Dr. Qiang Gao
Open-World Trustworthy Spatio-Temporal Intelligence

Teaching AI to Perceive Space, Understand Time, and Reason About the World

Dr. Qiang Gao 高强

I study Open-World Trustworthy Spatio-Temporal Intelligence, developing AI systems that continuously perceive, learn, reason, and make trustworthy decisions in dynamic real-world environments.

Professor · Ph.D. Supervisor
Complex Laboratory of New Finance and Economics (NiceLab)
School of Computing and Artificial Intelligence, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics (SWUFE)
Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Finance, Ministry of Education
Kash Institute of Electronics and Information Industry
NiceLab, Jingshi Building, Chengdu, Sichuan, China 611130 qianggao AT swufe DOT edu DOT cn
Google Scholar NiceLab 中文页面

Research Overview

Open-World Trustworthy Spatio-Temporal Intelligence
A unified framework integrating perception, adaptation, and trust
Open-World Trustworthy Spatio-Temporal Intelligence Dynamic World Modeling How can AI understand and represent complex real-world systems evolving across spatial, temporal, and relational dimensions? Spatial AI · Temporal AI Multimodal AI · World Models 1 Continuous Adaptation How can AI continuously adapt to new environments, emerging knowledge, and evolving tasks without catastrophic forgetting? Continual Learning · Open-world Knowledge Evolution · Lifelong AI 2 Trustworthy Decision Making How can AI provide reliable, explainable, and causally grounded decisions in high-stakes domains? Causal AI · Explainable AI Risk-aware AI · Decision Intel. 3 Urban Intelligence Mobility · Traffic · Spatial Services Financial Intelligence Markets · Enterprise · Economic Systems LLM as Enabling Technology Semantic reasoning · External memory · Multimodal knowledge integration

Dynamic World Modeling

How can AI understand and represent complex real-world systems evolving across spatial, temporal, and heterogeneous relationships?

Spatio-Temporal Intelligence Dynamic Graph Learning Multimodal Representation Spatial Reasoning World Modeling
Applications Urban intelligence, mobility analytics, location-based services, spatial decision systems

Learning in Open & Changing Environments

How can AI continuously adapt to new environments, emerging knowledge, and evolving tasks without catastrophic forgetting?

Open-World Learning Continual Learning Lifelong Learning Adaptive AI Knowledge Evolution
Connection to AGI Building AI systems capable of continuous adaptation rather than static training-and-deployment

Trustworthy AI for High-Stakes Decisions

How can AI provide reliable, explainable, and causally grounded decisions in high-impact domains?

Trustworthy AI Explainable AI Causal Learning Risk-aware AI Decision Intelligence
Applications Financial intelligence, enterprise risk analysis, economic systems, high-impact decision support

Financial Intelligence

Financial systems are not only numerical systems, but also dynamic relational-spatial systems involving enterprise locations, supply-chain networks, industrial ecosystems, regional economies, and market events. This research explores how spatial structures and temporal dynamics influence economic behaviors and financial risks — positioning finance not as an isolated application, but as a unique domain of spatio-temporal intelligence.

Enterprise Networks Supply Chain Risk Market Dynamics Regional Economics Industrial Ecosystems

Selected Publications

*Corresponding Author

2026
  • Qiang Gao*, Xiaolong Song, Li Huang, Goce Trajcevski, Fan Zhou and Xueqin Chen. "Alleviating Forgetting in Fine-Grained Urban Flow Inference via Incremental Neural Operator", ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology, 2026. Accepted Journal
  • Ce Li, Qiang Gao, Kunpeng Zhang and Goce Trajcevski. "Impact of Incorporating Multiple Spatial Sources on Different Paradigms for Short-term Power Load Forecast", ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL). Accepted Conference
  • Yanzhe Xie, Tuohang Li, Heng Wang, Yujun Ge, Li Huang, Qiang Gao*. "Frequency-Aware Dynamic Graph Learning via Pseudo-Spectral Decomposition for Metro Flow Forecasting", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). Accepted Conference
  • Yanzhe Xie, Li Huang, Qiang Gao*, Xueqin Chen, Fan Zhou, Kunpeng Zhang. "Beyond Graph Priors: A Co-evolving Framework under Uncertainty for Enterprise Resilience Assessment", AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Accepted Conference
  • Jiao Li, Jian Lang, Xikai Tang, Wenzheng Shu, Ting Zhong, Qiang Gao, Yong Wang, Leiting Chen, and Fan Zhou. "Shedding the Facades, Connecting the Domains: Detecting Shifting Multimodal Malicious Content with Test-Time Adaptation", AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). Accepted Conference
  • Jian Lang, Rongpei Hong, Ting Zhong, Leiting Chen, Qiang Gao, Fan Zhou. "From Shallow Humor to Metaphor: Towards Label-Free Harmful Meme Detection via LMM Agent Self-Improvement", ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). Accepted Conference
  • Jian Lang, Rongpei Hong, Meihui Zhong, Kaiju Li, Ting Zhong, Qiang Gao, and Fan Zhou. "LEAF: Towards Lightweight Explainable Hateful Video Detection via Self-Grounding CoT Guided Stage-Wise Distillation", Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Findings. Accepted Conference
  • Li Huang, Letian Ning, Chaoran Liu, Rong Zhang, Qiang Gao*, and Goce Trajcevski. "Dual-Offset Trajectory Recovery on Roads with Dynamic Transition Probability", IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2026. Accepted Journal
  • Qiang Gao*, Kunpeng Zhang, and Philip S. Yu. "Understanding Interactive Stock Dynamics via Sensitivity-aware Dependency Learning", IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2026. Accepted Journal
2025
  • Li Huang, Yujie Wu, Xiaolong Song, Qiang Gao*, Goce Trajcevski, and Xueqin Chen. "Enhancing Urban Region Representation via Adaptive Risk-aware Consensus Learning", ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL). Accepted Conference
  • Li Huang, Yanzhe Xie, Qiang Gao*, Kunpeng Zhang, Guisong Liu, and Xueqin Chen. "Progressive Dependency Representation Learning for Stock Ranking in Uncertain Risk Contrasting", ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD). [Paper] Conference
  • Xueqin Chen, Xiaoyu Huang, Qiang Gao*, Li Huang, Jiaojing Yu, and Guisong Liu. "Birds of a Feather: Enhancing Multimodal Fake News Detection via Multi-Element Retrieval", IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE). [Paper] Conference
  • Qiang Gao, Zizheng Wang, Li Huang, Goce Trajcevski, Guisong Liu, and Xueqin Chen. "Responsive Dynamic Graph Disentanglement for Metro Flow Forecasting", AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). [Paper] Oral Conference
  • Li Huang, Haowen Liu, Qiang Gao*, Jiajing Yu, Guisong Liu, and Xueqin Chen. "Adversity-aware Few-shot Named Entity Recognition via Augmentation Learning", AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). [Paper] Oral Conference
  • Qiang Gao, Letian Ning, Li Huang, Chaoran Liu, Xueqin Chen, and Fan Zhou. "Aligning Authentic Location Shares with Mobility Information Bottleneck", IEEE Transactions on Big Data, 2025. Accepted Journal
  • Haolun Ding, Zhengwen Fu, Rong Zhang, Li Huang, Xuan Luo, and Qiang Gao*. "Probabilistic Bayesian Learning with Long-Tail Awareness for Trajectory-User Linking", Neural Networks, 2025. [Paper] Journal
  • Hongzhu Fu, Yutao Wei, Gege Chen, Xing He, Qiang Gao, and Fan Zhou. "Augmented Graph Information Bottleneck with Type-Aware Periodicity Heterogeneity for Explainable Crime Prediction", Information Processing & Management, 2025. [Paper] Journal
  • Yanlong Huang, Wenxin Tai, Fan Zhou, Qiang Gao, Ting Zhong, and Kunpeng Zhang. "Extracting Key Insights from Earnings Call Transcript via Information-Theoretic Contrastive Learning", Information Processing & Management, 2025. [Paper] Journal
  • Xueqin Chen, Xiaoyu Huang, Qiang Gao*, Li Huang, and Guisong Liu. "Enhancing Text-centric Fake News Detection via External Knowledge Distillation from LLMs", Neural Networks, 2025. [Paper] Journal
  • Qiang Gao. "Deep Learning and Semantic Dynamics of Human Mobility", Encyclopedia of GIS, Third Edition, Springer, 2025. Book Chapter
2024
  • Qiang Gao, Zizheng Wang, Li Huang, Goce Trajcevski, Kunpeng Zhang, and Xueqin Chen. "Enhancing Dependency Dynamics in Traffic Flow Forecasting via Graph Risk Bootstrap", ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL). [Paper] Conference
  • Qiang Gao, Xiaolong Song, Li Huang, Goce Trajcevski, Fan Zhou, and Xueqin Chen. "Enhancing Fine-Grained Urban Flow Inference via Incremental Neural Operator", International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). [Paper] Conference
  • Kai Yang, Yi Yang, Qiang Gao, Ting Zhong, Yong Wang, and Fan Zhou. "Self-Explainable Next POI Recommendation", ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR). [Paper] Conference
  • Jinyu Hong, Ping Kuang, Qiang Gao*, Fan Zhou. "Disentanglement-Guided Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Network for Metro Flow Forecasting (Student Abstract)", AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). [Paper] Conference
  • Hongzhu Fu, Fan Zhou, Qing Guo, Qiang Gao*. "Spatial-Temporal Augmentation for Crime Prediction (Student Abstract)", AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). [Paper] Conference
  • Jianfei Sun#, Qiang Gao#, Cong Wu, Yuxian Li, Jiacheng Wang, and Dusit Niyato. "Secure Resource Allocation via Constrained Deep Reinforcement Learning", International Conference on Machine Learning for Cyber Security (ML4CS). [Paper] Best Paper Conference
  • Haoran Li, Qiang Gao, Hongmei Wu, and Li Huang. "Advancing Event Causality Identification via Heuristic Semantic Dependency Inquiry Network", Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). [Paper] Conference
  • Qiang Gao, Chaoran Liu, Li Huang, Goce Trajcevski, Qing Guo, and Fan Zhou. "Learning to Discover Anomalous Spatiotemporal Trajectory via Open-World State Space Model", Knowledge-Based Systems, 2024. [Paper] Journal
  • Li Huang, Pei Li, Qiang Gao*, Guisong Liu, Zhipeng Luo, and Tianrui Li. "Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Bike-sharing Demand Recovery with Factual Knowledge Fusion", Neural Networks, 2024. [Paper] Journal
  • Yujie Li, Xin Yang, Qiang Gao, Hao Wang, Junbo Zhang, and Tianrui Li. "Cross-regional Fraud Detection via Continual Learning with Knowledge Transfer", IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2024. [Paper] Journal
  • Zhipeng Luo, Qiang Gao, Yazhou He, Hongjun Wang, Milos Hauskrecht, and Tianrui Li. "Hierarchical Active Learning with Label Proportions on Data Regions", IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2024. [Paper] Journal
  • Qiang Gao, Zhengxiang Liu, Li Huang, Kunpeng Zhang, Jun Wang, and Guisong Liu. "Relational Stock Selection via Probabilistic State Space Learning", IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2024. [Paper] Journal
  • Qiang Gao*, Xinzhu Zhou, Li Huang, Kunpeng Zhang, Siyuan Liu, and Fan Zhou. "Relational Fusion-based Stock Selection with Neural Recursive Ordinary Differential Equation Networks", Information Fusion, 2024. [Paper] Journal
  • Nan Liu, Fengli Zhang, Qiang Gao and Xueqin Chen. "Contrastive Learning with Edge-wise Augmentation for Rumor Detection", International Journal of Intelligent Systems, 2024. [Paper] Journal
2023
  • Qiang Gao, Xiaohan Wang, Chaoran Liu, Goce Trajcevski, Li Huang, Fan Zhou. "Open Anomalous Trajectory Recognition via Probabilistic Metric Learning", International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). [Paper] Conference
  • Qiang Gao, Hongzhu Fu, Yutao Wei, Li Huang, Xingmin Liu, and Guisong Liu. "Spatial-Temporal Diffusion Probabilistic Learning for Crime Prediction", International Conference on Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management (KSEM). [Paper] Conference
  • Li Huang, Kai Liu, Chaoran Liu, Qiang Gao*, Xiao Zhou, and Guisong Liu. "HBay: Predicting Human Mobility via Hyperspherical Bayesian Learning", International Conference on Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management (KSEM). [Paper] Best Paper Conference
  • Jinyu Hong, Fan Zhou, Qiang Gao*, Kuang Ping, Kunpeng Zhang. "Mobility Prediction via Sequential Trajectory Disentanglement (Student Abstract)", AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). [Paper] Conference
  • Yujie Li, Yuxuan Yang, Qiang Gao*, Xin Yang. "Cross-regional Fraud Detection via Continual Learning (Student Abstract)", AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). [Paper] Conference
  • Qiang Gao, Xiaojun Shan, Yuchen Zhang, and Fan Zhou. "Enhancing Knowledge Transfer for Task Incremental Learning with Data-free Subnetwork", Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). [Paper] Conference
  • Miaomiao Li, Jiaqi Zhu, Xin Yang, Yi Yang, Qiang Gao, Hongan Wang. "CL-WSTC: Continual Learning for Weakly Supervised Text Classification on the Internet", ACM Web Conference (WWW). [Paper] Conference
  • Li Huang, Hongmei Wu, Qiang Gao*, Guisong Liu. "Attention Localness in Shared Encoder-Decoder Model for Text Summarization", IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). [Paper] Conference
  • Qiang Gao, Jinyu Hong, Xovee Xu, Ping Kuang, Fan Zhou, and Goce Trajcevski. "Predicting Human Mobility via Self-supervised Disentanglement Learning", IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2023. [Paper] Journal
  • Xovee Xu, Zhiyuan Wang, Qiang Gao, Ting Zhong, Bei Hui, Fan Zhou, and Goce Trajcevski. "Spatial-Temporal Contrasting for Fine-Grained Urban Flow Inference", IEEE Transactions on Big Data, 2023. [Paper] Journal
  • Qiang Gao, Hongzhu Fu, Kunpeng Zhang, Goce Trajcevski, Xu Teng, and Fan Zhou. "Inferring Real Mobility in Presence of Fake Check-ins Data", ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), 2023. [Paper] Journal
  • Qiang Gao, Wei Wang, Li Huang, Xin Yang, Tianrui Li and Hamido Fujita. "Dual-grained Human Mobility Learning for Location-aware Trip Recommendation with Spatial-temporal Graph Knowledge Fusion", Information Fusion, 2023. [Paper] Journal
  • Qiang Gao, Fan Zhou, Xin Yang and Guisong Liu. "When Friendship Meets Sequential Human Check-ins: Inferring Social Circles with Variational Mobility", Neurocomputing, 2023. [Paper] Journal
  • Xin Yang, Metoh Adler LOUA, Meijun Wu, Li Huang, Qiang Gao. "Multi-granularity Stock Prediction with Sequential Three-way Decisions", Information Sciences, 2023. [Paper] Journal
2022
  • Joojo Walker, Ting Zhong, Fengli Zhang, Qiang Gao and Fan Zhou. "Recommendation via Collaborative Diffusion Generative Model", International Conference on Knowledge Science, Engineering and Management (KSEM). [Paper] Conference
  • Fan Zhou, Rongfan Li, Qiang Gao, Goce Trajcevski, Kunpeng Zhang, Ting Zhong. "Dynamic Manifold Learning for Land Deformation Forecasting", AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). [Paper] Conference
  • Qiang Gao, Fan Zhou, Ting Zhong, Goce Trajcevski, Xin Yang and Tianrui Li. "Contextual Spatio-Temporal Graph Representation Learning for Reinforced Human Mobility Mining", Information Sciences, 2022. [Paper] Journal
  • Qiang Gao, Wei Wang, Kunpeng Zhang, Xin Yang, Congcong Miao and Tianrui Li. "Self-supervised Representation Learning for Trip Recommendation", Knowledge-Based Systems, 2022. [Paper] Journal
  • Qiang Gao, Zhipeng Luo, Diego Klabjan and Fengli Zhang. "Efficient Architecture Search for Continual Learning", IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 2022. [Paper] Journal
2021
  • Fan Zhou, Yurou Dai, Qiang Gao, Pengyu Wang, and Ting Zhong. "Self-Supervised Human Mobility Learning for Next Location Prediction and Trajectory Classification", Knowledge-Based Systems, 2021. [Paper] Journal
  • Qiang Gao, Fan Zhou, Goce Trajcevski, Kunpeng Zhang, Ting Zhong and Fengli Zhang. "Adversarial Human Trajectory Learning for Trip Recommendation", IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 2021. [Paper] Journal
2020
  • Qiang Gao, Fan Zhou, Goce Trajcevski, Fengli Zhang, Xucheng Luo. "Adversity-based Social Circles Inference via Context-Aware Mobility", IEEE Global Communications Conference (IEEE GLOBECOM). [Paper] Conference
  • Qiang Gao, Fengli Zhang, Fuming Yao, Ailing Li, Lin Mei and Fan Zhou. "Adversarial Mobility Learning for Human Trajectory Classification", IEEE Access, 2020. [Paper] Journal
2019
  • Qiang Gao, Goce Trajcevski, Fan Zhou, Kunpeng Zhang, Ting Zhong, and Fengli Zhang. "DeepTrip: Adversarially Understanding Human Mobility for Trip Recommendation", ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL). [Paper] Conference
  • Qiang Gao, Fan Zhou, Goce Trajcevski, Kunpeng Zhang, Ting Zhong and Fengli Zhang. "Predicting Human mobility via Variational Attention", International World Wide Web Conference (WWW). [Paper] [Code] Conference
2018
  • Qiang Gao, Goce Trajcevski, Fan Zhou, Kunpeng Zhang, Ting Zhong and Fengli Zhang. "Trajectory-based Social Circle Inference", ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL). [Paper] [Code] Conference
  • Fan Zhou, Qiang Gao, Goce Trajcevski, Kunpeng Zhang, Ting Zhong, Fengli Zhang. "Trajectory-User Linking via Variational AutoEncoder", International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). [Paper] Conference
2017
  • Qiang Gao, Fan Zhou, Kunpeng Zhang, Goce Trajcevski, Xuecheng Luo, Fengli Zhang. "Identifying Human Mobility via Trajectory Embeddings", International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). [Paper] [Code] Conference
2016
  • Qiang Gao, Fengli Zhang, Ruijin Wang, and Fan Zhou. "Trajectory big data: a review of key technologies in data processing", Journal of Software (软件学报), 2016, 28(4): 959-992. [Paper] Journal

Future Vision

Where this research is heading

Future AI systems should move beyond static prediction models toward continuously evolving intelligent agents capable of perceiving dynamic environments, accumulating knowledge, reasoning about causal mechanisms, and making trustworthy decisions.

Continual Learning World Models AI Agents Causal Reasoning Spatio-Temporal Intelligence

News

Research Funding

  • Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities. Grant No. JBK2406078 (PI, 2024.6-2025.6)
  • Science and Technology Program of Sichuan Province, Grant No. 2023ZYD0145 (PI, 2023.12-2024.12)
  • Chengdu Science and Technology Program, Grant No. 2023-JB00-00016-GX (PI, 2023-2025)
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant No. 62102326 (PI, 2022.01-2024.12)
  • Natural Science Foundation of Sichuan Province, Grant No. 2023NSFSC1411 (PI, 2023.01-2024.12)
  • The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (PI, Key Grant, 2021)
  • Guanghua Talent Project of SWUFE (PI, 2023-2025)

Activities & Services

Conference & Journal Organization

  • Senior Program Committee Member, AAAI, 2027
  • Posters and Short Papers Chair, ACM SIGSPATIAL, 2026
  • Senior Program Committee Member, IJCAI, 2026
  • Program Committee Member, AAAI, 2026
  • Program Committee Member, ECAI, 2025
  • Program Committee Member, IJCAI, 2025/2026
  • Program Committee Member, PAKDD, 2026
  • Program Committee Member, ICDE (Demo track), 2025
  • Session Chair, IJCAI, 2024
  • Program Committee Member, MDM, 2023-2025
  • Program Committee Member, KSEM, 2022-2025
  • Program Committee Member, SISAP, 2023/2024
  • Program Committee Member, ACM SIGSPATIAL, 2021-2026
  • Program Committee Member, EAI CollaborateCom, 2020

Reviewing for

  • NeurIPS 2025 · CVPR 2026
  • IEEE T-KDE · IEEE T-NNLS
  • IEEE T-SMC · IEEE T-ITS
  • ACM TKDD · IEEE IoT
  • Neural Networks · Information Fusion
  • Knowledge-Based Systems
  • Engineering Applications of AI
  • Pattern Recognition
  • Applied Soft Computing
  • Expert Systems With Applications
  • Neurocomputing · Information Sciences
  • GeoInformatica
  • ACM TALLIP · ACM TSAS
  • ISPRS IJGI
  • Human-Centric Intelligent Systems
  • KDD (2018-2021/2024-2027), Outstanding Reviewer (KDD 2025)
  • WWW (2025) · ICME (2024)
  • IEEE BigData (2019-2022)

Teaching

Current Courses

  • Deep Neural Networks for PhD students, Spring 2026

Previous Courses

  • Deep Neural Networks for PhD students, Spring 2025
  • Deep Learning for Undergraduates, Fall 2024/2025
  • Advanced Machine Learning for Undergraduates, Fall 2022-2024
  • Training Program of AI for Undergraduates, Fall 2022-2025
  • Machine Learning for Undergraduates, Spring 2022-2024
  • Artificial Intelligence for PhD students, Fall 2021
  • Data Mining for Undergraduates, Spring 2021, Fall 2021/2022

Spatio-Temporal Data Demos

Chengdu Spatio-Temporal Visualization

Interactive map of Chengdu with 6 types of spatio-temporal data: taxi trajectories, POIs, metro stations, check-in data, weather dynamics, and flow lines — all animated over time on an AMap base layer.

Taxi Trajectory POI Metro Check-in Weather Flow
Open Demo

Beijing Taxi & POI Visualization

Spatio-temporal visualization of Beijing with 130 taxi trajectories (T-Drive pattern), 38 POIs, dynamic heatmaps, and trail effects. Time controller sweeps from 6:00 to 22:00 with playback speed control.

Taxi Trajectory POI Heatmap Trail
Open Demo