Ruiying Ma

I am a second-year Ph.D. student at the UC Berkeley EPIC Data Lab, advised by Prof. Aditya Parameswaran. I received my B.Eng. in Computer Science from Tsinghua University (Yao Class) in 2025. Prior to this, I was a research intern at the Systems and Networking Research Group at Microsoft Research Asia, where I worked with Dr. Chieh-Jan Mike Liang, Prof. Francis Y. Yan, and Yanjie Gao.

News

Aug 20, 2026 DAB is accepted to the Main Conference of EMNLP 2026 (acceptance rate 15.4%)!
May 26, 2026 I gave an in-person talk on DAB at ByteDance (San Jose).
Apr 30, 2026 EPIC Retreat!
Mar 2, 2026 We release DAB, a new benchmark for data agents on realistic, multi-system data tasks. Contributions welcome!

Research

My research focuses on agentic data systems, especially how to help AI agents understand and process large-scale data in realistic, complex environments. In particular, I study two directions:

Improving systems to better support AI agents: What is the right system interface and architecture, and how can we improve the system's performance?
Designing agents to understand and process data more effectively: What is the right agent design, and how can we improve the agent's accuracy and efficiency in data processing?

Publications

^* Equal contribution.

Can AI Agents Answer Your Data Questions? A Benchmark for Data Agents

Ruiying Ma^*, Shreya Shankar^*, Ruiqi Chen, Yiming Lin, Sepanta Zeighami, Rajoshi Ghosh, Abhinav Gupta, Anushrut Gupta, Tanmai Gopal, Aditya G. Parameswaran

Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Main Conference, 2026

MetaMuse: Algorithm Generation via Creative Ideation

Ruiying Ma, Chieh-Jan Mike Liang, Yanjie Gao, Francis Y. Yan

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026

Querying Templatized Document Collections with Large Language Models

Yiming Lin, Madelon Hulsebos, Ruiying Ma, Shreya Shankar, Sepanta Zeighami, Aditya G. Parameswaran, Eugene Wu

IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2025