Zejun Ma
Also published as: Zejun MA
2026
MMSearch-R1: Incentivizing LMMs to Search
Jinming Wu | Zihao Deng | Wei Li | Yiding Liu | Bo You | Bo Li | Zejun MA | Ziwei Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jinming Wu | Zihao Deng | Wei Li | Yiding Liu | Bo You | Bo Li | Zejun MA | Ziwei Liu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Robust deployment of large multimodal models (LMMs) in real-world scenarios requires access to external knowledge sources, given the complexity and dynamic nature of real-world information. Existing approaches such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and prompt engineered search agents rely on rigid pipelines, often leading to inefficient or excessive search behaviors. We present MMSearch-R1, the first end-to-end reinforcement learning framework that enables LMMs to perform on-demand, multi-turn search in real-world Internet environments. Our framework integrates both image and text search tools, allowing the model to reason about when and how to invoke them guided by an outcome-based reward with a search penalty. To support training, We collect a multimodal search VQA dataset through a semi-automated pipeline that covers diverse visual and textual knowledge needs and curate a search-balanced subset with both search-required and search-free samples, which proves essential for shaping efficient and on-demand search behavior. Extensive experiments on knowledge-intensive and info-seeking VQA tasks show that our model not only outperforms traditional RAG-based baselines of the same model size, but also matches the performance of a larger RAG-based model while reducing search calls by over 30%. We further analyze key empirical findings to offer actionable insights for advancing research in multimodal search.
2025
Audio-centric Video Understanding Benchmark without Text Shortcut
Yudong Yang | Jimin Zhuang | Guangzhi Sun | Changli Tang | Yixuan Li | Peihan Li | Yifan Jiang | Wei Li | Zejun Ma | Chao Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yudong Yang | Jimin Zhuang | Guangzhi Sun | Changli Tang | Yixuan Li | Peihan Li | Yifan Jiang | Wei Li | Zejun Ma | Chao Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Audio often serves as an auxiliary modality in video understanding tasks of audio-visual large language models (LLMs), merely assisting in the comprehension of visual information. However, a thorough understanding of videos significantly depends on auditory information, as audio offers critical context, emotional cues, and semantic meaning that visual data alone often lacks. This paper proposes an audio-centric video understanding benchmark (AVUT) to evaluate the video comprehension capabilities of multimodal LLMs with a particular focus on auditory information. AVUT introduces a suite of carefully designed audio-centric tasks, holistically testing the understanding of both audio content and audio-visual interactions in videos. Moreover, this work points out the text shortcut problem that largely exists in other benchmarks where the correct answer can be found from question text alone without needing videos. AVUT addresses this problem by proposing a answer permutation-based filtering mechanism.A thorough evaluation across a diverse range of open-source and proprietary multimodal LLMs is performed, followed by the analyses of deficiencies in audio-visual LLMs. Demos and data are available at https://github.com/lark-png/AVUT.
2022
Improving Contextual Representation with Gloss Regularized Pre-training
Yu Lin | Zhecheng An | Peihao Wu | Zejun Ma
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022
Yu Lin | Zhecheng An | Peihao Wu | Zejun Ma
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022
Though achieving impressive results on many NLP tasks, the BERT-like masked language models (MLM) encounter the discrepancy between pre-training and inference. In light of this gap, we investigate the contextual representation of pre-training and inference from the perspective of word probability distribution. We discover that BERT risks neglecting the contextual word similarity in pre-training. To tackle this issue, we propose an auxiliary gloss regularizer module to BERT pre-training (GR-BERT), to enhance word semantic similarity. By predicting masked words and aligning contextual embeddings to corresponding glosses simultaneously, the word similarity can be explicitly modeled. We design two architectures for GR-BERT and evaluate our model in downstream tasks. Experimental results show that the gloss regularizer benefits BERT in word-level and sentence-level semantic representation. The GR-BERT achieves new state-of-the-art in lexical substitution task and greatly promotes BERT sentence representation in both unsupervised and supervised STS tasks.