😝 I am recruiting interns for ByteDance (Shenzhen).  If you're interested in DB+LLM, feel free to email me.

🥳 I’m honored to serve as Industry Track Chair for ADMA 2026. We welcome your contributions and support! 

🥳 I’m honored to co-organize the LLM + Vector Data Workshop at ICDE 2025 with Prof. Arijit Khan, Prof. M. Tamer Özsu, etc.  Thanks for your contributions and support! 

I am currently a Research Scientist at ByteDance. My research interests include vector databases (e.g., approximate nearest neighbor search, hybrid search, multi-modal search, agentic RAG) and AI for databases (e.g., learned index, learned filter, learned optimizer).

I received my Ph.D. in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2025, and was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Xiaofang Zhou. During my doctoral study, I was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, working with Prof. Ryan Marcus and Prof. Zachary Ives. Before HKUST, I earned my Master's and Bachelor's degrees in Mathematics at Zhejiang University (ZJU) and Sichuan University (SCU). During this time, I was honored to receive the National Scholarship and the first prize in the Chinese Mathematics Competition.

# 2027

22. Zhoujin Tian, Hao Zhang, Yao Tian*, Cheng Chen, Yakun Li, Lei Zhang, Xiaofang Zhou, "Beyond Retrieval: Analytic Memory for Multimodal Agents", submitted to ACL 2027. [link]

21. Dongyang Xie, Yao Tian, Hao Zhang, Yifei Yuan, Tieyun Qian, Ming Zhong, Jiawei Jiang, Yuanyuan Zhu, "DocNavRAG: Document-Structured Graph RAG with Stateful Evidence Construction for Complex Document Question Answering", submitted to ACL 2027.  [link]

20. Yuming Xu, Yao Tian, Bo Kuang, Yuncheng Lu, Hao Zhang, Jiehui Li, Yakun Li, Cheng Li, "Graphtor: Orchestrating Billion-Scale Proximity Graph Construction on GPUs", submitted to SIGMOD 2027.

19. Zhoujin Tian, Xi Zhao, Yao Tian, Zhengjun Huang, Xiaofang Zhou, "RaP: A Redirect-and-Patch Framework for Efficient Dynamic Updates in Graph-Based ANN Indexes", submitted to SIGMOD 2027.

# 2026

18. Yao Tian, Zhoujin Tian, Xi Zhao, Ruiyuan Zhang, Xiaofang Zhou, "GEM: A Native Graph-based Index for Multi-Vector Retrieval",  SIGMOD 2026. [link]

17. Yao Tian, Yuncheng Lu, Liyao Xiong, Yuming Xu, Hao Zhang, Weichen Zhao, Xi Zhao, Bo Kuang, Dongyu Wang, Jiehui Li, Yakun Li, Lei Zhang, "UBASE: An AI Search Engine for Trillion-Scale Vector Data Management", submitted to ATC 2026.

16. Jiang Yang, Zhizhuo Kou, Yao Tian, Hao Zhang, Han Chen, Sirui Han, Yike Guo, "RW-TTT: Batched Serving for Request-Owned Test-Time Training State", Submitted to EMNLP 2026 [link]

15. Weichen Zhao, Yuncheng Lu, Yao Tian, Jiehui Li, Minghao Zhao, Yakun Li, Weining Qian, "Taming Storage Stalls in Out-of-Memory Graph-based Vector Search via Fine-Grained Memory Orchestration",  submitted to ATC 2026. [link]

14. Xi Zhao,  Zhoujin Tian, Kai Huang, Yao Tian, Xiaokui Xiao, Bolong Zheng, Xiaofang Zhou, "Enhancing Graph-based Approximate Maximum Inner Product Search via Norm-Adaptive Partitioning",  SIGMOD 2026. [link]

13. He Huang, Hanwen Zhang, Yang Du, Jia Liu, Zhongjun Qiu, Yu-E Sun, Yao Tian, Xiaofang Zhou, Fu Xiao, "LifeSketch: Lifecycle-aware Active Flow Counting on Programmable Switches", Submitted to ATC 2026. 

# 2025

12. Zixuan Yi, Yao Tian, Zachary G. Ives, Ryan Marcus, "Low Rank Learning for Offline Query Optimization", SIGMOD 2025. [link]

11. Sheng Wang, Yao Tian, Xiaodong Mei, Ge Sun, Jie Cheng, Fulong Ma, Pedro V. Sander, Junwei Liang, "LHPF: Look back the History and Plan for the Future in Autonomous Driving", Arxiv. [link]

# 2024

10. Yao Tian, Tingyun Yan, Ruiyuan Zhang, Kai Huang, Bolong Zheng, Xiaofang Zhou, "A Learned Cuckoo Filter for Approximate Membership Queries over Variable-sized Sliding Windows on Data Streams", SIGMOD 2024. [link]

9. Zixuan  Yi, Yao Tian, Zachary G. Ives, Ryan Marcus, "Low Rank Approximation for Learned Query Optimization", aiDM@SIGMOD 2024. [link] 

8. Kai Huang, Yunqi Li, Qingqing Ye, Yao Tian, Xi Zhao, Yue Cui, Haibo Hu, Xiaofang Zhou, "FRESH: Towards Efficient Graph Queries in an Outsourced Graph", ICDE 2024. [link]

# 2023

7. Yao Tian, Xi Zhao, Xiaofang Zhou, "DB-LSH 2.0: Locality-Sensitive Hashing with Query-based Dynamic Bucketing", TKDE 2023. [link]

6. YaoTian, Ziyang Yue, Ruiyuan Zhang, Xi Zhao, Bolong Zheng, Xiaofang Zhou, "Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search in High Dimensional Vector Databases: Current Research and Future Directions", IEEE Data Eng. Bull. 2023. [link]

5. Xi Zhao, Yao Tian, Kai Huang, Bolong Zheng, Xiaofang Zhou, "Towards Efficient Index Construction and Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search in High-Dimensional Spaces", VLDB 2023. [link]

4. Kai Huang, Yue Cui, Qingqing Ye, Yan Zhao, Xi Zhao, Yao Tian, Kai Zheng, Haibo Hu, Xiaofang Zhou, "TED+:Towards Discovering Top-k Edge-Diversified Patterns in a Graph Database", TKDE 2023. [link]

3. Kai Huang, Houdong Liang, Chongchong Yao, Xi Zhao, Yue Cui, Yao Tian, Ruiyuan Zhang, Xiaofang Zhou, "VisualNeo: Bridging the Gap between Visual Query Interfaces and Graph Query Engines", VLDB 2023 Demo. [link]

# 2022

2. Yao Tian, Xi Zhao, Xiaofang Zhou, "DB-LSH: Locality-Sensitive Hashing with Query-based Dynamic Bucketing", ICDE 2022.  [link]

1. Yao Tian, Tingyun Yan, Xi Zhao, Kai Huang, Xiaofang Zhou, "A Learned Index for Exact Similarity Search in Metric Spaces", TKDE 2022. [link]

👀 Include "[Dove]" in the subject line if you'd like me to see your email faster. 

Teaching Assistant

1. C Programming Bridging Course, HKUST, Fall 2023  

2. Java Programming Bridging Course, HKUST, Spring 2023

3. Spatial and Multimedia Databases, HKUST, Spring 2023

4.  Database Management Systems, HKUST, Spring 2022

5.  Honors Object-Oriented Programming and Data Structures, HKUST, Fall 2021

6.  Probability and Statistics, ZJU, Fall 2018

7.  Calculus, ZJU, Spring 2018

8.  Linear Algebra, ZJU, Fall 2017

Research Intern

1.  Alibaba DAMO Academy,  Winter 2020

• Conduct research on neural ordinary differential equations at the Decision Intelligence Lab, advised by Dr. Qingsong Wen.

2. ByteDance, Summer 2025

   • Conduct research on large-scale distributed vector database systems.

1. HKUST RedBird Academic Excellence Award, 2024

2. HKUST Overseas Research Award, 2024

3. National Scholarship (the highest honor for students in China), 2019

4. The 1st Prize in the Chinese Mathematics Competition (the highest honor for math major students), 2016

5. ZJU Outstanding Graduated Student, 2020

6. ZJU Outstanding Student Leader, 2018

7. ZJU Outstanding Student, 2018

8. SCU Outstanding Graduated Student, 2017

9. SCU Outstanding Student Leader, 2014

10. SCU Outstanding Student, 2015

Table tennis 🏓, hiking 🏔, marathon running 🏃‍♀️‍➡️, travelling 🌏, dog‑raising 🐶 ...