Xingyu Tan

Ph.D. Candidate

UNSW, Sydney | Data61, CSIRO

xingyu.tan (at) unsw.edu.au

About Me

Hi there! 👋 I am Xingyu Tan (谭星雨), currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Data and Knowledge Research Group (DKR) at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales (UNSW), and the Software Systems Research Group at Data61, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). I am fortunate to be jointly supervised by Dr. Xiaoyang Wang and Prof. Wenjie Zhang from UNSW, along with Dr. Qing Liu, Prof. Xiwei Xu, Dr. Xin Yuan, and Prof. Liming Zhu from CSIRO.

Previously, I completed both my Bachelor of Science (BSc.) in Computer Science and my Master of Philosophy (MPhil.) in Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW, under the supervision of Dr. Xiaoyang Wang and Prof. Wenjie Zhang.

Former MLE & Research Intern at TikTok (Australia), worked on MLLMs and related research.

Research Interests

Knowledge-Grounded and Structure-Aware LLM Reasoning: Incorporating graph structure, temporal knowledge, and cross-source evidence into retrieval and reasoning pipelines for faithful and interpretable language model reasoning.
Memory, Belief Update, and Continual Reasoning for Language Agents: Building adaptive memory mechanisms and reusable reasoning structures to support long-horizon, evolving, and self-improving language agents.
Long-Context, Multimodal, and Privacy-Aware Intelligent Systems: Developing efficient and trustworthy methods for reasoning over long documents, long videos, multimodal evidence, and privacy-sensitive external knowledge.

Explore Research Tree

News

📌 Current - 2026

Award
[Jun. 2026] Received the School Nomination (Top-2) for the UNSW 3 Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition.
Accepted
[May. 2026] Our paper Graph is a Natural Regularization: Revisiting Vector Quantization for Graph Representation Learning is accepted to ICML 2026 🎉
New
[Apr. 2026] Our two papers at WWW 2026 are selected for Oral Presentation. See you in Dubai! 🎤
Award
[Mar. 2026] Been awarded the 2025 UNSW University Prize — The Norman Foo Memorial Best Research Paper Prize for the best PhD research paper (1 Recipient).
Internship
[Jan. 2026] Starting the MLE & Research Intern at TikTok Australia (Sydney).
Accepted
[Jan. 2026] Our paper MemoTime: Memory-Augmented Temporal Knowledge Graph Enhanced Large Language Model Reasoning is accepted to WWW 2026 🎉
Accepted
[Jan. 2026] Our paper PRoH: Dynamic Planning and Reasoning over Knowledge Hypergraphs for Retrieval-Augmented Generation is accepted to WWW 2026 🎉

📰 More News - 2025

Award
[Nov. 2025] Awarded UNSW Industry Engagement Grant 🔬
Accepted
[Aug. 2025] Our paper HydraRAG: Structured Cross-Source Enhanced Large Language Model Reasoning is accepted to EMNLP 2025 🎉
Award
[Apr. 2025] Awarded the WWW2025 Student Travel Award ✈️
Accepted
[Jan. 2025] Our paper Paths-over-Graph: Knowledge Graph Empowered Large Language Model Reasoning is accepted to WWW 2025 🎉

📰 More News - 2024 & 2023

Progress
[May. 2024] I have obtained my MPhil degree and started my PhD journey! 🥳
Progress
[Apr. 2024] I have passed my MPhil Thesis Defence 🎉
Award
[Jan. 2024] Awarded the CSIRO’s Data61-UNSW Joint PhD Full Scholarship 📚
Accepted
[Nov. 2023] Our paper Higher-order peak decomposition is accepted to CIKM 2023 🎉
Award
[Nov. 2023] Awarded the CIRES-ADC Travel Grant 🌏
Accepted
[Jun. 2023] Our paper Maximum Fairness-Aware (k,r)-Core Identification in Large Graphs is accepted to ADC 2023 🎉

Selected Publications

SkillZip: Contract-Preserving Graph Compression for Scalable Agent Skill Libraries

Xingyu Tan, Xiaoyang Wang, Qing Liu, Xiwei Xu, Xin Yuan, Liming Zhu, Wenjie Zhang

Preprint 2026

HyperAgent: Planning and Acting over Tool-Schema Hypergraphs for Tool-Use LLM Agents

Zian Zhai, Xingyu Tan, Gaowang Zou, Xiaoyang Wang, Wenjie Zhang

Preprint 2026

PDF

Trace Only What You Need: Structure-Aware On-Demand Hypergraph Memory for Long-Document Question Answering

Xiangjun Zai, Xingyu Tan , Chen Chen, Xiaoyang Wang, Wenjie Zhang

( Corresponding author)

Preprint 2026

PDF | Website

Weaving Multi-Source Evidence for Biomedical Reasoning: The BioMedHop Benchmark and BioWeave Framework

Xingyu Tan, Shiyuan Liu, Xiaoyang Wang, Qing Liu, Xiwei Xu, Xin Yuan, Liming Zhu, Wenjie Zhang

Preprint 2026

PDF | Website

PrivGemo: Privacy-Preserving Dual-Tower Graph Retrieval for Empowering LLM Reasoning with Memory Augmentation

Xingyu Tan, Xiaoyang Wang, Qing Liu, Xiwei Xu, Xin Yuan, Liming Zhu, Wenjie Zhang

Preprint 2026

PDF | Website

Graph is a Natural Regularization: Revisiting Vector Quantization for Graph Representation Learning

Zian Zhai, Fan Li, Xingyu Tan, Xiaoyang Wang, Wenjie Zhang

ICML 2026 CORE A*

PDF | Code

MemoTime: Memory-Augmented Temporal Knowledge Graph Enhanced Large Language Model Reasoning

Xingyu Tan, Xiaoyang Wang, Qing Liu, Xiwei Xu, Xin Yuan, Liming Zhu, Wenjie Zhang

WWW 2026 (Oral) CORE A*

PDF | Code | Website

PRoH: Dynamic Planning and Reasoning over Knowledge Hypergraphs for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Xiangjun Zai, Xingyu Tan , Xiaoyang Wang, Qing Liu, Xiwei Xu, Wenjie Zhang

( Corresponding author)

WWW 2026 (Oral) CORE A*

PDF | Code | Website

HydraRAG: Structured Cross-Source Enhanced Large Language Model Reasoning

Xingyu Tan, Xiaoyang Wang, Qing Liu, Xiwei Xu, Xin Yuan, Liming Zhu, Wenjie Zhang

EMNLP 2025 CORE A*

PDF | Code | Website | Poster

Paths-over-Graph: Knowledge Graph Empowered Large Language Model Reasoning

Xingyu Tan, Xiaoyang Wang, Qing Liu, Xiwei Xu, Xin Yuan, Wenjie Zhang

WWW 2025 CORE A* Travel Grant University Prize (Best Research Paper)

PDF | Code | Website | Poster

Higher-Order Peak Decomposition

Xingyu Tan, Jingya Qian, Chen Chen, Sima Qing, Yanping Wu, Xiaoyang Wang, Wenjie Zhang

CIKM 2023 CORE A

PDF | Code | Poster

Professional Experience

Machine Learning Engineer (MLE) & Research Intern

Jan. 2026 - May 2026

TikTok

Sydney, Australia

Industry

Working on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and applied research.

COMP9315 Database Systems Implementation

2025 - Present

UNSW

Sydney, Australia

Teaching Academic Handbook

Course Admin: 2026T1, 2025T1

ZZSC9001 Foundations of Data Science

2023

UNSW

Sydney, Australia

Teaching Academic Handbook

Teaching Academic: 2023T3

COMP9311 Database Systems

2023 - Present

UNSW

Sydney, Australia

Teaching Academic Handbook

Admin: 26T1, 25T1, 24T1 | Teaching Academic: 23T3, 23T1

Awarded Annual Best Teaching Course (2024, 2025)

COMP9313 Big Data Management

2024

UNSW

Sydney, Australia

Teaching Academic Handbook

Teaching Academic: 2024T2

CSIT115 Data Management and Security

2023

UoW

Sydney, Australia

Teaching Academic Handbook

Teaching Academic: 2023S2

Academic Service

Invited Journal Reviewer

IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE).
ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD).
Information Sciences.
Knowledge-Based Systems.

Conference Service

Session Chair, ACM The Web Conference (WWW): 2026.
Volunteer, International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB): 2022.

Selected Initiatives

Honors & Awards

School Nomination (Top-2), UNSW 3 Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition (2026)
UNSW The Norman Foo Memorial Best Research Paper Prize (University Prize, 1 Recipient) (2026)
UNSW Industry Engagement Grant (2025)
WWW2025 Student Travel Award (2025)
UNSW Development and Research Training Grant (2025 & 2026)
CSIRO's Data61-UNSW Joint PhD Full Scholarship (2024-2028)
CIRES-ADC Travel Grant (2023)
UNSW Global University Award (2022)
UNSW International Academic Excellence Award (2019)

Education

Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science and Engineering

UNSW & CSIRO's Data61, Sydney

May. 2024 – Present

M.Phil. in Computer Science and Engineering

UNSW, Sydney

Sep. 2022 – Dec. 2023

B.Sc. in Computer Science with Distinction

UNSW, Sydney

Sep. 2019 – May. 2022