Jiaqi Ma 马家祺
Assistant Professor, School of Information Sciences
Siebel School of Computing and Data Science (Affiliation)
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Outlook: jiaqima AT illinois DOT edu Gmail: jiaqima.mle AT gmail DOT com
About Me
I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Prior to UIUC, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Harvard University. I received my Ph.D. from University of Michigan and a B.Eng. from Tsinghua University.
I’m interested in the broad area of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Recently, my research focuses on the data foundations of AI, including three complementary aspects: 1) understanding how training data impact AI models (data attribution); 2) developing data-centric algorithms that improve the quality and safety of training data (data curation and synthetic data generation); and 3) studying how data mediate the societal impact of AI (data compensation and machine unlearning).
For students who want to work with me, please see here for more details.
News
Four papers accepted by NeurIPS 2026 and one paper by EMNLP 2026!- Giving a talk about our work on data selection/regularization at AICE Fall 2026 Symposium!
- Grateful to receive a research grant from the Amazon-Illinois Center on AI for Interactive Conversational Experiences (AICE)!
- Grateful to receive the NSF CAREER Award!
- Giving a talk about our work on data selection/regularization at EcoSta 2026 in August 2026!
- We are hosting a Data Foundations of AI Social as part of the official ICML 2026 Social program!
- Two papers accepted by ICML 2026 and one paper by ACL 2026!
- Junwei passed his preliminary exam (dissertation proposal)! He will be on the industry job market in the coming academic year. Please reach out to him if you are interested in hiring a full-stack expert in data-centric AI!
- Pingbang joined the Anthropic Safety Fellow program!
- I’m serving as an Area Chair for ICML 2026!
Older news
- Please check out our new survey paper on data attribution!
- Five papers accepted by NeurIPS 2025 (with one oral)!
- I’m serving as an Area Chair for AISTATS 2026!
- Grateful to receive a research grant from Google!
- Giving a talk about our work on data attribution at the AI Seminar at UMich in May 2025!
- Giving a talk about our work on data attribution at YouTube in Apr 2025!
- Giving a talk at the New Faculty Highlight session at AAAI 2025!
- I’m serving as an Area Chair for ICML 2025!
- Giving a talk about our work on data attribution at RIKEN AIP in Tokyo in Jan 2025!
- Giving a talk about our work on data attribution at the VASC Seminar at CMU in Dec 2024!
- Giving a talk about our work on data attribution at the IDEAL Institute in Chicago in Nov 2024!
- Two papers accepted by NeurIPS 2024 (with one spotlight at the D&B track)!
- I’m serving as an Area Chair for AISTATS 2025!
- Giving a talk about our work on data attribution at the Siebel School Colloquium at UIUC in Sep 2024!
- We are organizing the 2nd Workshop on Regulatable Machine Learning in conjunction with NeurIPS 2024!
- Our work on Computational Copyright received a best paper award from the DPFM Workshop at ICLR 2024!
- One paper accepted by AISTATS 2024!
- I’m serving as an Area Chair for ICML 2024!
- Two papers accepted by NeurIPS 2023!
- I’m serving as an Area Chair for ICLR 2024!
- We are organizing the 1st Workshop on Regulatable Machine Learning in conjunction with NeurIPS 2023!
- I’m serving as an Area Chair for CPAL 2024 and a Vice Program Chair for IEEE BigData 2023!
- We are organizing the 3rd Workshop on Graph Learning Benchmarks (GLB) in conjunction with KDD 2023!
- One paper on algorithmic recourse and unlearning accepted by ICML 2023!
- One paper on active learning for GNNs accepted by TMLR 2023!
- One paper on evaluating chemical space coverage metrics accepted by ICLR 2023!
- One paper (GLI) accepted as Oral by LOG 2022!
- Two papers accepted by WSDM 2022!
- One paper (SODEN) accepted by JMLR!
- We are organizing the 2nd Workshop on Graph Learning Benchmarks (GLB) at the WebConf (WWW) 2022! CfP is online.
- Take a look at my blog post on the GLB 2021 workshop we organized earlier this year.
- One paper on Generalization and Fairness of GNN accepted as Spotlight by NeurIPS 2021!
- One paper on Learning-to-Rank with Partitioned Preference accepted by AISTATS 2021!
- One paper (CopulaGNN) accepted by ICLR 2021!
- We are organizing a workshop on Graph Learning Benchmarks (GLB) at the WebConf (WWW) 2021!
- Please stop by the poster session of our paper on Towards More Practical Adversarial Attacks on GNNs at NeurIPS 2020 (poster session 7, 0AM - 2AM EST, 12/11, 2020).
Recent Papers
Please see the full list on my Google Scholar page.
(* Equal Contribution; † Equal Advising)
Preprints
- What's a Credit Worth? A Market Framework for Attribution-Aware Compensation in Generative Music.
- Dr. Post-Training: A Data Regularization Perspective on LLM Post-Training.
- How Faithful Is Trajectory-Based Data Attribution? Error Sources, Remedies, and Practical Guidelines.
Recent Publications
- OATS: Online Data Augmentation for Time Series Foundation Models.
- RL-Inf: Tracking Non-local Training Data Influence for Online Reinforcement Learning.
- FlyAOC: Evaluating Agentic Ontology Curation of Drosophila Scientific Knowledge Bases.
- Epistemic Infrastructures of Science in AI Era Should Rebalance Costs of Generation and Verification.
- Can Generalist Agents Automate Data Curation?
- Detecting and Filtering Unsafe Training Data via Data Attribution with Denoised Representation.
(Note: I publish under the name Jiaqi W. Ma, starting from Sep 2024.)
People
PhD Students
MS Students (thesis-based)
- Xirui Jiang
- Dan Lee
Teaching
- Instructor, IS 557, SP26, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Applied Machine Learning: Team Project. - Instructor, IS 527, SP24/SP25/SP26, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Network Analysis. - Instructor, IS 327, FA23/SP25, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Concepts of Machine Learning.
Misc
Pronunciation of my first name: Jia-Chi.