Biography

HUANG Qiang is currently a professor at the School of Intelligence Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen). Prior to this, he was a senior research fellow in the School of Computing, National University of Singapore (NUS), proudly working with Professor Anthony K. H. Tung. He was also a member of the NUS Artificial Intelligence Institute (NAII) and the Centre for Trusted Internet and Community (CTIC). Qiang received his B.Eng. and Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, in 2012 and 2017, respectively, under the supervision of Professor Jianlin Feng. From November 2011 to May 2012, he was a research intern at the School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham, advised by Associate Professor Shan He. 

Research Interests

• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG): Explores the integration of large-scale retrieval systems with multimodal large models to improve generation quality and efficiency, leveraging embedding, indexing, alignment, and reranking techniques to better utilize external knowledge. 

• Semantic Understanding and Embedding (SUE): Develops effective and interpretable semantic representations to support retrieval, recommendation, and generation, constructing a unified semantic space across text, images, and videos for precise alignment and transformation. 

• Time Series Generation (TSG): Centers on how generative AI can learn and simulate complex time series patterns to enhance time series generation in low-resource scenarios and improve downstream tasks such as anomaly detection, time series forecasting, and simulation.

Publications

‘*’ indicates the corresponding author.

1. Yiqun Sun, Qiang Huang*, Anthony K. H. Tung, Jun Yu. PRISM: A Framework for Producing Interpretable Political Bias Embeddings with Political-Aware Cross-Encoder. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025, Oral), Vienna, Austria, July 27-August 1, 2025. [code][arXiv]

2. Yingchaojie Feng, Yiqun Sun, Yandong Sun, Minfeng Zhu*, Qiang Huang*, Anthony K. H. Tung, Wei Chen. Don't Reinvent the Wheel: Efficient Instruction-Following Text Embedding based on Guided Space Transformation. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025, Oral), Vienna, Austria, July 27-August 1, 2025. [code][arXiv]

3. Yiqun Sun, Qiang Huang*, Yixuan Tang, Anthony K. H. Tung, Jun Yu. A General Framework for Producing Interpretable Semantic Text Embeddings. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025), Singapore Expo, Singapore, April 24-28, 2025. [code][poster][openreview][arXiv][bibtex]

4. Yiqian Zhang, Buyu Liu, Jun Bao, Qiang Huang, Min Zhang, Jun Yu. Learnability Matters: Active Learning for Video Captioning. Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024), vol. 37, pp. 37928-37954, Vancouver, Canada, December 10-15, 2024. [poster][openreview][pdf][bibtex]

5. Yihao Ang, Yifan Bao, Qiang Huang*, Anthony K. H. Tung, Zhiyong Huang. TSGAssist: An Interactive Assistant Harnessing LLMs and RAG for Time Series Generation Recommendations and Benchmarking. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (The 50th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, VLDB 2024, Demo), vol. 17, no. 12, pp. 4309-4312, Guangzhou, China, August 26-30, 2024. (Yihao and Yifan contributed equally to this work.) [pdf][bibtex]

6. Yiqun Sun, Qiang Huang*, Yanhao Wang, Anthony K. H. Tung. DiversiNews: Enriching News Consumption with Relevant Yet Diverse News Articles Retrieval. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (The 50th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, VLDB 2024, Demo), vol. 17, no. 12, pp. 4277-4280, Guangzhou, China, August 26-30, 2024. [code][poster][video][pdf][bibtex]

7. Biao Wu, Qiang Huang*, Anthony K. H. Tung. From Zero to Hero: Detecting Leaked Data through Synthetic Data Injection and Model Querying. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (The 50th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, VLDB 2024), vol. 17, no. 8, pp. 1898-1910, Guangzhou, China, August 26-30, 2024. [code][slides@vldb][full slides][poster][arXiv][pdf][bibtex]

8. Yihao Ang, Qiang Huang*, Yifan Bao, Anthony K. H. Tung, Zhiyong Huang. TSGBench: Time Series Generation Benchmark. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (The 50th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, VLDB 2024), vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 305-318, Guangzhou, China, August 26-30, 2024. [code][slides@vldb][poster][arXiv][pdf][bibtex] (VLDB 2024 Best Research Paper Award Nomination)

9. Yi Zhou, Yanhao Wang, Long Teng, Qiang Huang, Cen Chen. Approximate Kernel Density Estimation under Metric-based Local Differential Privacy. Proceedings of the 40th Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2024), article no. 200, pp. 4250-4270, Barcelona, Spain, July 15-19, 2024. [code & data][pdf][bibtex]

10. Yihao Ang, Qiang Huang*, Anthony K. H. Tung, Zhiyong Huang. EADS: An Early Anomaly Detection System for Sensor-based Multivariate Time Series. 2024 IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2024, Demo), pp. 5433-5436, Utrecht, Netherlands, May 13-16, 2024. [code][poster][bibtex]

11. Qiang Huang, Pingyi Luo, Anthony K. H. Tung. A New Sparse Data Clustering Method Based on Frequent Items. Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2023), vol. 1, issue 1, article no. 5, pp. 1-28, Seattle, WA, USA, June 18-23, 2023. (All authors contributed equally to this work.) [code][data][slides@sigmod][full slides][poster][pdf][video][bibtex]

12. Yihao Ang, Qiang Huang*, Anthony K. H. Tung, Zhiyong Huang. A Stitch in Time Saves Nine: Enabling Early Anomaly Detection with Correlation Analysis. 2023 IEEE 39th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2023), pp. 1832-1845, Anaheim, CA, USA, April 3-7, 2023. [code][slides][poster][video][bibtex]
    (Calling all industries! We're seeking collaboration for sensor time series anomaly detection. Please drop us an email if you are interested.)

13. Qiang Huang, Anthony K. H. Tung. Lightweight-Yet-Efficient: Revitalizing Ball-Tree for Point-to-Hyperplane Nearest Neighbor Search. 2023 IEEE 39th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2023), pp. 436-449, Anaheim, CA, USA, April 3-7, 2023. [code][data][slides@icde][full slides][poster][arXiv][bibtex]

14. Qiang Huang, Yanhao Wang, Anthony K. H. Tung. SAH: Shifting-Aware Asymmetric Hashing for Reverse k Maximum Inner Product Search. Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2023, Oral), vol. 37, no. 4, pp. 4312-4321, Washington, DC, USA, February 7-14, 2023. [code][data][slides][poster][arXiv][video][bibtex]

15. Yifan Lei, Qiang Huang*, Mohan Kankanhalli, Anthony K. H. Tung. DIOT: Detecting Implicit Obstacles from Trajectories. Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA 2022), pp. 232-240, Hyderabad, India (Virtual), April 11-14, 2022. [code][slides][technical report][video][bibtex]

16. Tao Zhuo, Qiang Huang, Mohan Kankanhalli. Unsupervised Abstract Reasoning for Raven's Problem Matrices. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP 2021), vol. 30, pp. 8332-8341, August 2021. [code][arXiv][bibtex]

17. Qiang Huang, Yifan Lei, Anthony K. H. Tung. Point-to-Hyperplane Nearest Neighbor Search Beyond the Unit Hypersphere. Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2021), pp. 777-789, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China (Virtual), June 20-25, 2021. [code][data][slides][video1][video2][bibtex]

18. Yifan Lei, Qiang Huang*, Mohan Kankanhalli, Anthony K. H. Tung. Locality-Sensitive Hashing Scheme based on Longest Circular Co-Substring. Proceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2020), pp. 2589-2599, Portland, OR, USA (Virtual), June 14-19, 2020. [code][data][slides][technical report][reproducibility][bibtex]

19. Yifan Lei, Qiang Huang*, Mohan Kankanhalli, Anthony K. H. Tung*. Sublinear Time Nearest Neighbor Search over Generalized Weighted Space. Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2019, Oral), pp. 3773-3781, Long Beach, CA, USA, June 9-15, 2019. [code][data][slides][poster][supplementary][bibtex]

20. Qiang Huang, Guihong Ma, Jianlin Feng, Qiong Fang, Anthony K. H. Tung. Accurate and Fast Asymmetric Locality-Sensitive Hashing Scheme for Maximum Inner Product Search. Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2018), pp. 1561-1570, London, UK, August 19-23, 2018. [code][data][poster][video][bibtex]

21. Qiang Huang*, Jianlin Feng, Qiong Fang, Wilfred Ng. Two Efficient Hashing Schemes for High-Dimensional Furthest Neighbor Search. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE 2017), vol. 29, no. 12, pp. 2772-2785, September 2017. [code][data][bibtex]

22. Qiang Huang, Jianlin Feng, Qiong Fang, Wilfred Ng, Wei Wang. Query-Aware Locality-Sensitive Hashing Scheme for lp Norm. The VLDB Journal (VLDBJ 2017), vol. 26, no. 5, pp. 683-708, June 2017. [code][data][user manual][bibtex]

23. Qiang Huang, Jianlin Feng, Qiong Fang. Reverse Query-Aware Locality-Sensitive Hashing for High-Dimensional Furthest Neighbor Search. 2017 IEEE 33rd International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2017), pp. 167-170, San Diego, CA, USA, April 19-22, 2017. [code][data][poster][bibtex]

24. Shan He, Guanbo Jia, Zexuan Zhu, Daniel Tennant, Qiang Huang, Ke Tang, Jing Liu, Mirco Musolesi, John Heath, Xin Yao. Cooperative Co-evoluationary Module Identification with Application to Cancer Disease Module Discovery. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation (TEVC 2016), vol. 20, no. 6, pp. 874-891, December 2016. [bibtex]

25. Qiang Huang, Jianlin Feng, Yikai Zhang, Qiong Fang, Wilfred Ng. Query-Aware Locality-Sensitive Hashing for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (The 42nd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, VLDB 2016), vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 1-12, New Delhi, India, September 5-9, 2016. [code][data][slides][poster][bibtex]

26. Yingying Zhou, Qiang Huang, Jianlin Feng. Distributed Data Cube Materialization on Holistic Measure. The 31st National Database Conference (NDBC 2014), Taiyuan, Shanxi, China, September 19-21, 2014. [bibtex]

27. Qiang Huang, Thomas White, Guanbo Jia, Mirco Musolesi, Nil Turan, Ke Tang, Shan He, John Heath, Xin Yao. Community Detection Using Cooperative Co-evolutionary Differential Evolution. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature-Volume Part II (PPSN 2012), pp. 235-244, Taormina, Italy, September 1-5, 2012. [code & data][bibtex]

Preprints

28. Yiqun Sun, Qiang Huang*, Anthony K. H. Tung, Jun Yu. Text Embeddings Should Capture Implicit Semantics, Not Just Surface Meaning. arXiv:2506.08354, June 2025.

29. Jitai Hao, Qiang Huang*, Hao Liu, Xinyan Xiao, Zhaochun Ren, Jun Yu*. A Token is Worth over 1,000 Tokens: Efficient Knowledge Distillation through Low-Rank Clone. arXiv:2505.12781, May 2025.

30. Yandong Sun, Qiang Huang, Ziwei Xu, Yiqun Sun, Yixuan Tang, Anthony K. H. Tung. A Single Swallow Does Not Make a Summer: Understanding Semantic Structures in Embedding Spaces. Openreview, 2025.

31. Yifan Bao, Yihao Ang, Qiang Huang, Anthony K. H. Tung, Zhiyong Huang. Towards Controllable Time Series Generation. arXiv:2403.03698, March 2024.

32. Qiang Huang, Yanhao Wang, Yiqun Sun, Anthony K. H. Tung. Diversity-Aware k-Maximum Inner Product Search Revisited. arXiv:2402.13858, February 2024.

33. Pingyi Luo, Qiang Huang, Anthony K. H. Tung. A Generic Distributed Clustering Framework for Massive Data. arXiv:2106.10515, June 2021.

Patents

34. 俞俊, 黄强, 尤晓兴, 刘晓鹏, 张驰. 一种基于多模态检索增强生成的新闻图片描述方法. CN Patent, Application No. 2025106946138, 2025. 

35. 俞俊, 张艺骞, 刘晓鹏, 刘卜瑜, 张驰, 包俊, 黄强. 一种基于视频语义结构化解析的监督数据生成方法. CN Patent, Application No. 2024112688552, 2024. 

36. Yihao Ang, Anthony K. H. Tung, Qiang Huang, Yifan Bao. TSGAssist: An Interactive Assistant Harnessing LLMs and RAG for Time Series Generation Recommendations and Benchmarking. SG Patent, Application No. 10202402169R, 2024.

37. Anthony K. H. Tung, Yihao Ang, Qiang Huang. Method And System For Abnormal Signal Detection. International Patent, Application No. PCT/SG2024/050191, 2024.

38. Anthony K. H. Tung, Yihao Ang, Qiang Huang. CAD: Anomaly Detection for Sensor-based Multivariate Time Series based on Correlation Analysis. CN Patent, Application No. 2023103270590, 2023. 

Professional Services

PC Member/Conference Reviewer

• Machine Learning

  • International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2020, 2021-2025)

  • International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2021 (Outstanding Reviewer), 2022-2025)

  • Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021-2025)

• Databases

  • The ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD 2023)

  • Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment Volume 18 (VLDB 2025)

  • IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2026)

• Data Mining

  • The ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD 2023 Research Track)

  • The ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2024, 2025)  

  • SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM 2024)

• Computer Vision

  • IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2021)

Journal Reviewer

• IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)

• IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)

• The VLDB Journal (VLDBJ)

• Chinese Journal of Computers (计算机学报)

• The Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)

• ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD)

• IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT)

• IEEE Transactions on Big Data (TBD)

• Pattern Recognition

• Machine Learning

• Information Systems

• Knowledge-Based Systems

• Multimedia Systems

• IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems

• IEEE Access

Thesis

• Qiang Huang. Approximate Similarity Search in High-Dimensional Euclidean Space. Ph.D. Thesis, Sun Yat-sen University, pp. 1-174, June 2017. 

• Qiang Huang. Community Detection in Complex Network by Evolution Computation. B.Eng. Thesis, Sun Yat-sen University, pp. 1-58, June 2012.