Biography
I am a third-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the DAMI Lab, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Yao Ma. I study reliable multimodal reasoning, particularly how VLMs ground visual evidence, integrate external and internal knowledge, and decide when the evidence is sufficient to answer. I also have expertise in graph learning, graph foundation models, graph self-supervised learning, spatio-temporal forecasting, time-series modeling, and urban computing.
Education
Ph.D. Student in Computer Science
Jan. 2024
Jan. 2028 (expected)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
M.Sc. in Multimedia Information Technology, Distinction
2022
2024
City University of Hong Kong
B.Eng. in Software Engineering - Systems and Technology
2018
2022
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China
Interests
I study reliable multimodal reasoning, particularly how VLMs ground visual evidence, integrate external and internal knowledge, and decide when the evidence is sufficient to answer.
I am interested in how foundation models ground non-textual structure, visual entities, and external knowledge. Before moving toward multimodal RAG and KB-VQA, I worked on graph learning, graph self-supervised learning, graph foundation models, spatio-temporal forecasting, time-series modeling, and urban computing.
- Qian Ma, S M Rayeed, Charles V. Stewart, Qiong Wu, Yao Ma. Identifying and Resolving Pitfalls of Knowledge-Based VQA Benchmarks: Auditing, Repairing, and Augmenting. ECCV 2026.
- Qian Ma, Qiong Wu, Zhengyi Zhou, Yao Ma. Ground Then Rank: Revisiting Knowledge-Based VQA with Training-Free Entity Identification. ACL 2026 Findings.
- Qian Ma, Haitao Mao, Jingzhe Liu, Zhehua Zhang, Chunlin Feng, Yu Song, Yihan Shao, Yao Ma. Do Neural Scaling Laws Exist on Graph Self-Supervised Learning? LoG 2024.
- Qian Ma, Hongliang Chi, Hengrui Zhang, Kay Liu, Zhiwei Zhang, Lu Cheng, Suhang Wang, Philip S. Yu, Yao Ma. Overcoming Pitfalls in Graph Contrastive Learning Evaluation: Toward Comprehensive Benchmarks. ACM SIGKDD Explorations, 2025.
- Qian Ma, Haitao Mao, Zhehua Zhang, Qiong Wu, Zhengyi Zhou, Yao Ma. Cross-Domain GraphWalker: Harnessing LLMs for Graph Structure Learning. Under review.
- Qian Ma, Zijian Zhang, Xiangyu Zhao, Haoliang Li, Hongwei Zhao, Yiqi Wang, Zitao Liu, Wanyu Wang. Rethinking Sensors Modeling: Hierarchical Information Enhanced Traffic Forecasting. CIKM 2023.
- Zijian Zhang, Xiangyu Zhao, Qidong Liu, Chunxu Zhang, Qian Ma, et al. PromptST: Prompt-Enhanced Spatio-Temporal Multi-Attribute Prediction. CIKM 2023.
See my Google Scholar profile for updates.
Conference photos and research-travel snapshots, organized as visual field notes.
Latest: ACL 2026 · San Diego →
Contact
Affiliation
Department of Computer Science
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, NY, United States