Agent Researcher & Engineer

Qianli Ma

Ph.D. student in Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

LLM post-training, work agents, and code agents.

Qianli Ma
01

About me

I am a Ph.D. student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, advised by Prof. Zhipeng Zhang. Previously, I received my master's degree in Computer Science from SJTU, advised by Prof. Li Niu and Prof. Linfeng Zhang, and my bachelor's degree in Instrument Science and Control Technology from Southeast University.

My research interests lie in LLM post-training, work agents, and code agents. My previous work spans collaborative work agents, model merging, and the generation and evaluation of visual content.

I'm always happy to discuss LLM post-training, work agents, and code agents. Let's get in touch.

02

News

Notes & milestones
  • One paper accepted by IJCV
  • Recognized as a Top Reviewer for NeurIPS 2026
  • Three papers accepted by NeurIPS 2026
  • One paper accepted by CoRL 2026
  • One paper accepted by EMNLP 2026
  • One paper accepted by ECCV 2026
  • Recognized as a Gold Reviewer for ICML 2026
  • One paper accepted by ICML 2026
  • Three papers accepted by ACL 2026 (2 main conference and 1 findings paper)
  • Two papers accepted by CVPR 2026
  • One paper accepted by IEEE TPAMI 2025
  • We release AutoPage , a multi-agent system that turns your academic paper into a high-quality project page.
  • We achieved top 3 ranking in IROS 2025 RoboSense Challenge, Driving with Language Track.
  • One paper accepted by ACL 2025 main conference
  • Completed my Master's degree! Thanks to all my friends and advisors
  • Two papers accepted by CVPR 2025!
  • Started internship at Shanghai AI Laboratory again.
  • We release VBench-Long , a tool for evaluating long video generation models.
  • Started internship at Shanghai AI Laboratory.
  • Started internship at Baidu.
03

Publications

Research, in a few directions

From diffusion models to LLM agents, I explore how AI can support human creativity and productivity.

Work Agents

Human–agent collaboration for research, writing, and scientific workflows.

LLM Post-training & Merging

Adapting and merging language models for better capability, safety, and utility.

Visual Generative Models

Diffusion models, efficient sampling, and image and video generation.

Benchmarks & Surveys

Benchmarks for models and agents, and surveys of emerging research directions.

Embodied Agents

Agents that perceive, reason, and act in physical environments.

* Equal contribution   ·   † Corresponding author   ·   § Project leader

18 publications
Preprint · 2026
Why Struggle with Continuous Latents? Interpretable Discrete Latent Reasoning via Rendered Compression — overviewWhy Struggle with Continuous Latents? Interpretable Discrete Latent Reasoning via Rendered Compression — method or evaluation figure
LLM Post-training & Merging

Why Struggle with Continuous Latents? Interpretable Discrete Latent Reasoning via Rendered Compression

Shuochen Chang*, Qingyang Liu*, Shaobo Wang, Bingjie Gao, Qianli Ma, Haonan Zhao, Yibo Miao, Yulin Sun, Zelin Peng, Jiangtong Li†, Li Niu†

DLR compresses rendered reasoning traces into interpretable discrete latent tokens, supporting autoregressive training, supervised finetuning, and reinforcement learning.

ICML 2026
A Very Big Video Reasoning Suite — overview
Visual Generative ModelsBenchmarks & Surveys

A Very Big Video Reasoning Suite

Maijunxian Wang*, Ruisi Wang*, Juyi Lin*, Ran Ji*, …, Qianli Ma, …, Zhongang Cai†, Hokin Deng†

All 56 authors

Maijunxian Wang*, Ruisi Wang*, Juyi Lin*, Ran Ji*, Thaddäus Wiedemer, Qingying Gao, Dezhi Luo, Yaoyao Qian, Lianyu Huang, Zelong Hong, Jiahui Ge, Qianli Ma, Hang He, Yifan Zhou, Lingzi Guo, Lantao Mei, Jiachen Li, Hanwen Xing, Tianqi Zhao, Fengyuan Yu, Weihang Xiao, Yizheng Jiao, Jianheng Hou, Danyang Zhang, Pengcheng Xu, Boyang Zhong, Zehong Zhao, Gaoyun Fang, John Kitaoka, Yile Xu, Hua Xu, Kenton Blacutt, Tin Nguyen, Siyuan Song, Haoran Sun, Shaoyue Wen, Linyang He, Runming Wang, Yanzhi Wang, Mengyue Yang, Ziqiao Ma, Raphaël Millière, Freda Shi, Nuno Vasconcelos, Daniel Khashabi, Alan Yuille, Yilun Du, Ziming Liu, Bo Li, Dahua Lin, Ziwei Liu, Vikash Kumar, Yijiang Li, Lei Yang, Zhongang Cai†, Hokin Deng†

A large-scale suite for video reasoning, pairing diverse training tasks with verifiable evaluation and a systematic study of reasoning generalization.

TPAMI 2025
VBench++: Comprehensive and Versatile Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models — overviewVBench++: Comprehensive and Versatile Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models — supporting figure
Visual Generative ModelsBenchmarks & Surveys

VBench++: Comprehensive and Versatile Benchmark Suite for Video Generative Models

Ziqi Huang, Fan Zhang, Xiaojie Xu, Yinan He, Jiashuo Yu, Ziyue Dong, Qianli Ma, Nattapol Chanpaisit, Chenyang Si, Yuming Jiang, Yaohui Wang, Xinyuan Chen, Ying-Cong Chen, Limin Wang, Dahua Lin†, Yu Qiao†, Ziwei Liu†

A comprehensive benchmark suite for evaluating video generative models.

Preprint · 2025
RAPO++: Cross-Stage Prompt Optimization for Text-to-Video Generation via Data Alignment and Test-Time Scaling — overviewRAPO++: Cross-Stage Prompt Optimization for Text-to-Video Generation via Data Alignment and Test-Time Scaling — supporting figure
Visual Generative ModelsLLM Post-training & Merging

RAPO++: Cross-Stage Prompt Optimization for Text-to-Video Generation via Data Alignment and Test-Time Scaling

Bingjie Gao, Qianli Ma, Xiaoxue Wu, Shuai Yang, Guanzhou Lan, Haonan Zhao, Jiaxuan Chen, Qingyang Liu, Yu Qiao†, Xinyuan Chen†, Yaohui Wang†, Li Niu†

Cross-stage prompt optimization for text-to-video generation through data alignment and test-time scaling.

04

Education

2025.04 — Present

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence

School of Artificial Intelligence
Advisor: Prof. Zhipeng Zhang

2022.09 — 2025.03

Shanghai Jiao Tong University

M.Sc. in Computer Science

Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Advisors: Prof. Li Niu and Prof. Linfeng Zhang

2018.09 — 2022.06

Southeast University

B.Eng. in Instrument Science and Control Technology

School of Instrument Science and Engineering

05

Research and Industry Experience

2025.02 — Present

Shanghai AI Laboratory

Research Intern

Advised by Dr. Yanan Sun and Dr. Yanhong Zeng

2024.01 — 2024.07

Shanghai AI Laboratory

Research Intern

Advised by Prof. Ziwei Liu; collaborated with Ziqi Huang

2023.07 — 2023.10

Baidu

Machine Learning Engineering Intern · Paddle Team

06

Service & Honors

Academic service

Conference reviewer
ICML, ICLR, ICCV, CVPR, ECCV, COLM, ARR, NeurIPS, ACM MM, ACM WWW, AAAI

Teaching

AI2805 · Digital Signal and Image Processing
Teaching Assistant · SJTU · Spring 2026

AI7002 · AI Ethics
Teaching Assistant · SJTU · Autumn 2025

Honors & awards

  • Top Reviewer · NeurIPS 2026
  • Gold Reviewer · ICML 2026
  • Top 3 · IROS 2025 RoboSense Challenge, Driving with Language
  • First-Class Graduate Academic Scholarship · 2023, 2024
  • Freshman Graduate Academic Scholarship · 2022
  • Undergraduate Course Scholarship · 2020, 2021