Publications: 'Improving and Unifying Discrete- and Continuous-time Discrete Denoising Diffusion', 'Pard: Permutation-Invariant Autoregressive Diffusion for Graph Generation' (2024); 'A Practical, Progressively-Expressive GNN', 'Hyperparameter Sensitivity in Deep Outlier Detection: Analysis and a Scalable Hyper-Ensemble Solution' (NeurIPS 2022); 'From Stars to Subgraphs: Uplifting Any GNN with Local Structure Awareness', 'Graph Condensation for Graph Neural Networks' (ICLR 2022); 'On Using Classification Datasets to Evaluate Graph Outlier Detection: Peculiar Observations and New Insights' (Big Data Journal, 2021); 'Connecting GCN and Graph-Regularized PCA' (GRL+ Workshop of ICML 2020); 'PairNorm: Tackling Oversmoothing in GNNs' (ICLR 2020).
Research Experience
Last year Ph.D. student in the Machine Learning Department and Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University.
Education
Ph.D. in Machine Learning Joint Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Leman Akoglu; Master's in ECE, Carnegie Mellon University; Bachelor's in EE (power system area), Xi'an Jiaotong University.
Background
Research interests: developing machine learning algorithms over graph-structured data, and applying designed algorithms to solve real-world problems. Also worked on pretraining LLMs and diffusion-based generative models. Future interests lie in combining graph models and LLMs to boost LLMs' reasoning and emergent abilities at different stages, moving towards a multimodal generative foundation model.
Miscellany
Has a twin brother, Lingfei Zhao, who is pursuing his Ph.D. in Physics at Duke University. They enjoy playing games together.