Papers by Yi Ma
Symbol tuning improves in-context learning in language models (2023.emnlp-main)
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Jerry Wei, Le Hou, Andrew Lampinen, Xiangning Chen, Da Huang, Yi Tay, Xinyun Chen, Yifeng Lu, Denny Zhou, Tengyu Ma, Quoc Le
| Challenge: | Language models are sensitive to the way that prompts are given, indicating that they are not reasoning in a robust manner. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine tune language models on in-context input-label pairs where natural language labels are replaced with arbitrary symbols. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is much stronger at reasoning tasks and more robust to underspecified prompts than the standard model. |
MS2SL: Multimodal Spoken Data-Driven Continuous Sign Language Production (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions for sign language production are limited due to phonological differences and data scarcity. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework for continuous sign language production that generates sign predictions step by step from text or speech embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitive performance on how2sign and PHOENIX14T datasets. |
TextMixer: Mixing Multiple Inputs for Privacy-Preserving Inference (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are often deployed as cloud services, enabling users to upload textual data and perform inference remotely. |
| Approach: | They propose a privacy-preserving inference framework called MixPi which aims to obfuscate a user's private input by mixing it with multiple other inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses existing privacy-preserving methods on token and sentence classification tasks. |
Reasoning with Language Model is Planning with World Model (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities, particularly with Chain-of-Thought-style prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that repurposes the LLM as both a world model and a reasoning agent and incorporates a principled planning algorithm (based on Monte Carlo Tree Search) |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework repurposes the LLM as both a world model and a reasoning agent and incorporates a principled planning algorithm (based on Monte Carlo Tree Search) it achieves optimum balance between exploration and exploitation, while achieving high-reward reasoning paths efficiently. |
PFDial: A Structured Dialogue Instruction Fine-tuning Method Based on UML Flowcharts (2025.findings-acl)
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Ming Zhang, Yuhui Wang, Yujiong Shen, Tingyi Yang, Changhao Jiang, Yilong Wu, Shihan Dou, Qinhao Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Zhihao Zhang, Yi Dong, Zhen Wang, Zhihui Fei, Mingyang Wan, Tao Liang, Guojun Ma, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in dialogue and reasoning, but they struggle to solve strictly constrained dialogue tasks. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset that contains 12,705 high-quality Chinese dialogue instructions from 440 flowcharts containing 5,055 process nodes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-4o models on backward transitions and outperformed GPT-42 models on the same dataset. |
[MASK] Insertion: a robust method for anti-adversarial attacks (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on adversarial defenses against pretrained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial defensing algorithm that inserts tokens into input sequences . they show an improvement in accuracy between 3.2 and 11.1 absolute points . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves model accuracy on clean and polluted inputs compared with state-of-the-art models . |
ThinkLinker: From Low-Rank Interaction to Knowledge-Aware Verification for Multimodal Entity Linking (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal entity linking rely on textual context for disambiguation . textual contextual information alone fails to resolve ambiguity, leading to unreliable disambiguations in weak contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage multimodal entity linking framework called ThinkLinker . they propose fusion mechanism to model joint dependencies among features . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on public benchmark datasets. |
PizzaPal: Conversational Pizza Ordering using a High-Density Conversational AI Platform (D18-2)
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| Challenge: | a pizza ordering bot that can be used to order pizzas is described in this paper. |
| Approach: | They describe PizzaPal, a voice-only agent for ordering pizza, and the Conversational AI architecture built at b4.ai. |
| Outcome: | The pizza ordering bot is based on a dialog framework developed by b4.ai . |
M-ABSA: A Multilingual Dataset for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (2025.emnlp-main)
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ChengYan Wu, Bolei Ma, Yihong Liu, Zheyu Zhang, Ningyuan Deng, Yanshu Li, Baolan Chen, Yi Zhang, Yun Xue, Barbara Plank
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on English-centric aspects of sentiment analysis, limiting scope for multilingual evaluation and research. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multilingual dataset to analyze aspects with associated sentiment elements in text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the most extensive multilingual parallel dataset for ABSA to date. |
Mixture of Heterogeneous Grouped Experts for Language Modeling (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) based on Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) enforce uniform expert sizes, creating a rigidity that fails to align computational costs with varying token-level complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixture of heterogeneous grouped experts (MoHGE) that allows for flexible, resource-aware expert combinations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model matches the performance of existing Mixture-of-Experts architectures while maintaining balanced GPU utilization. |
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. |
Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Continual Few-Shot Relation Extractors (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn new relations with limited labeled data are prone to catastrophic forgetting and overfitting. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses prompts to acquire more generalized knowledge . they propose CFRE to continuously learn new relations while retaining knowledge of old ones . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin and significantly mitigates catastrophic forgetting and overfitting in low-resource scenarios. |
Too Good to be Bad: On the Failure of LLMs to Role-Play Villains (2026.findings-acl)
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Zihao Yi, Qingxuan Jiang, Ruotian Ma, Xingyu Chen, Qu Yang, Mengru Wang, Fanghua Ye, Ying Shen, Zhaopeng Tu, Xiaolong Li, Liefeng Bo
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly tasked with creative generation, but their ability to portray non-prosocial, antagonistic personas remains largely unexamined. |
| Approach: | They propose a moral alignment benchmark to test the safety of large language models . they find that models struggle with traits directly antithetical to safety principles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fails to accurately portray morally ambiguous or villainous characters . the model fails most with traits directly antithetical to safety principles . |
WebAggregator: Enhancing Compositional Reasoning Capabilities of Deep Research Agent Foundation Models (2026.acl-long)
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Rui Wang, Ce Zhang, Jun-Yu Ma, Jianshu Zhang, Hongru Wang, Yi Chen, Boyang Xue, Tianqing Fang, Zhisong Zhang, Hongming Zhang, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing agentic systems are retrieval-heavy but reasoning-light . current systems lack compositional reasoning, a key component of deep research . |
| Approach: | They propose a data synthesis pipeline WebAggregator to shift agentic paradigm . they use Proactive Explorer to collect interconnected knowledge and Compositional Logic Proposer to weave knowledge into complex questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline surpasses GPT-4.1 and matches Claude-3.7-Sonnet on GAIA, WebWalkerQA, and XBench. |
HiTRANS: A Hierarchical Transformer Network for Nested Named Entity Recognition (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies for named entity recognition focus on flat NER, i.e., without nested entities, by sequence labeling methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical Transformer network which decomposes the input sentence into multi-grained spans and enhances the representation learning in a hierarchical manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves much better performance than the state-of-the-art approaches on GENIA, ACE-2004, ace-2005 and NNE datasets. |
Meta-Reinforced Multi-Domain State Generator for Dialogue Systems (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train a multi-domain dialogue state tracker are lacking in accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a Meta-Reinforced Multi-Domain State Generator to train a DST meta-learning model with a few domains as source domains and a new domain as target domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms the traditional training approach with extremely little training data in target domain. |
A Coarse-to-fine Cascaded Evidence-Distillation Neural Network for Explainable Fake News Detection (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fake news detection focus on fact-checked reports, resulting in limited coverage and debunking delays. |
| Approach: | They propose a Coarse-to-fine Cascaded Evidence-Distillation neural network for explainable fake news detection based on raw reports . they use hierarchical encoders and cascaded selectors to select most explainable sentences for verdicts on top of selected top-K reports based upon raw reports. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline detection methods and generates high-quality explanations from diverse evaluation perspectives. |
COVID-19 Literature Knowledge Graph Construction and Drug Repurposing Report Generation (2021.naacl-demos)
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Qingyun Wang, Manling Li, Xuan Wang, Nikolaus Parulian, Guangxing Han, Jiawei Ma, Jingxuan Tu, Ying Lin, Ranran Haoran Zhang, Weili Liu, Aabhas Chauhan, Yingjun Guan, Bangzheng Li, Ruisong Li, Xiangchen Song, Yi Fung, Heng Ji, Jiawei Han, Shih-Fu Chang, James Pustejovsky, Jasmine Rah, David Liem, Ahmed ELsayed, Martha Palmer, Clare Voss, Cynthia Schneider, Boyan Onyshkevych
| Challenge: | a new framework to digest relevant biomedical knowledge is needed to combat COVID-19 . quantity of research results is a bottleneck, and false information promoted in publications . |
| Approach: | a team of researchers has developed a framework to extract multimedia knowledge elements from scientific literature to combat COVID-19. |
| Outcome: | a new framework extracts fine-grained multimedia knowledge elements from scientific literature . it provides detailed contextual sentences, subfigures, and knowledge subgraphs as evidence . the framework is based on a case study of drug repurposing . |
Natural-Language Policies to Executable Decisions: An Interpretable Large Language Model Framework (2026.acl-industry)
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Ziqiang Zhang, Jing Ma, Zilong Wang, Jiayuan Chen, Yi Qiao, Yu He, Wei Zhang, Dai Cheng, Xiaoyu Shen
| Challenge: | a production-grade pricing system for tourism is challenging due to unstructured nature of travel orders and ever-evolving pricing policies. |
| Approach: | They propose a production-grade pricing system with a strict decision boundary . they propose to combine structured extraction and bounded policy/path selection with interpretable condition trees . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system processed 3,960 orders in six months and reduced the order management team from 15-20 to 3 . the system reduced the per-order handling time from 10 minutes to 2 minutes. |
R3: End-to-End Reasoning-based Planning for Multi-step Retrosynthesis via Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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YiFei Wang, Qizhi Pei, Jiangtao Feng, Yuntian Shi, Yi Duan, Lihao Wang, Lei Bai, Lijun Wu, Wei-Ying Ma, Hao Zhou
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that R3 is a superior alternative to traditional search algorithms for multistep retrosynthesis planning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates multistep retrosynthetic planning as a generative reasoning task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art Top-1 accuracy of 43.7% on retrobench . it leverages Large Language Models to reformulate multistep retrosynthesis as a generative reasoning task. |
ChatMusician: Understanding and Generating Music Intrinsically with LLM (2024.findings-acl)
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Ruibin Yuan, Hanfeng Lin, Yi Wang, Zeyue Tian, Shangda Wu, Tianhao Shen, Ge Zhang, Yuhang Wu, Cong Liu, Ziya Zhou, Liumeng Xue, Ziyang Ma, Qin Liu, Tianyu Zheng, Yizhi Li, Yinghao Ma, Yiming Liang, Xiaowei Chi, Ruibo Liu, Zili Wang, Chenghua Lin, Qifeng Liu, Tao Jiang, Wenhao Huang, Wenhu Chen, Jie Fu, Emmanouil Benetos, Gus Xia, Roger Dannenberg, Wei Xue, Shiyin Kang, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Despite LLMs' impressive capabilities in musical knowledge, music reasoning remains an unsolved task. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source large language model (LLM) that integrates intrinsic musical abilities into LLaMA2 and GPT-3.5. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can understand and generate music with a pure text tokenizer without external multi-modal neural structures or tokenizers. |
Towards Low-Resource Semi-Supervised Dialogue Generation with Meta-Learning (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that use labelled data to generate dialogues are lacking in high accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning based semi-supervised explicit dialogue state tracker for neural dialogue generation, denoted as MEDST. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing systems by 18.7% goal accuracy and 14.3% entity match rate on the KVRET corpus with 2% labelled data in semi-supervision. |
Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrievers (2022.emnlp-main)
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Jianmo Ni, Chen Qu, Jing Lu, Zhuyun Dai, Gustavo Hernandez Abrego, Ji Ma, Vincent Zhao, Yi Luan, Keith Hall, Ming-Wei Chang, Yinfei Yang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that dual encoders outperform sparse and dense retrievers on the BEIR dataset significantly. |
| Approach: | They challenge belief that bottleneck layer is too limited for out-of-domain generalization . they scale up the model while keeping bottleneck as a single dot-product with a fixed size . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms sparse and dense retrievers on the BEIR dataset significantly. |
CLIO: Role-interactive Multi-event Head Attention Network for Document-level Event Extraction (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-level event extraction struggle due to two intrinsic challenges: nested arguments and multiple events. |
| Approach: | They propose a role-interactive multi-event head attention network to solve two challenges . they map different events to multiple subspaces and then determine whether the current event exists . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two widely used DEE datasets on the Internet. |
UniCorn: Towards Self-Improving Unified Multimodal Models through Self-Generated Supervision (2026.acl-long)
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Zhen Fang, Ruiyan Han, XinYu Sun, Yuchen Ma, Ziheng Wang, Yu Zeng, Zehui Chen, Lin Chen, Wenxuan Huang, Wei-Jie Xu, Yi Cao, Feng Zhao
| Challenge: | Unified Multimodal Models have achieved remarkable success in cross-modal comprehension, but a gap persists in their ability to translate internal knowledge into faithful and controllable synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-improvement framework that partitions a single UMM into three collaborative roles: Proposer, Solver, and Judge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on TIIF, DPG, CompBench and UniCycle benchmarks. |
Domain-Specific Data Generation Framework for RAG Adaptation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) combines the language understanding and reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) with external retrieval to produce domain-grounded responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable and modular data-centric framework for generating domain-grounded question–answer–context triples tailored to diverse RAG adaptation strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates domain-grounded question–answer–context triples for multiple RAG adaptation strategies. |
PILE: Pairwise Iterative Logits Ensemble for Multi-Teacher Labeled Distillation (2022.emnlp-industry)
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Lianshang Cai, Linhao Zhang, Dehong Ma, Jun Fan, Daiting Shi, Yi Wu, Zhicong Cheng, Simiu Gu, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have been a key part of ranking systems . knowledge distillation is widely used to maintain high performance while keeping efficient computations. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm to combine knowledge from multi-teachers and label information to achieve competitive performance in offline and online experiments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has been deployed in a real-world commercial search system. |
Stratagem: Learning Transferable Reasoning via Trajectory-Modulated Game Self-Play (2026.acl-long)
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Xiachong Feng, Deyi Yin, Xiaocheng Feng, Yi Jiang, Libo Qin, Yangfan Ye, Lei Huang, Weitao Ma, Qiming Li, Yuxuan Gu, Bing Qin, Lingpeng Kong
| Challenge: | Existing self-play approaches to developing general reasoning in language models rely on terminal game outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a game-based reasoning transfer model that addresses two barriers to reasoning transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves mathematical reasoning, general reasoning, and code generation benchmarks. |
Making Harmful Behaviors Unlearnable for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are often customized by fine-tuning for the requirements of different domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a controllable training framework to make undesired behaviors unlearnable during the fine-tuning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework makes undesired behaviors unlearnable during the fine-tuning process while preserving the ability to learn other information. |
SLIM: Subtrajectory-Level Elimination for More Effective Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xifeng Yao, Chengyuan Ma, Dongyu Lang, Yinhao Ni, Zhiwei Xu, Huarui Xie, Zihao Chen, Guang Shen, Dandan Tu, Yi Bai, Changzheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Notable examples include OpenAI’s o1/o3/o4 series and DeepSeek-R1 . |
| Approach: | They develop a framework to identify suboptimal subtrajectories based on human-established criteria . they also use a sampling algorithm to select data whose reasoning process is free from suboptimally subtravertories to the highest degree . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the number of suboptimal subtrajectories by 25.9% during the inference process. |
Does Higher Order LSTM Have Better Accuracy for Segmenting and Labeling Sequence Data? (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural models take long distance dependencies into account when predicting the tag of the current token. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to capture long distance tag dependencies and use them for dependency analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict multiple tags for the current token without taking dependencies between tags into account. |
GraphICL: Unlocking Graph Learning Potential in LLMs through Structured Prompt Design (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) are a powerful tool for understanding complex systems and relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate large language models for graph-structured data using prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms state-of-the-art graph LLMs and graph neural networks on graph learning tasks without training. |
SAVOIR: Learning Social Savoir-Faire via Shapley-based Reward Attribution (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiachong Feng, Yi Jiang, Xiaocheng Feng, Deyi Yin, Libo Qin, Yangfan Ye, Lei Huang, Weitao Ma, Yuxuan Gu, Chonghan Qin, Bing Qin, Lingpeng Kong
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve social intelligence of AI systems employ retrospective attributions and lack theoretical grounding. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses Shapley values to ensure fair credit distribution with axiomatic guarantees of efficiency, symmetry, and marginality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches or exceeds proprietary models including GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. |
ED2LM: Encoder-Decoder to Language Model for Faster Document Re-ranking Inference (2022.findings-acl)
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Kai Hui, Honglei Zhuang, Tao Chen, Zhen Qin, Jing Lu, Dara Bahri, Ji Ma, Jai Gupta, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos, Yi Tay, Donald Metzler
| Challenge: | State-of-the-art neural models typically encode document-query pairs using cross-attention for re-ranking. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine tune a pretrained encoder-decoder model using document to query generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable results to more expensive approaches while being 6.8X faster. |
TextObfuscator: Making Pre-trained Language Model a Privacy Protector via Obfuscating Word Representations (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing inference services are plagued by privacy concerns, such as sharing sensitive data with service providers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for protecting inference privacy by applying random perturbations to clustered representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework protects inference privacy by applying random perturbations to clustered representations. |