Brief Biography

I obtained my bachelor and master degrees from Nanjing University and PhD degree from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Prior to joining Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), I have worked in HKUST and Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) for about eight years.
My current research interests include artificial intelligence, machine learning, pattern recognition, and data mining. I am especially interested in multi-task learning, transfer learning, meta learning, deep learning, semi-supervised learning, dimensionality reduction, and metric learning.

News

  • [January 2024] Four paper got accepted by ICLR 2024 and three of them are in spotlight presentation (acceptance rate 5%).
  • [April 2023] One paper got accepted by ICML 2023.
  • [April 2023] One paper got accepted by IJCAI 2023.
  • [March 2023] One paper got accepted by CVPR 2023.
  • [January 2023] One paper got accepted by ICLR 2023.
  • [November 2022] Two papers got accepted by AAAI 2023.
  • [September 2022] One paper got accepted by NeurIPS 2022.
  • [May 2022] One paper got accepted by ICML 2022.
  • [March 2022] We have released a package for multi-task learning at Github. Details can be found in the technical report at arXiv.
  • [September 2021] Two papers got accepted by NeurIPS 2021.
  • [May 2021] A paper on multi-task learning got accepted by KDD 2021.
  • [March 2021] The survey paper on multi-task learning got accepted by IEEE TKDE.
  • [March 2021] My paper "An Overview of Multi-Task Learning" won the best paper award of National Science Review in 2020.
  • Contact

  • Outdated email addresses: zhangyu@cse.ust.hk; yuzhang@comp.hkbu.edu.hk; yuzhangcse@ust.hk; yuzhangcse@cse.ust.hk
  • Publications

    [Google Scholar] [DBLP]

    Books

  • Qiang Yang, Yu Zhang, Wenyuan Dai, and Sinno Jialin Pan. Transfer Learning. Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9781107016903, 2020. (A Chinese Translation has been published by China Machine Press with ISBN 9787111661283.) (Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2020, Choice Reviews)
  • Refereed Journal Papers

  • Qiao Xiao, Yu Zhang, and Qiang Yang. Selective Random Walk for Transfer Learning in Heterogeneous Label Spaces. To appear in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2024.
  • Baijiong Lin and Yu Zhang. LibMTL: A Python Library for Multi-Task Learning. Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), 24: 1-7, 2023.
  • Yi Zhang, Yu Zhang, and Wei Wang. Learning Linear and Nonlinear Low-Rank Structure in Multi-Task Learning. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 35(8): 8157--8170, 2023.
  • Shujun Yang, Yu Zhang, Yao Ding, and Danfeng Hong. Superpixelwise Low-rank Approximation based Partial Label Learning for Hyperspectral Image Classification. IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters (GRSL), 20:5504905, 2023.
  • Yuan Yao, Xutao Li, Yu Zhang, and Yunming Ye. Multi-Source Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation with Conditional Weighting Adversarial Network. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), 34(4): 2079-2092, 2023. (A technical report is available at arXiv.)
  • Yu Zhang and Qiang Yang. A Survey on Multi-Task Learning. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 34(12): 5586–5609, 2022. (A technical report is available at arXiv.)
  • Baijiong Lin, Feiyang Ye, Yu Zhang, and Ivor W. Tsang. Reasonable Effectiveness of Random Weighting: A Litmus Test for Multi-Task Learning. Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2022.
  • Shujun Yang, Yu Zhang, Yuheng Jia, and Weijia Zhang. Local Low-Rank Approximation With Superpixel-Guided Locality Preserving Graph for Hyperspectral Image Classification. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing (JSTARS), 15: 7741-7754, 2022. (Code)
  • Shuangyin Li, Weiwei Chen, Yu Zhang, Gansen Zhao, Rong Pan, Zhenhua Huang, and Yong Tang. A Context-Enhanced Sentence Representation Learning Method for Close Domains with Topic Modeling. Information Sciences, 607(August): 186–210, 2022.
  • Shuangyin Li, Yu Zhang, and Rong Pan. Bi-Directional Recurrent Attentional Topic Model. ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD), 14(6): article 74, 2020.
  • Yuan Yao, Yu Zhang, Xutao Li, and Yunming Ye. Discriminative Distribution Alignment: A Unified Framework for Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation. Pattern Recognition (PR), 101: article 107165, 2020.
  • Yuan Yao, Xutao Li, Yunming Ye, Feng Liu, Michael K. Ng, Zhichao Huang, and Yu Zhang. Low-Resolution Image Categorization via Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation. Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS), 163(1): 656–665, 2019.
  • Yu Zhang and Qiang Yang. An Overview of Multi-Task Learning. National Science Review (NSR), 5(1): 30–43, 2018. (A Chinese translation can be found here.) (Best Paper Award)
  • Qing Bao, William K. Cheung, Yu Zhang, and Jiming Liu. A Component-based Diffusion Model with Structural Diversity for Social Networks. IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics (TCYB), 47(4): 1078-1089, 2017.
  • Yu Zhang, William K. Cheung, and Jiming Liu. A Unified Framework for Epidemic Prediction based on Poisson Regression. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 27(11): 2878-2892, 2015. (Link)
  • Deming Zhai, Yu Zhang, Dit-Yan Yeung, Hong Chang, Xilin Chen, and Wen Gao. Instance-Specific Canonical Correlation Analysis. Neurocomputing, 155(1): 205-218, 2015.
  • Yu Zhang and Dit-Yan Yeung. A Regularization Approach to Learning Task Relationships in Multitask Learning. ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD), 8(3): article 12, 2014. (Link)
  • Yu Zhang and Dit-Yan Yeung. Multilabel Relationship Learning. ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD), 7(2): article 7, 2013. (Link)
  • Yu Zhang and Dit-Yan Yeung. Transfer Metric Learning with Semi-Supervised Extension. ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), 3(3): article 54, 2012. (Link)
  • Yu Zhang and Dit-Yan Yeung. Semisupervised Generalized Discriminant Analysis. IEEE Transactions on Neural Network (TNN), 22(8): 1207-1217, 2011. (Link)
  • Refereed Conference Papers

  • Zhan Zhuang, Yu Zhang, and Ying Wei. Gradual Domain Adaptation via Gradient Flow. In: Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), Vienna, Austria, 2024. (Spotlight)
  • Shuai Fu, Xiequn Wang, Qiushi Huang, and Yu Zhang. Nemesis: Normalizing the Soft-Prompt Vectors of Vision-Language Models. In: Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), Vienna, Austria, 2024. (Spotlight)
  • Feiyang Ye, Yueming Lyu, Xuehao Wang, Yu Zhang, and Ivor Tsang. Adaptive Stochastic Gradient Algorithm for Black-box Multi-Objective Learning. In: Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), Vienna, Austria, 2024.
  • Longhui Yu, Weisen Jiang, Han Shi, Jincheng YU, Zhengying Liu, Yu Zhang, James Kwok, Zhenguo Li, Adrian Weller, and Weiyang Liu. MetaMath: Bootstrap Your Own Mathematical Questions for Large Language Models. In: Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), Vienna, Austria, 2024. (Spotlight)
  • Weisen Jiang, Yu Zhang, and James T. Kwok. Effective Structured-Prompting by Meta-Learning and Representitive Verbalizer. In: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, 2023.
  • Feiyang Ye, Xuehao Wang, Yu Zhang, and Ivor Tsang. Multi-Task Learning via Time-Aware Neural ODE. In: Proceedings of the Thirty-Second International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Macao, China, 2023.
  • Yunhao Gou, Tom Ko, Hansi Yang, James T. Kwok, Yu Zhang, and Mingxuan Wang. Leveraging per Image-Token Consistency for Vision-Language Pre-training. In: Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Vancouver, Canada, 2023.
  • Weisen Jiang, Hansi Yang, Yu Zhang, and James T. Kwok. An Adaptive Policy to Employ Sharpness-Aware Minimization. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), Kigali, Rwanda, 2023.
  • Zhixiong Yue, Yu Zhang, and Jie Liang. Learning Conflict-Noticed Architecture for Multi-Task Learning. In: Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Washington, DC, USA, 2023.
  • Qiushi Huang, Yu Zhang, Tom Ko, Xubo Liu, Bo Wu, Wenwu Wang, and Lilian Tang. Personalized Dialogue Generation with Persona-Adaptive Attention. In: Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Washington, DC, USA, 2023. (A technical report is available at arXiv.)
  • Qiushi Huang, Shuai Fu, Xubo Liu, Wenwu Wang, Tom Ko, Yu Zhang, and Lilian Tang. Learning Retrieval Augmentation for Personalized Dialogue Generation. In: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Singapore, 2023.
  • Yanbin Wei, Qiushi Huang, Yu Zhang, and James T. Kwok. KICGPT: Large Language Model with Knowledge in Context for Knowledge Graph Completion. In: Findings of EMNLP, Singapore, 2023.
  • Xiyu Wang, Pengxin Guo, and Yu Zhang. Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via Bidirectional Cross-Attention Transformer. In: Proceedings of European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD), Turin, Italy, 2023. (A technical report is available at arXiv.)
  • Feiyang Ye, Jianghan Bao, and Yu Zhang. Partially-Labeled Domain Generalization via Multi-Dimensional Domain Adaptation. In: Proceedings of International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), Queensland, Australia, 2023.
  • Xubo Liu, Qiushi Huang, Xinhao Mei, Haohe Liu, Qiuqiang Kong, Jianyuan Sun, Shengchen Li, Tom Ko, Yu Zhang, Lilian Tang, Mark Plumbley, Volkan Kilic, and Wenwu Wang. Visually-Aware Audio Captioning With Adaptive Audio-Visual Attention. In: Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), Dublin, Ireland, 2023.
  • Qiao Xiao, Boqian Wu, Yu Zhang, Shiwei Liu, Mykola Pechenizkiy, Elena Mocanu, and Decebal Constantin Mocanu. Dynamic Sparse Network for Time Series Classification: Learning What to "See". In: Proceedings of the Thirty-Sixth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS/NIPS), New Orleans, City in Louisiana, USA, 2022.
  • Weisen Jiang, James T. Kwok, and Yu Zhang. Subspace Learning for Effective Meta-Learning. In: Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2022.
  • Junyi Ao, Rui Wang, Long Zhou, Shujie Liu, Shuo Ren, Yu Wu, Tom Ko, Qing Li, Yu Zhang, Zhihua Wei, Yao Qian, Jinyu Li, and Furu Wei. SpeechT5: Unified-Modal Encoder-Decoder Pre-training for Spoken Language Processing. In: Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Dublin, 2022. (A technical report is available at arXiv.) (project)
  • Fengpeng Yue, Yan Deng, Lei He, Tom Ko, and Yu Zhang. Exploring Machine Speech Chain for Domain Adaptation. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Singapore, 2022.
  • Rui Wang, Junyi Ao, Long Zhou, Shujie Liu, Zhihua Wei, Tom Ko, Qing Li, and Yu Zhang. Multi-View Self-Attention based Transformer for Speaker Recognition. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Singapore, 2022. (A technical report is available at arXiv.)
  • Juan Zha, Zheng Li, Ying Wei, and Yu Zhang. Disentangling Task Relations for Few-shot Text Classification via Self-Supervised Hierarchical Task Clustering. In: Findings of EMNLP, Abu Dhabi, 2022.
  • Qianqian Dong, Fengpeng Yue, Tom Ko, Mingxuan Wang, Qibing Bai, and Yu Zhang. Leveraging Pseudo-labeled Data to Improve Direct Speech-to-Speech Translation. In: Proceedings of the 23rd Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), Incheon, Korea, 2022.
  • Rui Wang, Qibing Bai, Junyi Ao, Long Zhou, Zhixiang Xiong, Zhihua Wei, Yu Zhang, Tom Ko, and Haizhou Li. LightHuBERT: Lightweight and Configurable Speech Representation Learning with Once-for-All Hidden-Unit BERT. In: Proceedings of the 23rd Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), Incheon, Korea, 2022.
  • Qibing Bai, Tom Ko, and Yu Zhang. A Study of Modeling Rising Intonation in Cantonese Neural Speech Synthesis. In: Proceedings of the 23rd Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (INTERSPEECH), Incheon, Korea, 2022.
  • Zhixiong Yue, Pengxin Guo, Yu Zhang, and Christy Liang. Learning Feature Alignment Architecture for Domain Adaptation. In: Proceedings of International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), Padua, Italy, 2022. (An old version is available at arXiv.)
  • Zhixiong Yue, Baijiong Lin, Yu Zhang, and Christy Liang. Effective, Efficient and Robust Neural Architecture Search. In: Proceedings of International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), Padua, Italy, 2022. (An old version is available at arXiv.)
  • Pengxin Guo, Jinjing Zhu, and Yu Zhang. Selective Partial Domain Adaptation. In: Proceedings of the 33rd British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), London, UK, 2022.
  • Wenya Zhu, Yinghua Zhang, Yu Zhang, Yuhang Zhou, Yinfu Feng, Qing Da, Anxiang Zeng, and Yuxiang Wu. DHA: Product Title Generation with Discriminative Hierarchical Attention for E-commerce. In: Proceedings of the 26th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD), Chengdu, China, 2022.
  • Wenbo Zhang, Yunhao Gou, Yuepeng Jiang, and Yu Zhang. Adversarial VAE with Normalizing Flows for Multi-Dimensional Classification. In: Proceedings of the Fifth Chinese Conference on Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision (PRCV), Shenzhen, China, 2022.
  • Feiyang Ye, Baijiong Lin, Zhixiong Yue, Pengxin Guo, Qiao Xiao, and Yu Zhang. Multi-Objective Meta Learning. In: Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS/NIPS), 2021. (An old version is available at arXiv.)
  • Weisen Jiang, James T. Kwok, and Yu Zhang. Effective Meta-Regularization by Kernelized Proximal Regularization. In: Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS/NIPS), 2021.
  • Yi Zhang, Yu Zhang, and Wei Wang. Multi-Task Learning via Generalized Tensor Trace Norm. In: Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), pp. 2254-2262, 2021. (A technical report is available at arXiv.)
  • Qiao Xiao and Yu Zhang. Distant Transfer Learning via Deep Random Walk. In: Proceedings of the 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 10422–10429, 2021. (A technical report is available at arXiv.)
  • Pengxin Guo, Chang Deng, Linjie Xu, Xiaonan Huang, and Yu Zhang. Deep Multi-Task Augmented Feature Learning via Hierarchical Graph Neural Network. In: Proceedings of European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD), 2021. (A technical report is available at arXiv.)
  • Ziyang Wang, Yunhao Gou, Jingjing Li, Yu Zhang, and Yang Yang. Region Semantically Aligned Network for Zero-Shot Learning. In: Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2021.
  • Jianghan Bao and Yu Zhang. Time-Aware Recommender System via Continuous-Time Modeling. In: Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2021. (Short paper) (code)
  • Weisen Jiang, Yu Zhang, and James T. Kwok. SEEN: Few-Shot Classification with SElf-ENsemble. In: Proceedings of International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), 2021.
  • Ruihong Yang, Junchao Tian, and Yu Zhang. Regularized Mutual Learning for Personalized Federated Learning. In: Proceedings of the 13th Asian Conference on Machine Learning (ACML), 2021.
  • Sicong Liang, Chang Deng, and Yu Zhang. A Simple Approach to Balance Task Loss in Multi-Task Learning. In: Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData), 2021. (An old version is available at arXiv.)
  • Zheng Li, Mukul Kumar, William Headden, Bing Yin, Ying Wei, Yu Zhang, and Qiang Yang. Learn to Cross-lingual Transfer with Meta Graph Learning across Heterogeneous Languages. In: Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pp. 2290-2301, 2020.
  • Guang Shen, Riwei Lai, Rui Chen, Yu Zhang, Kejia Zhang, Qilong Han, and Hongtao Song. WISE: Word-Level Interaction-based Multimodal Fusion for Speech Emotion Recognition. In: Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (InterSpeech), pp. 369-373, Shanghai, China, 2020.
  • Shuangyin Li, Yu Zhang, Rong Pan, and Kaixiang Mo. Adaptive Probabilistic Word Embedding. In: Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW), pp. 651-661, Taipei, 2020.
  • Yinghua Zhang, Yu Zhang, Ying Wei, Kun Bai, Yangqiu Song, and Qiang Yang. Fisher Deep Domain Adaptation. In: Proceedings of SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM), pp. 469-477, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, 2020.
  • Yu Zhang and Lei Han. Learning (from) Deep Hierarchical Structure among Features. In: Proceedings of the 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 5837-5844, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, 2019. (Supplementary Material)
  • Yuan Yao, Yu Zhang, Xutao Li, and Yunming Ye. Heterogeneous Domain Adaptation via Soft Transfer Network. In: Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM), pp. 1578-1586, Nice, France, 2019. (A technical report is available at arXiv.)
  • Zheng Li, Ying Wei, Yu Zhang, Xiang Zhang, and Xin Li. Exploiting Coarse-to-Fine Task Transfer for Aspect-level Sentiment Classification. In: Proceedings of the 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 4253-4260, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, 2019. (A technical report is available at arXiv.) (data)
  • Guangneng Hu, Yu Zhang, and Qiang Yang. Transfer Meets Hybrid: A Synthetic Approach for Cross-Domain Collaborative Filtering with Text. In: Proceedings of the Web Conference (WWW), pp. 2822-2829, San Francisco, California, USA, 2019. (A technical report is available at arXiv.)
  • Zheng Li, Xin Li, Ying Wei, Lidong Bing, Yu Zhang, and Qiang Yang. Transferable End-to-End Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Selective Adversarial Learning. In: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pp. 4589-4599, Hong Kong, China, 2019. (code)
  • Yinghua Zhang, Yu Zhang, and Qiang Yang. Parameter Transfer Unit for Deep Neural Networks. In: Proceedings of the 23rd Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD), pp. 82-95, Macao, China, 2019. (A technical report is available at arXiv.) (Best Paper Award)
  • Dou Huang, Xuan Song, Zipei Fan, Renhe Jiang, Ryosuke Shibasaki, Yu Zhang, Haizhong Wang, and Yugo Kato. A Variational Autoencoder based Generative Model of Urban Human Mobility. In: Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval (MIPR), pp. 425-430, San Jose, CA, USA, 2019.
  • Yu Zhang, Ying Wei, and Qiang Yang. Learning to Multitask. In: Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS/NIPS), pp. 5776–5787, Montréal, Canada, 2018. (A technical report is available at arXiv.)
  • Ying Wei, Yu Zhang, Junzhou Huang, and Qiang Yang. Transfer Learning via Learning to Transfer. In: Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), pp. 5072-5081, Stockholm, Sweden, 2018. (A technical report is available at arXiv.)
  • Kaixiang Mo, Yu Zhang, Shuangyin Li, Jiajun Li, and Qiang Yang. Personalizing a Dialogue System with Transfer Reinforcement Learning. In: Proceedings of the 32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 5317-5324, New Orleans, Lousiana, USA, 2018. (A technical report is available at arXiv.)
  • Bo Liu, Ying Wei, Yu Zhang, Zhixian Yan, and Qiang Yang. Transferable Contextual Bandit for Cross-Domain Recommendation. In: Proceedings of the 32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 3619-3626, New Orleans, Lousiana, USA, 2018.
  • Zheng Li, Ying Wei, Yu Zhang, and Qiang Yang. Hierarchical Attention Transfer Network for Cross-domain Sentiment Classification. In: Proceedings of the 32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 5852-5859, New Orleans, Lousiana, USA, 2018. (code)
  • Guangneng Hu, Yu Zhang, and Qiang Yang. CoNet: Collaborative Cross Networks for Cross-Domain Recommendation. In: Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), pp. 667–676, Lingotto, Turin, Italy, 2018. (A technical report is available at arXiv.)
  • Yu Zhang and Yuan Jiang. Multimodal Linear Discriminant Analysis via Structural Sparsity. In: Proceedings of the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), pp. 3448-3454, Melbourne, Australia, 2017.
  • Zheng Li, Yu Zhang, Ying Wei, Yuxiang Wu, and Qiang Yang. End-to-End Adversarial Memory Network for Cross-domain Sentiment Classification. In: Proceedings of the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), pp. 2237-2243, Melbourne, Australia, 2017. (code)
  • Bo Liu, Ying Wei, Yu Zhang, and Qiang Yang. Deep Neural Networks for High Dimension, Low Sample Size Data. In: Proceedings of the 26th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), pp. 2287-2293, Melbourne, Australia, 2017.
  • Yu Zhang and Qiang Yang. Learning Sparse Task Relations in Multi-Task Learning. In: Proceedings of the 31st AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 2914-2920, San Francisco, California, USA, 2017.
  • Ben Tan, Yu Zhang, Sinno Jialin Pan, and Qiang Yang. Distant Domain Transfer Learning. In: Proceedings of the 31st AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 2604-2610, San Francisco, California, USA, 2017.
  • Shuangyin Li, Yu Zhang, Rong Pan, Mingzhi Mao, and Yang Yang. Recurrent Attentional Topic Model. In: Proceedings of the 31st AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 3223-3229, San Francisco, California, USA, 2017. (Project page)
  • Lei Han, Yu Zhang, and Tong Zhang. Fast Component Pursuit for Large-Scale Inverse Covariance Estimation. In: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), pp. 1585-1594, San Francisco, California, USA, 2016. (The first two authors contributed equally)
  • Lei Han, Yu Zhang, Xiu-Feng Wan, and Tong Zhang. Generalized Hierarchical Sparse Model for Arbitrary-Order Interactive Antigenic Sites Identification in Flu Virus Data. In: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), pp. 865-874, San Francisco, California, USA, 2016.
  • Shuangyin Li, Rong Pan, Yu Zhang, and Qiang Yang. Correlated Tag Learning in Topic Model. In: Proceedings of the 32nd Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), New York City, NY, USA, 2016.
  • Lei Han and Yu Zhang. Multi-Stage Multi-Task Learning with Reduced Rank. In: Proceedings of the 30th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 1638-1644, Phoenix, Arizona, USA, 2016. (Both authors contributed equally)
  • Lei Han and Yu Zhang. Reduction Techniques for Graph-based Convex Clustering. In: Proceedings of the 30th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 1645-1651, Phoenix, Arizona, USA, 2016. (Both authors contributed equally)
  • Yu Zhang. Parallel Multi-Task Learning. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), pp. 629-638, Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA, 2015.
  • Lei Han and Yu Zhang. Learning Tree Structure in Multi-Task Learning. In: Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), pp. 397-406, Sydney, 2015. (Both authors contributed equally) (Matlab Code)
  • Rui Chen, Qian Xiao, Yu Zhang, and Jianliang Xu. Differentially Private High-Dimensional Data Publishing via Sampling-Based Inference. In: Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), pp. 129-138, Sydney, 2015.
  • Yu Zhang. Multi-Task Learning and Algorithmic Stability. In: Proceedings of the 29th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 3181-3187, Austin Texas, USA, 2015. (Supplementary Material)
  • Lei Han and Yu Zhang. Learning Multi-Level Task Groups in Multi-Task Learning. In: Proceedings of the 29th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 2638-2644, Austin Texas, USA, 2015. (Both authors contributed equally) (Matlab Code)
  • Lei Han and Yu Zhang. Discriminative Feature Grouping. In: Proceedings of the 29th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 2631-2637, Austin Texas, USA, 2015. (Both authors contributed equally) (Matlab Code)
  • Lei Han, Yu Zhang, Guojie Song, and Kunqing Xie. Encoding Tree Sparsity in Multi-Task Learning: A Probabilistic Framework. In: Proceedings of the 28th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 1854-1860, Quebec City, Quebec, Canada, 2014.
  • Yu Zhang. Heterogeneous-Neighborhood-based Multi-Task Local Learning Algorithms. In: Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), pp. 1896-1904, Lake Tahoe, Nevada, USA, 2013.
  • Yu Zhang and Dit-Yan Yeung. Learning High-Order Task Relationships in Multi-Task Learning. In: Proceedings of the 23rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), pp. 1917-1923, Beijing, China, 2013.
  • Qing Bao, William K. Cheung, and Yu Zhang. Incorporating Structural Diversity of Neighbors in a Diffusion Model for Social Networks. In: Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI), pp. 431-438, Atlanta, USA, 2013. (Best Student Paper Award)
  • Yu Zhang and Dit-Yan Yeung. Multi-Task Boosting by Exploiting Task Relationships. In: Proceedings of European Conference on Machine Learning and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD), pp. 697-710, Bristol, UK, 2012. (Link)
  • Yu Zhang and Dit-Yan Yeung. Overlapping Community Detection via Bounded Nonnegative Matrix Tri-Factorization. In: Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), pp. 606-614, Beijing, China, 2012. (Link)
  • Yu Zhang, Dit-Yan Yeung, and Eric P. Xing. Supervised Probabilistic Robust Embedding with Sparse Noise. In: Proceedings of the 26th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 1226-1232, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2012.
  • Yu Zhang and Dit-Yan Yeung. Discriminative Experimental Design. In: Proceedings of European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD), pp. 585-596, Athens, Greece, 2011. (Link)
  • Yu Zhang and Dit-Yan Yeung. Multi-Task Learning in Heterogeneous Feature Spaces. In: Proceedings of the 25th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 574-579, San Francisco, California, USA, 2011.
  • Yu Zhang, Dit-Yan Yeung, and Qian Xu. Probabilistic Multi-Task Feature Selection. In: Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), pp. 2559-2567, Vancouver, Canada, 2010.
  • Yu Zhang and Dit-Yan Yeung. Worst-Case Linear Discriminant Analysis. In: Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), pp. 2568-2576, Vancouver, Canada, 2010.
  • Yu Zhang and Dit-Yan Yeung. A Convex Formulation for Learning Task Relationships in Multi-Task Learning. In: Proceedings of the 26th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), pp. 733-742, Catalina Island, California, 2010. (Best Paper Award) (Matlab Code)
  • Yu Zhang, Bin Cao, and Dit-Yan Yeung. Multi-Domain Collaborative Filtering. In: Proceedings of the 26th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), pp. 725-732, Catalina Island, California, 2010.
  • Yu Zhang and Dit-Yan Yeung. Transfer Metric Learning by Learning Task Relationships. In: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), pp. 1199-1208, Washington, DC, USA, 2010. (Link)
  • Yu Zhang and Dit-Yan Yeung. Multi-Task Warped Gaussian Process for Personalized Age Estimation. In: Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp. 2622-2629, San Francisco, CA, 2010. (Link) (Matlab Code)
  • Yu Zhang and Dit-Yan Yeung. Multi-Task Learning using Generalized t Process. In: Proceedings of the 13rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), pp. 964-971, Chia Laguna Resort, Sardinia, Italy, 2010.
  • Yan-Ming Zhang, Yu Zhang, Dit-Yan Yeung, Cheng-Lin Liu, and Xinwen Hou. Transductive Learning on Adaptive Graphs. In: Proceedings of the 24th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 661-666, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. 2010.
  • Bin Cao, Sinno Jialin Pan, Yu Zhang, Dit-Yan Yeung, and Qiang Yang. Adaptive Transfer Learning. In: Proceedings of the 24th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), pp. 407-412, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, 2010.
  • Yu Zhang and Dit-Yan Yeung. Semi-Supervised Multi-Task Regression. In: Proceedings of European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD), pp. 617-631, Bled, Slovenia, 2009. (Link)
  • Yu Zhang and Dit-Yan Yeung. Heteroscedastic Probabilistic Linear Discriminant Analysis with Semi-Supervised Extension. In: Proceedings of European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD), pp. 602-616, Bled, Slovenia, 2009. (Link)
  • Yu Zhang and Dit-Yan Yeung. Semi-Supervised Discriminant Analysis via CCCP. In: Proceedings of European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML PKDD), pp. 644-659, Antwerp, Belgium, 2008. (Link)
  • Yu Zhang and Dit-Yan Yeung. Semi-Supervised Discriminant Analysis using Robust Path-based Similarity. In: Proceedings of the 21st IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Anchorage, Alaska, 2008. (Link)
  • Xin Geng, Zhi-Hua Zhou, Yu Zhang, Gang Li, and Honghua Dai. Learning from Facial Aging Patterns for Automatic Age Estimation. In: Proceeding of the 14th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM), pp. 307-316, Santa Barbara, CA, 2006.
  • Ph.D. Thesis

  • Yu Zhang. A Probabilistic Framework for Learning Task Relationships in Multi-Task Learning. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, August, 2011. (pdf)
  • Preprints

  • Zhixiong Yue, Feiyang Ye, Yu Zhang, Christy Liang, and Ivor W. Tsang. Deep Safe Multi-Task Learning. arXiv:2111.10601v2, 2021.
  • Shijie Chen, Yu Zhang, and Qiang Yang. Multi-Task Learning in Natural Language Processing: An Overview. arXiv:2109.09138, 2021.
  • Pengxin Guo, Yuancheng Xu, Baijiong Lin, and Yu Zhang. Multi-Task Adversarial Attack. arXiv:2011.09824, 2020.
  • Kaixiang Mo, Yu Zhang, Qiang Yang, and Pascale Fung. Cross-domain Dialogue Policy Transfer via Simultaneous Speech-act and Slot Alignment. arXiv:1804.07691, 2018.
  • Guangneng Hu, Yu Zhang, and Qiang Yang. LCMR: Local and Centralized Memories for Collaborative Filtering with Unstructured Text. arXiv:1804.06201, 2018.
  • Kaixiang Mo, Yu Zhang, Qiang Yang, and Pascale Fung. Fine Grained Knowledge Transfer for Personalized Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems. arXiv:1711.04079, 2017.
  • Weiyan Wang, Yuxiang Wu, Yu Zhang, Zhongqi Lu, Kaixiang Mo, and Qiang Yang. Integrating User and Agent Models: A Deep Task-Oriented Dialogue System. arXiv:1711.03697, 2017.
  • Wenya Zhu, Kaixiang Mo, Yu Zhang, Zhangbin Zhu, Xuezheng Peng, and Qiang Yang. Flexible End-to-End Dialogue System for Knowledge Grounded Conversation. arXiv:1709.04264, 2017.
  • Book Chapters

  • Bin Cao, Yu Zhang, and Qiang Yang. Transfer Learning, Multi-Task Learning and Cost-Sensitive Learning. In Cost-Sensitive Machine Learning, B. Krishnapuram, S. Yu, and B. Rao (ed.), pp. 61-86, CRC Press, 2012. (Link)
  • Dit-Yan Yeung and Yu Zhang. Learning Inverse Dynamics by Gaussian Process Regression under the Multi-Task Learning Framework. In The Path to Autonomous Robots, G. S. Sukhatme(ed.), pp.131-142. Springer, 2009. (Link)
  • Workshop Papers

  • Yang Liu, Zhonglei Gu, Yu Zhang, and Yan Liu. Mining Emotional Features of Movies. In: Proceedings of the MediaEval 2016 Workshop, Hilversum, The Netherlands, 2016.
  • Yu Zhang. Age Estimation using Bayesian Process. In New Frontiers in Applied Data Mining, Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD), Shenzhen, China, 2011.
  • Papers in Chinese

  • Yu Zhang and Zhi-Hua Zhou. A New Age Estimation Method based on Ensemble Learning. ACTA AUTOMATICA SINICA, 34(8): 997-1000, 2008.
  • Yu Zhang and Zhi-Hua Zhou. Research on Facial Features that Impact Gender Classification. Journal of Jiangsu Polytechnic University, 17: 9–12, 2005. (Best Paper Award by Jiangsu Province Computer Society 2005)
  • Honors

  • Best Paper Award, National Science Review, 2020
  • Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2020, Choice Reviews
  • Best Paper Award, PAKDD Conference, 2019
  • Young National Distinguished Scholar, China, 2019
  • Distinguished Senior Program Committee Member, IJCAI Conference, 2018
  • Outstanding Reviewer, ICML Conference, 2018
  • Best Student Paper Award, WI Conference, 2013
  • Advanced Individual, Shenzhen Virtual University Park, 2013
  • SENG PhD Research Excellence Award, HKUST, 2011
  • Best Paper Award, UAI Conference, 2010
  • Overseas Research Award, HKUST, 2010-2011
  • Research Travel Award, NIPS, UAI, AISTATS, 2010
  • Champion, Postgraduate Student Research Paper Competition 2010, IEEE (Hong Kong) Computational Intelligence Chapter
  • Research Travel Award, HKUST, 2009
  • Second Runner-Up Award, Postgraduate Student Research Paper Competition 2009, IEEE (Hong Kong) Computational Intelligence Chapter
  • Postgraduate Scholarship, HKUST (2007-2011)
  • Best Paper Award, Jiangsu Province Computer Society, 2005
  • Excellent Undergraduate Scholarship, Nanjing University (2001-2004)
  • Professional Activities

    • Journal Reviewer

      Artificial Intelligence
      IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
      Journal of Machine Learning Research
      Machine Learning
      IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
      IEEE Transactions on Multimedia
      IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
      IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B
      IEEE Transactions on Big Data
      IEEE Transactions on Aritificiall Intelligence
      ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology
      Neural Computation
      National Science Review
      Statistical Analysis and Data Mining
      Pattern Recognition
      Physica A
      Knowledge and Information Systems
      Pattern Recognition Letter
      Information Sciences
      Neurocomputing
      Applied Intelligence

    • Conference (Senior) PC Member

      IJCAI (2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021)
      AAAI (2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021)
      UAI (2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021)
      NIPS/NeurIPS (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020)
      ICML (2014, 2016, 2018, 2021)
      AISTATS (2017, 2019, 2020, 2021)
      ICLR (2018, 2019, 2020, 2021)
      KDD (2015, 2016, 2017)
      ICPR (2014, 2016)
      ACML (2013, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021)
      PRICAI (2014, 2016, 2018, 2019)
      EMNLP (2019, 2020)
      NAACL-HLT (2019, 2021)
      ICDM (2015)
      SDM (2013)
      CIKM (2017)
      CVPR (2022)

    Students

  • Lei Han (Exchange Student and Postdoctoral Associate, HKBU, 2013-2015)
  • Yi Zhang (Master Student, SUSTech, 2019)
  • Sicong Liang (Master Student, SUSTech, 2019)
  • Weisen Jiang (PhD Student, SUSTech, 2020)
  • Feiyang Ye (PhD Student, SUSTech, 2020)
  • Zhixiong Yue (Transferred PhD Student, SUSTech, 2020)
  • Ruihong Yang (Transferred Master Student, SUSTech, 2020)
  • Junchao Tian (Transferred Master Student, SUSTech, 2020)
  • Pengxin Guo (Master Student, SUSTech, 2020)
  • Shujun Yang (Postdoctoral, SUSTech, 2021)
  • Yanbin Wei (PhD Student, SUSTech, 2021)
  • Shaojie Zhang (PhD Student, SUSTech, 2021)
  • Qiushi Huang (Transferred PhD Student, SUSTech, 2021)
  • Fengpeng Yue (Transferred Master Student, SUSTech, 2021)
  • Qibing Bai (Transferred Master Student, SUSTech, 2021)
  • Jiabo Zhou (Master Student, SUSTech, 2021)
  • Yunhao Gou (PhD Student, SUSTech, 2022)
  • Zhan Zhuang (PhD Student, SUSTech, 2022)
  • Xuehao Wang (Master Student, SUSTech, 2022)
  • Shuhao Chen (Master Student, SUSTech, 2022)
  • Teaching Experience

  • CS102B: Introduction to Computer Programming B, Spring 2020, SUSTech
  • CSE5001: Advanced Artificial Intelligence, Fall 2019, 2020, SUSTech
  • MSBD 5012: Machine Learning, Spring 2018, HKUST
  • COMP 4331: Data Mining, Fall 2017, HKUST
  • MSBD 6000B: Deep Learning, Fall 2017, HKUST
  • COMP 7930: Big Data Analytics, Spring 2015, HKBU
  • COMP 7390: Algorithms for Financial Information Systems, Fall 2014, HKBU
  • COMP 3045 & 3790: Advanced Algorithm Design, Analysis and Implementation, Fall 2014, HKBU
  • COMP 7070: Advanced Topics in Machine Learning, Fall 2013, HKBU
  • COMP 7340: Enterprise Architecture and Integration, Spring 2013, HKBU
  • Short Course: Classic Data Mining Algorithms, Winter 2012, HKBU