Papers by Tianyi Ma
Meta-rater: A Multi-dimensional Data Selection Method for Pre-training Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Xinlin Zhuang, Jiahui Peng, Ren Ma, Yinfan Wang, Tianyi Bai, Xingjian Wei, Qiu Jiantao, Chi Zhang, Ying Qian, Conghui He
| Challenge: | composition of pre-training datasets for large language models remains undisclosed . current methods for evaluating data quality are limited by single-dimensional evaluation or redundancy-focused strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional data selection method that integrates dimensions with existing quality metrics through learned optimal weightings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method doubles convergence speed for 1.3B model models and improves downstream task performance by 3.23%. |
Neo-Classic: A Benchmark for Evaluating Linguistic-Aesthetic Reasoning in Classical Chinese Poetry (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve high accuracy on established Classical Chinese Poetry benchmarks, but it remains challenging to distinguish transferable Linguistic-Aesthetic Reasoning from reliance on familiar pre-training patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that combines a constructionist Out-of-Sample dataset with reverse understanding probes to evaluate large-scale large-format models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on classical Chinese poetry benchmarks, but a performance gap persists . the model can complete famous couplets and can be used to understand a variety of texts. |
PsyScam: A Benchmark for Psychological Techniques in Real-World Scams (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | PTs are employed by scammers to manipulate victims and cause lasting psychological trauma. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to capture the PTs employed in real-worldscam reports and investigate how LLMs can be utilized to generate variants of scams based on the pts and the contexts provided by thesescams. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate variants of scams based on the PTs employed in real-world scam reports and the contexts provided by these scams. |
Vision-and-Language Navigation with Analogical Textual Descriptions in LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing zero-shot LLM-based Vision-and-Language Navigation agents either encode images as textual scene descriptions, potentially oversimplifying visual details, or process raw image inputs, which can fail to capture abstract semantics required for high-level reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate large language models into embodied AI models by incorporating textual descriptions that facilitate analogical reasoning across images from multiple perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the agent’s contextual understanding on the R2R dataset, showing that it can make better decisions based on the LLMs. |
AgentRouter: A Knowledge-Graph-Guided LLM Router for Collaborative Multi-Agent Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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Zheyuan Zhang, Kaiwen Shi, Zhengqing Yuan, Zehong Wang, Tianyi Ma, Keerthiram Murugesan, Vincent Galassi, Chuxu Zhang, Yanfang Ye
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to agent routing emphasize cost efficiency while overlooking the fine-grained contextual and relational structure inherent in QA tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that formulates multi-agent QA as a knowledge-graph-guided routing problem supervised by empirical performance signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms single-agent and ensemble baselines while generalizing across benchmarks and LLM backbones. |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
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Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
NGQA: A Nutritional Graph Question Answering Benchmark for Personalized Health-aware Nutritional Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Zheyuan Zhang, Yiyang Li, Nhi Ha Lan Le, Zehong Wang, Tianyi Ma, Vincent Galassi, Keerthiram Murugesan, Nuno Moniz, Werner Geyer, Nitesh V Chawla, Chuxu Zhang, Yanfang Ye
| Challenge: | Diet plays a critical role in human health, but tailoring dietary reasoning to individual health conditions remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | a new benchmark evaluates dietary reasoning using a national health survey data set. |
| Outcome: | The NGQA benchmark evaluates dietary reasoning across three tasks using a set of question complexity settings and baseline models. |
Diagnosing Hidden Instabilities in Model Editing via Uncertainty Quantification (2026.acl-long)
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Zihan Gu, TianYi Zhang, Xinyan Zhang, Zhiyuan Wang, Han Zhang, Yuhao Wei, Jiacheng Lu, Tianyi Ma, Xingsheng Zhang, Hua Zhang, Yue Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to update large language models (LLMs) without expensive retraining are fragile under single-edit evaluation protocols. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that characterizes activation-based editing as a constrained intervention on intermediate representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reveals local knowledge conflicts invisible to existing benchmarks. |
LLM-Empowered Class Imbalanced Graph Prompt Learning for Online Drug Trafficking Detection (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to combat illicit drug trafficking are impractical due to the scarcity of labeled samples and imbalance of classes. |
| Approach: | They propose a Large Language Model-empowered Heterogeneous Graph Prompt Learning framework for illicit drug trafficking detection that leverages LLM to facilitate heterogeneous graph neural networks to effectively identify minority classes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is able to identify minority classes in class-imbalanced scenarios. |
Breaking Down and Building Up: Mixture of Skill-Based Vision-and-Language Navigation Agents (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a subfield of embodied AI that integrates natural language understanding, visual perception, and sequential decision-making to allow autonomous agents to navigate and interact within visual environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular framework that introduces structured, skill-based reasoning into Transformer-based VLN agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes navigation into atomic skills handled by a specialized agent. |
Can LLMs Convert Graphs to Text-Attributed Graphs? (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to model graph-structured data are limited by the availability of text-attributed graph data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to convert existing graphs into text-attributed graphs using large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing approaches that manually design node features on text-free graphs. |
TheraAgent: Self-Improving Therapeutic Agent for Precise and Comprehensive Treatment Planning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models rely on one-shot output without explicit verification, resulting in rough, incomplete, and potentially unsafe treatment plans. |
| Approach: | They propose an agentic framework that replaces one-shot generation with an iterative generate-judge-refine pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results on HealthBench, leading in Accuracy and Completeness. |
RASPberry: Retrieval-Augmented Monte Carlo Tree Self-Play with Reasoning Consistency for Multi-Hop Question Answering (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating and analyzing multiple document knowledge are not effective for multi-hop question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a Monte Carlo tree-based approach to inference-time scaling using RASPberry. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better inference-time scaling on smaller LLMs. |
GUITester: Enabling GUI Agents for Exploratory Defect Discovery (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Exploratory GUI testing is essential for software quality but suffers from high manual costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples navigation from verification via two modules . they propose 143 tasks and a GUITestBench benchmark that features 26 defects . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks in 143 tasks and 26 defects. |
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. |