Chuang Ma

Chuang Ma

Ph.D. Candidate, Kyoto University

View / Download Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

About

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Informatics at the Mathematical Information Systems Group, System Science course, Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, advised by Prof. Toshiyuki Tanaka and Prof. Tomoyuki Obuchi. I am also a Research Assistant at the Research and Development Center for Large Language Models (LLMC), National Institute of Informatics (NII), where I work under the guidance of Dr. Qianying Liu and Prof. Akiko Aizawa.

I received my Master of Informatics from the same group and advisors at Kyoto University. Before that, I earned my Bachelor of Engineering in Software Engineering from Dalian University of Technology (Dual Degree: Bachelor of Science in Information Science, Ritsumeikan University), advised by Prof. Tadahiro Taniguchi.

Research Areas
Deep Learning Theory; LLM / MLLM Mechanistic Interpretability; MLLM Pretraining; LLM Post-Training

News

2026/09/30New first-author preprint on head geometry and dynamics in federated regression, analyzed with an unconstrained feature model, posted on arXiv. [link]
2026/09/28New co-first-author preprint on how to loop mixture-of-experts models (How to Loop MoE) posted on arXiv. [link]
2026/08/22First-author paper on mechanistic diagnostics of spatial lexical bias in multimodal large language models accepted to the EMNLP 2026 Main Conference, to be held in Budapest in October. [link]
2026/08/04Submitted a second-author paper to the ACL Rolling Review August 2026 cycle.
2026/08/03Committed a first-author paper to EMNLP 2026.
2026/07/08Co-authored paper on separating reasoning modes in hybrid-thinking LLMs (Path-Lock Expert) accepted at COLM 2026, to be held in San Francisco in October. [link]
2026/07/06Attended ICML 2026 in Seoul, South Korea.
2026/07/02Completed reviewing for the ACL Rolling Review May 2026 cycle (EMNLP 2026 / AACL-IJCNLP 2026).
2026/07Completed reviewing for NeurIPS 2026.
2026/06/01First-author preprint on mechanistic diagnostics of spatial lexical bias in multimodal large language models posted on arXiv. [link]
2026/05/15Co-authored survey "A Survey on Agent Skills for LLMs: A Lifecycle Perspective from Construction to Ecosystems" released on SSRN.
2026/04/29New co-authored preprint on separating reasoning modes in hybrid-thinking LLMs (Path-Lock Expert) posted on arXiv. [link]
2026/04/07New co-authored preprint introducing AgentCE-Bench, a configurable agent evaluation benchmark, posted on arXiv. [link]
2026/02/18Poster and flash talk at the 20th ICT Innovation, Kyoto University.
2026/02/01New co-authored preprint about cross-domain effects in GRPO for LLM reasoning posted on arXiv. [link]
2025/12/12Invited talk on neural collapse at Prof. Yoshino's group, Graduate School of Science, Osaka University.
2025/12/05First-author poster at NeurIPS 2025, San Diego, USA, on neural collapse in ordinal regression. [link]
2025/11/13Presentation at IBIS 2025, Okinawa, Japan.
2025/09/18First-author paper on neural collapse in ordinal regression accepted as poster at NeurIPS 2025 (initial scores: 5/4/4/4 out of 6, final: 5/4/4/4). [link]
2025/09/17Co-authored paper "JMO: A Benchmark for Mathematical Reasoning on Japanese Olympiad Problems" accepted at MathNLP 2025 (EMNLP workshop).
2025/09/15Oral presentation on neural collapse at the 80th Annual Meeting of the Physical Society of Japan, Hiroshima.
2025/07/02Completed reviewing for NeurIPS 2025.
2025/06/06First-author preprint on neural collapse in ordinal regression posted on arXiv. [link]
2025/05/16Joined LLMC, National Institute of Informatics as a Research Assistant.
2024/11/04Poster presentation at IBIS 2024, Saitama, Japan.
2024/04/01Continued to Ph.D. in Mathematical Information Systems Group (same lab as M.S.) at Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, advised by Prof. Toshiyuki Tanaka and Prof. Tomoyuki Obuchi.
2024/04/01Appointed as lab server administrator.
2024/03/25Received Master of Informatics from Kyoto University.
2022/04/01Started M.S. in Mathematical Information Systems Group at Graduate School of Informatics, Kyoto University, advised by Prof. Toshiyuki Tanaka and Prof. Tomoyuki Obuchi.
2021/09/27Received B.S. in Information Science from Ritsumeikan University and B.E. in Software Engineering from Dalian University of Technology.

Publications

* Equal contribution.

Published

  • NeurIPS 2025Neural Collapse in Cumulative Link Models for Ordinal Regression: An Analysis with Unconstrained Feature Model
    Chuang Ma, Tomoyuki Obuchi, and Toshiyuki Tanaka. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025, Poster.
    [PDF] [arXiv] [Proceedings] [OpenReview] [Video] [Slides] [Poster]
  • EMNLP 2026Mechanistic Diagnostics of Spatial Lexical Bias in Multimodal Large Language Model Spatial Reasoning
    Chuang Ma, Qianying Liu, Tomoyuki Obuchi, Fei Cheng, Wang Yang, Sudong Cai, Shuyuan Zheng, Akiko Aizawa, and Sadao Kurohashi. Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2026, Main Conference.
    [PDF] [arXiv]
  • COLM 2026Path-Lock Expert: Separating Reasoning Mode in Hybrid Thinking via Architecture-Level Separation
    Shouren Wang*, Wang Yang*, Chuang Ma, Debargha Ganguly, Vikash Singh, Chaoda Song, Xinpeng Li, Xianxuan Long, Vipin Chaudhary, and Xiaotian Han. Conference on Language Modeling (COLM), 2026, Poster.
    [PDF] [arXiv] [OpenReview] [Code]

Under Review

  • arXivUnderstanding Head Geometry and Dynamics in Federated Regression through a Natural Solution Selection Rule: An Unconstrained Feature Model Analysis
    Chuang Ma and Tomoyuki Obuchi. arXiv preprint, 2026.
    [PDF] [arXiv]
  • arXivHow to Loop MoE: Flatten the Experts, Untie the Attention
    Shouren Wang*, Chuang Ma*, Mohsen Hariri, Debargha Ganguly, Wang Yang, Xiaoqing Tong, Qianying Liu, Xiaotian Han, and Vipin Chaudhary. arXiv preprint, 2026.
    [PDF] [arXiv] [Code]
  • SSRNA Survey on Agent Skills for LLMs: A Lifecycle Perspective from Construction to Ecosystems
    Wang Yang, Chaoda Song, Xinpeng Li, Shouren Wang, Nengbo Wang, Yanyan Zhang, Chuang Ma, Debargha Ganguly, Vikash Singh, Shuai Xu, Jing Ma, Yu Yin, Vipin Chaudhary, and Xiaotian Han. SSRN preprint, 2026.
    [PDF] [SSRN]
  • arXivAgentCE-Bench: Agent Configurable Evaluation with Scalable Horizons and Controllable Difficulty under Lightweight Environments
    Wang Yang, Chaoda Song, Xinpeng Li, Debargha Ganguly, Chuang Ma, Shouren Wang, Zhihao Dou, Yuli Zhou, Vipin Chaudhary, and Xiaotian Han. arXiv preprint, 2026.
    [PDF] [arXiv]
  • arXivWhen Domains Interact: Asymmetric and Order-Sensitive Cross-Domain Effects in Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning
    Wang Yang, Shouren Wang, Chaoda Song, Chuang Ma, Xinpeng Li, Nengbo Wang, Kaixiong Zhou, Vipin Chaudhary, and Xiaotian Han. arXiv preprint, 2026.
    [PDF] [arXiv]
Others
  • JMO benchmark
    Under reviewJMO: A Benchmark for Mathematical Reasoning on Japanese Olympiad Problems
    Qianying Liu, Chuang Ma, Chaoran Liu, Fei Cheng, and Sadao Kurohashi.

Talks & Presentations

2nd Japanese Symposium on Open Large Language Models (poster) Upcoming

National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan.

Mechanistic Diagnostics of Spatial Lexical Bias in Multimodal Large Language Model Spatial Reasoning (poster) Upcoming

EMNLP 2026, Budapest, Hungary.

Path-Lock Expert: Separating Reasoning Mode in Hybrid Thinking via Architecture-Level Separation (poster) Upcoming

COLM 2026, San Francisco, USA.

Neural Collapse in Cumulative Link Models for Ordinal Regression: An Analysis with Unconstrained Feature Model (poster)

NeurIPS 2025, San Diego, USA. [Poster] [Slides] [Video]

JMO: A Benchmark for Mathematical Reasoning on Japanese Olympiad Problems (oral)

Qianying Liu, Chuang Ma, et al. MathNLP Workshop, EMNLP 2025.

Neural Collapse in Cumulative Link Models for Ordinal Regression (oral)

The 80th Annual Meeting of the Physical Society of Japan, Hiroshima, Japan.

Exploring Collapse Phenomena in the Feature Space of Overparameterized Neural Networks for Imbalanced Regression through Unconstrained Feature Model (poster)

The 27th Information-Based Induction Sciences Workshop (IBIS 2024), Saitama, Japan.

Experience

Education

Awards & Scholarships

Liaoning Province Outstanding Graduate

Saionji Memorial Scholarship

Ritsumeikan University, Academically Outstanding Students Category

Chinese National Scholarship

Academic Service

Reviewer, International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2027) Upcoming

Reviewer, ACL Rolling Review (ARR), October 2026 Cycle (NAACL 2027 / COLING 2027) Upcoming

Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS) Upcoming

Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS)

Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS)

Reviewer, ACL Rolling Review (ARR), May 2026 Cycle (EMNLP 2026 / AACL-IJCNLP 2026)

Reviewer, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026)

Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS)

Reviewer, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025)

Contact

ma.chuang.52h@st.kyoto-u.ac.jp · chuang_ma@nii.ac.jp · Kyoto, Japan