Hi, my name is

Yutong Xia

PhD Student @ NUS

Hi! I am Xia Yutong (夏宇彤), currently a Research Fellow at School of Computing (SoC), National University of Singapore (NUS), working with Prof. Roger Zimmermann. I received my Ph.D. in Data Science from NUS, under the supervision of Prof. Roger Zimmermann. My research interests lie in spatio-temporal data mining, urban computing, and time series analysis. My recent work focuses on leveraging causal AI techniques to better understand and model complex spatio-temporal systems.

I am open to research collaborations in causality AI for time series, spatio-temporal and urban data. Please contact me at: yutong.x@outlook.com.

News

[Apr. 2026] I successfully defended my PhD thesis! Special thanks to my supervisor Prof. Roger for all the support throughout my PhD journey! :)
[Jun. 2025] We will give a tutorial on Foundation Models for Spatio-Temporal Data at KDD’25. Check out our survey paper here.
[Apr. 2025] Invited talk about Towards Predictive Cities: Learning Spatio-Temporal Graphs Data in the AI Era at City+Talk.
[Dec. 2024] Two papers about graph data augmentation and air quality inferrence were accepted by AAAI'25.
[Nov. 2024] Calling for papers! We are organizing WebST Workshop 2025 - Spatio-Temporal Data Mining from the Web at WWW'25. We are calling for submissions (4-8 pages).
[Nov. 2024] One paper about ST forecasting was accepted by KDD'25 ADS Track.
[May. 2024] One paper about large-scale delivery dataset was accepted by KDD'24 ADS track.
[May. 2024] Two papers about Singapore parking dataset and spatio-temporal field neural network were accepted by IJCAI'24 AI for Social Good track.
[Jan. 2024] I was honored to receive the NUS SoC Research Achievement Award. Thanks Prof. Roger for the supports!!
[Sept. 2023] One paper about spatio-temporal causal inference was accepted by NeurIPS'23.
[Sept. 2023] One large-scale traffic benchmark was accepted by NeurIPS'23 DB Track.
[Sept. 2023] I was honored to receive the NUSGS Research Incentive Award!
[Sept. 2023] One paper about spatio-temporal diffusion model was accepted by SIGSPATIAL'23.
[Jan. 2023] I will attend AAAI'23 at Washington DC in person ✈️. (It is my first time attending a conference!! XD)
[Nov. 2022] One paper about large-scale air quality prediction using Transformers was accepted by AAAI'23 as an oral presentation.
[Aug. 2022] One paper about travel mode choice prediction was accepted by Travel Behaviour and Society.
[Aug. 2022] One paper about accessibility equality was accepted by Sustainable Cities and Society.
[Jan. 2022] I started my Ph.D. candidature at National University of Singapore.
[Dec. 2021] I graduated from University College London and obtained my master’s degree with a distinction.

Community Services

  • Organizer of WWW'25'26 Workshop: WebST (Publicity Chair)
  • Contributor of KDD’25 Tutorial: Foundation models for spatio-temporal data science
  • Session Chair: KDD’25
  • Senior PC Member: CIKM’25 (Short paper track)
  • PC Member & Reviewer: ICML’25’26, ICLR’25’26, NeurIPS’24’25, KDD’25’26, AAAI’26, AISTATS’25’26, WWW’26, SIGSPATIAL’25, ECML’23, UrbanComp’25
  • Journal Reviewer: TPAMI, Neurocomputing, TNNLS, IJGIS, Scientific Reports, Ann. GIS

Professional Experience

Research Fellow - National University of Singapore
Mar 2026 - Present
I currently work as a Research Fellow at School of Computing, National University of Singapore (NUS) in Singapore, working with Prof. Roger Zimmermann. I work on IBM benchmarking and geographical foundation models.
I worked as a Research Intern at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, China, mentored by Dr. Jiang Bian and Dr. Chang Xu. I worked on a project about causal time series generation via diffusion models.
I visited at JTL Urban Mobility Lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), supervised by Prof. Jinhua Zhao. I worked on a project about scaling urban causal inference with large language models, in collaboration with Ao Qu.
I worked as a Research Intern at Alibaba Cloud, Alibaba Group in Hangzhou, China, mentored by Dr. Lunting Fan and Dr. Yingying Zhang. I worked on a project about time series anomaly detection.

Selected Publications

Selected papers of my primary research contributions. The full publication list is available on Google Scholar. (* denotes equal contribution; † denotes corresponding author.)
Yutong
Causal Time Series Generation via Diffusion Models
Yutong Xia , Chang Xu , Yuxuan Liang , Qingsong Wen , Roger Zimmermann , Jiang Bian ,
Preprint 2025 [Paper] [Code]
Yutong
Foundation models for spatio-temporal data science: A tutorial and survey
Yuxuan Liang* , Haomin Wen* , Yutong Xia* , Ming Jin , Bin Yang , Flora Salim , Qingsong Wen , Shirui Pan , Gao Cong
KDD Tutorial 2025 [Paper]
Yutong
Reimagining Urban Science: Scaling Causal Inference with Large Language Models
Yutong Xia* , Ao Qu* , Yunhan Zheng , Yihong Tang , Dingyi Zhuang , Yuxuan Liang , Shenhao Wang , Cathy Wu Lijun Sun Roger Zimmermann , Jinhua Zhao
Preprint 2025 [Paper] [Code]
Yutong
CaPulse: Detecting Anomalies by Tuning in to the Causal Rhythms of Time Series
Yutong Xia , Yingying Zhang , Yuxuan Liang , Lunting Fan , Qingsong Wen , Roger Zimmermann ,
Preprint 2025 [Paper]
Yutong
Through the Dual-Prism: A Spectral Perspective on Graph Data Augmentation for Graph Classification
Yutong Xia* , Runpeng Yu* , Yuxuan Liang , Xavier Bresson , Xinchao Wang , Roger Zimmermann ,
AAAI 2025 [Paper] [Code]
Yutong
Predicting Carpark Availability in Singapore with Cross-Domain Data: A New Dataset and A Data-Driven Approach
Huaiwu Zhang* , Yutong Xia* , Siru Zhong , Kun Wang , Zekun Tong , Qingsong Wen , Roger Zimmermann , Yuxuan Liang ,
IJCAI 2024 [Paper] [Code]
Yutong
Deciphering Spatio-Temporal Graph Forecasting: A Causal Lens and Treatment
Yutong Xia , Yuxuan Liang , Haomin Wen , Xu Liu , Kun Wang , Zhengyang Zhou , Roger Zimmermann ,
NeurIPS 2023 [Paper] [Code]