Yixiang Fang
Associate Professor
School of Data Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Longgang District, Shenzhen City, Guangdong Province, China
Coach of CUHK-Shenzhen Programming Contest Team
Email: fangyixiang at cuhk.edu.cn
[Google Scholar], [DBLP]
Yixiang Fang is an Associate Professor in the School of Data Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. Previously, he was a Research Associate in the School of Computer Science and Engineering, the University of New South Wales (UNSW), working with Prof. Xuemin Lin. He received the PhD from Department of Computer Science in the University of Hong Kong (HKU) in 2017, advised by Prof. Reynold Cheng. He was a visiting scholar at Nanyang Technological University in 2016, working with Prof. Gao Cong.
Yixiang Fang's general research interests mainly focus on the data management, data mining, and artificial intelligence over big data, particularly big graph data. He has published extensively in the areas of database and data mining, including One of the Best Papers in SIGMOD 2020 (a world flagship conference in database areas), and most of them are published in top-tier conferences (e.g., PVLDB, SIGMOD, ICDE, NeurIPS, WWW, AAAI, and IJCAI) and journals (e.g., TODS, VLDBJ, and TKDE). He was awarded the 2021 ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award and 2025 CUHK-Shenzhen Excellent Teaching Achievement Award. Currently, he is an editorial board member of the journal Information Processing & Management (IPM, IF: 6.9). He was a PC co-chair of LLM+Graph@VLDB2025 workshop. He has also served on the program committees for several top conferences (e.g., VLDB, ICDE, KDD, AAAI, and IJCAI) and as invited reviewers for top journals (e.g., TKDE and VLDBJ) in the areas of database, data mining, and artificial intelligence. He is a member of ACM, IEEE, and CCF.
Yixiang Fang's general research interests mainly focus on the data management, data mining, and artificial intelligence over big data, particularly big graph data. Currently, he is mainly working on the research topics of densest subgraph discovery, community search, path/connectivity computation, LLM + Graph (e.g., graph-based retrieval augmented generation), and so on.
Yixiang Fang's general research interests mainly focus on the data management, data mining, and artificial intelligence over big data, particularly big graph data. Currently, he is working on the following research topics:
The two most representative topics that Yixiang has studied are Community Search and Densest Subgraph Discovery, which are introduced as follows.
As a hot research topic in the network science, community search (CS) aims to efficiently find the most likely community that contains the query vertex. It has attracted great attention from both academic and industry areas, and found various real-world applications, such as friend recommendation, event organization, fraud detection, network analysis, and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) for LLMs. Yixiang has systematically studied this topic and made many contributions, including
In particular, Yixiang's works on cohesive subgraphs have been well recognized by leading IT companies. His works on community search on knowledge graphs and temporal graphs have been funded by CCF-Huawei Populus euphratica Fund and ByteDance, respectively.
Recently, Yixiang has been focusing on the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for LLMs via CS solutions, supported by Huawei Cloud. Note that since it also queries subgraphs from knowledge graphs, it can be considered as a continuation of Yixiang's prior research on CS. He has proposed a novel graph-based RAG approach (arXiv'2025) and performed an in-depth study of graph-based RAG approaches (arXiv'2025).
As one of the most fundamental problems in graph mining, DSD aims to discover the subgraph with the highest density from a given graph. This topic has garnered tremendous attention from both database and theory areas in recent years. It has found a broad spectrum of real applications, such as network community detection, graph index construction, regulatory motif discovery in DNA, fake follower detection, etc. Yixiang has continuously worked on this topic, and innovatively addressed this problem by developing a k-core-based paradigm. He has achieved a series of breakthroughs on this research topic, including
In particular, Yixiang's SIGMOD'2020 paper was selected as One of the four Best Papers in SIGMOD'2020 conference, and his paper, entitled Efficient Directed Densest Subgraph Discovery, was awarded The 2021 SIGMOD Research Highlight Award, which aims to showcase a set of research projects that exemplify core database research, address an important problem, represent a definitive milestone in solving the problem, and have the potential of significant impact.
In addition, Yixiang has also made some important contributions on the topics of connectivity/path queries, motif counting, node importance estimation, similarity/relevance computation, graph clustering, and so on.