Papers by Tengfei Ma
CP-BCS: Binary Code Summarization Guided by Control Flow Graph and Pseudo Code (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current work on understanding assembly code is oriented towards generating function names, which involve numerous abbreviations that make them confusing. |
| Approach: | They propose a control flow graph and pseudo code guided binary code summarization framework to learn the comprehensive binary function execution behavior and logic semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the efficiency of reverse engineering on 3 different binary optimization levels for 3 different computer architectures. |
NBDESCRIB: A Dataset for Text Description Generation from Tables and Code in Jupyter Notebooks with Guidelines (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Jupyter Notebooks focus on generating cell-level descriptions from code snippets or table outputs independently. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to generate personalized cell-level descriptions using code, tables, and user-written guidelines in Jupyter Notebooks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task combines code, tables, and user-written guidelines with personalized descriptions to evaluate the performance of existing models. |
HypEHR: Hyperbolic Modeling of Electronic Health Records for Efficient Question Answering (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that LLM-based EHR question answering is costly to deploy and does not leverage hierarchical structure of clinical data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Lorentzian model that embeds codes, visits, and questions in hyperbolic space and answers queries via geometry-consistent cross-attention with type-specific pointer heads. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model embeds codes, visits, and questions in hyperbolic space and answers queries via geometry-consistent cross-attention with type-specific pointer heads. |
Pre-Training BERT on Domain Resources for Short Answer Grading (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained contextualized representations have achieved state-of-the-art results on multiple downstream NLP tasks by fine-tuning with task-specific data. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment domain-specific data by using labeled short answering grading data for further enhancement of the pre-trained language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be enhanced by augmenting data from domain-specific resources like textbooks and labeled short answering grading data. |
Tram: A Token-level Retrieval-augmented Mechanism for Source Code Summarization (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate source code summaries are coarse-grained and noise-filled . however, they do not capture contextual code semantics and are often outdated in continuous software iteration. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained Token-level retrieval-augmented mechanism on the decoder side to enhance performance of neural models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces more low-frequency tokens and is interpretable. |
Timeline Summarization based on Event Graph Compression via Time-Aware Optimal Transport (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for timeline summarization ignore the events’ intra-structures and inter-structure connections. |
| Approach: | They propose to represent news articles as an event-graph, thus compressing the whole graph to its salient sub-graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves on the state-of-the-art on three real-world datasets, including two public benchmarks and a Timeline100 dataset. |
Constructing contrastive samples via summarization for text classification with limited annotations (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Various contrastive learning methods have been developed and lead to state-of-the-art performance in many computer vision tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to construct efficient contrastive samples using text summarization to gain better representations of text classification tasks with limited annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework gains better representations on text classification tasks with limited annotations and is compared with existing methods on real-world text classification datasets. |
From Knowledge to Treatment: Large Language Model Assisted Biomedical Concept Representation for Drug Repurposing (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for drug repurposing ignore common-sense biomedical concept knowledge in real-world labs, such as mechanistic priors indicating that certain drugs are fundamentally incompatible with specific treatments. |
| Approach: | They propose a Large Language Model-assisted framework for Drug Repurposing which improves the representation of biomedical concepts within KGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the representation of biomedical concepts within KGs by extracting treatment-related textual representations of biomedic entities from large language models and fine-tuning knowledge graph embedding models. |
Unsupervised Reference-Free Summary Quality Evaluation via Contrastive Learning (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document summarization consider the informativeness of the assessed summary and require human-generated references for each test summary. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate summary qualities without reference summaries by unsupervised contrastive learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other evaluation metrics even without reference summaries. |
A Study of the Attention Abnormality in Trojaned BERTs (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | In computer vision, the trigger can be a fixed pattern overlaid on the images or videos. |
| Approach: | They propose an attention-based Trojan detector to distinguish Trojaned models from clean ones by observing the attention focus drifting behavior of Trojanes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed detector is based on transformer’s attention and can distinguish Trojan models from clean ones. |
Graph Enhanced Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Generation (D19-53)
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| Challenge: | Existing deep learning approaches for semantic parsing do not generalize to unseen data sets . existing benchmarks have shown text-to-SQL parsers do not generally perform well to unsen SQL queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a new cross-domain learning scheme to perform text-to-SQL translation . they demonstrate its use on a large-scale cross- domain text- to-Sql data set Spider . |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning scheme improves on a large-scale text-to-SQL data set. |
FAC2E: Better Understanding Large Language Model Capabilities by Dissociating Language and Cognition (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are evaluated by overall performance on various text understanding and generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Fine-grAined and Cognition-grounded LLMs’ Capability Evaluation that dissociates the language-related capabilities from cognition-related ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework dissociates the language-related capabilities from cognition-related ones and breaks down the process of applying a specific capability into three sub-steps: recalling relevant knowledge, utilizing knowledge, and solving problems. |
Knowledge Graph Compression Enhances Diverse Commonsense Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models use commonsense knowledge graphs to extract subgraphs of relevant knowledge pertaining to concepts in the input but due to the large coverage and vast scale of ConceptNet, the extracted subgraph may contain loosely related, redundant and irrelevant information. |
| Approach: | They propose to apply a differentiable graph compression algorithm to extract subgraphs of relevant knowledge from input sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves better quality-diversity tradeoff than a large language model with 100 times the number of parameters. |
CAML: A Conflict-Aware Molecular Language Model Merging Framework for Multi-Constraint Molecular Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Xuanbai Ren, Luoda Tan, Pei Liu, Tengfei Ma, Xiangzheng Fu, Longyue Wang, Yiping Liu, Xiangxiang Zeng
| Challenge: | Existing paradigms struggle with this challenge due to catastrophic forgetting or gradient conflicts. |
| Approach: | They propose a conflict-aware molecular language model merging framework that generates multiple constraints moleculaire as a cooperative game among property-specific fine-tune models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates multiple constraints molecular as a cooperative game among property-specific fine-tune models (expert models) it minimizes conflicts among properties by exploring the optimal combination of the importance of the task parameter and relative fusion weights of each expert (fusion coefficient). |