Haoquan Guan

h-index14
2papers

2 Papers

91.8CLMay 20
Residual Skill Optimization for Text-to-SQL Ensembles

Jiongli Zhu, Haoquan Guan, Parjanya Prajakta Prashant et al.

Text-to-SQL ensembles improve over single-candidate generation by drawing multiple SQL candidates and selecting one, but their effectiveness is bounded by Pass@K, the probability that at least one of K candidates is correct. Existing methods source diversity heuristically through stochastic decoding or prompt variants, leaving candidate sets dominated by correlated failures. We present DivSkill-SQL, a residual skill optimization framework that builds complementary agentic Text-to-SQL ensembles without model fine-tuning: each new skill is optimized on examples the current skill ensemble fails on, provably targeting its marginal contribution to Pass@K. On Spider2-Lite, DivSkill-SQL improves selected accuracy by up to +11.1 points on Snowflake and +8.3 on BigQuery over the strongest ensemble baseline, with consistent gains across two base models (Opus-4.6 and GPT-5.4). Skills optimized on a single dialect transfer without retraining across dialects (Snowflake, BigQuery, SQLite) and to a different task formulation, such as BIRD-Critic (+2.6 pts). Error diagnostics show up to 3x fewer hallucinated schema references and function calls, indicating that gains come from genuinely reliable complementary skills rather than surface-form variation.

DBDec 2, 2025
Stress-Testing Causal Claims via Cardinality Repairs

Yarden Gabbay, Haoquan Guan, Shaull Almagor et al.

Causal analyses derived from observational data underpin high-stakes decisions in domains such as healthcare, public policy, and economics. Yet such conclusions can be surprisingly fragile: even minor data errors - duplicate records, or entry mistakes - may drastically alter causal relationships. This raises a fundamental question: how robust is a causal claim to small, targeted modifications in the data? Addressing this question is essential for ensuring the reliability, interpretability, and reproducibility of empirical findings. We introduce SubCure, a framework for robustness auditing via cardinality repairs. Given a causal query and a user-specified target range for the estimated effect, SubCure identifies a small set of tuples or subpopulations whose removal shifts the estimate into the desired range. This process not only quantifies the sensitivity of causal conclusions but also pinpoints the specific regions of the data that drive those conclusions. We formalize this problem under both tuple- and pattern-level deletion settings and show both are NP-complete. To scale to large datasets, we develop efficient algorithms that incorporate machine unlearning techniques to incrementally update causal estimates without retraining from scratch. We evaluate SubCure across four real-world datasets covering diverse application domains. In each case, it uncovers compact, high-impact subsets whose removal significantly shifts the causal conclusions, revealing vulnerabilities that traditional methods fail to detect. Our results demonstrate that cardinality repair is a powerful and general-purpose tool for stress-testing causal analyses and guarding against misleading claims rooted in ordinary data imperfections.