I am Tang Xiaoli, a fourth-year Ph.D. student at the College of Computing and Data Science (CCDS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU). My Ph.D. supervisor is Prof. Yu Han, and my Master’s supervisor is Prof. Song Hengjie from School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology.

Research Interests

• Federated Learning: auction-based federated leanring, personalised federated leanring

Education

• 2021 – Present: Ph.D., College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

  Supervisor: Prof. Yu Han ⭐ GPA: 4.25/5

• 2017 – 2020: M.Sc., School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China

  Supervisor: Prof. Song Hengjie ⭐ GPA: 3.83/4 (2/30)

• 2013 – 2017: B.Sc., School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China

  ⭐ GPA: 3.86/4 (1/253)

Awards & Honors

• 2024: Innovative Application of AI Award, IAAI 2024-“HiFi-Gas: Hierarchical Federated Learning Incentive Mechanism Enhanced Gas Usage Estimation”
• 2024: Innovative Application of AI Award, IAAI 2024-“IBCA: An Intelligent Platform for Social Insurance Benefit Qualification Status Assessment”
• 2023: Best Poster Runner-Up Award, Singapore ACM SIGKDD Symposium 2023 -“Competitive-Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Auction-based Federated Learning”, IJCAI’23
• 2019, 2018: Graduate Scholarship, South China University of Technology (SCUT) for Academic Year 2018-2019/2017-2018
• 2019, 2018: Outstanding Student, SCUT for Academic Year 2018-2019/2017-2018
• 2016, 2015: Outstanding Student, SCUT for Academic Year 2015-2016/2014-2015
• 2016-2014: Chinese National Scholarship for Academic Year 2015-2016/2014-2015/2013-2014
• 2015: 2nd Prize at the 10th IBM Host Technology Application National Campus Final Contest

Publications

Conference (* indicates equal contribution)

1. Multi-Session Budget Optimization for Forward Auction-based Federated Learning

   Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML’25)

   Xiaoli Tang, Han Yu, Zengxiang Li & Xiaoxiao Li

2. Reputation-aware Revenue Allocation for Auction-based Federated Learning

   Proceedings of the 39th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25)

   Xiaoli Tang & Han Yu

3. Intelligent Agents for Auction-based Federated Learning: A Survey

   Proceedings of the 33rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI’24)

   Xiaoli Tang, Han Yu, Xiaoxiao Li & Sarit Kraus

4. A Bias-Free Revenue-Maximizing Bidding Strategy for Data Consumers in Auction-based Federated Learning

   Proceedings of the 33rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI’24)

   Xiaoli Tang, Han Yu, Zengxiang Li & Xiaoxiao Li

5. Dual Calibration-based Personalised Federated Learning

   Proceedings of the 33rd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI’24)

   Xiaoli Tang, Han Yu, Run Tang, Chao Ren, Anran Li & Xiaoxiao Li

6. Stakeholder-oriented Decision Support for Auction-based Federated Learning

   Proceedings of the 39th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-25)

   Xiaoli Tang

7. HiFi-Gas: Hierarchical Federated Learning Incentive Mechanism Enhanced Gas Usage Estimation

   Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-24)

   Hao Sun, Xiaoli Tang*, Chengyi Yang, Zhenpeng Yu, Xiuli Wang, Qijie Ding, Zengxiang Li & Han Yu

8. Agent-oriented Joint Decision Support for Data Owners in Auction-based Federated Learning

   Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME’24)

   Xiaoli Tang, Han Yu & Xiaoxiao Li

9. Multi-Session Multi-Objective Budget Optimization for Auction-Based Federated Learning

   Proceedings of the 2024 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN’24)

   Xiaoli Tang & Han Yu

10. Competitive-cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning for auction-based federated learning

    Proceedings of the 32nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI’23)

    Xiaoli Tang & Han Yu

11. Utility-maximizing bidding strategy for data consumers in auction-based federated learning

    Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME’23)

    Xiaoli Tang & Han Yu

12. AKUPM: Attention-enhanced knowledge-aware user preference model for recommendation

    Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD’19)

    Xiaoli Tang, Tengyun Wang, Haizhi Yang & Hengjie Song

13. RLCP: A Reinforcement Learning-based Copyright Protection Method for Text-to-Image Diffusion Model recommendation

    Proceedings of the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME’25)

    Zhuan Shi, Jing Yan, Xiaoli Tang, Lingjuan Lyu & Boi Faltings

14. FedCal: Achieving Local and Global Calibration in Federated Learning via Aggregated Parameterized Scaler

    Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML’24)

    Hongyi Peng, Han Yu, Xiaoli Tang & Xiaoxiao Li

15. Free-Rider and Conflict Aware Collaboration Formation for Cross-Silo Federated Learning

    Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS’24)

    Mengmeng Chen, Xiaohu Wu, Xiaoli Tang, Tiantian He, Yew-Soon Ong, Qiqi Liu, Qicheng Lao & Han Yu

16. FedRMS: Privacy-Preserving Federated Knowledge Graph Embedding through Randomization

    Proceedings of the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME’24)

    Qianyu Li, Xiaoli Tang, Siyao Zhou, Han Yu, Hengjie Song, Lizhen Cui & Xiaoxiao Li

17. Modeling Time Decay Effect in Temporal Knowledge Graphs via Multivariate Hawkes Process

    Proceedings of the 2024 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN’24)

    Qianyu Li, Jiebin Chen, Xiaoli Tang, Han Yu & Hengjie Song

18. IBCA: An Intelligent Platform for Social Insurance Benefit Qualification Status Assessment

    Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-24)

    Yuliang Shi, Lin Cheng, Cheng Jiang, Hui Zhang, Guifeng Li, Xiaoli Tang, Han Yu, Zhiqi Shen & Cyril Leung

19. Multi-task learning for bias-free joint ctr prediction and market price modeling in online advertising

    Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM’21)

    Haizhi Yang, Tengyun Wang, Xiaoli Tang, Qianyu Li, Yueyue Shi, Siyu Jiang, Han Yu & Hengjie Song

Journal

1. Towards Trustworthy AI-Empowered Real-Time Bidding for Online Advertisement Auctioning

   ACM Computing Surveys 2025 (IF: 23.8)

   Xiaoli Tang & Han Yu

2. A Cost-Aware Utility-Maximizing Bidding Strategy for Auction-based Federated Learning

   IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems 2024 (IF: 10.2)

   Xiaoli Tang & Han Yu

3. Fairness-Aware Reverse Auction-based Federated Learning

   IEEE Internet of Things Journal 2024 (IF: 10.6)

   Xiaoli Tang & Han Yu

4. Efficient Large-Scale Personalizable Bidding for Multi-Agent Auction-based Federated Learning

   IEEE Internet of Things Journal 2024 (IF: 10.6)

   Xiaoli Tang & Han Yu

5. Ten Challenging Problems in Federated Foundation Models

   IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 2025 (IF: 8.9)

   Tao Fan, Hanlin Gu, Xuemei Cao, Chee Seng Chan, Qian Chen, Yiqiang Chen, Yihui Feng, Yang Gu, Jiaxiang Geng, Bing Luo, Shuoling Liu, Win Kent Ong, Chao Ren, Jiaqi Shao, Chuan Sun, Xiaoli Tang, Hong Xi Tae, Yongxin Tong, Shuyue Wei, Fan Wu, Wei Xi, Mingcong Xu, He Yang, Xin Yang, Jiangpeng Yan, Hao Yu, Han Yu, Teng Zhang, Yifei Zhang, Xiaojin Zhang, Zhenzhe Zheng, Lixin Fan & Qiang Yang

6. Advances and Open Challenges in Federated Foundation Models

   IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials 2025 (IF: 34.4)

   Chao Ren, Han Yu, Hongyi Peng, Xiaoli Tang, Bo Zhao, Liping Yi, Alysa Ziying Tan, Yulan Gao, Anran Li, Xiaoxiao Li, Zengxiang Li & Qiang Yang

7. MuLAN: Multi-level attention-enhanced matching network for few-shot knowledge graph completion

   Neural Networks 2024 (IF: 7.8)

   Qianyu Li, Bozheng Feng, Xiaoli Tang, Han Yu & Hengjie Song

8. Capsule neural tensor networks with multi-aspect information for Few-shot Knowledge Graph Completion

   Neural Networks 2023 (IF: 7.8)

   Qianyu Li, Jiale Yao, Xiaoli Tang, Han Yu, Siyu Jiang, Haizhi Yang & Hengjie Song

9. Kaplan–Meier Markov network: Learning the distribution of market price by censored data in online advertising

   Knowledge-Based Systems 2022 (IF: 8.8)

   Tengyun Wang, Haizhi Yang, Siyu Jiang, Yueyue Shi, Qianyu Li, Xiaoli Tang, Han Yu & Hengjie Song

10. Dynamically optimizing display advertising profits under diverse budget settings

    IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering 2021 (IF: 8.9)

    Haizhi Yang, Tengyun Wang, Xiaoli Tang, Han Yu, Fei Liu & Hengjie Song

Experience

Teaching Assistant Experience

• 2018-2019 S1: School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology

  Distributed Intelligent Software, 123 Masters

• 2018-2019 S2: School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology

  Artificial intelligence, 131 Undergraduates

• 2019-2020 S1: School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology

  Distributed Intelligent Software, 124 Masters

• 2019-2020 S2: School of Software Engineering, South China University of Technology

  Artificial intelligence, 127 Undergraduates

• 2022-2023 S1: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University

  Algorithm Design & Analysis, 100 Undergraduates

• 2022-2023 S2: School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University

  Introduction to Databases, 78 Undergraduates

• 2024-Present: College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University

  Undergraduate Final Year Project

Services

Conference Reviewers

• Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025
• International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025
• International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2025
• Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligences, 2025
• International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2025
• IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME), 2025
• International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024
• International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2024
• Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2024
• IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME), 2024
• International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2024
• International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2023
• Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2023
• International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), 2023
• IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME), 2023

Journal Reviewers

• IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), 2022-Present
• IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (TAI), 2024-Present
• IEEE Transactions on Big Data (TBD), 2022-Present
• IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, 2025-Present

Worshop Co-Chairs

• Local Arrangement Co-Chairs, International Workshop on Federated Foundation Models for the Web 2024 (FL@FM-TheWebConf’24)