Yankai Chen

I am now a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University, working on topics of NLP for EHR data in healthcare, funded by Prof. Yunyu Xiao. I received my Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2023, supervised by Prof. Irwin King. Prior to that, I completed my M.S. degree at The University of Hong Kong in 2018, working with Prof. Reynold Cheng, and received my B.S. degree from Nanjing University in 2016, mentored by Prof. Qizhi Liu.

My research interest is machine learning for Information Retrieval, Processing, and Generation. My recent topics include but are not limited to:

• AI for health data science, e.g., multimodal EHR data mining & predictive models, social risk & health determinant discovery.
• AI for scientific problems, e.g., molecular representation learning, protein-protein-interaction prediction.
• LLM-related problems, e.g., PEFT, zero/few-shot learning.
• Search, advertising, and recommender systems.
• Large-scale graph data mining and learning problems, e.g., community retrieval, GNNs, self-supervised graph learning .
• AI4DB problems, e.g., ANN search and optimization for vector database, motif prediction.

Recent Research Highlight

• Recent Advances of Multimodal Continual Learning: A Comprehensive Survey
  Dianzhi Yu, Xinni Zhang, Yankai Chen, Aiwei Liu, Yifei Zhang, Philip S Yu, Irwin King
  ArXiv preprint arXiv:2410.05352, 2024

• Towards Effective Top-N Hamming Search via Bipartite Graph Contrastive Hashing
  Yankai Chen, Yixiang Fang, Yifei Zhang, Chenhao Ma, Yang Hong, Irwin King
  IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 2024.

• EASE: Learning Lightweight Semantic Feature Adapters from Large Language Models for CTR Prediction
  Zexuan Qiu, Jieming Zhu, Yankai Chen, Guohao Cai, Weiwen Liu, Zhenhua Dong, Irwin King
  The 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2024.

• Effective Job-market Mobility Prediction with Attentive Heterogeneous Knowledge Learning and Synergy
  Sida Lin, Zhouyi Zhang, Yankai Chen^*, Chenhao Ma^*, Yixiang Fang, Shan Dai, Guangli Lu
  The 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2024.

• Shopping Trajectory Representation Learning with Pre-training for E-commerce Customer Understanding and Recommendation
  Yankai Chen, Quoc-Tuan Truong, Xin Shen, Jin Li, Irwin King
  The 30th SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (SIGKDD), 2024.