Aloha!

My name is 马义然 (MA Yiran), and I go by Yiran Rex Ma in papers.

Call me Yiran or Rex per your liking :)

I’m with Peking University & ByteDance Digital Humanities Open Lab (PKUDH) and serving as a visiting algorithm engineer in Qwen Team, Alibaba Group, working on Multi-Modal Foundation Model for heritage science.

Coming in September 2026, I’m starting my PhD in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at Peking University, advised by Prof. Qi Su, with a concentration on foundation language models and computational linguistics, specifically on representation across modalities.

Currently, I’m graduating from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT), with a BA in English, Linguistics and Language Technologies and a minor in Data Science and Big Data Technologies.

From September 2024 to August 2025, I was a research intern in AI for Humanities & Social Science subdivision in TsinghuaNLP with Prof. Zhiyuan Liu thanks to kind mentorship from Dr. Yuxiao Ye and Prof. Shuangjie Li.

Before all that, I was primarily born and raised in the humanities with a discovered and ever since ongoing passion for human languages.

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Current focus

I’m striding towards becoming an LLM engineer, focusing on continual learning and specifically, lightweight and personalized models, which swiftly adapt the foundation to diverse domains and achieves meaningful alignment with inherent human preferences beyond verifiable rewards.

My partner and I founded Monticule with the same vision, seeking possibilities to scale up the solution in diverse real-world applications, pain-free.

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Last but not least

I love expressing myself, in all forms.

I’m something of a language aficionado, ever since I was made to realize this when my education finally took English seriously at the age of 13. Unlike many of my peers in this context, my family is humble small town dwellers from the rurals, with nothing fancy but Asian-style support.

They made Yiran possible. And I build Rex into who he is.

Therefore, American English and Simplified Chinese are my working languages, while I was marinated with Sichuan Dialect as my mother tone. Besides, I’m currently on track for Spanish, French, Hokkien, Cantonese, and more…

And I do think of language as a human-driven probability system, so I hope to establish proficiency in major programming languages, to become a full-stack polyglot :)

Oh, almost forgot, I also produce my own music under the name RexEra, experimenting with all sorts of elements while documenting my life.

You’ll possibly catch me jogging, hiking, touching grass, or dacing at a hyperpop live, but you can also find me at:

Instagram: @yiran_rex_ma_

Medium: @yiran_rex_ma_

WeChat OA/Xiaohongshu/Douyin/Bilibili: @馬大凛

(Personal) WeChat: rex0407317