About Me
Here is a virtual but warm greeting from Ziqiao, as you just came across this page! As many of my friends found it hard to pronounce my name (马子乔, pronounced as Tsz-Chaw in Mandarin), it's absolutely fine to just call me Martin alternatively.
Quick Pointers
CV (Aug 2024) / Research Overview / CSE595 NLP / Google Scholar / Semantic Scholar
Bio
Ziqiao (Martin) Ma is a 4th year Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science and Engineering advised by Professor Joyce Chai. His work has been supported in part by the Weinberg Cognitive Science Fellowship. He is also a part-time researcher at Adobe Research. Previously, he worked with Amazon AGI. He received an Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2023, and an Amazon Alexa Prize Award. He taught Natural Language Processing and won an Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award. He co-organized Bi-Align @ ICLR 2025, SpLU-RoboNLP @ ACL 2024, and co-instructed tutorial on Learning Language through Grounding @ NAACL 2025.
My Research (TL;DR)
The three constant themes of my research are Language, Interaction, and Embodiment from a scalable and cognitive angle.
Selected Awards/Recognitions
- Outstanding Paper Award, ACL 2023.
- First Place, Amazon Alexa Prize, 1st SimBot Challenge, 2023.
- Outstanding GSI Award, University of Michigan, 2022.
- James B. Angell Scholar, University of Michigan, 2021.
Selected Fellowships/Scholarships
- Weinberg Cognitive Science Fellowship, 2024.
- Rackham Doctoral Intern Fellowship, 2024.
- China National Scholarship, 2018.
- John Wu & Jane Sun Excellence Scholarship, 2017.
Updates
⚠ ⚠ ⚠
- SLED members and my collaborators (alphabet order) Yidong Huang (Embodied AI and Generative AI), Jayjun Lee (Robotic Perception and Policies), Sikai Li (Robotic Perception and Policies) Huijie Tang (Machine Learning), Sihan Xu (Self-supervised Learning and Generative AI), Xuejun Zhang (Multimodal Learning and Interpretability), Zheyuan "Brian" Zhang (Embodied AI, NLP, CogSci), are looking for grad school opportunities. They are extremely talented, self-motivated, and pleasant to work with. Please consider them if you have openings!
- My friend Canyu Chen (Truthful, Safe and Responsible Large Language Models with the applications in Social Computing and Healthcare), is actively looking for a new Ph.D. position starting from Fall 2025. Please consider him if you are hiring!
News
- [Dec. 2024] The Tutorial on Learning Language through Grounding will be with NAACL 2025. See you in Albuquerque :)
- [Dec. 2024] The 1st Workshop on Bidirectional Human-AI Alignment (Bi-Align) will be with ICLR 2025. Look forward to your best work and join us in Singapore :)
- [Aug. 2024] I will be the Graduate Student Instructor for CSE 595 (NLP) in Fall 2024 at Michigan. Check out our LLM-edition of the course!
- [July 2024] Excited to be selected to receive the Weinberg Cognitive Science Fellowship!!
- [Jan. 2024] I started my intern with Adobe Research!!
- [Oct. 2023] The 4th International Combined Workshop on Spatial Language Understanding and Grounded Communication for Robotics (SpLU-RoboNLP) will be with ACL 2024. Look forward to your best work and join us in Bangkok :)
- [Jul. 2023] Our paper "World-to-Words: Grounded Open Vocabulary Acquisition through Fast Mapping in Vision-Language Models" was selected for the Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2023!!
- [Jun. 2023] We won the 1st place in the Alexa Prize SimBot Challenge!!
Archived news...
- [May. 2023] I started my intern with Amazon Alexa AI (Amazon AGI)!!
- [Sep. 2022] I will serve as the Poster/Demo Session Chair for Michigan AI Symposium 2022.
- [Aug. 2022] I will be the Graduate Student Instructor for EECS 595 (NLP) in Fall 2022 at Michigan.
- [Mar. 2021] I will join the family of the Michigan AI as a Ph.D. student this fall. Go Blue!
- [Dec. 2020] I will be the Instructional Aide for EECS 492 (Intro. AI) in Winter 2021 at Michigan.
Paper Alerts
- [Nov. 2024] Our survey on vision-language navigation is accepted to TMLR with a survey certificate :)
- [Sep. 2024] One papers to appear in NeurIPS 2024, see you in Vancouver :)
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[Jun. 2024] One papers to appear in IROS 2024,
see you in Abu Dhabi:) - [Feb. 2024] Two papers to appear in CVPR 2024, see you in Seattle :)
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[Oct. 2023] One paper to appear in EMNLP 2023,
see you in Singapore:) - [Sep. 2023] One paper to appear in NeurIPS 2023, see you in New Orleans :)
- [May. 2023] Two papers to appear in ACL 2023, and I will serve as an on-site volunteer in Toronto :)
Archived news...
- [Apr. 2023] One paper to appear in IJCAI 2023, see you in Macau :)
- [Oct. 2022] Two papers to appear in EMNLP 2022, and I will serve as an on-site volunteer in Abu Dhabi :)
Seminar Talks
- [20241203] Seeing What You See: Perceptual Perspective-Taking Towards a Situated Machine Theory of Mind @ Cognitive Science Seminar Series, UMich.
- [20241205] Language Grounding to the Visual World and Human Interactions: How Far Are We from Embodied Dialogue Agents @ University of Washington.
Previous talks...
- [20240712] Babysit A Language Model From Scratch: Interactive Language Learning by Trials and Demonstrations @ Deep Learning: Classics and Trends (DLCT). Host: Rosanne Liu
- [20240705] Language Grounding to the Visual World and Human Interactions: How Far Are We from Embodied Dialogue Agents @ Data Science Group, KAIST.
- [20240627] Babysit A Language Model From Scratch: Interactive Language Learning by Trials and Demonstrations @ CoCoDev Seminar. Host: Abdellah Fourtassi
- [20240529] Language Grounding to the Visual World and Human Interactions: How Far Are We from Embodied Dialogue Agents @ University of Maryland. Host: Furong Huang
Experiences
Education
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Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering, Certificate in Cognitive Science
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor | Sept 2021 - May 2026 (Expected)
Advisor: Joyce Chai -
(Dual) BSE in Computer Science, Minor in Mathematics (Summa Cum Laude)
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor | Sept 2019 - May 2021
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(Dual) BSE in Electrical and Computer Engineering
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai | Sept 2017 - Aug 2021
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Visiting Student
Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin | Jan 2019 - Feb 2019
-
High School
Chengdu Foreign Languages School, Chengdu | Sept 2011 - June 2017
Industry
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Adobe Research, San Jose | Jan 2024 - Now
Research Scientist Intern
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Amazon AGI, Sunnyvale | May 2023 - Aug 2023
Applied Scientist Intern
Teaching @ UMich
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CSE/EECS 595 (SI 561/LING 541) Natural Language Processing, University of Michigan. (Fall 2022, Fall 2024)
- Slides and Homework: To be published by 2025 :-)
- EECS 492 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, University of Michigan. (Winter 2021)
Previous Teaching ...
- VE 492 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. (Summer 2020)
- VE 280 Programming and Data Structure, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. (Summer 2020)
- VP 141 Physics Lab I, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. (Summer 2019)
- VY 200 Academic Writing II, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. (Spring 2019)
- VY 100 Academic Writing I, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. (Fall 2018)
Guest Lectures
- DSC 291 Machine Learning with Few Labels (May. 2024), University of California San Diego. Host: Zhiting Hu
- PSYCH 745 Psychology of Language (Nov. 2023), University of Michigan. Host: Julie Boland
Academic Services
The 4th International Combined Workshop on Spatial Language Understanding and Grounded Communication for Robotics (SpLU-RoboNLP @ ACL 2024)
Co-organizer
The 5th Michigan AI Symposium: AI & Accessibility (2022)
Poster/Demo Session Chair
- Seminar Tsar, Michigan AI Seminar Series, 2023.
- Program Committee/Reviewer: NLP venues (e.g., ARR, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, EACL, COLING, COLM, ...), ML/DM venues (e.g., ICLR, NeurIPS, AISTATS, KDD, ECML, TMLR, DMLR, ...), CV venues (CVPR, ECCV, ...), Cognitive Science venues (COGSCI), and sometimes Robotics/HCI/CSS venues (RA-L, HRI, CHI, ICWSM, ...).
Publications
Show by... ( Recent Selection / Cognitive AI Selection / Publication Year / All Research Topics )
Research Topics: Language Grounding to Visual Perception / Language Grounding to Human Interaction / Language-Guided Multimodal Generation / Embodied/Situated Language Intelligence / Alignment and (Inter)active Learning / Teaching & Community Services
* indicates equal contributions; § indicates correspondence and mentoring.
Misc
Fun Facts
- I was given my Chinese name, 马子乔, through a visually symbolic process, breaking down the radicals of 骄子, which roughly translates to 'the gifted child' in English. This is one of the reasons why logographic languages are so beautiful.
- I was born and raised up in Chengdu, the home of pandas. I am proud of Chengdu Foreign Languages School, my high school, and identify myself as a CFLSer. 成外人永远不会成外人.
- I am INFJ according to the Myers-Briggs, and my friends said that I exhibit stereotypical traits of this personality type...lol
- I love literature and plays. I am particularly interested in Shakespeare's plays, traditional Chinese opera, Latin American literature, and modern Asian literature. Here is one of my essays about Cross-Dressed Heroines in Shakespearean and Ming-Qing Comedies.
- I love movies, I am obsessed with the Czechoslovak New Wave and psychological thrillers these days.
- I am a super fan of Nightwish. My favourite album is Imaginaerum.
- [NEW] Lately, I've become deeply fascinated with herbariums. I just started to keep a personal herbarium journal!
Game Design (More)
I seriously considered a career in game design, and although I ultimately chose a different path, it provided excellent preparation for my work in embodied AI research, which often involves intensive programming with simulators.
- a list of student-made games I enjoyed: Mogu, Turbo Neon.
- a list of video games I enjoyed: Sandbox (MineCraft, Terraria), Story-based RPG & Interactive Stories (Stardew Valley, Undertale, The Stanley Parable, This War of Mine, To the Moon), Roguelike (Soul Knight, Risk of Rain), Puzzle & Puzzle-based Platformer (Gorogoa, Limbo, Inside, Chants of Sennaar), Battle Royales (Naraka Bladepoint, Fall Guys).
Contracts
Zekai Fan, Shiyu Qu, Juan Rivera Plata, Yihao Huang, Ziqiao Martin Ma
[trailer][itch.io][indidb][tigsource]
- A turn-based tactic video game.
Floating
Ziqiao Martin Ma
- A physics-based puzzle video game.
Mentoring
I understand that access to research oppotunities can be hard, particularly for beginners and the underrepresented. If there is a match in research interests, I am happy to collaborate with undergrads and masters when I have the bandwidth. Please check my Research and Mentoring Statements and fill out our application form to indicate that you want to collaborate with me.I've been fortunate to have (co-)mentered and collaborated with these amazingly talented young researchers:
- Zekun Wang (2022-2024), Now Ph.D. @ Georgia Tech.
- Xijia Zhang (2022-2024), Now Ph.D. @ Georgia Tech.
- Jacob Sansom (2022-2024), Now Ph.D. @ UMich.
- Run Peng (2022-2024), Now Ph.D. @ UMich.
- Jiayi Pan (2021-2023), Now Ph.D. @ UCB.
Random Tours
- Take a random virtual stroll over to one of my friends' homepage! It's like a digital house call, minus the awkward small talk and the "sorry, my place is a mess" excuse!
- When I was exhausted but couldn't take time off to travel, I'd go on virtual adventures instead: randomly searching for remote destinations and dropping pins on Google Maps. Here are a few spots that I swear I'll visit in person...someday, eventually!
- Why I am still staying alive?
Chat?
If you would like to have a random (virtual) coffee chat with me, please visit my calendly page. I am happy to talk if you want to share your stress or just want to chat about life in general (when I have time), but be sure to check out the On-Campus Mental Health Resources @ Michigan.
Get In Touch
You are welcome to drop me a message :)