Papers by Xueguang Ma
TheoremQA: A Theorem-driven Question Answering Dataset (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent LLMs like GPT-4 and PaLM-2 have made tremendous progress in solving fundamental math problems like GSM8K by achieving over 90% accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use theorem-driven question-answering dataset to evaluate AI models' ability to apply theoretic concepts to solving challenging science problems. |
| Outcome: | TheoremQA is curated by domain experts and contains 800 high-quality questions covering 350 theoremics from Math, Physics, EE&CS, and Finance. |
VISA: Retrieval Augmented Generation with Visual Source Attribution (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to retrieval-augmented generation primarily link generated content to document-level references, making it difficult for users to locate evidence among multiple content-rich retrieved documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that combines answer generation with visual source attribution by leveraging large vision-language models to identify evidence and highlight exact regions that support the generated answers with bounding boxes in the retrieved document screenshots. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach identifies evidence and highlights exact regions that support the generated answers with bounding boxes in the retrieved document screenshots. |
Found in the Middle: Permutation Self-Consistency Improves Listwise Ranking in Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit positional bias in how they use context, which affects listwise ranking. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to marginalize out different list orders in the prompt to produce an order-independent ranking with less positional bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on five datasets in sorting and passage reranking by 34-52% . it marginalizes out different list orders in the prompt to produce an order-independent ranking . |
PromptReps: Prompting Large Language Models to Generate Dense and Sparse Representations for Zero-Shot Document Retrieval (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) excel in zero-shot document ranking tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based re-ranking method that requires no further training but is only feasible for reranking a handful of candidates due to computational costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can retrieve documents from the entire corpus without training and with a large amount of paired text data. |
Unifying Multimodal Retrieval via Document Screenshot Embedding (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing document retrieval pipelines require document parsing and content extraction to prepare input for indexing. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval paradigm that regards document screenshots as a unified input format . they leverage a large vision-language model to directly encode document screenshot into dense representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing retrieval pipelines in a text-intensive context. |
Augmenting Black-box LLMs with Medical Textbooks for Biomedical Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have demonstrated impressive abilities in generating responses based on human instructions. however, their use in the medical domain can be challenging due to their lack of specific, in-depth knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that integrates authoritative medical textbooks into LLMs’ framework using plug-and-play modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms the specialized Med-PaLM 2 model on three medical QA tasks by 11.6% to 16.6%. |
Precise Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval without Relevance Labels (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing dense retrieval systems that use semantic embedding similarities can be effective across tasks and languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to pivot through Hypothetical Document Embeddings (HyDE) given a query, HyDE first zero-shot prompts an instruction-following language model to generate a hypothetical document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised dense retriever Contriever and shows strong performance comparable to fine-tuned retrievers across tasks and languages. |
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. |
Few-shot In-context Learning on Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | KB-BINDER enables few-shot in-context learning over knowledge base questions . KBQA is a difficult problem due to the heterogeneity of knowledge bases . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables few-shot in-context learning over KBQA tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can outperform state-of-the-art models on GraphQA and MetaQA datasets. |
DRAMA: Diverse Augmentation from Large Language Models to Smaller Dense Retrievers (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong effectiveness and robustness when fine-tuned as dense retrievers. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that leverages pruned LLMs to train smaller generalizable dense retrievers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training framework offers better multilingual and long-context capabilities than traditional encoder-based retrievers and achieves strong performance across multiple tasks and languages. |
Simple and Effective Unsupervised Redundancy Elimination to Compress Dense Vectors for Passage Retrieval (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Dense passage retrieval improves ranking accuracy in open-domain question answering but at the cost of large space and memory requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple unsupervised pipeline that includes principal component analysis (PCA), product quantization, and hybrid search to improve space efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline achieves good accuracy–space trade-offs, for example, 48 compression with less than 3% drop in top-100 retrieval accuracy on average or 96 compression without drop in space requirements. |
Hard Negatives, Hard Lessons: Revisiting Training Data Quality for Robust Information Retrieval with LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Using LLMs to identify false negatives improves retrieval and reranker models by 0.7-1.4 points on BEIR and by 1.7-1.8 points on AIR-Bench evaluation. |
| Approach: | They use a simple, cost-effective approach to identify and relabel false negatives in training datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves retrieval models by 0.7-1.4 points on BEIR and by 1.7-1.8 points on AIR-Bench evaluation. |