I am Jing Zhu, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, with Danai Koutra.

Before that, I obtained my B.S.E. from both the University of Michigan and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and I worked with Andrew Owens.

My current research focuses on (1) knowledge distillation from black-box LLMs, (2) Adapting LLMs on various recommendation tasks, (3) Any-to-any modality LLMs

• CV

News

• [2023/10] "Pitfalls in Link Prediction with Graph Neural Networks: Understanding the Impact of Target-link Inclusion & Better Practices is accepted at WSDM'24!
• [2022/09] "Touch and Go: Learning from Human-Collected Vision and Touch is accepted at NeurIPS'22!
• [2022/08] "CAPER: Coarsen, Align, Project, Refine - A General Multilevel Framework for Network Alignment is accepted at CIKM'22!
• [2021/08] "NegatER: Unsupervised Discovery of Negatives in Commonsense Knowledge Bases is accepted at EMNLP'21!
• [2020/12] "Node Proximity Is All You Need: A Unified Framework for Proximity-Preserving and Structural Node and Graph Embedding." is accepted at SDM'21!

Book Chapter

Fact Summarization for Personalized Knowledge Graphs

Danai Koutra, Davide Mottin, Jing Zhu

Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKGS): Methodology, Tools and Applications

Publications

[6] TouchUp-G: Improving Feature Representation through Graph-Centric Finetuning. [link] [code]

Jing Zhu, Xiang Song, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Danai Koutra, Christos Faloutsos

ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2024)

We present TouchUp-G; a simple Touch-Up enhancement technique to improve Graphs’ node features obtained from Pretrained Models(PMs) via graph-centric pretraining. TouchUp-G is especially helpful for recommendation tasks with various types of natural features.

[5] Pitfalls in Link Prediction with Graph Neural Networks: Understanding the Impact of Target-link Inclusion & Better Practices.[link] [code]

Jing Zhu*, Yuhang Zhou*, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Shengyi Qian, Wei Ai, Xiang Song, Danai Koutra

The 17th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM 24)

We propose SpotTarget: the first theoretical and empirical framework that analyzes on the effect of including target edges as message passing edges at training and test time. We merged this as a plug-and-play module in the DGL library.

Best paper award at MLoG [Slides]

[4] Touch and Go: Learning from Human-Collected Vision and Touch. [link] [code]

Fengyu Yang, Chenyang Ma, Jiacheng Zhang, Jing Zhu, Wenzhen Yuan, Andrew Owens

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 22 Dataset and Benchmark)

We propose Touch and Go: a multimodal visuo-tactile learning dataset which tries to associate sight with touch to understand material properties

[3] CAPER: Coarsen, Align, Project, Refine - A General Multilevel Framework for Network Alignment. [link] [code]

Jing Zhu, Danai Koutra, Mark Heimann

International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 22)

We propose CAPER, a multilevel alignment framework that improves upon existing alignment algorithms by enforcing alignment consistency across multiple graph resolutions.

Also at MLG KDD

[2] NegatER: Unsupervised Discovery of Negatives in Commonsense Knowledge Bases. [link] [code]

Tara Safavi, Jing Zhu, Danai Koutra

The 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 21)

We propose NegatER, the first Unsupervised framework that ranks potential negatives in commonsense KBs using a contextual language model (LM).

[1] Node Proximity Is All You Need: A Unified Framework for Proximity-Preserving and Structural Node and Graph Embedding. [link] [code]

Jing Zhu*, Xingyu Lu*, Mark Heimann, Danai Koutra

SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM 21)

We present the first unified framework of node embedding (PhUSION) that includes both proximity-preserving and structural embeddings.

Selected Awards

• Two Sigma Fellowship Finalist
• CIKM Travel Award, SIGIR. Oct. 2022
• KDD Travel Award, SIGKDD. Aug. 2022
• CSE fellowship, University of Michigan. 2021-2022
• Rackham Travel Grant, University of Michigan. Nov. 2021.
• SDM Travel Award, SIAM. Apr. 2021.
• James B. Angell Scholar, University of Michigan. Mar. 2021.
• Jackson and Muriel Lum Scholarship, University of Michigan. 2019-2021
• Excellent Undergraduate Scholarship, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Nov. 2018, Nov. 2019.

Teaching

• EECS476 Data Mining, University of Michigan. 2021 Winter.
• EECS496 Major Design Experience-Professionalism, University of Michigan. 2020 Fall.
• VV285 Honors Mathematics III, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. 2019 Summer.
• VV186 Honors Mathematics II, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. 2018 Fall.

Mentoring

• Zhongmou He

Academic Service

• Review: TKDD, NeurIPS, AAAI, KDD, ECML-PKDD, SDM, LoG, NeurIPS New Frontiers in Graph Learning
• Organizer: LoG Meetup 2023

Misc

• I would love to help minority students in CS research. Feel free to reach out if you need anything.
• My research journey starts during high school with my great advisor SHI Guochao. We investigate the effect of Cactus Optunia on Bronchitis and won multiple innovation awards including Honorable Mention in Shing-Tung Yau High School Science Award.