Assistant Professor
School of Computing and Information Systems
Singapore Management University

[Email] [Google Scholar] [GitHub]

*Collaboration* I am looking for highly motivated students (PhD, master, undergraduates) to work together on multimodal event forecating, recommender system, and various application problems in vertical domains, including fashion, finance, cyber security, and politics. Please feel free to send me your CV if you are interested.

*Call for Contributions* We will host "FinIR 2025: The 2nd Workshop on Financial Information Retrieval in the Era of Generative AI", co-located with SIGIR'25 in Padua, Italy. Please feel free to disseminate the information with your colleagues and the researchers who might be interested. Looking forward to your submissions and seeing you in Padua! Submission deadline: 23 April, 2025 (AoE). [Workshop Website] [Submission link].

*Call for Contributions* We are editing Special Issue of Frontiers in Big Data about "Generative Search and Recommendation" to explore GenAI in search, recommendations, and IR broadly defined. Abstract due 02/15/2024; Full paper due 04/15/2024. [Submission link] [Submission Guidelines] Feel free to contact me if you have any question.

Biography

I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor in School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University. Before that, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in National University of Singapore (NUS), where I was a member of NExT++ Research Center, supervised by Prof. Chua Tat-Seng. I was also under National Cybersecurity R&D Lab, where I worked with Prof. Chang Ee-Chien and Prof. Liang Zhenkai. I got my PhD from NUS in 2022, supervised by Prof. Chua Tat-Seng.

My research focuses on the emerging and practical problem of multimodal event forecasting, which aims to understand multimodal information and make forecasting in various domains, such as international politics, macro economy, finance, cyber threats, fashion trend, etc. I am also working on computational fashion, including personalized mix-and-match, fashion outfit generation, fashion report generation, etc. In addition, I study a specialized branch of recommender system, i.e., bundle recommendation, including multimodal bundle construction and recommendation. In summary, I am interested in investigating computational (e.g., data mining, information retrieval, and multimedia) approaches to solve realworld problems. I am enthusiatic in discovering, formulating, and solving new and crucial problems, which have been not or rarely touched by the current academic and industrial community.

News

  • [New!] 2025/02 Our workshop proposal, titled as "FinIR 2025: The 2nd Workshop on Financial Information Retrieval in the Era of Generative AI", get accepted by SIGIR 2025. We look forward to submissions relevant to broad topics on Fiance and Information Retrieval. More details can be seen in the website.

  • [New!] 2025/01 I joined Singapore Management University, School of Computing and Information Systems as a tenure-track Assistant Professor.

  • [New!] 2024/11 One paper is accepted by KDD'25 Research Track (August Batch) of using multimodal LLMs for product bundling, and one paper is accepted by the journal "Computers & Security" of using LLMs for cyber attack KG construction!
         Fine-tuning Multimodal Large Language Models for Product Bundling.[pdf][code]
         AttacKG+: Boosting Attack Graph Construction with Large Language Models.[pdf]

  • [New!] 2024/10 I chaired two sessions in ACM Multimedia 2024: 1) Multimodal Learning and Recommender Systems and 2) Media and Communication Technologies.

  • [New!] 2024/07 I give an invited talk at ChinaMM-24, with the title of "Multimodal Event Forecasting in Vertical Domains".

  • [New!] 2024/07 Two papers are accepted by ACMMM'24! On the topics of multimodal product bundling and multimodal event forecasting, respectively.
         CIRP: Cross-Item Relational Pre-training for Multimodal Product Bundling.[pdf][code]
         MM-Forecast: A Multimodal Approach to Temporal Event Forecasting with Large Language Models.[pdf][code]

  • 2024/05 Three papers are accepted by ACL'24 main track, KDD'24 research track, and KSEM'24! Studying the problems of temporal event analysis and forecasting, music language pretraining for playlist continuation, and event extraction.
         ACL'24: Analyzing Temporal Complex Events with Large Language Models? A Benchmark towards Temporal, Long Context Understanding.[pdf][code]
         KDD'24: LARP: Language Audio Relational Pre-training for Cold-Start Playlist Continuation.[pdf][code]
         KSEM'24: EE-LCE: An Event Extraction Framework Based on LLM-Generated CoT Explanation.[pdf][code]

  • 2024/04 One paper is accepted by ICMR'24! We integrate mix-and-match into the virtual try-on system and propose an overall framework HMaVTON.
         Smart Fitting Room: A One-stop Framework for Matching-aware Virtual Try-On.[pdf][code]

  • 2024/03 One demo paper is accepted by The Web Conf'24 and one paper is accepted by SIGIR'24! Both papers are about fashion generation, where the former is about an interesting new task of fashion report generation, and the other is using diffusion models for fashion outfit generation.
         WWW'24 Demo: FashionReGen: LLM-Empowered Fashion Report Generation.[pdf][code]
         SIGIR'24: Diffusion Models for Generative Outfit Recommendation.[pdf][code]

  • 2024/02 One paper is accepted by TOIS!
         Filter-based Stance Network for Rumor Verification.[pdf]

  • 2024/01 One paper is accepted by The Web Conf'24 and one paper is accepted by TOIS!
         WWW'24: Learning to Generate Explainable Stock Predictions using Self-Reflective Large Language Models.[pdf][code]
         TOIS: MultiCBR: Multi-view Contrastive Learning for Bundle Recommendation.[pdf][code]

    • Professional Services

  • Conference Organizing Committee
         - Local co-chair in ACM International Conference on AI in Finance 2025 (ICAIF'25), Singapore.
         - Grand Challenge co-chair in ACM Multimedia Asia 2025 (MMAsia'25), Kuala Lumpur.
         - Open source co-chair in ACM Multimedia 2025 (MM'25), Dublin.
         - Volunteers co-chair in The Web Conf 2024 (WWW'24), Singapore.
  • Conference Session Chairs
         - Session chairs of 1) Multimodal Learning and Recommender Systems and 2) Media and Communication Technologies in ACM Multimedia 2024, Melbourne.
         - Session chair of Recommendations and Ads of SIRIP in SIGIR 2023, Taipei.
  • Conference Area Chairs
         - Area chair in NLPCC 2025.
         - Area co-chair in CCL 2023.
  • Conference PC Members
         - KDD, WWW, SIGIR, IJCAI, ACMMM, WSDM, AAAI, etc.
  • Journal Invited Reviewers
         - TKDE, TOIS, TMM, ToMM, TWeb, TIST, etc.

    • Honors and Awards

  • Best Student Paper Award, ICMR 2021.
  • Research Achievement Award, National University of Singapore 2019.
  • Best Paper Finallist, ACMMM 2018.

    • Education and Research Background

  • 2025.01-present: Assistant Professor, School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University (SMU)
  • 2022.04-2024.12: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, NExT++ Research Center, National University of Singapore (NUS)
         Supervisor: Prof Tat-Seng Chua.
  • 2017.08-2022.03: PhD in Computer Science, School of Computing, National University of Singapore
         Supervisor: Prof Tat-Seng Chua.
  • 2011-2015: Bachelor in Communication Engineering, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT)