Chang Ma

Bio

I am a second-year CS Ph.D student at HKUNLP Lab, The University of Hong Kong. I am fortunately co-advised by Lingpeng Kong and Tao Yu. I am also working closely with Junxian He. Before that, I received my B.S. in Computer Science from Peking University, advised by Prof.Zhihong Deng. I was also deeply inspired by these collaborators.

My research goal is to develop Autonomous, Efficient and Theory-Grounded machine learning algorithms, with a particular focus on advancing scientific discoveries.

For Autonomous Decision Making, I design agents powered by generative models, with an emphasis on improving reasoning and planning abilities of foundation models that could facilitate research-level abilities.

For Theory-Grounded Research, I focus on developing AI systems that are certifiably robust and provably optimal, ensuring reliability and efficiency in their decision-making processes.

For Efficient Scientific Discovery, I leverage natural language processing and generative agents to accelerate key areas of scientific progress, with a focus on drug discovery.

By bridging foundational machine learning research with real-world scientific applications, my work aims to create robust, reasoning-intensive AI systems capable of addressing critical challenges, including treating human diseases and uncovering the fundamental laws of nature.

Research Interest

#Agents #AI4Science #DrugDiscovery #MachineLearningTheory

Publications

Most recent publications on Google Scholar.
^‡ indicates equal contribution.

All
#AI4Science
#Agent
#Machine Learning Theory

Retrieved Sequence Augmentation for Protein Representation Learning

Chang Ma, Haiteng Zhao, Lin Zheng, Jiayi Xin, Qintong Li, Lijun Wu, Zhihong Deng, Yang Lu, Qi Liu, Sheng Wang, Lingpeng Kong

EMNLP 2024

Paper Code

Benchmarking and Enhancing Large Language Models for Biological Pathway Reasoning

Haiteng Zhao, Chang Ma, Lingpeng Kong, Zhi-Hong Deng

Preprint

Paper

GIMLET: A Unified Graph-Text Model for Instruction-Based Molecule Zero-Shot Learning

Haiteng Zhao, Shengchao Liu, Chang Ma, Hannan Xu, Jie Fu, Zhi-Hong Deng, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu

NeurIPS 2023

Paper Code

TorchDrug: A Powerful and Flexible Machine Learning Platform for Drug Discovery

Zhaocheng Zhu, Chence Shi, Zuobai Zhang, Shengchao Liu, Minghao Xu, Xinyu Yuan, Yangtian Zhang, Junkun Chen, Huiyu Cai, Jiarui Lu, Chang Ma, Runcheng Liu, Louis-Pascal Xhonneux, Meng Qu, Jian Tang

Preprint

Paper Code

PEER: A Comprehensive and Multi-Task Benchmark for Protein Sequence Understanding

Minghao Xu, Zuobai Zhang, Jiarui Lu, Zhaocheng Zhu, Yangtian Zhang, Chang Ma, Runcheng Liu, Jian Tang

NeurIPS 2022 Dataset and Benchmark Track

Paper Code

Non-myopic Generation of Language Models for Reasoning and Planning

Chang Ma, Haiteng Zhao, Junlei Zhang, Junxian He, Lingpeng Kong

Preprint

Paper

AgentBoard: An Analytical Evaluation Board of Multi-Turn LLM Agents

Chang Ma*, Junlei Zhang*, Zhihao Zhu*, Cheng Yang*, Yujiu Yang, Yaohui Jin, Zhenzhong Lan, Lingpeng Kong, Junxian He

NeurIPS 2024 Dataset and Benchmark Track (Oral)

Paper Code

Empowering Large Language Model Agents through Action Learning

Haiteng Zhao, Chang Ma, Guoyin Wang, Jing su, Lingpeng Kong, Jingjing Xu, Zhi-Hong Deng, Hongxia Yang

COLM 2024

Paper

A Challenging Benchmark for Low-Resource Learning

Yudong Wang*, Chang Ma*, Qingxiu Dong, Lingpeng Kong, Jingjing Xu

ACL 2024 Findings

Paper Code

KS-Lottery: Finding Certified Lottery Tickets for Multilingual Language Models

Fei Yuan, Chang Ma, Shuai Yuan, Qiushi Sun, Lei Li

Preprint

Paper

Certified Robustness Against Natural Language Attacks by Causal Intervention

Haiteng Zhao*, Chang Ma*, Xinshuai Dong*, Anh Tuan Luu, Zhi-Hong Deng, Hanwang Zhang

ICML 2022

Paper Code

Domain Adaptation via Mutual Information Maximization

Haiteng Zhao, Chang Ma, Qinyu Chen, Zhihong Deng

IJCAI 2022 Long Presentation

Paper Code

Non-myopic Generation of Language Models for Reasoning and Planning

Chang Ma, Haiteng Zhao, Junlei Zhang, Junxian He, Lingpeng Kong

Preprint

Paper

AgentBoard: An Analytical Evaluation Board of Multi-Turn LLM Agents

Chang Ma*, Junlei Zhang*, Zhihao Zhu*, Cheng Yang*, Yujiu Yang, Yaohui Jin, Zhenzhong Lan, Lingpeng Kong, Junxian He

NeurIPS 2024 Dataset and Benchmark Track (Oral)

Paper Code

Empowering Large Language Model Agents through Action Learning

Haiteng Zhao, Chang Ma, Guoyin Wang, Jing su, Lingpeng Kong, Jingjing Xu, Zhi-Hong Deng, Hongxia Yang

COLM 2024

Paper

Retrieved Sequence Augmentation for Protein Representation Learning

Chang Ma, Haiteng Zhao, Lin Zheng, Jiayi Xin, Qintong Li, Lijun Wu, Zhihong Deng, Yang Lu, Qi Liu, Sheng Wang, Lingpeng Kong

EMNLP 2024

Paper Code

Benchmarking and Enhancing Large Language Models for Biological Pathway Reasoning

Haiteng Zhao, Chang Ma, Lingpeng Kong, Zhi-Hong Deng

Preprint

Paper

GIMLET: A Unified Graph-Text Model for Instruction-Based Molecule Zero-Shot Learning

Haiteng Zhao, Shengchao Liu, Chang Ma, Hannan Xu, Jie Fu, Zhi-Hong Deng, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu

NeurIPS 2023

Paper Code

TorchDrug: A Powerful and Flexible Machine Learning Platform for Drug Discovery

Preprint

Paper Code

PEER: A Comprehensive and Multi-Task Benchmark for Protein Sequence Understanding

Minghao Xu, Zuobai Zhang, Jiarui Lu, Zhaocheng Zhu, Yangtian Zhang, Chang Ma, Runcheng Liu, Jian Tang

NeurIPS 2022 Dataset and Benchmark Track

Paper Code

A Challenging Benchmark for Low-Resource Learning

Yudong Wang*, Chang Ma*, Qingxiu Dong, Lingpeng Kong, Jingjing Xu

ACL 2024 Findings

Paper Code

KS-Lottery: Finding Certified Lottery Tickets for Multilingual Language Models

Fei Yuan, Chang Ma, Shuai Yuan, Qiushi Sun, Lei Li

Preprint

Paper

Certified Robustness Against Natural Language Attacks by Causal Intervention

Haiteng Zhao*, Chang Ma*, Xinshuai Dong*, Anh Tuan Luu, Zhi-Hong Deng, Hanwang Zhang

ICML 2022

Paper Code

Domain Adaptation via Mutual Information Maximization

Haiteng Zhao, Chang Ma, Qinyu Chen, Zhihong Deng

IJCAI 2022 Long Presentation

Paper Code

Switch-GPT: an effective method for constrained text generation under few-shot settings

Chang Ma*, Song Zhang*, Gehui Shen, Zhihong Deng

AAAI Student Abstract 2021

Paper

Blogs

Avoiding Mistakes and Fixing Mistakes -- The Two Tales of Planning

A control theory view on Large Language Model reasoning and planning. In order to achieve successful planning, an agent can take two kinds of strategies handing mistakes: speculative planning v.s. self-reflection...

Vitæ

Full Resume in PDF.

Microsoft Research AI4Science April-December 2023

Research Intern
Foundation Model Group
The University of Hong Kong Sep 2022 -

Ph.D. Student
CS, NLP
Microsoft Nov 2021 - June 2022

Software Engineer Research Intern
Bing Advertisement Group, NLP
MILA Jan-Oct 2021

Research Intern
DeepGraph Group, Computational Biology
Nanyang Technological University June-Nov 2021

Research Intern
NAIL Group, NLP
Peking University July 2019 - July 2022

Research Assistant
Sigma Lab, Department of Machine Intelligence
Peking University Sep 2018 - July 2022

B.Sc. Student
Machine Intelligence

Miscellaneous

I am a hiking enthusiast and my favorite trail is the MacLehose Trail, Section 2 in Hong Kong. I played piano for 8 years as a child and just started getting back into it. I am a keen fan of Bach and recently learning the Goldberg-Variationen. I love two kinds of elegance -- beautiful music and elegant proof.

Thanks to Martin Saveski for the website template.