Chenrui Ma

Hi, here is Chenrui’s homepage, welcome 👋!

I am a Master’s student at the University of California, Irvine, working as a Research Assistant in the Trustworthy ML/AI Group at UCI, advised by Prof. Yanning Shen. I am also a student collaborator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I received my bachelor’s degree from Central South University (中南大学). During my senior year, I studied as an exchange student at the University of California, Irvine, where I completed my undergraduate thesis and graduate-level coursework.

🌟 Research Interests

Generative Modeling & Algorithmic Foundations:
Research focuses on advanced generative models, including diffusion/flow models, autoregressive models, and VAEs, with an emphasis on the mathematical and algorithmic foundations of generation, aiming to improve controllability, robustness, and generalization for real-world data. A key direction is the development of efficient generative methods, these methods aim to fundamentally reduce inference and training cost while preserving or improving fidelity, providing theoretically grounded solutions for scalable and fast generation.
Multi-modal and Physically-Aware Understanding and Generation:
Research also covers multi-modal understanding and generation for images, videos, 3D data, and vision–language tasks, motivating to solve the multi-modal collaboration and cross-modal alignment. Longer-term interests include incorporating physical structure, dynamics, and causal constraints into generative models, moving toward physically consistent, trustworthy AI systems deployed in realistic environments.
Fairness and Trustworthy Representation Learning:
Another line of work studies the interaction between generative models, representation learning, and fairness, enabling both generative and downstream tasks to behave reliably and ethically across diverse populations and data distributions.

Email: chenrum@uci.edu
Location: Irvine, California, USA
My Chinese name is 马晨睿.

[2026-01] Our work CTR-LoRA: Curvature-Aware and Trust-Region Guided Low-Rank Adaptation for Large Language Models is accepted to ICASSP 2026.
[2025-11] Glad to see our recent work Learning Straight Flows: Variational Flow Matching for Efficient Generation (under review), receiving growing attention and discussion in the community.
[2025-11] Exited to receive AAAI-26 Scholarship ($1000), Thanks AAAI!
[2025-11] Our work CAD-VAE: Leveraging Correlation-Aware Latents for Comprehensive Fair Disentanglement is accepted to AAAI 2026 main track.
[2025-11] Our work Self-Supervised Visual Prompting for Cross-Domain Road Damage Detection is accepted to WACV 2026.

(* denotes equal contribution)

University of California, Irvine
Master of Science in Computer Science (Networked Systems)
September 2025 – June 2026 (Expected)
GPA: 4.00/4.00
University of California, Irvine
Exchange Student (UCI 3+2 Engineering program) in Computer Science
September 2024 – June 2025
GPA: 3.92/4.00
Central South University
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
September 2021 – June 2025
Grade: 86.8%, Rank: Top 35%

Research Assistant
Trustworthy ML/AI Group @ UCI
September 2024 – Present
- Developed advanced algorithms and models for generative modeling, understanding, and reasoning, with applications in computer vision and vision-language models.
- Proposed novel generative theory/algorithms for efficiency (one-step generation, multi-stage generation).
- Designed methods to address challenges of fairness in generative models and representation learning.
Teaching Assistant
University of California, Irvine
January 2026 – March 2026
- Assist the professor with teaching and grading, and organize course discussions.
Student Collaborator (remote)
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
May 2025 – Present
- Engineered generative and understanding models with a focus on improving efficiency and performance.

AAAI-2026 Scholarship
Singapore, November 2025
Awarded to students with outstanding academic performance for the year.
University-level Second Prize Scholarship (Top 20%)
Central South University, September 2024
University-level Third Prize Scholarship (Top 30%)
Central South University, September 2023
21st China Undergraduate Mathematical Competition in Modeling
Changsha, Hunan, China, September 2023
National Second Prize, Top 15% nationwide.
4th National College Student Mathematical Modeling Competition
Changsha, Hunan, China, July 2023
National First Prize, Top 5% nationwide.