Papers by Qiang Ma
Unified Thinker: A General Reasoning Core for Image Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Sashuai Zhou, Qiang Zhou, Jijin Hu, Hanqing Yang, Yue Cao, Junpeng Ma, Yinchao Ma, Jun Song, Tiezheng Ge, Cheng Yu, Bo Zheng, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | generative models struggle with logic-intensive instruction following, exposing a persistent reasoning–execution gap. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic reasoning architecture for general image generation . they propose pixel-level feedback to ground the Thinker's policy in pixel feedback . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system significantly improves image reasoning and generation quality. |
Exploring Knowledge Filtering for Retrieval-Augmented Discriminative Tasks (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on generative tasks, while its potential in discriminative tasks remains largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates knowledge filtering and prediction fusion mechanisms to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model performance on discriminative tasks by filtering out harmful knowledge and integrating it into the input context. |
PPC-GPT: Federated Task-Specific Compression of Large Language Models via Pruning and Chain-of-Thought Distillation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming more popular and are gaining widespread use in artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework that addresses both privacy preservation and model compression in federated settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework maintains competitive performance comparable to full-sized LLMs while ensuring robust privacy protection through its federated architecture. |
UniSonate: A Unified Model for Speech, Music, and Sound Effect Generation with Text Instructions (2026.acl-long)
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Chunyu Qiang, Xiaopeng Wang, Kang Yin, Yuzhe Liang, Yuxin Guo, Teng Ma, Ziyu Zhang, Tianrui Wang, Cheng Gong, Yushen Chen, Ruibo Fu, Longbiao Wang, Jianwu Dang
| Challenge: | Generative audio modeling has been fragmented into specialized tasks such as text-to-speech (TTS), text- to-music (TTM), and text-ta (TTA) specialized models require reference audio for timbre cloning and strict phoneme alignment, whereas TTA models generate unstructured textures from open-ended captions. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified flow-matching framework capable of synthesizing speech, music, sound effects . they propose 'token injection mechanism' that projects unstructured environmental sounds into structured temporal latent space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in instruction-based TTS and TTM while maintaining competitive fidelity in TTA. |
RankPrompt: Step-by-Step Comparisons Make Language Models Better Reasoners (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions to reasoning tasks require extensive human annotations or fail in scenarios with inconsistent responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method that enables LLMs to self-rank their responses without additional resources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves reasoning performance of ChatGPT and GPT-4 with 13% improvement over existing methods. |
Dual Attention Model for Citation Recommendation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for recommending citations suffer from severe information loss . citation recommender methods do not consider the section of the paper for which the user is writing and for which they need to find a citation . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel embedding-based neural network to recommend citations during manuscript preparation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can recommend citations during manuscript preparation. |
FedCoT: Federated Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a transformative force in artificial intelligence, demonstrating exceptional proficiency across various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a federated framework for the Chain-of-Thought distillation of knowledge from LLMs to SLMs, while adhering to privacy requirements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework ensures secure knowledge transfer from an LLM on a high-powered server to an SLM on resource-constrained client while adhering to privacy requirements. |
EX-FEVER: A Dataset for Multi-hop Explainable Fact Verification (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on fact verification lack a high-quality dataset for explainability . existing systems lack evidence retrieval and veracity prediction, limiting the ability to verify a claim . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for multi-hop explainable fact verification that summarises and modifies Wikipedia documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset aims to improve the accuracy of multi-hop explainable fact verification systems. |
A Black-Box Attack on Code Models via Representation Nearest Neighbor Search (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating adversarial code examples face challenges such as limted availability of substitute variables and the creation of adversarials with noticeable perturbations. |
| Approach: | They propose a search seed based on historical attacks to find adversarial substitutes . they employ a pre-trained variable name encoder to map the search seed to a continuous vector space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline methods in terms of ASR and QT. |
FedMKT: Federated Mutual Knowledge Transfer for Large and Small Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research in large language models (LLMs) has focused on enabling clients to fine-tune their locally deployed homogeneous LLMs collaboratively or on transferring knowledge from server-based LLM to small language models at downstream clients. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient federated mutual knowledge transfer framework for large and small language models that allows for token alignment and selective knowledge transfer between client-side LLMs and a server-side SLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances the performance of both LLMs and SLMs with clients' unique domain insights while preserving the server's LLM and client's unique domain insight. |
FedProxy: Federated Fine-Tuning of LLMs via Proxy SLMs and Heterogeneity-Aware Fusion (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from a performance bottleneck . Existing approaches like Offsite-Tuning (OT) secure the LLMs IP . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that replaces weak adapters with a unified, powerful Proxy Small Language Model (SLM) they propose 'resource-friendly' compression and 'robust optimization' to handle data heterogeneity. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that FedProxy outperforms OT and centralized fine-tuning methods. |
Sample-Efficient Human Evaluation of Large Language Models via Maximum Discrepancy Competition (2025.acl-long)
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Kehua Feng, Keyan Ding, Tan Hongzhi, Kede Ma, Zhihua Wang, Shuangquan Guo, Cheng Yuzhou, Ge Sun, Guozhou Zheng, Qiang Zhang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluation of large language models are inefficient and inefficient due to inaccuracy of standard metrics in human perception of text quality and inefficiency in sampling informative test examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a sample-efficient human evaluation method for large language models based on the principle of MAximum Discrepancy (MAD) competition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the “golden” ranking of LLMs with a minimum set of input instructions, which in turn reveal their relative strengths and weaknesses. |
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. |
CO-EVO: Co-evolving Semantic Anchoring and Style Diversification for Federated DG-ReID (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for person re-identification fail to provide global supervision . stylistic gaps in the model can lead to shortcut learning . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aims to generalize a person's identity across multiple decentralized domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance . it can generalize to unseen target environments without compromising privacy . |
From Completion to Editing: Unlocking Context-Aware Code Infilling via Search-and-Replace Instruction Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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Jiajun Zhang, Zeyu Cui, Jiaxi Yang, Lei Zhang, Yuheng Jing, Zeyao Ma, Tianyi Bai, Zilei Wang, Qiang Liu, Liang Wang, Binyuan Hui, Junyang Lin
| Challenge: | Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) models suffer from performance degradation and prohibitive latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a search-and-replace infilling framework that integrates agentic verification and editing into a single-pass inference process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework harmonizes completion tasks with the instruction-following priors of Chat LLMs, extending the paradigm from static infilling to dynamic context-aware editing. |