YIFEI MA

马逸飞

I am an applied scientist focused on modeling design for large-scale decision and feedback systems, with an emphasis on measurable impact in search and advertising. My work involves identifying appropriate mathematical structures for ambiguous business problems, drawing on tools such as off-policy evaluation, temporal point processes, and contrastive estimation. I am also interested in understanding how multi-turn interaction, algorithmic distillation, and world-knowledge association contribute to emergent capabilities in language models. I frequently engage in early-stage evaluation of new ideas to assess feasibility and scientific soundness prior to execution.

Publications

Google Scholar profile

Optimal Design for Human Preference Elicitation
Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Anusha Lalitha, Kousha Kalantari, Aniket Anand Deshmukh, Ge Liu, Yifei Ma, Branislav Kveton
NeurIPS 2024 [paper]
Logic-Scaffolding: Personalized Aspect-Instructed Recommendation Explanation Generation Using LLMs
Behnam Rahdari, Hao Ding, Ziwei Fan, Yifei Ma, Zhuotong Chen, Anoop Deoras, Branislav Kveton
Proceedings of the 17th ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining 2024 [paper]
Trending Now: Modeling Trend Recommendations
Hao Ding, Branislav Kveton, Yifei Ma, Youngsuk Park, Venkataramana Kini, Yupeng Gu, Ravi Divvela, Fei Wang, Anoop Deoras, Hao Wang
Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems 2023 [paper]
Fixed-Budget Best-Arm Identification with Heterogeneous Reward Variances
Anusha Lalitha, Kousha Kalantari, Yifei Ma, Anoop Deoras, Branislav Kveton
Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence 2023 [paper]
Context Uncertainty in Contextual Bandits with Applications to Recommender Systems
Hao Wang, Yifei Ma, Hao Ding, Yuyang Wang
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2022 [paper]
Bridging Recommendation and Marketing via Recurrent Intensity Modeling
Yifei Ma, Ge Liu, Anoop Deoras
International Conference on Learning Representations 2022 [paper]
Temporal-Contextual Recommendation in Real-Time
Yifei Ma, Balakrishnan Narayanaswamy, Haibin Lin, Hao Ding
Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining 2020 [paper]
Imitation-Regularized Offline Learning
Yifei Ma, Yu-Xiang Wang, Balakrishnan Narayanaswamy
The 22nd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics 2019 [paper]
Towards Optimal Off-Policy Evaluation for Reinforcement Learning with Marginalized Importance Sampling
Tengyang Xie, Yifei Ma, Yu-Xiang Wang
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32 2019 [paper]

Experience

Amazon — Senior Applied Scientist, Sponsored Products (Ads)
Palo Alto, CA, USA · Sep 2025 – Present
Amazon — Senior Applied Scientist, Stores Foundational AI
Palo Alto, CA, USA · Jan 2025 – Sep 2025
Amazon — Applied Scientist → Senior Applied Scientist, AWS Personalize
East Palo Alto & Santa Clara, CA, USA · Sep 2017 – Dec 2024

Education

Ph.D., Machine Learning
Carnegie Mellon University · Aug 2011 – May 2017
Advisor: Jeff Schneider
Dissertation: Active Search with Complex Actions and Rewards [slides]

B.S., Automation and Mathematics (Dual Major)
Tsinghua University · Aug 2007 – Jul 2011

Service

Photo of Yifei Ma