Short Bio

I am a full professor of computer science at the School of Computer Science and Information Engineering , at Hefei University of Technology (HFUT). From 2019 to 2023, I was a researcher at Shandong Artificial Intelligence Insitute, China.  From 2016 to 2018, I was a research fellow in the School of Computing, National University of Singapore, working with Professor Mohan Kankanhalli.  I got my Ph.D degree from  Singapore Management University (SMU) in 2016, under the supervision of Prof. Jialie Shen. I received my B.E.  and M.E. degree  from Huazhong University of Science & Technology (HUST) and Xi'an Jiaotong University (XJTU), in 2007 and 2010, respectively. I visited Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, and worked with Prof. Alexander G. Hauptmann from Aug. 2014 to July 2015. I was a research assistant in SIS, SMU from November 2009 to July 2011.

Research Interests

• Information Retrieval & Recommendation

• Social Media Analysis 

• Multimedia Systems

Recent publications (Full list) (# the students I advised when preparing the papers,  * corresponding author )

1. Tao Zhuo, Zhiyong Cheng, Hehe Fan, and Mohan Kankanhalli. Prior-Free Continual Learning with Unlabeled Data in the Wild. [arXiv ]

2. Tao Zhuo, Zhiyong Cheng, Zan Gao, Mohan Kankanhalli. Continual Learning with Strong Experience Replay. [arXiv] 

3. Fan Liu, Yaqi Liu, Zhiyong Cheng, Liqiang Nie, Mohan Kankanhalli. Understanding Before Recommendation: Semantic Aspect-Aware Review Exploitation via Large Language Models. [arXiv ]

4. Fan Liu , Shuai Zhao#, Zhiyong Cheng, Liqiang Nie, Mohan Kankanhalli. Cluster-based Graph Collaborative Filtering.  ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), accepted. [CCF A]

5. Zhiyong Cheng, Jianhua Dong#, Fan Liu, Lei Zhu, Xun Yang, Meng Wang. Disentangled Cascaded Graph Convolution Networks for Multi-Behavior Recommendation. ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems (TORS), accepted, 2024. [CODE ]

6. Zhenyang Li, Fan Liu, Yinwei Wei, Zhiyong Cheng, Liqiang Nie, Mohan Kankanhalli. Attribute-driven Disentangled Representation Learning for Multimodal Recommendation. ACM MM 2024, full paper, accepted.  [arXiv]

7. Mingshi Yan#, Fan Liu, Jing Sun, Fuming Sun, Zhiyong Cheng, Yahong Han. Behavior-Contextualized Item Preference Network for Multi-Behavior Recommendation. ACM SIGIR 2024, full paper, accepted. 

8. Haojie Li, Zhiyong Cheng, Xu Yu, Jinhuan Liu, Guanfeng Liu and Junwei Du. Behavior Pattern Mining-based Multi-Behavior Recommendation. ACM SIGIR 2024, short paper, accepted.

9. Yu Zhang#, Zhiyong Cheng*, Fan Liu, Xun Yang, Yuxin Peng. Decoupled domain-specific and domain-conditional representation learning for cross-domain recommendation. Information Processing & Management (IPM), 61 (3), 103689, 2024. [CODE ]

10. Fan Liu, Huilin Chen#, Zhiyong Cheng, Liqiang Nie, Mohan Kankanhalli. Semantic-guided feature distillation for multimodal recommendation. ACM MM 2023. Ottawa , Canada, 2023  (Full Paper, acceptance rate: 29.3%)

11. Zhiyong Cheng, Sai Han, Fan Liu, Lei Zhu, Zan Gao, Yuxin Peng. Multi-behavior Recommendation with Cascading Graph Convolution Networks. The Web Conference 2023 (WWW’23): 1181-1189, 2023. [CODE]

12. Mingshi Yan#, Zhiyong Cheng*, Chen Gao, Jing Sun, Fan Liu, Fuming Sun, Haojie Li. Cascading Residual Graph Convolutional Network for Multi-Behavior Recommendation.   ACM  TOIS,  42(1), 10:1-26, 2023. [Axiv][CODE]

13. Fan Liu, Huilin Chen#, Zhiyong Cheng,  Anan Liu, Liqiang Nie, Mohan Kankanhalli. Disentangled Multimodal Representation Learning for Recommendation. IEEE TMM, ,25: 7149-7159, 2023. [Axiv][CODE]

14. Fan Liu, Zhiyong Cheng, Huilin Chen, Yinwei Wei, Liqiang Nie and Mohan Kankanhalli. Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Data Generation for Recommendation. ACM SIGIR'22. Online, 2022.  [CCF A][Axiv][CODE]

15. Ansong Li#, Zhiyong Cheng*, Fan Liu, Zan Gao, Weili Guan, Yuxin Peng. Disentangled graph neural networks for session-based recommendation. IEEE TKDE, 35(8): 7870-7882 , 2023.  [Axiv ][CODE]

16. Yangyang Guo, Liqiang Nie, Harry Cheng, Zhiyong Cheng, Mohan Kankanhalli, Alberto Del Bimbo. On Modality Bias Recognition and Reduction. ACM TOMM, 19(3):103:1 -103: 22, 2023.  [Axiv][CODE]

17. Zhiyong Cheng,  Fan Liu, Shenghan Mei, Yangyang Guo, Lei Zhu, Liqiang Nie. Feature-level Attentive ICF for Recommendation.  ACM TOIS. 40(4): 75:1-75:24, 2022. [PDF]  [CODE]

18. Yangyang Guo#, Liqiang Nie*, Zhiyong Cheng*, Feng Ji, Ji Zhang, Alberto Del Bimbo. AdaVQA: Overcoming Language Priors with Adapted Margin Cosine Loss.IJCAI, 2021. (Full Paper, acceptance rate: 13.9%).  [CCF A][PDF][CODE]

19. Xinxiao Zhao#, Zhiyong Cheng*, Lei Zhu, Jiecai Zheng, Xueqing Li. UGRec: Modeling Directed and Undirected Relations for Recommendation. ACM SIGIR, 2021. ((Full Paper, acceptance rate: 21%). [PDF][CODE]

20. Fan Liu#, Zhiyong Cheng*, Lei Zhu, Zan Gao, Liqiang Nie*. Interest-aware Message-Passing GCN for Recommendation. The Web Conference 2021 (WWW'21), Online. (Full Paper, acceptance rate: 20.6%).[PDF][CODE]

21. Haoyu Tang#, Jihua Zhu, Meng Liu, Zan Gao, Zhiyong Cheng*. Frame-wise Cross-modal Matching for Video Moment Retrieval. IEEE TMM, 24: 1338-1349, 2022. [PDF][CODE]

22. Fan Liu#, Zhiyong Cheng*, Lei Zhu, Chenghao Liu, Liqiang Nie*. An Attribute-aware Attentive GCN Model for Attribute Missing in Recommendation. IEEE TKDE, 34(9): 4077-4088 , 2022.[PDF] [CODE ]

23. Yangyang Guo#, Zhiyong Cheng*, Jiazheng Jing, Yanpeng Lin, Liqiang Nie, Meng Wang. Enhancing Factorization Machines with Generalized Metric Learning. IEEE TKDE, 34(8): 3740-3753, 2022. [PDF][CODE]

24. Tao Zhuo, Zhiyong Cheng, Peng Zhang, Yongkang Wong, Mohan Kankanhalli. Unsupervised Online Video Object Segmentation with Motion Property Understanding.  IEEE TIP, 29: 237-249,2020 . [PDF][CODE]

25. Fan Liu#, Zhiyong Cheng*, Changchang, Yinglong Wang, Liqiang Nie*, Mohan Kankanhalli. User Diverse Preference Modeling via Multimodal Attentive Metric Learning. ACM MM, Nice, France, 2019. (Oral, acceptance rate:  26.5%) [PDF][CODE]

26. Yinwei Wei#, Zhiyong Cheng*, Xuzheng Yu, Zhou Zhao, Lei Zhu and Liqiang Nie*. Personalized Hashtag Recommendation for Micro-videos. ACM MM, Nice, France, 2019. (Full Paper, acceptance rate:  26.5%)[PDF] [CODE]

27. Tao Zhuo, Zhiyong Cheng*, Peng Zhang, Yongkang Wong, Mohan Kankanhalli. Explainable Video Action Reasoning via Prior Knowledge and State Transitions. ACM MM, Nice, France, 2019. (Oral, acceptance rate:  26.5%) [PDF] [CODE & Dataset]

28. Yangyang Guo#, Zhiyong Cheng*, Liqiang Nie*, Yibing Liu, Yinglong Wang and Mohan Kankanhalli. Quantifying and Alleviating the Language Prior Problem in Visual Question Answering. ACM SIGIR, Pairs, France, 2019.  (Full Paper, acceptance rate: 20%). [PDF][CODE]

29. Xinyu Guan#, Zhiyong Cheng*, Xiangnan He, Yongfeng Zhang, Zhibo Zhu, Qinke Peng, Tat-Seng Chua. Attentive Aspect Modeling for Review-Aware Recommendation. ACM TOIS, 37 (3),  Article 28,  2019 .  [PDF][CODE]

30. Yangyang Guo#, Zhiyong Cheng*, Liqiang Nie*, Yinglong Wang, Jun Ma, Mohan Kankanhalli. Attentive Long Short-Term Preference Modeling for Personalized Product Search. ACM TOIS, 37 (2),  Article 19,  2019.  [PDF][CODE]

31. Zhiyong Cheng, Xiaojun Chang, Lei Zhu, Rose C. Kanjirathinkal, Mohan Kankanhalli. MMALFM: Explainable Recommendation by Leveraging Reviews and Images. ACM TOIS, 37 (2), Article 16, 2019.  [PDF]

Community Service

• Journal Editorial Board / Associate Editor: IEEE TCSS, NPL, DKE, JIIS.

• Area Chair or SPC:  ACM MM 2019 (Media Interpretation track) , ACM MM Asia 2020, MM 2021, SIGIR 2023, SIGIR-AP 2023,  SIGIR 2024,  CIKM 2024

• Guest Editor: MTAP Special Issue on Binary Representation Learning for Large-scale Multimedia Applications

• Guest Editor: MTAP Special Issue on Multi-Source and Heterogeneous Multimedia Analytics

• Special Session Chair, PCM 2018

• Program Committee Member of  KDD 2025

• Program Committee Member of  WWW 2024, KDD 2024, WSDM 2024

• Program Committee Member of  WSDM 2023, ICME 2023,  ECML/PKDD 2023, ACM MM 2023, MMM 2023, ICME 2023, MM Asia 2023

• Program Committee Member of  WSDM 2022, SIGIR 2022,  KDD 2022, AAAI 2022, ACM MM 2022, MMM 2022, ICME 2022, MM Asia 2022

• Program Committee Member of  WSDM 2021, AAAI 2021, MMM 2021, SIGIR 2021,  ICME 2021,  AsiaMM 2021,  ECML/PKDD 2021

• Program Committee Member of  ACM MM 2020, SIGIR 2020, IJCAI 2020, ICME 2020,  ECML-PKDD 2020, MMM 2020

• Program Committee Member of CIKM 2019, MMM 2019, MM Asia 2019, NLPCC 2019, CCL 2019, CSMT 2019, CCIS 2019

• Program Committee Member of PCM 2018, CCL 2018, IMMM 2018

• Program Committee Member of ACM MM 2017, CCL 2017, ICIMCS 2017

• Program committee member, the ICDM 2015 workshop on Social Media Retrieval and Analysis (SoMeRA), 2015 

• Program committee member, the 21st International Conference on Multimedia Modelling (MMM) Special Session: Social Geo-Media Analytics and Retrieval, 2015 

• Invited Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) 

• Invited Reviewer for ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) 

• Invited Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS) 

• Invited Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP) 

• Invited reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM)

• Invited reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics (TCYB)

• Invited reviewer for IEEE Transactions on  Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST)

• Invited reviewer for Pattern Recognition (PR)

• Invited reviewer for Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) 

• Invited reviewer for Information Sciences

• Invited reviewer for PLOS ONE

• Invited reviewer for Journal of Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU)

• Invited reviewer for Multimedia Tools and Applications (MTAP)

• Invited reviewer for IEEE Access

• Invited reviewer for Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation (JVCI)

• External Reviewer of ACM MM 2017, ICCV 2017, ICMR 2015, WSDM 2014,  PAKDD 2014