Yicong Li is now an associate professor at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA). She has graduated from the Data Science and Machine Intelligence (DSMI) Lab of Advanced Analytics Institute, University of Technology Sydney, under the supervision of Prof. Guandong Xu, Dr. Hongxu Chen, and Dr. Xiangguo Sun in 2024. During from Sep. 2022 to Apr. 2024, she was a visiting student at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the collaborative supervisors are Dr. Yu Yang and Prof. Jiannong Cao.

She obtained her Master’s degree from the National University of Defense Technology in Dec 2019. The supervisors were Prof. Dongsheng Li and A/Prof. Dawei Feng.

🔥 Recruiting! I am actively recruiting self-motivated MSc and Research Assistants. Send me email if you are interested.

🔥 常年招计算机科学与技术、计算机技术专业硕士生，以及本校实习生，可提前参与科研。

Research Interests

The current research focuses on explainable machine learning, especially the application in the recommendation area. The thesis title is Towards Graph-based Explainable Recommender Systems.

• Explainability
• Fairness
• Recommender systems
• Counterfactual learning
• Graph neural networks

Previous research interests:

• Topic Model
• Distributed Algorithms
• Natural Language Generation

News

• We have 2 research papers accepted by the top conference CIKM 2025 (CCF B, CORE A).
  • NR-GCF: Graph Collaborative Filtering with Improved Noise Resistance
  • Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Multi-Perspective Thinking via Large Multimodal Models
• Our paper “AGT2:Learning User Preferences for Next POI Recommendation via Adaptive Graph and Time Tree” has been accepted by the conference ADMA 2025 (CCF C, CORE C).
• I am happy to be invited as a Programme Committee Member in many conferences, including AAAI 2025, NeurIPS 2025, SIGIR 2025, WSDM 2026, PRICAI 2025, APWeb-WAIM 2025, ACML 2025 and IEEE DSC 2025.
• Our paper “MSCI: Addressing CLIP’s Inherent Limitations for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning” has been accepted by the top conference IJCAI 2025 (CCF A, CORE A*).
• Yicong has been invited as an honored guest at the CCF YOCSEF Nanjing forum “Decoding the information cocoon: Dilemma and breakthrough”.
• I have joined Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics as an associate professor and a postgraduate supervisor. 😊
• I am invited as a PC Member of ICLR 2025.
• The second-authored paper, “Developing an LLM-Empowered Agent to Enhance Student Collaborative Learning Through Group Discussion”, has been accepted by the 32nd International Conference on Computers in Education (ICCE).
• I am invited to give a talk at the School of Computer Science and Technology, East China Normal University.
• I am invited as a PC Member of ACM KDD 2025.
• The first-authored paper, “Toward Structure Fairness in Dynamic Graph Embedding: A Trend-aware Dual Debiasing Approach” has been accepted by ACM KDD 2024 (CCF A, CORE A*).
• I am very happy to be awarded the Dean’s Award by the University of Technology Sydney! 😊
• My Thesis Has Got a Satisfactory Score!
• I am invited as a PC Member of The 11th International Conference on Behavioural and Social Computing (BESC 2024) conference.
• I am invited as a reviewer of the Journal of Social Computing.
• The co-authored paper “Low-Resource Court Judgment Summarization for Common Law Systems” has been accepted by Information Processing & Management. (中科院一区top)
• I am invited as a PC Member of The 21st Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI 2024) conference (CCF C, CORE B).
• I am invited to give a talk at the Artificial Intelligence and Future Network Research Institute, Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai.
• The first-authored paper “Attention Is Not the Only Choice: Counterfactual Reasoning for Path-based Explainable Recommendation” has been accepted by IEEE TKDE (CCF A, CORE A*).
• The co-authored paper “An Empirical Study Towards Prompt-Tuning for Graph Contrastive Pre-Training in Recommendations” has been accepted by NeurIPS 2023 (CCF A, CORE A*).
• The first-authored paper “Reinforcement Learning based Path Exploration for Sequential Explainable Recommendation” has been accepted by IEEE TKDE (CCF A, CORE A*).
• The co-authored paper “DA-Net: Distributed Attention Network for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning” has been accepted by CIKM 2022 (CCF B, CORE A).
• The co-authored paper “Unsupervised graph poisoning attack via contrastive loss back-propagation” has been accepted by WWW2022 (CCF A, CORE A*).
• I am very delighted that our tutorial “Graph Data Mining in Recommender Systems” has been accepted by WISE 2022 (CCF C, CORE B).
• The first-authored paper “Hyperbolic hypergraphs for sequential recommendation” has been accepted by CIKM 2021 (CCF B, CORE A).
• The first-authored paper “Temporal Meta-path Guided Explainable Recommendation” has been accepted by WSDM 2021 (CCF B, CORE A*).
• The co-authored paper “An adversarial feature distillation method for audio classification” has been accepted by IEEE Access.
• The first-authored paper “A distributed topic model for large-scale streaming text” has been accepted by KSEM 2019 (CCF C, CORE B).

Teaching

Data Fusion and Intelligent Analysis（数据融合与智能分析）

Experiment of Data Fusion and Intelligent Analysis （数据融合与智能分析实验）

Contact

If you are interested in my research, feel free to contact me . Welcome collaboration!