Xiaofei Zhang

Associate Professor of Computer Science · University of Memphis

Xiaofei Zhang

About

Data systems for evolving and connected worlds

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Memphis, where I direct the Data System Research (DSR) Lab. My research develops scalable data systems for dynamic, distributed, and graph-structured data, with current interests in temporal graph systems, federated data services, and reliable AI for data systems.

I received my Ph.D. from HKUST and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo, CUHK, and HKUST.

Updates

Recent news

Aug 2026
Named a Distinguished Reviewer for the VLDB 2026 conference.
Aug 2026
Our work Hawkeye: Seeing One Layer Deeper — A Cohesion-Aware Structural Channel for Temporal Link Prediction, led by Jiacheng, was accepted as a full research paper at CIKM 2026.
May 2026
Our work SAGA: Synthetic Agentic Graph Architecture for Temporal Benchmark Generation, led by Jiacheng, was accepted to the VLDB 2026 Demonstrations track. We look forward to presenting the demo.
Apr 2026
Received a Distinguished PC Award from ICDE 2026.
Jan 2026
Elected a full member of the Sigma Xi Scientific Research Honor Society.

Publications

Selected Publications

  1. CIKM 2026
    Hawkeye: Seeing One Layer Deeper — A Cohesion-Aware Structural Channel for Temporal Link Prediction
    Jiacheng Ding, Xiaofei Zhang
    To appear in the ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2026.
    To appear
  2. VLDB 2026
    SAGA: Synthetic Agentic Graph Architecture for Temporal Benchmark Generation
    Jiacheng Ding, Xiaofei Zhang
    52nd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB), Demonstration, 2026.
    paper code
  3. ICDM 2025
    ChronoConnect: Tracking Pathways Along Highly Dynamic Vertices in Temporal Graphs
    Jiacheng Ding, Cong Guo, Xiaofei Zhang
    2025 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), Demonstration, pp. 2593-2596.
    paper code
  4. ICDM 2025
    Speciated Unsupervised Skill Discovery
    Ryan Wickman, Xiaofei Zhang
    2025 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), pp. 1655-1663.
    paper code
  5. GECCO 2023
    Efficient quality-diversity optimization through diverse quality species
    Ryan Wickman, Bibek Poudel, Taylor Michael Villarreal, Xiaofei Zhang, Weizi Li
    Proceedings of the Companion Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO), pp. 699-702, 2023
    paper code
  6. ICDM 2022
    A Generic Graph Sparsification Framework using Deep Reinforcement Learning
    Ryan Wickman, Xiaofei Zhang, Weizi Li
    IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM), pp. 1221-1226, 2022
    paper code
  7. PVLDB
    Hu-Fu: Efficient and Secure Spatial Queries over Data Federation
    Yongxin Tong, Xuchen Pan, Yuxiang Zeng, Yexuan Shi, Chunbo Xue, Zimu Zhou, Xiaofei Zhang, Lei Chen, Yi Xu, Ke Xu, Weifeng Lv
    Pro. of the VLDB Endowment Vol. 15(6), pp. 1159-1172.
    paper code
  8. PVLDB
    Correlation Constraint Shortest Path over Large Multi-Relation Graphs
    Xiaofei Zhang, M. Tamer Özsu
    Proc. of the VLDB Endowment, Vol. 12(5), pp. 488-501
    paper

Please see my Google Scholar profile for the full list of publications.

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Prospective students

I welcome inquiries from students interested in graph data systems, temporal data management, distributed data services, and reliable AI for databases. Please include a brief description of your research interests and relevant preparation.

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