🙋 About Me

📚 Biography: I am a postdoctoral researcher at the CNRS LIRIS research lab (Lyon, France), supported by the ERC-Advanced Go-Y Project and working with Prof. Angela Bonifati. I received my Ph.D. in March 2026 from the School of Data Science at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, advised by Prof. Yixiang Fang. I received my M.Eng. and B.Eng. from Harbin Institute of Technology in 2022 and 2020, under the supervision of Prof. Yunming Ye. I was a visiting student at the National University of Singapore in 2025, working with Prof. Xiaokui Xiao.

📮 I am open to collaborations, invited talks, and visiting opportunities in data management, database systems, and graph-based AI infrastructure.

🔬 Research Overview

My research agenda is to build causality-aware graph data management and reliable graph data infrastructure for AI. I study how graph structure, causal signals, and scalable data systems can make AI applications more trustworthy, explainable, and efficient.

🔥 News

• [2026.08] I received the KDD 2026 Best Reviewer award!
• [2026.05] We released a comprehensive survey on Agent Skills!
• [2026.02] Two papers were accepted by SIGMOD'26!
• [2026.01] One paper was accepted by VLDB'26!
• [2025.09] One paper was accepted by VLDB'26!
• [2025.03] Our systematic benchmark and analysis of graph-based RAG is available on arXiv!

📝 Selected Publications CCF AWorkshop

• Efficient Anchored Densest Subgraph Discovery: Improved Time Complexity and Practical Performance

  Yingli Zhou, Youran Sun, Yixiang Fang.

  SIGMOD'26 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data.

• LLM-Based Test Case Generation in DBMS through Monte Carlo Tree Search

  Yujia Chen, Yingli Zhou, Fangyuan Zhang, Cuiyun Gao.

  ICSE'26 International Conference on Software Engineering, Industry Challenge Track. 🏆 Best Paper Award

• A Semantics-aware Approach for Graph Edit Distance Estimation over Knowledge Graphs

  Yingli Zhou, HuiZhong Wang, Chenhao Ma, Yixiang Fang.

  VLDB'26 Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 19(6): 1226–1239.

• ArchRAG: Attributed Community-based Hierarchical Retrieval-Augmented Generation

  Shu Wang, Yixiang Fang, Yingli Zhou, Xilin Liu, Yuchi Ma.

  AAAI'26 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. 🎤 Oral

• Lamba: A Pretrained Model for Latency Prediction over Distributed Databases

  Yingli Zhou^#, Tianjing Zeng^#, Rong Zhu, Yingze Li, Junwei Lan, Zhewei Wei, Yixiang Fang, Bolin Ding, Jingren Zhou.

  VLDBJ'26 The VLDB Journal.

• In-depth Analysis of Graph-based RAG in a Unified Framework

  Yingli Zhou, Yaodong Su, Youran Sun, Shu Wang, Taotao Wang, Runyuan He, Yongwei Zhang, Sicong Liang, Xilin Liu, Yuchi Ma, Yixiang Fang.

  VLDB'25 Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 18(13): 5623–5637. ⭐ High-Star Project

  [Paper] [Code]

• Efficient 𝑘-Clique Densest Subgraph Discovery: Towards Bridging Practice and Theory

  Yingli Zhou^#, Qingshuo Guo^#, Yixiang Fang.

  VLDB'25 Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 18(10): 3490–3503.

• Influential Community Search over Large Heterogeneous Information Networks

  Yingli Zhou, Yixiang Fang, Wensheng Luo, Yunming Ye.

  VLDB'23 Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 16(8): 2047–2059.

  [Paper] [Code]

👉 See the full publication list

💻 Open-source Projects

🔮 DIGIMON / GraphRAG: the first unified graph-based RAG prototype system for structured retrieval and reasoning over complex data. [papers]

⏳ EraRAG: the first graph-based RAG system to handle evolving documents. [arXiv]

📚 BookRAG: a hierarchical structure-aware index-based approach for retrieval-augmented generation on complex documents. [arXiv]

🌍 MicroWorld: a lightweight system for turning multi-modal event materials into structured graphs, agent populations, and inspectable social simulations. [site]

🏆 Honors and Awards

• [2026] 💎 KDD Best Reviewers
• [2026] 🏆 Best Paper Award, ICSE Industry Challenge Track (CCF-A)
• [2025] 🥇 BYD Scholarship (1 recipient in the school)
• [2024] 🎖️ Guotai Junan Scholarship for Excellence and Better China (4 recipients university-wide)
• [2024] 🌟 ByteDance Scholarship Nominee (40 nominees worldwide)
• [2023, 2025] 🍎 Best Teaching Assistant, CUHK-Shenzhen
• [2021] 🥈 Alibaba OceanBase Competition, Second Place
• [2020] 🎓 Outstanding Graduate, Harbin Institute of Technology

🎧 Beyond Research

• 🎵 I have been a big fan of Jay Chou for around 18 years. I also grew up listening to Avril Lavigne and Coldplay, and their music has been a big part of my life.
• ⚽ I love watching football, Dota2 and LOL. My favorite national teams are Portugal and France. As for clubs, I support Manchester City and used to support Real Madrid when Cristiano Ronaldo played there.
• 🏃 I enjoy running in my free time, and my current goal is to complete a marathon.