Yingtong Dou's Homepage

Bio

I am a research scientist at Visa Research. As a member of the Foundational AI team, I am currently working on payment foundation models, deep learning for fraud detection, and various LLM applications in payment. My research interests include transaction data modeling, ML trust and safety, and graph mining.

Prior to joining Visa, I obtained my Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of Illinois Chicago in 2022, advised by Prof. Philip S. Yu. My Ph.D. dissertation is “Robust Graph Learning for Misbehavior Detection” [PDF]. Before attending UIC, I received my B.E. from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2017.

News

[01/2026] One LLM safety paper Sysformer accepted by ICLR 2026.
[01/2026] Serving as a PC member for Advances in Financial AI Workshop at ICLR 2026.
[11/2025] One transaction foundation model paper TREASURE accepted by KDD 2026.
[11/2025] TransactionGPT technical report released.
[10/2025] A foundation model paper accepted by EMNLP 2025.

[09/2025] Serving as a PC member for TheWebConf 2026.
[07/2025] Release two preprints on RAG compression and LLM guardrails.
[06/2025] Serving as reviewers for NeurIPS 2025, ICAIF 2025, and KDD 2026.
[04/2025] One paper with summer intern Kartik Sharma is accepted by TMLR.
[07/2024] Be invited to serve as a PC member for KDD'25.
[05/2024] Be invited to serve as a PC member for RecSys'24，MLF@KDD'24，NeurIPS'24.
[04/2024] Our PyGOD Package is accepted by JMLR MLOSS Track.
[03/2024] Our neural network for transactional data (TransNet) is released as defensive publication.
[02/2024] Be invited to serve as a PC member for CySoc@ICWSM'24.
[01/2024] Be invited to serve as a PC member for KDD 2024.
[07/2023] Our TheWebConf'23 paper is featured on Montreal AI Ethics Institute.
[06/2023] Be invited to serve as a PC member for GML4Rec@ICDM'23.
[06/2023] Be invited to serve as a PC member for MLF@KDD'23.
[04/2023] Be invited to serve as a PC member for NeurIPS 2023.
[02/2023] Be invited to serve as a PC member for ECML-PKDD 2023.
[02/2023] One paper is accepted by TheWebConf 2023.
[01/2023] Be invited to serve as a PC member for SIGIR 2023.
[12/2022] Join Visa Research as a full-time research scientist.
[12/2022] Be invited to serve as a PC member for KDD 2023.
[12/2022] Be invited to serve as a PC member for IJCAI 2023.
[12/2022] Our TOIS paper is the most-cited TOIS paper in 2022.
[12/2022] Give a talk about GNN-based Fraud Detection at Wells Fargo.
[10/2022] Our paper has been selected as the best paper honorable mention at CIKM 2022.
[10/2022] Be invited to serve as a PC member for TheWebConf 2023.
[10/2022] I successfully defended my Ph.D. dissertation!
[09/2022] Be invited to serve as a PC member for SDM 2023.
[09/2022] Our node outlier detection benchmark is accepted by NeurIPS 2022.
[09/2022] My blog about GNN-based anomaly detection is featured on TigerGraph Blog.
[08/2022] Our graph attack&defense survey is accepted by IEEE TKDE.
[08/2022] Give a talk about GNN-based Anomaly Detection at Novartis Data Science Seminar.
[08/2022] Give a talk about GNN-based Financial Fraud Detection at Machine Learning in Finance Workshop@KDD'22.
[08/2022] One paper is accepted by CIKM 2022.
[08/2022] Be invited to serve as a PC member for AAAI 2023.
[06/2022] Release a benchmark for node outlier detection on graphs.
[06/2022] Be invited to serve as a reviewer for LoG 2022.
[06/2022] Be invited to serve as a reviewer for NeurIPS 2022.
[05/2022] Be invited to serve as a PC member for ASONAM 2022.
[05/2022] Be invited to serve as a PC member for CIKM 2022.
[04/2022] Be invited to serve as a PC member for CySoc@ICWSM 2022.
[04/2022] Release a Python Library for Graph Outlier Detection (PyGOD).
[04/2022] Received the Papers with Code Contributor Award from Papers With Code.
[03/2022] Be invited to serve as the Video Conference Chair for TheWebConference 2022.
[03/2022] Give a talk at IIT for event and misinformation detection on Twitter [Slides PDF].
[02/2022] I will join VISA Research as a full-time staff research scientist this summer.
[12/2021] Our fraud dataset has become a benchmark on PaperWithCode.
[12/2021] Be invited to serve as a PC member for CONSTRAINT@ACL 2022.
[11/2021] Be invited to serve as a PC member for KDD 2022.
[11/2021] Be invited to serve as the Whova Chair for WSDM 2022, e-meet you in 02/2022!
[10/2021] One paper collaborated with Grab has been accepted by IEEE BigData.
[10/2021] Our Cross-lingual COVID-19 fake news dataset has been accepted by ICDMW.
[10/2021] Give a talk about GNN-based fraud detection at Datafun Summit.
[09/2021] Be invited to serve as a PC member for SDM 2022.
[08/2021] The CARE-GNN model proposed by us has been integrated with DGL.
[08/2021] Be invited to serve as a PC member for WSDM 2022.
[07/2021] Be invited to serve as a PC member for IJCAI 2022-2024.
[06/2021] Start the summer intern at Snap Research.
[05/2021] Our fake news dataset has been added to PyG and DGL as a graph classification benchmark.
[05/2021] Our GNN-based Fraud Detection toolbox DGFraud-TF2 has upgraded to TensorFlow 2.0.
[05/2021] Give two talks at F5 Security and Grab Inc. (Slides PDF).
[05/2021] Be invited to serve as a PC member for ASONAM 2021.
[05/2021] Release a GNN-based Fake News Detection Repo with two news propagation graph datasets.
[04/2021] Two papers are accepted by SIGIR 2021.
[04/2021] One paper is accepted by IEEE TKDE.
[01/2021] One paper is accepted by The Web Conference 2021.
[12/2020] I will join the CSS Team @Snap Research as a research intern in Summer 2021.
[10/2020] Be invited to serve as PC members for AAAI-21 and IJCAI-21.
[08/2020] We release an Unsupervised Graph-based Fraud Detection Toolbox.
[07/2020] One paper is accepted by CIKM 2020.
[05/2020] One paper is accepted by KDD 2020.
[05/2020] We release a Deep Graph-based Fraud Detection Toolbox.
[04/2020] One paper is accepted by SIGIR 2020.
[07/2019] One paper was accepted to ASONAM 2019.
[01/2019] Move my personal website from Wordpress to Github.
[01/2019] Give a talk about graph based spammer detection at Tencent.
[05/2018] Start summer intern at the Search and Recommendation Group of Huawei Noah's Ark Lab.
[02/2018] Publish a dataset with Chinese O2O service Wechat lucky package sharing log.
[10/2017] An article is published on IEEE Access.
[08/2017] Start my Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
[06/2017] Graduate from BUPT and QMUL with the Beijing Excellent Graduate prize.
[04/2017] Decide to join the BDSC Lab at UIC under the supervision of Prof. Philip Yu.
[03/2017] Join D-Lab in the Institute for Data Science of Tsinghua University as a research volunteer.
[09/2016] A paper is accepted by the 2nd workshop of EMGIS in 2016 ACM SIGSPATIAL.
[08/2016] Attend KDD 2016 at San Francisco.
[07/2016] Start summer intern at UIC Big Data and Social Computing Lab.
[06/2016] Attend ICDSC 2016 in Changsha, China.

Talks and Blogs

Talk Leveraging GNNs for Financial Fraud Detection: Practices and Challenges at KDD 2022, Washington DC.
Talk Mining Twitter for Social Event and Misinformation Detection at IIT, Chicago.
Blog Tackling Fake Downloads in Mobile App Markets at Medium.

Recent Work

TransactionGPT Tech Report
Yingtong Dou, Yuzhong Chen et al.
Technical Report 11/2025.
[Paper][Website]
Sysformer: Safeguarding Frozen Large Language Models with Adaptive System Prompts ICLR 2026
Kartik Sharma, Yiqiao Jin, Vineeth Mohan, Yingtong Dou et al.
[Paper]
TREASURE: A Transformer-Based Foundation Model for High-Volume Transaction Understanding KDD 2026
Chin-Chia Michael Yeh, Uday Singh Saini et al.
[Paper]
Enhancing Foundation Models in Transaction Understanding with LLM-based Sentence Embeddings EMNLP 2025
Xiran Fan, Zhimeng Jiang et al.
[Paper]
SARA: Selective and Adaptive Retrieval-augmented Generation with Context Compression Preprint
Yiqiao Jin, Kartik Sharma, Vineeth Mohan, Yingtong Dou et al.
Preprint 07/2025.
[Paper]
Personalized Layer Selection for Graph Neural Networks TMLR 2025
Kartik Sharma, Vineeth Mohan, Yingtong Dou et al.
[Paper]

Selected Publications

PyGOD: A Python Library for Graph Outlier Detection JMLR 2024
Kay Liu*, Yingtong Dou* et al.
[Paper][Code]
BOND: Benchmarking Unsupervised Outlier Node Detection on Static Attributed Graphs. NeurIPS 2022
Kay Liu*, Yingtong Dou*, Yue Zhao* et al.
[Paper][Code][Chinese Blog]
User Preference-aware Fake News Detection SIGIR 2021
Yingtong Dou, Kai Shu, Congying Xia, Philip S. Yu, Lichao Sun. (Trending New Datasets for 2021)
[Paper][Code][Slides][Video][PyG Example][DGL Example][Data][Chinese Blog]
Enhancing Graph Neural Network-based Fraud Detectors against Camouflaged Fraudsters CIKM 2020
Yingtong Dou, Zhiwei Liu, Li Sun, Yutong Deng, Hao Peng, Philip S. Yu. (Top 10 Influential Papers at CIKM'20)
[Paper][Code][Slides][DGL Example]
Robust Spammer Detection by Nash Reinforcement Learning KDD 2020
Yingtong Dou, Guixiang Ma, Philip S. Yu, Sihong Xie.
[Paper][Code][Slides][Video][Chinese Blog]