Papers by Meng Ma
Mirror-Consistency: Harnessing Inconsistency in Majority Voting (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are a widely-used decoding strategy that relies on the plurality voting rule, which focuses on the most frequent answer while overlooking all other minority responses. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate a ‘reflective mirror’ into the self-ensemble decoding process and enables LLMs to critically examine inconsistencies among multiple generations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method incorporates a ‘reflective mirror’ into the self-ensemble decoding process and enables LLMs to critically examine inconsistencies among multiple generations. |
Gumbel Reranking: Differentiable End-to-End Reranker Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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Siyuan Huang, Zhiyuan Ma, Jintao Du, Changhua Meng, Weiqiang Wang, Jingwen Leng, Minyi Guo, Zhouhan Lin
| Challenge: | Existing distillation-based approaches suffer from training-inference misalignment and fail to capture interdependencies among candidate documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to optimize rerankers by learning a stochastic, document-wise Top-k attention mask using the Gumbel Trick and Relaxed Top-K Sampling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework minimizes the overall language loss and improves recall on hotpotQA. |
SoRFT: Issue Resolving with Subtask-oriented Reinforced Fine-Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing issue-resolving frameworks rely on commercial models, leading to high costs and privacy concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a training approach to enhance issue resolving capability of LLMs by decomposing issue reasolving into subtasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves issue-resolving performance and generalizes model . it is cost-effective and provides a cost-efficient alternative to commercial models . |
RankNAS: Efficient Neural Architecture Search by Pairwise Ranking (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods require training millions of architectures to estimate the accuracy of the search results. |
| Approach: | They propose a performance ranking method (RankNAS) that uses pairwise ranking and search space pruning to enlarge the search space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly accelerates NAS through pairwise ranking and search space pruning. |
Adaptive Graph Convolutional Network for Knowledge Graph Entity Alignment (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Entity alignment (EA) aims to identify equivalent entities from different Knowledge Graphs (KGs) noisy neighbors of entities transfer invalid information, drown out equivalent information, and ultimately reduce the performance of EA. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to deal with neighbor noises to reduce the performance of EA by capturing the differences and complementarities of multiple KGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in supervised and unsupervised settings. |
WebUncertainty: Dual-Level Uncertainty Driven Planning and Reasoning For Autonomous Web Agent (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing web agents struggle with complex tasks due to rigid planning strategies and hallucination-prone reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-uncertainty-driven Adaptive Planning Mechanism that adaptively selects planning modes to navigate unknown environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs better on the WebArena and WebVoyager benchmarks than existing frameworks. |
MMAU: A Holistic Benchmark of Agent Capabilities Across Diverse Domains (2025.findings-naacl)
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Guoli Yin, Haoping Bai, Shuang Ma, Feng Nan, Yanchao Sun, Zhaoyang Xu, Shen Ma, Jiarui Lu, Xiang Kong, Aonan Zhang, Dian Ang Yap, Yizhe Zhang, Karsten Ahnert, Vik Kamath, Mathias Berglund, Dominic Walsh, Tobias Gindele, Juergen Wiest, Zhengfeng Lai, Xiaoming Simon Wang, Jiulong Shan, Meng Cao, Ruoming Pang, Zirui Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on specific application scenarios, emphasizing task completion but failing to dissect the underlying skills that drive these outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a Massive Multitask Agent Understanding benchmark that evaluates LLMs across five domains and offline tasks. |
| Outcome: | The Massive Multitask Agent Understanding (MMAU) benchmark evaluates models across five domains including Tool-use, Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) QA, Data Science and Machine Learning coding, Contest-level programming and Mathematics. |
KM-BART: Knowledge Enhanced Multimodal BART for Visual Commonsense Generation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for visual and language understanding are not capable of multimodal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model capable of reasoning about commonsense knowledge from multimodal inputs of images and texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs state-of-the-art on the Visual Commonsense Generation task. |
On the Robustness of Document-Level Relation Extraction Models to Entity Name Variations (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing DocRE models which perform well may make more mistakes when merely changing the entity names in the document, hindering the generalization to novel entity names. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline to generate entity-renamed documents by replacing the original entity names with names from Wikidata. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline generates entity-renamed documents by replacing the original entity names with names from Wikidata. |
Interleaved Tool-Call Reasoning for Protein Function Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have highlighted the effectiveness of chain-of-thought reasoning in symbolic domains such as mathematics and programming. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-augmented protein reasoning agent that unifies problem decomposition, tool invocation, and grounded answer generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed protein function understanding agent outperforms text-only reasoning models with an average performance improvement of 103%. |
RAPL: A Relation-Aware Prototype Learning Approach for Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify semantic relations between entities are time-consuming and labor-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a relation-aware prototype learning method for document-level relation extraction (FSDLRE) they propose RAPL, which judiciously leverages relation descriptions and real NOTA instances as guidance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by 2.61% F1 . it generates task-specific NOTA prototypes and refines relation prototypes . |
CH-SIMS: A Chinese Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Dataset with Fine-grained Annotation of Modality (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies in multimodal sentiment analysis only use unified multimodal annotations, which do not reflect the independent sentiment of single modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese single- and multi-modal sentiment analysis dataset with multimodal and independent unimodal annotations that can be used to study the interaction between modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art performance and learn more distinctive unimodal representations. |
A Law Reasoning Benchmark for LLM with Tree-Organized Structures including Factum Probandum, Evidence and Experiences (2025.findings-acl)
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Jiaxin Shen, Jinan Xu, Huiqi Hu, Luyi Lin, Guoyang Ma, Fei Zheng, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Wenjuan Han
| Challenge: | a recent study focuses on generating impartial and interpretable judicial judgments based on established criminal fact. |
| Approach: | They propose a law reasoning schema enriched with hierarchical factum probandum, evidence, and implicit experience that enables public scrutiny and preventing bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed schema enables public scrutiny and prevents bias in the "Intelligent Court" it employs a suite of legal analysis tools to address the challenge task. |
BrowseComp-Plus: A Fair and Disentangled Evaluation Benchmark for Deep Search Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Zijian Chen, Xueguang Ma, Shengyao Zhuang, Ping Nie, Kai Zou, Sahel Sharifymoghaddam, Andrew Liu, Joshua Green, Kshama Patel, Ruoxi Meng, Mingyi Su, Yanxi Li, Haoran Hong, Xinyu Shi, Xuye Liu, Hosna Oyarhoseini, Nandan Thakur, Crystina Zhang, Luyu Gao, Wenhu Chen, Jimmy Lin
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for deep search agents rely on blackbox web search APIs . dynamic and opaque web APIs hinder reproducibility and fair comparisons - authors . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that employs a fixed corpus for controlled retrieval for deep search agents. |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark shows that agents that combine large language models with retrieval tools excel at complex, reasoning-intensive queries. |
Evaluating the Expressive Appropriateness of Speech in Rich Contexts (2026.acl-long)
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Tianrui Wang, Ziyang Ma, Yizhou Peng, Haoyu Wang, Zhikang Niu, Zikang Huang, Yihao Wu, Yi-Wen Chao, Yu Jiang, Yuheng Lu, Guanrou Yang, Xuanchen Li, Hexin Liu, Chunyu Qiang, Cheng Gong, Yifan Yang, Tianchi Liu, Junyu Wang, Nana Hou, Meng Ge, Fuming You, Yang Wei, Zhongqian Sun, Hu Haifeng, Xiaobao Wang, Eng Siong Chng, Xie Chen, Longbiao Wang, Jianwu Dang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating expressive speech focus on word accuracy, naturalness, signal quality, or emotional intensity at the utterance level. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Evaluating Expressive Appropriateness in speech that assesses whether a speech sample aligns with the underlying communicative intent implied by its discourse-level narrative context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing speech evaluation and analysis systems on a human-annotated test set. |
Enhancing Distantly Supervised Named Entity Recognition with Strong Label Guided Lottery Training (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) requires a limited quantity of strongly labeled data . weakly labeles can be acquired through distant supervision, but can cause noise . |
| Approach: | They propose a noise-robust learning framework where safe parameters can be identified . they conduct extensive experiments on multiple datasets and show it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on weakly labeled data. |
ARCQuant: Boosting NVFP4 Quantization with Augmented Residual Channels for LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | NVFP4 supports fine-grained block isolation, 4-bit quantization errors and mixed-precision approaches . ARCQuant boosts NVFO4 performance via Augmented Residual Channels . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that boosts NVFP4 performance via Augmented Residual Channels. |
| Outcome: | ARCQuant boosts NVFP4 performance via Augmented Residual Channels . the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art accuracy comparable to full-precision baselines compared to FP16 . |