Recently, MODELS 2021 announced the most influential paper (MIP) award. The paper from MODELS 2011 titled "From State- to Delta-based Bidirectional Model Transformations: the Symmetric Case" received this prestigious award. Associate Professor Yingfei Xiong is the co-first author of this paper. The other co-first author is Dr. Zinovy Diskin from McMaster University. Other authors include Krzysztof Czarnecki, Hartmut Ehrig,Frank Hermann, Fernando Orejas.

This paper answers the question of how changes should be represented in the context of bidirectional model transformation. Bidirectional model transformation concerns when one of two interconnected models changes, how to change the other model to restore consistency. This paper shows that the classic way of representing changes as a pair of states would lead to information loss at vertical and horizontal composition, resulting in a series of problems. This paper further proposes a delta-based model, Delta Lens, to solve these problems. Delta lens is now one of the standard models in bidirectional transformation, and a lot of theoretical and practical work has been conducted on top of delta lenses.

The MODELS 2021 MIP award selects three papers by impact, respectively from the research track, the industry track, and the software and system modeling journal of year 2011. "From State- to Delta-based Bidirectional Model Transformations: the Symmetric Case" is the one selected from the research track. This is also the first time a researcher from China won this prestigious award.