Yu Wang is an incoming Assistant Professor in the School of Computing and Institute of AI at the University of Georgia, starting August 1, 2026. He directs the Knowledge Intelligence for Discovery and Decision-Making lab, which conducts research in machine learning, Agentic AI (LLMs), and Graph-structured Data. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University. His overarching research vision is to harmonize structural and neural knowledge via developing structure-rigorized neural processing and neural-guided structure abstraction to build effective and trustworthy ML solutions for infrastructure and scientific applications.

📢📢📢 Recruiting Ph.D. students and interns! I am actively seeking highly motivated Ph.D. students for Spring 2027 and Fall 2027, as well as research interns, master’s students, undergraduate students, and visiting students/scholars. Please feel free to email me your CV, transcripts, and brief descriptions about why you want to work with me if you are interested!

UGA is a leading public research university, ranked #19 among U.S. public universities (U.S. News 2026), #10 (Niche 2026), #18 (Forbes 2026), and #12 Best Value Public School (The Princeton Review 2025).

Research Interests:

Direction:

• Data Mining and Machine Learning
• Neural-Symbolic Learning
• Agentic AI for Structured Reasoning and Decision-making
• Structured Intelligence for Trustworthy Agentic AI

Application:

• Infrastructure System
• Drug Discovery
• Document Intelligence

Email: yw20254@uga.edu. Find me on Github, Twitter, Linkedin, and Google Scholar

News

🐴 2026

• [06] SURGeLLM-ACL Workshop: SURGeLLM: Structured Understanding, Retrieval, and Generation in LLM Era at ACL 2026.
• [05] 📚 Zhisheng's first paper on Privacy Preserving on RAG accepted at KDD'26 Benchmark&Dataset Track (Oral)!
• [05] 📚 Our paper on RAG vs. GraphRAG: A Systematic Evaluation and Key Insights accepted at KDD'26 Benchmark&Dataset Track!
• [05] 🎤 Invited to talk at Trillion Parameter Consortium (TPC) AI for Science Seminar Series!
• [05] Invited to serve as NSF Panel!
• [04] 💰 Our NSF-NAIRR Pilot project on "Multi-Modal Agentic Social Network Modeling and Optimization" has been selected!
• [04] 📚 Paper on ReviewGrounder: Improving Review Substantiveness with Rubric-Guided, Tool-Integrated Agents accepted at ACL'26 main track!
• [03] 🎤 Invited talk at Temple University!
• [03] 🎤 Invited talk at University of Georgia (UGA)!
• [03] 📚 Our collaborative project 'Fast-Food Brand Marketing and User Engagement on Instagram' has been accepted by the Meta Content Library!
• [02] 🎤 Invited to Attend NSF NAIRR Pilot Meeting, see you in DC!
• [02] 📚 Zhisheng's first Paper on Benchmarking Knowledge-Extraction Attack and Defense on RAG is online
• [01] 📚 Large Language Models for Conversational User Simulation accepted at EACL 2026.
• [01] 📚 Paper on RL Exploration on Graphs accepted at WWW'26!

🐍 2025

• [12] 📚 Yongjia's Paper on Rule Mining and Learning for Structured Knowledge Retrieval accepted at WSDM'26!
• [11] 📚 Utkarsh's first Paper on Knowledge Homophily in Large Language Models accepted at WSDM'26!
• [11] 📚 Paper on SaVe-TAG: Semantic-aware Vicinal Risk Minimization for Long-Tailed Text-Attributed Graphs accepted at KDD'26!
• [11] 📚 Riya's First Paper on Building Transparency in Deep Learning-Powered Network Traffic Classification: A Traffic-Explainer Framework accepted at KDD'26!
• [11] 🎤 Yu Invited Talk at AI Seminar at Oregon State University on "Rigorizing Neural Thinking with Structural Intelligence"!
• [10] 📚 Our Group Tutorial on Democratizing RAG with Structured Knowledge Intelligence accepted at WSDM'26!
• [09] 📚 Riya's Workshop Paper on Contrastive Learning approach to Submarine Network Cartography accepted at IMC Student Workshop'25!
• [09] 📚 Workshop SURGeLLM: Structured Understanding, Retrieval, and Generation in LLMs Era accepted at ACL'26!
• [08] 📚 Paper on Knowledge Filtering and Integration for GraphRAG accepted at EMNLP'25!
• [08] 💰 Our NSF-NAIRR Pilot project on developing Foundational GraphRAG has been selected!
• [08] 📚 Riya's Paper on SSL for Unveiling Submarine Cable Paths has been accepted at IMC 2025 Student Workshop!
• [08] 🎉 Received KDD Outstanding Dissertation Award Honorable Mention!
• [07] 💰 Received NSF IIS-III Core Program Award as lead PI. This project aims to well-round GraphRAG for society, security, and science!
• [07] 📚 Paper on Agentic Learning beyond Pre-defined Action Space accepted at COLM'25!
• [06] 📚 Paper on Edge Splitting for Temporal Graph has been accepted at TNSE!
• [06] 📚 Survey on Personalization of LLMs has been accepted at TMLR!
• [05] 🎉 My first Ph.D. student Yongjia's first work Mixture of Structural-and-Textual Retrieval accepted at ACL'25 Findings!
• [05] 🎤 Invited to attend CCC Computing Futures Symposium!
• [05] 📚 Survey on GUI Agents accepted at ACL'25 Findings!
• [05] 📚 Survey on LLM Active Learning accepted at ACL'25 main!
• [05] 📚 Paper on Tie Strength Benchmark accepted at KDD'25!
• [04] 🎉 My first student, Yongjia, awarded the SDM Doctorum Forum Poster Session Honorable Mention Award!
• [03] 🎉 My student Yongjia Lei, will begin her summer internship at Adobe Research!
• [03] 📚 Paper on Graph Reasoning-Structured Question Answering accepted at NAACL SRM'25!
• [03] 📚 Paper Trustworthy ML-powered Networking System accepted at SDM-AI4TS'25!
• [02] 📚 Workshop GML-GenAI@KDD25 accepted at KDD'25!
• [02] 🎉 My co-advised student Riya selected for the 2025 Pulse Research Fellowship!
• [01] 📚 Paper on LLM for Graph Generation accepted at NAACL'25 Findings!
• [01] 📚 Paper on Large Graph Generative Models accepted at ICLR'25!

🐲 2024

• [12] 🎉 Receive outstanding reviewer award at ECML-PKDD'24!
• [12] 📚 Paper on Reliable RAG for KG accepted at AAAI'25!
• [11] 📚 Tutorial on GraphRAG accepted at SDM'25!
• [10] 📚 Paper Imbalance Edge Classification accepted at WSDM'24!
• [09] 📚 Paper Drug Discovery Benchmark accepted at NeurIPS'24!
• [09] 🦆 Faculty Career Start at UO, Go Duck!
• [08] 📚 Survey Trustworthy GNN: Attacks/Preservation/Applications accepted at IEEE-TKDE!
• [07] 📚 Paper Topology-RAG accepted at CIKM'24!
• [07] 📚 Tutorial Data-quality-aware Graph Machine Learning accepted at CIKM'24!
• [05] 📚 The Home Depot Internship Paper KG-RAG for Session Recommendation selected as Spotlight at WWW'24!
• [04] 📚 Survey Recommendation diversity and fairness accepted at TIST!
• [04] 🎉 Received the Best Doctoral Forum Poster Runner-up at SDM'24!
• [02] 🎉 Received 2023-2024 Vanderbilt Outstanding Doctoral Student Award!
• [02] 🎉 Survey Fairness-aware GNN accepted at TKDD'24!
• [02] 📚 The Home Depot Internship Paper KG-RAG for Session Recommendation accepted at WWW'24 Industrial Track!
• [01] 📚 Paper Multi-Embeddings for Fair Recommendation accepted at WWW'24!
• [01] 📚 Paper Topological Perspective on GNNs' Link Prediction accepted at ICLR'24!

🐰 2023

• [12] 🎉 Adobe Internship Paper KG-RAG for LLMs Received Best Paper Award at GLFrontiers Workshop in Neurips'23!
• [12] 📚 Paper KG-RAG for LLMs accepted at AAAI'24!
• [12] 📚 Paper Fair Dating Recommendation accepted at AAAI'24!
• [11] 📚 Tutorial Data-quality-aware Graph Machine Learning accepted at SDM'24!
• [05] 🎉 Received 2023 Graduate Leadership Anchor Awards Research Branch!
• [04] 📚 Paper Expert Knowledge for Drug Discovery accepted at JCIM!
• [01] 🎉 Thrilled to receive the American Bureau of Shipping Scholarship Award!
• [01] 📚 Paper Collaboration-aware GNNs accepted at WWW’23!

🐯 2022

• [12] 📚 Paper Bayesian Reconstruction of Infrastructure Networks available now!
• [12] 📚 Paper Degree-related Bias in Link Prediction accepted at ICDMW 22!
• [11] 📚 Abstract Topological-enhanced GNNs for Recommender Systems accepted at LOG'22!
• [11] 📚 Paper Fair Explanation accepted at AAAI'23
• [11] 📚 Paper Molecular Graph Kernal Representation accepted at AAAI'23!
• [08] 📚 Paper Imbalanced Graph Classification accepted by CIKM'22!
• [05] 📚 Paper Sensitive Leakage in GNNs accepted at KDD’22!
• [05] 📚 Paper Structural Explanation of Bias in GNNs accepted at KDD'22
• [05] 📚 Paper ChemicalX accepted at KDD'22 with open-source library
• [04] 🎉 Won Vanderbilt’s C.F.Chen Best Paper Award!
• [02] 📚 Paper Imbalanced and Biased Graph Learning accepted at WSDM'22!
• [01] 📚 Book chapter SSL for GNNs available in Graph Neural Networks: Foundations, Frontiers, and Applications.

Before 🐮-2021

• [11] 📚 Paper Infrastructure Network Simulation accepted to IEEE System Journal!
• [08] 📚 Paper Tree Decomposed Graph Neural Network accepted by CIKM 2021!
• [08] 🎉 Work A Data-Integration Analysis on Road Emissions and Traffic Patterns won the Smoky Mountain Data Challenge!