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.
Here are some talk slides that introduce my works in these directions:
  [Bundle Recommendation and Generation] Aug. 2025, present at a workshop on generative recommendation. [slides]
  [LLM for Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) Analysis] Sep. 2025, present at SMU-SCIS MITB AI translational seminar & ST Engineering research workshop. [slides]
  [AI That Sees the Future: Multimodal LLMs for Open-World Forecasting] Sep. 2025, present at SMU-SCIS research cluster seminar. [slides]

News

[New!] 2026/02 One paper gets accepted by Knowledge-Based Systems, congratulations to Yongheng!
    MM-AttacKG: A Multimodal Approach to Attack Graph Construction with Large Language Models.[pdf][code coming soon]

[New!] 2026/01 Our paper, Integrating Symbolic and Waveform Music into Large Language Models, receives the best paper award of Multimdeia Modeling (MMM) 2026!

[New!] 2026/01 Two papers are accepted by ICLR'26! On the topics of product bundling and stock forecasting, respectively. Congruatulations to Tu Teng, Li Ai, Kelvin, and Jan!
     Discrete Diffusion for Bundle Construction.[pdf][code]
     Reasoning on Time-Series for Financial Technical Analysis.[pdf][code]

[New!] 2026/01 One short paper, about geo-political event forecasting using LLM agents, gets accepted by The Web Conference (WWW) 2026, congratulations to Haoxuan and Chang He!
    ThinkTank-ME: A Multi-Expert Framework for Middle East Event Forecasting.[pdf][code]

[New!] 2025/12 Our demo paper, VibeMus: Proactive Agentic System for Music Personalization, receives the best demo paper award of ACM Multimdeia Asia 2025!

[New!] 2025/11 Our paper, Reasoning on Time-Series for Financial Analysis, wins the best paper award of the Workshop on Rethinking Financial Time-Series in ACM ICAIF 2025.

[New!] 2025/11 One paper accepted by AAAI 2026, congratulations to Jiajie!
    Potent but Stealthy: Rethink Profile Pollution against Sequential Recommendation via Bi-level Constrained Reinforcement Paradigm.[pdf][code]

[New!] 2025/10 One demo paper accepted by AAAI 2025, big congratulations to Jared Chan! Notably, Jared is a year-2 undergradute student in SMU SCIS, and this work was done during a part-time summer research project.
    PortfolioPilot: An Agentic Platform for Financial Portfolio Management Algorithm Development and Evaluation.[pdf][code]

[New!] 2025/10 One paper accepted by Multimedia Modeling (MMM) 2025, congratulations to Tu Teng and Xiaohao!
    Integrating Symbolic and Waveform Music into Large Language Models.[pdf][website]

[New!] 2025/10 One paper accepted by The 2nd Workshop on LLMs and Generative AI for Finance (co-host on ICAIF'25), congratulations to Kelvin!
    Temporal Relational Reasoning of Large Language Models for Detecting Stock Portfolio Crashes.[pdf]

[New!] 2025/10 One paper accepted by the Workshop on Rethinking Financial Time-Series, congratulations to Kelvin!
    Reasoning on Time-Series for Financial Analysis. [pdf][code]

[New!] 2025/10 One demo paper accepted by ACM Multimedia Asia 2025, congratulations to Zhiliang and Tu Teng!
    VibeMus: Proactive Agentic System for Music Personalization.[pdf][code]

[New!] 2025/09 One paper accepted by TKDD, congratulations to Tu Cheng!
    Website Owner Identification through Multi-level Contrastive Representation Learning.[pdf][code]

[New!] 2025/08 Our workshop proposal, titled as "International Workshop on Multimodal Generative Search and Recommendation", gets accepted by CIKM 2025. We look forward to submissions relevant to broad topics on Multimodal Generative Search and Recommendation. More details can be seen on the website.

[New!] 2025/07 Our demo gets accepted by ACM Multimedia'25 Demo Track, congratulations to Jin Peng, Yilin, and Mingzhe!
    GenWardrobe: A Fully Generative System for Travel Fashion Wardrobe Construction.[pdf][code]

[New!] 2025/05 One paper accepted by KDD'25, congratulations to Yingzhi and Xiaohao!
    LLM2Rec: Large Language Models Are Powerful Embedding Models for Sequential Recommendation.[pdf][code]

[New!] 2025/04 One paper accepted by SIGIR'25, congratulations to Mingzhe!
    FashionDPO:Fine-tune Fashion Outfit Generation Model using Direct Preference Optimization.[pdf][code]

[New!] 2025/04 Our ICLR'25 paper, "Alphaedit: Null-space constrained model editing for language models", wins the outstanding paper award!

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

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

Professional Services

Conference Organizing Committee
     - Local co-chair of ACM International Conference on AI in Finance 2025 (ICAIF'25), Singapore.
     - Grand Challenge co-chair of ACM Multimedia Asia 2025 (MMAsia'25), Kuala Lumpur.
     - Open source co-chair of ACM Multimedia 2025 (MM'25), Dublin.
     - Volunteers co-chair of The Web Conf 2024 (WWW'24), Singapore.

Conference Session Chairs
     - Session chairs of Oral 13: Sketch and search in ACM Multimedia Asia 2025, Kuala Lumpur.
     - Session chairs of Engagement: Multimedia Search and Recommendation III in ACM Multimedia 2025, Dublin.
     - 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 Program Committee
     - Senior Program Committee (SPC) member of ICMR 2026.
     - Area chair of NLPCC 2025.
     - Area co-chair of CCL 2023.
     - PC member of ACMMM, SIGIR, KDD, WWW, WSDM, CIKM, IJCAI, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, ICMR, MMM etc.

Journal Invited Reviewers
     - TKDE, TOIS, TMM, ToMM, TWeb, TIST, etc.

Honors and Awards

Best Paper Award, Multimedia Modeling 2026.

Best Demo Award, ACM Multimedia Asia 2025.

Best Paper Award, ACM ICAIF'25 Workshop on Rethinking Financial Time-Series.

Outstanding Paper Award, ICLR 2025.

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)