Recently, MODELS 2021, the international flagship conference for model-driven development, announced its most influential paper award of the decade, which was won by MODELS 2011's paper "From State- to Delta-based Bidirectional Model Transformations: the Symmetric Case", and Xiong Yingfei, associate professor of the Department of Computer Science and Technology of Peking University, was the co-author of the paper. Another co-author is Dr. Zinovy Diskin of McMaster University, and other authors include Krzysztof Czarnecki, Hartmut Ehrig, Frank Hermann, and Fernando Orejas.

"From State- to Delta-based Bidirectional Model Transformations: the Symmetric Case" explores how software changes should be expressed in bidirectional model transformations. Given two software models that are interrelated, bidirectional model transformation focuses on how one model should be modified to eliminate inconsistencies between the two models when one of them changes, i.e. evolutionary defect fixing. Traditionally, change is expressed in terms of the state before and after the change. The paper points out that state-based expression-based methods will introduce a series of information loss problems, including the classical open problem PUTPUT in the field, and proposes a difference-based model Delta Lens to fix these problems. Delta Lens has become one of the basic models of bidirectional transformation, and researchers have established a series of theories around Delta Lens and developed a series of model consistency maintenance methods and tools based on Delta Lens.

The MODELS Most Influential Paper of the Decade Award is divided into three sub-awards, each for the most influential paper to date in the Research Track, Industry Track and Software and Systems Modeling Journal (Sosym) at the MODELS conference 10 years ago. Associate Professor Xiong Yingfei's winning paper was the most influential paper in the research session. This is also the first time that a Chinese university has won the award.