Sun*, Chao Wang, Hui Xiong*, LLMCDSR: Enhancing Cross-Domain Sequential Recommendation with Large Language Models, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (ACM TOIS), 2025.

  3. Ying Sun, Yang Ji, Hengshu Zhu, Fuzhen Zhuang, Qing He, Hui Xiong, Market-aware Long-term Job Skill Recommendation with Explainable Deep Reinforcement Learning, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (ACM TOIS), 2024.

  4. 刘辉，祝恒书, 周景博, 武晗, 张乐, 孙莹, 王晶, 朱琛, 张开颜, 任巍（中国人力资源开发研究会“人才友好型城市研究”课题组）, 2024年人才友好型城市研究报告, 《中国人力资源开发》, 41(10), 6-36, 2024

  5. Weiyu Guo, Ying Sun*, Yijie Xu, Ziyue Qiao, Yongkui Yang, Hui Xiong*, “SpGesture: Source-Free Domain-adaptive sEMG-based Gesture Recognition with Jaccard Attentive Spiking Neural Network”, The 38th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024.

  6. Liyi Chen, Ying Sun, Shengzhe Zhang, Yuyang Ye, Wei Wu, Hui Xiong, “Tackling Uncertain Correspondences for Multi-Modal Entity Alignment”, The 38th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024.

  7. Liyi Chen, Panrong Tong, Zhongming Jin, Ying Sun, Jieping Ye, Hui Xiong, “Plan-on-Graph: Self-Correcting Adaptive Planning of Large Language Model on Knowledge Graphs”, The 38th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2024.

  8. Yuting Zhang, Zhao Zhang, Yiqing Wu, Ying Sun, Fuzhen Zhuang, Wenhui Yu, Lantao Hu, Han Li, Kun Gai, Zhulin An, Yongjun Xu, “Tag Tree-Guided Multi-grained Alignment for Multi-Domain Short Video Recommendation”, In Proceedings of The 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM-2024), 2024. [paper]

  9. Zheng Gong, Ying Sun*. “An Energy-centric Framework for Category-free Out-of-distribution Node Detection in Graphs”, In Proceedings of The 30th SIGKDD conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2024), 2024. [paper]

  10. Yuting Zhang, Yiqing Wu, Ruidong Han, Ying Sun, Yongchun Zhu, Fuzhen Zhuang, Xiang Li, Wei Lin, Zhulin An, Yongjun Xu. “Unified Dual-Intent Translation for Joint Modeling of Search and Recommendation”, In Proceedings of The 30th SIGKDD conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2024), 2024. [paper]

  11. Zheng Gong, Ying Sun*, "Graph Reasoning Enhanced Language Models for Text-to-SQL", In Proceedings of The 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR-2024), 2024. [paper]

  12. Guanyu Jiang, Fuzhen Zhuang, Bowen Song, Yongchun Zhu, Ying Sun, Weiqiang Wang, Deqing Wang, "SeqSHAP: Subsequence Level Shapley Value Explanations for Sequential Predictions", In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA 2024), 2024.

  13. Rui Zha, Ying Sun, Chuan Qin, Le Zhang, Tong Xu, Hengshu Zhu, Enhong Chen, "Towards Unified Representation Learning for Career Mobility Analysis with Trajectory Hypergraph", ACM Transactions on Information Systems (ACM TOIS), 2024. [paper]

  14. Liyi Chen, Chuan Qin, Ying Sun, Xin Song, Tong Xu, Hengshu Zhu, Hui Xiong, "Collaboration-Aware Hybrid Learning for Knowledge Development Prediction", In Proceedings of The Web Conference 2024 (WWW-2024), 2024. [paper]

  15. Ying Sun, Hengshu Zhu, Lu Wang, Le Zhang, Hui Xiong, "Large-scale Online Job Search Behaviors Reveal Labor Market Shifts Amid COVID-19", Nature Cities (2024): 1-14, 2024. [paper]

  16. Yuting Zhang, Ying Sun, Fuzhen Zhuang, Yongchun Zhu, Zhulin An, Yongjun Xu, "Triple Dual Learning for Opinion-Based Explainable Recommendation", ACM Transactions on Information Systems (ACM TOIS), 2023. [paper]

  17. Chuan Qin, Le Zhang, Yihang Cheng, Rui Zha, Dazhong Shen, Qi Zhang, Xi Chen, Ying Sun, Chen Zhu, Hengshu Zhu, Hui Xiong, “A comprehensive survey of artificial intelligence techniques for talent analytics”, arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.03195, 2023.[paper]

  18. 孙莹, 章玉婷, 庄福振, 祝恒书, 何清, 熊辉, "基于集合效用边际贡献学习的可解释薪酬预测算法", 《计算机研究与发展》, 2023. [paper]

  19. He Zhang, Ying Sun*, Weiyu Guo, Yafei Liu, Haonan Lu, Xiaodong Lin,and Hui Xiong*."Interactive Interior Design Recommendation via Coarse-to-fine Multimodal Reinforcement Learning", In Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM-2023), 2023.[paper]

  20. Zhi Zheng, Ying Sun, Xin Song, Hengshu Zhu and Hui Xiong, "Generative Learning Plan Recommendation for Employees: A Performance-aware Reinforcement Learning Approach"ACM Recommender Systems (RecSys-2023), 2023. [paper]

  21. Chuan Qin, Hengshu Zhu, Dazhong Shen, Ying Sun, Kaichun Yao, Peng Wang, Hui Xiong, "Automatic Skill-oriented Question Generation and Recommendation for Intelligent Job Interviews", ACM Transactions on Information Systems (ACM TOIS), 2023.[paper]

  22. Zheng Gong, Guifeng Wang, Ying Sun, Qi Liu, Yuting Ning, Hui Xiong, Jingyu Peng, "Beyond Homophily: Robust Graph Anomaly Detection via Neural Sparsification", In Proceedings of International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2023 (IJCAI-2023), 2023.[paper]

  23. Hongting Niu, Ying Sun, Hengshu Zhu, Cong Geng, Jiuchun Yang, Hui Xiong, Bo Lang, "Exploring the Tidal Effect of Urban Business District with Large-scale Human Mobility Data", Frontiers of Computer Science (FCS), 2022. [paper]

  24. Tianxin Wang, Fuzhen Zhuang, Ying Sun, Xiangliang Zhang, Leyu Lin, Feng Xia, Lei He, Qing He. "Adaptively Sharing Multi-Levels of Distributed Representations in Multi-Task Learning", In Information Sciences, 2022. [paper]

  25. Ying Sun, Fuzhen Zhuang, Hengshu Zhu, Qi Zhang, Qing He, Hui Xiong, "Market-oriented Job Skill Valuation with Cooperative Composition Neural Network", Nature Communications, 2021. [paper] [code]

  26. Ying Sun, Hengshu Zhu, Chuan Qin, Fuzhen Zhuang, Qing He, Hui Xiong. "Discerning Decision-Making Process of Deep Neural Networks with Hierarchical Voting Transformation", In The 35th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS-2021), 2021. [paper] [code]

  27. Ying Sun, Fuzhen Zhuang, Hengshu Zhu, Xin Song, Qing He, Hui Xiong, "Modeling the Impact of Person-Organization Fit on Talent Management with Structure-Aware Attentive Neural Networks", In IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (IEEE TKDE), 2021. [paper]

  28. Ying Sun, Fuzhen Zhuang, Hengshu Zhu, Qing He, Hui Xiong, "Cost-Effective and Interpretable Job Skill Recommendation with Deep Reinforcement Learning", In Proceedings of The Web Conference 2021 (WWW-2021), Taipei, 2021. [paper] [code]

  29. Qi Zhang, Hengshu Zhu, Ying Sun, Hao Liu, Fuzhen Zhuang, Hui Xiong, "Talent Demand Forecasting with Attentive Neural Sequential Model", In Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-2021), 2021. [paper]

  30. Hongting Niu, Hengshu Zhu, Ying Sun, Xinjiang Lu, Jing Sun, Zhiyuan Zhao, Hui Xiong, Bo Lang, "Exploring the Risky Travel Area and Behavior of Car-hailing Service", In ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (ACM TIST), 2021. [paper]

  31. Yongchun Zhu, Ruobing Xie, Fuzhen Zhuang, Kaikai Ge, Ying Sun, Xu Zhang, Leyu Lin and Juan Cao, "Learning to Warm Up Cold Item Embeddings for Cold-start Recommendation with Meta Scaling and Shifting Networks", In Proceedings of the 44st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR-2021), 2021. [paper]

  32. Hengshu Zhu, Ying Sun, Wenjia Zhao, Fuzhen Zhuang, Baoshan Wang, Hui Xiong, "Rapid Learning of Earthquake Felt Area and Intensity Distribution with Real-time Search Engine Queries", Scientific Reports , 2020. [paper]

  33. Yiqing Wu, Ying Sun, Fuzhen Zhuang, Deqing Wang, Xiangliang Zhang, Qing He, "Meta-path Hierarchical Heterogeneous Graph Convolution Network for High Potential Scholar Recognition", In Proceedings of the 19th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM-2020), 2020. [paper]

  34. Ying Sun, Fuzhen Zhuang, Hengshu Zhu, Xin Song, Qing He, Hui Xiong, "The Impact of Person-Organization Fit on Talent Management: A Structure-Aware Convolutional Neural Network Approach", In Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-2019) , Anchorage, Alaska, 2019. [paper]

  35. Xuebing Li, Ying Sun, Fuzhen Zhuang, Jia He, Zhao Zhang, Shijun Zhu, Qing He, "Potential Off-Grid User Prediction System Based on Spark", ZTE Communications, 17, 26–37, 2019. [paper]

  36. Ying Sun, Hengshu Zhu, Fuzhen Zhuang, Jingjing Gu, Qing He, "Exploring the Urban Region-of-Interest through the Analysis of Online Map Search Queries", In Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-2018), 2018. [paper]

Research Grants

  1. Principal Investigator, Research on Interpretable Neural Network based on Expressive Self-Attributing Structure (基于高表达自归因结构的可解释神经网络研究), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (国家自然科学基金), Youth Science Foundation Project (青年科学基金项目), 62306255, 300,000CNY, 2024-01 – 2026-12.

  2. Principal Investigator, Research on Interpretable Graph Structure Learning Algorithm Based on Neural Networks (基于神经网络的可解释图结构学习算法研究), Guangdong Natural Science Foundation (广东省自然科学基金), General Program (面上项目), 2024A1515011839, 150,000CNY, 2024-01 - 2026-12.

  3. Principal Investigator, Research on Multimodal Interactive Recommendation Algorithms for Scenario Design (面向场景设计的多模态交互式推荐算法研究), Guangzhou-HKUST(GZ) Joint Funding Scheme (市校（院）企联合资助专题项目), 2023A03J0141, 250,000CNY, 2023-04 – 2025-03.

  4. Principal Investigator, Research on Self-Interpreting Neural Network Modeling Approach for Dynamic Relational Data (面向动态关系数据的自解释神经网络建模方法), the Fundamental Research Project of Guangzhou (广州市基础与应用基础研究专题项目), 2024A04J4233, 100,000CNY, 2024-01 – 2025-12.

  5. Principal Investigator, Interpretable Neural Network Algorithms for Intelligent Talent Management (面向智能人才管理的可解释神经网络算法), Baidu, 100,000CNY, 2022-09 - 2023-08.

  6. Principal Investigator, Interpretable Complex Event Impact Analysis (可解释的复杂事件影响分析), Huawei, 300,000CNY, 2023-01 - 2024-01.

  7. Participation, Co-Research on Universal Multimodal Human Computer Interaction Methods for Professional Fields,（面向专业领域的可通用多模态人机交互方法研究）, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (国家自然科学基金), Major research program projects (重大研究计划项目), 92370204, 3,000,000CNY, 2024-01 - 2027-12.

  8. Participation, Research on data-driven efficient drug response prediction and new drug development methods (数据驱动的高效药物反应预测及新药研发方法研究), Key projects of Guangdong Provincial and Municipal Joint Fund (广东省省市联合基金重点项目)，2023B1515120057, 1,000,000CNY, 2023-11 - 2026-10.

  9. Participation, Knowledge-driven scientific data intelligent analysis method and system (知识驱动的科学数据智能分析方法和系统), National Key R&D Program (国家重点研发计划), Ministry of Science and Technology of China (国家科技部), 2023YFF0725000, 10,000,000CNY, 2024-01 - 2028-12.

  10. Participation, Cooperation on Multimodal Interaction technology (基于多模态的交互技术合作), OPPO, 10,000,000CNY, 2022-08 - 2024-12.

Selected Media Coverage

  1. Oct. 2024, 科学中国人 (539期), 从信息碎片到知识集锦——记香港科技大学（广州）人工智能学域助理教授孙莹

  2. Mar. 2023, 北京青年报【北青深一】, AI“她力量” ：向人类想象更深处漫溯 | 深度报道 [Link]

  3. Apr. 2021, 中国日报, “AI+人才管理成大趋势，百度又走在了行业前面？” [Link]

  4. Apr. 2021, 光明网, “AI+人才管理”最新研究成果登上Nature子刊 [Link]

Selected Honors and Awards

  1. ICDM Young Female Scholar Award Candidate, 2024

  2. Best Innovation Cooperation award of Huawei(华为最佳创新合作奖), 2023

  3. CCF Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Incentive Program（CCF博士学位论文激励计划（原CCF优博））[link]

  4. AI List of Young Chinese Female Scholars, 2023[link]

  5. Huohua award of Huawei(华为火花奖), 2023

  6. Zhuliyuehua award of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2022

  7. National Scholarship, Ph.D. Student (博士生国家奖学金), 2021

  8. National Scholarship, Master Student (硕士生国家奖学金), 2019

  9. Baidu Scholarship top 20 Candidate, 2021

  10. The Web Conference Student Scholarship Award, 2021

  11. UCAS First-class Scholarship, 2018, 2019, 2021 (three times)

  12. UCAS Excellent Student, 2019 - 2021

  13. Outstanding Volunteer of ICT, CAS, 2019

  14. KDD Student Travel Award, 2018 - 2019 (two times)

  15. Beiwei Outstanding Student Award, 2018

  16. Beijing Outstanding Graduate Award, 2017

  17. BIT Software School Silver Medal Graduate Award, 2017

  18. ACM ICPC World Final, Participation, 2017

  19. BIT First-class Scholarship, 2014 - 2017 (five times)

  20. ACM ICPC China-Final, Silver Medal, 2016

  21. ACM ICPC Asia Shenyang Regional Contest, Third Place & Gold Medal, 2016

  22. ACM ICPC Asia Hong Kong Regional Contest, Second Runner-up, 2016

  23. China Collegiate Computing Contest (C4) Group Programming Ladder Tournament, First Prize, 2016

  24. BIT Outstanding League Member (two times), 2014 - 2016

  25. “Lanqiao Cup” National Software and Information Technology Professionals Competition (C/C Undergraduate A group) Beijing Regional, First Prize, 2016

  26. BIT Outstanding Student, 2013-2015 (two times)

  27. “Lanqiao Cup” National Software and Information Technology Professionals Competition (C/C Undergraduate A group) National Final, Second Prize, 2015

  28. ACM ICPC Asia Changchun Regional Contest, Silver Medal, 2015

  29. National Scholarship, Undergraduate Student (本科生国家奖学金), 2014