I graduated from the Automation major at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) in 2018 for my undergraduate degree, and in 2021 I obtained my Master’s degree in Computer Science from the same university. I am currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree under the supervision of Prof. Yanru Zhang with the School of Computer Science and Engineering, UESTC. My research interests include machine learning, federated learning, large language model and smart grid. I have published papers in top conferences such as ACM MM and journals such as TKDE, TSG, and TCSVT. I was a visiting scholar at the University of Houston under the supervision of Prof. Han Zhu during 2023-2024.

My research interest includes AI in smart grid, Recommendation, and Multi-modal in machine learning. I have published 26 papers with total google scholar citations 140+ .

🔍 Research

My research interest currently focuses on:

• Social-related information analysis in smart grid applications
• Multi-modal and Large Language Models in smart grid applications
• Time series analysis

🔥 News

• 2025.05:  🎉🎉 Our paper “SocioDiff: A Socio-aware Diffusion Model for Residential Load Data Generation” has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid (🏆Top Journal, CAS Tier 1)! [dataset and code]

• 2022.04: We have released a awesome repo named Awesome Energy LLM papers, focus on applications of LLMs in energy areas.

📝 Publications

• 2025.05:  Weilong Chen, Xinru Liu, Xinran Zhang, Jian Shi, Han Yang, Zhu Han, and Yanru Zhang, “SocioDiff: A Socio-aware Diffusion Model for Residential Load Data Generation“, in IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, May. 2025. (🏆Top Journal, CAS Tier 1)

• 2025.04:  Wenhao Hu, Weilong Chen, Weimin Yuan, Xiaolu Chen, Han Yang, Yanru Zhang, Zhu Han, “Feature Disentangling Dual-stream Network for User Bias Alleviation in Social Media Prediction“, ICASSP 2025 - 2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Hyderabad, India, 2025, pp. 1-5. (CCF B)

• 2024.12:  Xinran Zhang, Dan Wang, Yifei Zhu, Weilong Chen, Zheng Chang and Zhu Han, “When Zero-Trust Meets Federated Learning“, GLOBECOM 2024 - 2024 IEEE Global Communications Conference, Cape Town, South Africa, 2024, pp. 794-799. (CCF C)

• 2024.10:  Wenhao Hu, Weilong Chen, Weimin Yuan, Yan Wang, Shimin Cai, Yanru Zhang, “Dual-Stream Pre-Training Transformer to Enhance Multimodal Learning for Social Media Prediction“, ACM MM 2024 - Proceedings of the 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia, Melbourne VIC, Australia, 2024, pp. 11450–11456. (🏆CCF A)

• 2024.10:  Weilong Chen, Wenhao Hu, Xiaolu Chen, Weimin Yuan, Yan Wang, Yanru Zhang, Zhu Han, “Tri-Modal Transformers With Mixture-of-Modality-Experts for Social Media Prediction“, in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 1897-1909, Feb. 2025. (🏆Top Journal, CAS Tier 1)

• 2024.07:  Weilong Chen, Shengrong Bu, Xinran Zhang, Yanqing Tao, Yanru Zhang, Zhu Han, “Deep Reinforcement Learning-Assisted Federated Learning for Robust Short-Term Load Forecasting in Electricity Wholesale Markets“, in IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, vol. 11, no. 5, pp. 5073-5086, Sept.-Oct. 2024. (CAS Tier 2)

• 2024.06:  Weilong Chen, Shengrong Bu, Xinran Zhang, Yanqing Tao, Yanru Zhang, Zhu Han, “Semi-Supervised Federated Analytics for Heterogeneous Household Characteristics Identification“, in IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 5799-5812, Nov. 2024. (🏆Top Journal, CAS Tier 1)

• 2024.05:  Xinran Zhang, Weilong Chen, Hui Zhao, Zheng Chang, Zhu Han, “Joint accuracy and latency optimization for quantized federated learning in vehicular networks“, IEEE Internet of Things Journal, vol. 11, no. 17, pp. 28876-28890, 1 Sept.1, 2024. (CAS Tier 2)

• 2024.05:  Weilong Chen, Shaoliang Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Feng Xia, Leyu Lin, Xinran Zhang, Yan Wang, Yanru Zhang, “CIPPO: Contrastive Imitation Proximal Policy Optimization for Recommendation Based on Reinforcement Learning“, in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, vol. 36, no. 11, pp. 5753-5767, Nov. 2024. (🏆Top Journal, CAS Tier 1)

• 2023.10:   Xiaolu Chen, Weilong Chen, Chenghao Huang, Zhongjian Zhang, Lixin Duan, Yanru Zhang, “Double-Fine-Tuning Multi-Objective Vision-and-Language Transformer for Social Media Popularity Prediction“, ACM MM 2023 - Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia, Ottawa ON, Canada, 2023, pp. 9462–9466. (🏆CCF A)

• 2023.06:   Xinran Zhang, Zheng Chang, Tao Hu,Weilong Chen, Xin Zhang, Geyong Min, “Vehicle selection and resource allocation for federated learning-assisted vehicular network“, *in IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 23, no. 5, pp. 3817-3829, May 2024. (🏆Top Journal, CAS Tier 1)

• 2022.10:   Weilong Chen, Chenghao Huang, Weimin Yuan, Xiaolu Chen, Wenhao Hu, Xinran Zhang, Yanru Zhang, “Title-and-tag contrastive vision-and-language transformer for social media popularity prediction“, ACM MM 2022 - Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Multimedia, Lisboa, Portugal, 2022, pp. 7008–7012. (🏆CCF A)

• other papers can be found in google scholar

🎖 Honors and Awards

• 2024.09: 🏆 Best Performance Prize, ACM MM SMP 2024 International Challenge
• 2023.09: 🏆 Best Performance Prize, ACM MM SMP 2023 International Challenge
• 2022.09: 🏆 Best Performance Prize, ACM MM SMP 2022 International Challenge
• 2020.10: 🥈 2nd Place, NeurIPS Procgen Challenge 2020
• 2020.09: 🏆 Best Performance Prize, ACM MM SMP 2020 International Challenge
• 2020.07: 🥇 1st Place, SIGIR FinIR Challenge 2020
• 2019 & 2020: 🥇 1st Place, ACM WSDM Cup (consecutive years)
• 2020.11: 🎓 National Scholarship (China)
• 2020.11: 🏅 Outstanding Student of UESTC (Top 10 annually)

📖 Educations

• 2021.09 – Present, Ph.D. in Electronic Information, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), Chengdu, China
  Supervisor: Prof. Yanru Zhang

• 2023.09 – 2024.09, Visiting Ph.D. Student, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Houston, USA
  Supervisor: Prof. Zhu Han (IEEE/ACM Fellow)

• 2018.09 – 2021.06, M.Eng. in Computer Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), Chengdu, China
  Supervisor: Prof. Tao Zhou

• 2014.03 – 2018.10, B.Eng. in Automation, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), Chengdu, China

💬 Invited Talks

• 2024.01, 🎤 AIGC Tutorial: An Introduction to Diffusion Model, University of Houston, Texas, USA
  🎥 Video Link

💻 Work Experience

• 2022.10 – 2023.09, Senior Algorithm Engineer, TikTok (ByteDance), Beijing, China

  • Led end-to-end optimization for the CapCut recommendation chain; redesigned the ranking objective to fix underestimation issues, boosting DAU by 9.53%.

  • Optimized CapCut’s fine-ranking model, increasing publishing volume by 0.42% and per-user publishing count by 1.86%.
  • Led full-stack optimization of the TikTok.MT publishing chain, increasing effective daily publishing by 1.82% and per-user views by 1.33%.
• 2020.03 – 2022.10, Algorithm Engineer, Tencent WeChat, Beijing, China
  • Applied offline reinforcement learning to boost long-term engagement, achieving a 9.51% increase in average playtime and 10.95% improvement in engagement rate.
  • Proposed a meta-ID embedding method to enhance user representation, raising low-activity user retention by 0.6%.
  • Developed a personalized multi-objective reinforcement learning framework based on Pareto optimization, improving CTR by 1.63% and next-day retention by 0.24%.