Ph.D. student at McGill University and Mila - Quebec AI Institute.

About Me

I am a Ph.D. student in ECE at McGill University and Mila‑Quebec AI Institute, supervised by Mark Coates. I am also working with Adriana Romero Soriano. During my Ph.D., I had been a visiting PhD student with Torr Vision Group at University of Oxford, working with Philip Torr; and had been interning in Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab Montréal.

Prior to that, I received my M.Sc. in CS from McGill and Mila, supervised by Reihaneh Rabbany and Adriana Romero Soriano; my B.Sc. in Stat from Sun Yat-sen University.

My research focuses on Geometric Deep Learning, particularly learning on graphs.

I develop Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) that are both theoretically and empirically expressive, going beyond Message-passing Networks (MPNNs). This includes Graph Transformers and Continuous Convolution Kernels.

I am also interested in time-series forecasting and, more recently, have been exploring RL post-training for LLMs.

Taken in Stamford Bridge

• Google Scholar
• Linkedin
• Mila Website
• OpenReview
• Email: {first_name}.{last_name}@mail.mcgill.ca

Selected Publication

My work has appeared in top-tier conferences (e.g., ICML, AISTATS, AAAI, KDD…), with 800+ citations.

• equal contribution

• Graph Inductive Biases in Transformers without Message Passing Liheng Ma*, Chen Lin*, Derek Lim, Adriana Romero‑Soriano, Puneet K. Dokania, Mark Coates, Philip H.S. Torr, Ser‑Nam Lim In Proc. Int. Conf. Mach. Learn. (ICML), 2023
• **Memory Augmented Graph Neural Networks for Sequential Recommendation** Chen Ma, Liheng Ma, Yingxue Zhang, Jianing Sun, Xue Liu, Mark Coates In Proc. AAAI Conf. Artif. Intell. (AAAI), 2020
• CKGConv: General Graph Convolution with Continuous Kernels Liheng Ma, Soumyasundar Pal, Yitian Zhang, Jiaming Zhou, Yingxue Zhang, Mark Coates In Proc. Int. Conf. Mach. Learn. (ICML), 2024
• **Multi‑Resolution Time‑Series Transformer for Long‑term Forecasting** Yitian Zhang*, Liheng Ma*, Soumyasundar Pal, Yingxue Zhang, Mark Coates In Proc. Int. Conf. Artif. Intell. Stat. (AISTATS), 2024
• **SKOLR: Structured Koopman Operator Linear RNN for Time‑Series Forecasting** Yitian Zhang, Liheng Ma, Antonios Valkanas, Boris N. Oreshkin, Mark Coates In Proc. Int. Conf. Mach. Learn. (ICML), 2025
• **It Takes Two: Your GRPO Is Secretly DPO** Yihong Wu*, Liheng Ma*, Lei Ding, Muzhi Li, Xinyu Wang, Kejia Chen, Zhan Su, Zhanguang Zhang, Chenyang Huang, Yingxue Zhang, Mark Coates, Jian-Yun Nie In Submission, 2025

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Academic Service

Conference Reviewer

• International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2023‑2025