I am a postdoctoral fellow at the School of Computer Science Engineering, Southeast University, where I am part of the Institute of Cognitive Intelligence (COIN lab), where I collaborate with Professor Guilin Qi.

I am broadly interested in developing artificial intelligence, specifically focusing on integrating structured or semi-structured knowledge into foundation models like large language models to enhance their performance in question answering and other more complex tasks. I am also concerned with the continual learning capability of the foundation model, to adapt and evolve over time. This requires mechanisms to update its knowledge base in response to new knowledge, trends, and changes in the environment it operates within.

Work

• “Zhishan” Postdoc in School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, 2024.9 ~ Present
  • Collaborator: Prof. Guilin Qi

Education

• Ph.D in Software Engineering, Southeast University, 2020.9 ~ 2024.6
  • Supervisor: Prof. Guilin Qi
• M.S. in Software Engineering, Southeast University, 2017.9 ~ 2020.6
  • Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Huiying Li
• B.S. in Internet of Thing, Northeastern University, 2013.9 ~ 2017.6

Internship

• Tencent AI Lab: Hornbill Elite Talent Program, 2023.6 ~ 2023.12
  • Research LLM instruction fine-tuning methods, an instruction tuning dataset was built based on human-written document to reduce LLMs’ hallucinations.
  • Write a research paper published at the NAACL 2024 conference.
• Alibaba Cloud: Research Internship, 2020.7 ~ 2020.9
  • Research single-table text-to-SQL methods for zero-shot scenarios.
  • Write a research paper published at the AAAI 2021 conference.

Selected Publications

First Author

• [2025] K-DeCore: Facilitating Knowledge Transfer in Continual Structured Knowledge Reasoning via Knowledge Decoupling

  Yongrui Chen, Yi Huang, Yunchang Liu, Shenyu Zhang, Junhao He, Tongtong Wu, Guilin Qi, Tianxing Wu. In Thirty-seventh Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS’25)* (NeurIPS’25) [paper]

• [2025] Pandora: Leveraging Code-driven Knowledge Transfer for Unified Structured Knowledge Reasoning

  Yongrui Chen, Junhao He, Linbo Fu, Shenyu Zhang, Rihui Jin, Xinbang Dai, Jiaqi Li, Dehai Min, Nan Hu, Yuxin Zhang, Guilin Qi, Yi Huang, Tongtong Wu. Preprint (arXiv) [paper]

• [2025] OneEval: Benchmarking LLM Knowledge-intensive Reasoning over Diverse Knowledge Bases

  Yongrui Chen, Zhiqiang Liu, Jing Yu, Lin Ren, Nan Hu, Xinbang Dai, Jiajun Liu, Jiazhen Kang, Shenyu Zhang, Xinda Wang, Keyan Ding, Pengfei Shen, Haolei Zhu, Hongjie Deng, Yisong Wang, Tongtong Wu, Sheng Bi, Wen Zhang, Tianxing Wu, Qiu Ji, Haofen Wang, Wenliang Chen, Huajun Chen, Guilin Qi. Preprint (arXiv) [paper]

• [2024] DoG-Instruct: Towards Premium Instruction-Tuning Data via Text-Grounded Instruction Wrapping

  Yongrui Chen, Haiyun Jiang, Xinting Huang, Shuming Shi, Guilin Qi. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL’24) [paper][code]

• [2023] Parameterizing Context: Unleashing the Power of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning and In-Context Tuning for Continual Table Semantic Parsing

  Yongrui Chen* , Shenyu Zhang*, Guilin Qi, Xinnan Guo. In Thirty-seventh Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS’23) [paper][code] (*: Equal Contribution)

• [2023] Learn from yesterday: A semi-supervised continual learning method for supervision-limited text-to-sql task streams

  Yongrui Chen, Xinnan Guo, Tongtong Wu, Guilin Qi, Yang Li, Yang Dong. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI’23) [paper][code]

• [2023] Outlining and Filling: Hierarchical Query Graph Generation for Answering Complex Questions Over Knowledge Graphs

  Yongrui Chen, Huiying Li, Guilin Qi, Tianxing Wu, Tenggou Wang. In IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) [paper][code]

• [2021] Leveraging table content for zero-shot text-to-sql with meta-learning

  Yongrui Chen, Xinnan Guo, Chaojie Wang, Jian Qiu, Guilin Qi, Meng Wang, Huiying Li. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI’21) [paper][code]

• [2020] Formal query building with query structure prediction for complex question answering over knowledge base

  Yongrui Chen, Huiying Li, Yuncheng Hua, Guilin Qi. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI’20) [paper][code]

• [2020] DAM: Transformer-based relation detection for Question Answering over Knowledge Base

  Yongrui Chen, Huiying Li. In Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS) [paper]

• [2019] Convolutional neural network-based question answering over knowledge base with type constraint

  Yongrui Chen, Huiying Li, Zejian Xu. In Knowledge Graph and Semantic Computing. Knowledge Computing and Language Understanding: Third China Conference (CCKS’18) [paper]

Co-author

• [2025] Can LLMs Evaluate Complex Attribution in QA? Automatic Benchmarking using Knowledge Graphs Nan Hu, Jiaoyan Chen, Yike Wu, Guilin Qi, Hongru Wang, Sheng Bi, Yongrui Chen, Tongtong Wu, Jeff Z. Pan. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (ACL’25) [paper]

• [2025] Forget the Token and Pixel: Rethinking Gradient Ascent for Concept Unlearning in Multimodal Generative Models Jiaqi Li, Chuanyi Zhang, Miaozeng Du, Hui Zhang, Yongrui Chen, Qianshan Wei, Junfeng Fang, Ruipeng Wang, Sheng Bi, Guilin Qi. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’25) [paper]

• [2025] Hegta: Leveraging heterogeneous graph-enhanced large language models for few-shot complex table understanding

  JRihui Jin, Yu Li, Guilin Qi, Nan Hu, Yuan-Fang Li, Jiaoyan Chen, Jianan Wang, Yongrui Chen, Dehai Min, Sheng Bi. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI’25) [paper]

• [2024] Single Image Unlearning: Efficient Machine Unlearning in Multimodal Large Language Models

  Jiaqi Li, Qianshan Wei, Chuanyi Zhang, Guilin Qi, Miaozeng Du, Yongrui Chen, Sheng Bi. Preprint (arXiv) [paper]

• [2024] MATEval: A Multi-Agent Discussion Framework for Advancing Open-Ended Text Evaluation

  Yu Li, Shenyu Zhang, Rui Wu, Xiutian Huang, Yongrui Chen, Wenhao Xu, Guilin Qi, Dehai Min. Preprint (arXiv) [paper]

• [2024] DEE: Dual-stage Explainable Evaluation Method for Text Generation

  Shenyu Zhang, Yu Li, Rui Wu, Xiutian Huang, Yongrui Chen, Wenhao Xu, Guilin Qi. Preprint (arXiv) [paper]

• [2024] MIKE: A New Benchmark for Fine-grained Multimodal Entity Knowledge Editingn

  Jiaqi Li, Miaozeng Du, Chuanyi Zhang, Yongrui Chen, Nan Hu, Guilin Qi, Haiyun Jiang, Siyuan Cheng, Bozhong Tian. Preprint (arXiv) [paper]

• [2024] Event is more valuable than you think: Improving the Similar Legal Case Retrieval via event knowledge

  Yuxin Zhang, Songlin Zhai, Yuan Meng, Sheng Bi, Yongrui Chen, Guilin Qi. In Information Processing & Management (IPM) [paper]

• [2023] Can ChatGPT replace traditional KBQA models? An in-depth analysis of the question answering performance of the GPT LLM family

  Yiming Tan, Dehai Min, Yu Li, Wenbo Li, Nan Hu, Yongrui Chen, Guilin Qi. In International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC’23) [paper]

• [2023] Three stream based multi-level event contrastive learning for text-video event extraction

  Jiaqi Li, Chuanyi Zhang, Miaozeng Du, Dehai Min, Yongrui Chen, Guilin Qi. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP’23) [paper]

• [2023] TabPrompt: Graph-based Pre-training and Prompting for Few-shot Table Understanding

  Rihui Jin, Jianan Wang, Wei Tan, Yongrui Chen, Guilin Qi, Wang Hao. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EMNLP Findings’23) [paper]

• [2023] CLRN: A reasoning network for multi-relation question answering over Cross-lingual Knowledge Graphs

  Yiming Tan, Xinyu Zhang, Yongrui Chen, Zafar Ali, Yuncheng Hua, Guilin Qi. In Expert Systems with Applications (ESWA) [paper]

• [2023] MLPQ: A dataset for path question answering over multilingual knowledge graphs

  Yiming Tan, Yongrui Chen, Guilin Qi, Weizhuo Li, Meng Wang. In Big Data Research (BDR) [paper]

• [2023] Incorporating domain knowledge graph into multimodal movie genre classification with self-supervised attention and contrastive learning

  Jiaqi Li, Guilin Qi, Chuanyi Zhang, Yongrui Chen, Yiming Tan, Chenlong Xia, Ye Tian. In Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM’23) [paper]

• [2023] CoMave: Contrastive Pre-training with Multi-scale Masking for Attribute Value Extraction

  Xinnan Guo, Wentao Deng, Yongrui Chen, Yang Li, Mengdi Zhou, Guilin Qi, Tianxing Wu, Dong Yang, Liubin Wang, Yong Pan. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL Findings’23) [paper]

• [2023] Improving Few-Shot Text-to-SQL with Meta Self-Training via Column Specificity

  Xinnan Guo, Yongrui Chen, Guilin Qi, Tianxing Wu, Hao Xu. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI’22) [paper]

Peer Review

• Program Committee of the AAAI 2025
• Reviewer of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
• Reviewer of Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data
• PC Member of the International Workshop on Data Management Opportunities in Unifying Large Language Models+Knowledge Graphs (VLDB’24 Workshop 2024)
• PC Member of China Conference on Knowledge Graph and Semantic Computing and International Joint Conference on Knowledge Graphs (CCKS-IJCKG 2024)
• Subreviewer of the Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2022)
• Subreviewer of the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2022)
• Subreviewer of European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 2022)

Talks

• 【Tutorial】 Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for Question Answering: Recent Advances and Opportunities, EDBT 2024 [slides]
• 【Invited Presentation】Collaborative Solutions for Complex Task Reasoning Using Large Models and Knowledge Graphs, Huawei Autonomous Driving Network Technical Forum 2024 [slides]
• 【Tutorial】 Collaborative Enhancement of Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models, CCKS-IJCKG 2024 [slides]
• 【Invited Presentation】Speaker of OpenKG Seminar in May 2023 [slides]
• 【Invited Presentation】Speaker of the NLP Frontier Forum at the 5th Jiangsu Artificial Intelligence Conference in 2022 [slides]

Honors & Awards

• 2025 National Natural Science Foundation of China Youth Science Research Project
• 2025 Jiangsu Outstanding Postdoctoral Fellowship Program
• 2024 Huawei Spark Award
• 2023 Zhangjiang High-Tech Scholarship
• 2022 Tencent Scholarship
• 2022 Southeast University Outstanding PhD Award
• 2021 CEC Great Wisdom Scholarship
• 2020 Nanjing Artificial Intelligence “Xingzhi Plan” Scholarship
• 2020 Southeast University PhD Freshman Scholarship

Competitions

• Silver Medal at the 2017 ACM-ICPC Asia Qingdao Regional Contest
• Silver Medal at the 2017 CCPC Qinhuangdao Regional Contest
• Brozen Medal at the 2017 ACM-ICPC East-China Final Contest
• Brozen Medal at the 2016 ACM-ICPC Asia Dalian Regional Contest
• Champion at the 2017 HUAWEI Cup Southeast University Programming Contest