Education

University of Auckland (UoA)Auckland, New Zealand
Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science supervised by Prof. Michael Witbrock 02/20 – 03/24
  • PhD Research Project Scholarship/Outstanding PhD Mentor
  • Graduate Teaching Assistant (Tutor)/Research Assistant (Professional Causal Staff)
University of Auckland (UoA)Auckland, New Zealand
Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Computer Science (First Class), GPA: 7/9 07/18 – 09/19
  • Precision Driven Health Summer Research Scholarship
Auckland University of Technology (AUT)Auckland, New Zealand
Bachelor of Science in Computer and Information Science, GPA: 7.733/9 07/16 – 07/18
  • Excellent Graduate Research and Development Project
China Jiliang University (CJLU)Hangzhou, China
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, GPA: 4.11/5 09/14 – 07/18
  • Outstanding Graduated Student of Zhejiang Province
  • The Honorable Mention of American Mathematics Modelling Contest

Paper List

  • Qiming Bao, Juho Leinonen, Alex Yuxuan Peng, Wanjun Zhong, Tim Pistotti, Alice Huang, Paul Denny, Michael Witbrock, Jiamou Liu. Exploring Iterative Enhancement for Improving Learnersourced Multiple-Choice Question Explanations with Large Language Models, AGI@ICLR (2024)
  • Qiming Bao, Gaël Gendron, Alex Peng, Neset Tan, Michael Witbrock, Jiamou Liu. A Systematic Evaluation of Large Language Models on Out-of-Distribution Logical Reasoning Tasks., LLM@IJCAI (2023)
  • Qiming Bao, Alex Peng, Zhenyun Deng, Wanjun Zhong, Gaël Gendron, Neşet Tan, Nathan Young, Yang Chen, Yonghua Zhu, Michael Witbrock, Jiamou Liu. Enhancing Logical Reasoning of Large Language Models through Logic-Driven Data Augmentation., LLM@IJCAI (2023)
  • Qiming Bao, Alex Peng, Tim Hartill, Neset Tan, Zhenyun Deng, Michael Witbrock, Jiamou Liu. Multi-Step Deductive Reasoning Over Natural Language: An Empirical Study on Out-of-Distribution Generalisation, IJCLR-NeSy (2022)
  • Nathan Young, Qiming Bao, Joshua Ljudo Bensemann, Michael J. Witbrock. AbductionRules: Training Transformers to Explain Unexpected Inputs, The Findings of ACL (2022)
  • Gaël Gendron, Qiming Bao, Michael Witbrock, Gillian Dobbie. Large Language Models Are Not Strong Abstract Reasoners, IJCAI (2024)
  • Lin Ni, Qiming Bao, Xiaoxuan Li, Qianqian Qi, Paul Denny, Jim Warren, Michael Witbrock, Jiamou Liu. DeepQR: Neural-based Quality Ratings for Learnersourced Multiple-Choice Questions, AAAI/EAAI (2022)
  • Qianqian Qi, Qiming Bao*, Alex Yuxuan Peng, Jiamou Liu, Michael Witbrock. A Dynamic Prompt-tuning Method for Data Augmentation with Associated Knowledge, ICLR TinyPapers (2023)
  • Gaël Gendron, Qiming Bao, Michael Witbrock, Gillian Dobbie. Large Language Models Are Not Strong Abstract Reasoners Yet, AGI@ICLR (2024)
  • Qiming Bao, Lin Ni, Jiamou Liu. HHH: An Online Medical Chatbot System based on Knowledge Graph and Hierarchical Bi-Directional Attention, ACSW (2020)
  • Zhongsheng Wang, Jiamou Liu, Qiming Bao, Hongfei Rong, Jingfeng Zhang. ChatLogic: Integrating Logic Programming with Large Language Models for Multi-step Reasoning, NucLeaR@AAAI (2024)
  • Neset TAN, Trung Nguyen, Josh Bensemann, Alex Peng, Qiming Bao, Yang Chen, Mark Gahegan, Michael Witbrock. Multi2Claim: Generating Scientific Claims from Multi-Choice Questions for Scientific Fact-Checking, EACL (2023)
  • Neset TAN, Alex Peng, Joshua Bensemann, Qiming Bao, Tim Hartill, Mark Gahegan, Michael Witbrock. Input-length-shortening and text generation via attention values, AAAI-EMC^2 (2023)
  • Work & Project Experience

    Enhancing Max Sequence Length in Large Multimodal Models Xtracta (Accredited Employer), Auckland, New Zealand
    Artificial Intelligence Researcher/Engineer 07/22 – now
    • Investigate and implement alternative attention mechanisms to extend the effective sequence length in multi-modal document processing models such as LayoutLMv3 and ERNIE-LayoutX.
    • By applying the sliding window technique and a global attention mask from Longformer to extend the maximum sequence length from 512 to 4096, which model among LayoutLMv3 and ERNIE-LayoutX achieves a higher F1 score on the XFUND, FUNSD and other company internal datasets without significantly increasing GPU memory usage.
    • Replicate the multi-task, multimodal pre-training code for LayoutLMv3, which Microsoft did not open source, including masked language modeling, masked image modeling, and word-patch alignment.
    • Integrating DeepSpeed and adapters into ERNIE-LayoutX and LayoutLMv3, which can reduce training costs, result in a smaller model size, and make it easier to deploy in the production environment.
    • Successfully applied for the Research & Development Tax Incentive (RDTI) grants from Callaghan Innovation (New Zealand's Innovation Agency) for both 2022 and 2023, each offering a tax credit equal to 15% of eligible R&D expenditure. This credit can be utilised to reduce the income tax payable by the company.
    Large Language Model and Logical Reasoning (Ph.D. Main Topic) UoA, Auckland, New Zealand
    Research & Development Project Leader/Developer 02/20 – 03/24
    • We have developed an iterative enhancement framework based on LLM for generating explanations. The framework iteratively interacts between an explanation generation module and an explanation evaluation module to enhance the quality of the generated explanations. Our paper has been accepted by AGI@ICLR 2024. paper and source code.
    • Our method "AMR-LDA" (GPT-4 + AMR-LDA Prompt Augmentation) achieved #1 on the ReClor leaderboard. We are the first group scored above 90% on the hidden test set around the world. Our paper has been accepted by LLM@IJCAI'23. paper, source code and model weights.
    • We evaluated generative and discriminative large language models on out-of-distribution logical reasoning tasks. While they excel in standard tasks, minor changes lead to notable performance drops, indicating insufficient reasoning capabilities. Our paper has been accepted by LLM@IJCAI'23. paper and source code.
    • To address depth imbalance in multi-step reasoning datasets and enhance model performance, we created the IMA-GloVe-GA model, combining DeepLogic with Gate Attention. Additionally, we developed a larger dataset, PARARULE-Plus, for deep multi-step reasoning over natural language. We published the paper, code and data and presentation recording on IJCLR-NeSy-22.
    • We built up a dataset called AbductionRules to increase the Transformer's performance on the tasks requiring abduction reasoning. We published the paper, code and data on the Findings of ACL-22.
    • PARARULE Plus (Multi-step deductive reasoning) and AbductionRules (Abductive reasoning) datasets are collected and merged as part of LogiTorch.ai, ReasoningNLP, Prompt4ReasoningPapers and OpenAI/Evals.
    Abstract Extraction and Multi-Turn Dialogue System Advanced Institute of Information Technology, Peking University, Hangzhou, China
    Research and Development Engineer 11/19 – 02/20
    • We developed and researched a robot-based system including automatic abstract extraction, text segmentation, theme prediction, and multi-turn question answering.
    • Investigation and standard documentation of robot-related technologies.
    • We built a well-encapsulated API to implement meeting record document processing based on the abstract extraction, text segmentation, and theme prediction.
    HHH: An Online Medical Chatbot System Precision Driven Health, Auckland, New Zealand
    Research Project Leader and Developer 11/18 – 04/19
    • We developed a medical text similarity algorithm called HBAM using Pre-trained Language Model and Knowledge Graph.
    • Compared with BERT and MaLSTM models, HBAM performs higher test accuracy than the two Deep Learning models respectively code (#star: 85+), news, recording and published paper (#citation: 55+) on ACSW-20.

    Invited Speaker/Visiting Scholar

  • Microsoft Research Asia Invited Talk 2022 (Invitation Letter) (Presentation Slide) (Recording)
  • Samsung AI Center Cambridge UK Invited Talk 2022 (Invitation Letter) (Presentation Slide) (Recording)
  • IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (VTS) New Zealand North Chapter and IEEE New Zealand North Section SIGHT Group 2022 (Invitation Letter) (Presentation Slide) (Recording)
  • ZJU-NLP Group, Zhejiang University 2023
  • NLP Group, The University of Melbourne Invited Talk 2023 (Invitation Letter) (Presentation Slide)
  • Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences Invited Talk 2023 (Invitation Letter) (Presentation Slide)