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
Experience
- Built LLM-based ad retrieval systems leveraging near-real-time shopper intent prediction
- Led multi-objective reinforcement fine-tuning using distant rewards and online A/B feedback to maximize ad relevance and conversion
- Delivered statistically significant revenue lifts on search and homepage widgets
- Led a cross-team effort (5 scientists, 1 engineer) to improve a personalized query builder widget on the Amazon search navigation bar using fine-tuned LLM rerankers; delivered ~20% offline recall@1 lift and advanced to online experimentation
- Led synthetic data generation and instruction-tuning for a domain-adapted 7B LLM; improved IFEval performance by ~15% while maintaining parity on other benchmarks
- Self-organized a team of 1 scientist and 3 engineers to develop MCP servers for monitoring and debugging internal ML workflows; won a GenAI hackathon hosted by the Rufus team
- Early work on counterfactual optimization for personalization (AISTATS 2019)
- Developed scalable hybrid sequential recommender systems for real-time personalization in AWS AI; lead author of KDD 2020 Best Paper (Applied Data Science Track)
- Extended item-to-user recommendation to user-to-item segmentation using a novel temporal point process framework (ICLR 2022)
- Scaled recommender systems to 5M+ unique items via noise-contrastive loss and approximate nearest-neighbor search, addressing large-catalog customer needs (AWS blog)
- Led development of an LLM-based content generator to enhance thematic recommendation quality using human feedback (WSDM 2023 demo)
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
- Service: Reviewer for NeurIPS, ICML, KDD, UAI, AAAI (multiple years)