Papers by Yong Ma
DisCo_Speech: Controllable Zero-Shot Speech Generation with A Disentangled Speech Codec (2026.acl-long)
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Tao Li, Wenshuo Ge, Zhichao Wang, Zihao Cui, Yong Ma, Yingying Gao, Chao Deng, Shilei Zhang, Junlan Feng
| Challenge: | DisCo-Speech is a zero-shot controllable text-to-speech framework . standard codecs entangle timbre and prosody, which hinders independent control in continuation-based LMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a disentangled speech codec and an LM-based generator to solve this problem . they propose fusion and reconstruction that merges content and prosody into unified tokens . |
| Outcome: | DisCo-Speech achieves competitive voice cloning and superior zero-shot prosody control. |
Towards Real-World Writing Assistance: A Chinese Character Checking Benchmark with Faked and Misspelled Characters (2024.acl-long)
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Yinghui Li, Zishan Xu, Shaoshen Chen, Haojing Huang, Yangning Li, Shirong Ma, Yong Jiang, Zhongli Li, Qingyu Zhou, Hai-Tao Zheng, Ying Shen
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on misspelled characters, ignoring faked characters which are more common and difficult to correct. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese character checking to identify and correct wrong characters in texts by human annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first real-world visual and the largest human-crafted dataset for the Chinese character checking scenario. |
PAEG: Phrase-level Adversarial Example Generation for Neural Machine Translation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for adversarial example generation are word-level or character-level, which ignore the ubiquitous phrase structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a phrase-level adversarial example generation framework to enhance the robustness of the translation model by adopting a sentence-level substitution strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation performance and robustness to noise on three benchmarks. |
Automated Fine-Grained Mixture-of-Experts Quantization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | specialized quantization framework for Mixture of Experts architectures is inadequate for model compression. |
| Approach: | They propose a specialized quantization framework for Mixture of Experts architectures . they find that expert networks exhibit distinctive channel-wise outlier distributions ." |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the Mixtral-8x7b-v0.1 architecture while maintaining minimal computational overhead. |
Too Open for Opinion? Embracing Open-Endedness in Large Language Models for Social Simulation (2026.eacl-long)
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Bolei Ma, Yong Cao, Indira Sen, Anna-Carolina Haensch, Frauke Kreuter, Barbara Plank, Daniel Hershcovich
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate public opinion and other social phenomena. |
| Approach: | They argue that open-endedness is essential for realistic social simulations . they argue that it captures expressiveness and individuality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks can improve measurement and design, support exploration of unanticipated views, and reduce researcher-imposed directive bias. |
Large Language Model Is Not a Good Few-shot Information Extractor, but a Good Reranker for Hard Samples! (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models have made remarkable strides in various tasks, but whether they are competitive few-shot solvers remains an open question. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive filter-then-rerank paradigm to combine the strengths of LLMs and SLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves promising improvements on various IE tasks with acceptable time and cost investment. |
SARA: Salience-Aware Reinforced Adaptive Decoding for Large Language Models in Abstractive Summarization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing decoding strategies neglect the explicit use of salient contextual information and rely on static hyperparameters to fix the balance between contextual and prior knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a salience-aware reinforced adaptive decoding (SARA) which incorporates salient contextual information and allows the model to determine reliance on source document's context, salient context, and model's prior knowledge based on pointwise mutual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the quality and faithfulness of summaries across LLMs without modifying their weights. |
From Conversation to Evaluation: Benchmarking LLMs on Development Knowledge via SimpleDevQA (2026.findings-acl)
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Jing Zhang, Lianghong Guo, Yanlin Wang, Terry Yue Zhuo, Yong Wang, Mingwei Liu, Jiachi Chen, Ensheng Shi, Yuchi Ma, Hongyu Zhang, Zibin Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing Dev Knowledge QA benchmarks are limited in development knowledge scope and often not built from real user queries. |
| Approach: | They conduct preliminary analysis of real user–LLM dialogues from WildChat to investigate the importance of Dev Knowledge QA in AI-assisted software development scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is based on real user–LLM dialogues from WildChat. |
WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing web agents only handle one input modality and are evaluated only in simplified web simulators or static web snapshots, greatly limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a large multimodal model-powered web agent that can complete user instructions end-to-end by interacting with real-world websites. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves 59.1% task success rate, surpassing both GPT-4 and WebVoyager setups. |
Thinking with Map: Reinforced Parallel Map-Augmented Agent for Geolocalization (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuxiang Ji, Yong Wang, Ziyu Ma, Yiming Hu, Hailang Huang, Xuecai Hu, Guanhua Chen, Liaoni Wu, Xiangxiang Chu
| Challenge: | Existing large vision-language model (LVLM) approaches overlook a common strategy used by humans — using maps. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to equip a vision-language model with the ability to think with maps and optimize it using agentic reinforcement learning and parallel test-time scaling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms open- and closed-source models on most metrics. |
SDPO: Segment-Level Direct Preference Optimization for Social Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Aobo Kong, Wentao Ma, Shiwan Zhao, Yongbin Li, Yuchuan Wu, Ke Wang, Xiaoqian Liu, Qicheng Li, Yong Qin, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has proven effective in aligning LLM behavior with human preferences across various tasks, but is limited in multi-turn social interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which dynamically selects key segments within interactions to optimize multi-turn agent behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform existing methods and proprietary LLMs on the SOTOPIA benchmark and show that they can improve social intelligence. |
Everything of Thoughts: Defying the Law of Penrose Triangle for Thought Generation (2024.findings-acl)
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Ruomeng Ding, Chaoyun Zhang, Lu Wang, Yong Xu, Minghua Ma, Wei Zhang, Si Qin, Saravan Rajmohan, Qingwei Lin, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have greatly advanced problem solving in diverse domains such as mathematical reasoning and knowledge reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a thought prompting approach called 'Everything of Thoughts' it leverages pretrained reinforcement learning and Monte Carlo Tree Search to incorporate external domain knowledge and planning capability into thoughts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing approaches on game of 24, 8-Puzzle, and Pocket Cube. |
TextFusion: Privacy-Preserving Pre-trained Model Inference via Token Fusion (2022.emnlp-main)
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Xin Zhou, Jinzhu Lu, Tao Gui, Ruotian Ma, Zichu Fei, Yuran Wang, Yong Ding, Yibo Cheung, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to preserve inference privacy are available as cloud services . however, the risk of privacy leakage remains, according to recent studies . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to preserve inference privacy by fusing token representations in the cloud. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method preserves inference privacy without sacrificing performance on different scenarios. |
CoEvolve: Training LLM Agents via Agent-Data Mutual Evolution (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on AppWorld and BFCL demonstrate consistent and significant improvements over strong base models, yielding absolute gains of 19.43%, 15.58%, and 18.14%, respectively. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts feedback signals such as forgetting and uncertainty from rollout trajectories and utilizes them to guide LLM-based task synthesis. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on AppWorld and BFCL show that the proposed framework improves over strong base models. |
MuVER: Improving First-Stage Entity Retrieval with Multi-View Entity Representations (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in entity retrieval ignore the property that meanings of entity mentions diverge in different contexts and are related to various portions of descriptions. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that constructs multi-view representations for entity descriptions and approximates the optimal view for mentions via a heuristic searching method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on ZESHEL and improves quality of candidates on three standard Entity Linking datasets. |
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. |