Richard Shin

Subhro Roy, Sam Thomson, Tongfei Chen et al. · microsoft-research

Recent work has shown that generation from a prompted or fine-tuned language model can perform well at semantic parsing when the output is constrained to be a valid semantic representation. We introduce BenchCLAMP, a Benchmark to evaluate Constrained LAnguage Model Parsing, that includes context-free grammars for seven semantic parsing datasets and two syntactic parsing datasets with varied output representations, as well as a constrained decoding interface to generate only valid outputs covered by these grammars. We provide low, medium, and high resource splits for each dataset, allowing accurate comparison of various language models under different data regimes. Our benchmark supports evaluation of language models using prompt-based learning as well as fine-tuning. We benchmark eight language models, including two GPT-3 variants available only through an API. Our experiments show that encoder-decoder pretrained language models can achieve similar performance or surpass state-of-the-art methods for syntactic and semantic parsing when the model output is constrained to be valid.

Xinyu Tang, Richard Shin, Huseyin A. Inan et al. · microsoft-research

We study the problem of in-context learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs) on private datasets. This scenario poses privacy risks, as LLMs may leak or regurgitate the private examples demonstrated in the prompt. We propose a novel algorithm that generates synthetic few-shot demonstrations from the private dataset with formal differential privacy (DP) guarantees, and show empirically that it can achieve effective ICL. We conduct extensive experiments on standard benchmarks and compare our algorithm with non-private ICL and zero-shot solutions. Our results demonstrate that our algorithm can achieve competitive performance with strong privacy levels. These results open up new possibilities for ICL with privacy protection for a broad range of applications.

Fatemehsadat Mireshghallah, Yu Su, Tatsunori Hashimoto et al. · microsoft-research

Task-oriented dialogue systems often assist users with personal or confidential matters. For this reason, the developers of such a system are generally prohibited from observing actual usage. So how can they know where the system is failing and needs more training data or new functionality? In this work, we study ways in which realistic user utterances can be generated synthetically, to help increase the linguistic and functional coverage of the system, without compromising the privacy of actual users. To this end, we propose a two-stage Differentially Private (DP) generation method which first generates latent semantic parses, and then generates utterances based on the parses. Our proposed approach improves MAUVE by 2.5$\times$ and parse tree function type overlap by 1.3$\times$ relative to current approaches for private synthetic data generation, improving both on fluency and semantic coverage. We further validate our approach on a realistic domain adaptation task of adding new functionality from private user data to a semantic parser, and show overall gains of 8.5% points in accuracy with the new feature.

Kevin Yang, Olivia Deng, Charles Chen et al.

We introduce a novel setup for low-resource task-oriented semantic parsing which incorporates several constraints that may arise in real-world scenarios: (1) lack of similar datasets/models from a related domain, (2) inability to sample useful logical forms directly from a grammar, and (3) privacy requirements for unlabeled natural utterances. Our goal is to improve a low-resource semantic parser using utterances collected through user interactions. In this highly challenging but realistic setting, we investigate data augmentation approaches involving generating a set of structured canonical utterances corresponding to logical forms, before simulating corresponding natural language and filtering the resulting pairs. We find that such approaches are effective despite our restrictive setup: in a low-resource setting on the complex SMCalFlow calendaring dataset (Andreas et al., 2020), we observe 33% relative improvement over a non-data-augmented baseline in top-1 match.

Nicholas Farn, Richard Shin

Large language models (LLMs) have displayed massive improvements in reasoning and decision-making skills and can hold natural conversations with users. Many recent works seek to augment LLM-based assistants with external tools so they can access private or up-to-date information and carry out actions on behalf of users. To better measure the performance of these assistants, this paper introduces ToolTalk, a benchmark consisting of complex user intents requiring multi-step tool usage specified through dialogue. ToolTalk contains 28 tools grouped into 7 plugins, and includes a complete simulated implementation of each tool, allowing for fully automated evaluation of assistants that rely on execution feedback. ToolTalk also emphasizes tools that externally affect the world rather than only tools for referencing or searching information. We evaluate GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 on ToolTalk resulting in success rates of 26% and 50% respectively. Our analysis of the errors reveals three major categories and suggests some future directions for improvement. We release ToolTalk at https://github.com/microsoft/ToolTalk.

Gheorghe Comanici, Eric Bieber, Mike Schaekermann et al. · amazon-science, baidu

In this report, we introduce the Gemini 2.X model family: Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 2.5 Flash, as well as our earlier Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite models. Gemini 2.5 Pro is our most capable model yet, achieving SoTA performance on frontier coding and reasoning benchmarks. In addition to its incredible coding and reasoning skills, Gemini 2.5 Pro is a thinking model that excels at multimodal understanding and it is now able to process up to 3 hours of video content. Its unique combination of long context, multimodal and reasoning capabilities can be combined to unlock new agentic workflows. Gemini 2.5 Flash provides excellent reasoning abilities at a fraction of the compute and latency requirements and Gemini 2.0 Flash and Flash-Lite provide high performance at low latency and cost. Taken together, the Gemini 2.X model generation spans the full Pareto frontier of model capability vs cost, allowing users to explore the boundaries of what is possible with complex agentic problem solving.

Bailin Wang, Richard Shin, Xiaodong Liu et al.

When translating natural language questions into SQL queries to answer questions from a database, contemporary semantic parsing models struggle to generalize to unseen database schemas. The generalization challenge lies in (a) encoding the database relations in an accessible way for the semantic parser, and (b) modeling alignment between database columns and their mentions in a given query. We present a unified framework, based on the relation-aware self-attention mechanism, to address schema encoding, schema linking, and feature representation within a text-to-SQL encoder. On the challenging Spider dataset this framework boosts the exact match accuracy to 57.2%, surpassing its best counterparts by 8.7% absolute improvement. Further augmented with BERT, it achieves the new state-of-the-art performance of 65.6% on the Spider leaderboard. In addition, we observe qualitative improvements in the model's understanding of schema linking and alignment. Our implementation will be open-sourced at https://github.com/Microsoft/rat-sql.

Yunmo Chen, Tongfei Chen, Harsh Jhamtani et al.

We introduce iterative retrieval, a novel framework that empowers retrievers to make iterative decisions through policy optimization. Finding an optimal portfolio of retrieved items is a combinatorial optimization problem, generally considered NP-hard. This approach provides a learned approximation to such a solution, meeting specific task requirements under a given family of large language models (LLMs). We propose a training procedure based on reinforcement learning, incorporating feedback from LLMs. We instantiate an iterative retriever for composing in-context learning (ICL) exemplars and apply it to various semantic parsing tasks that demand synthesized programs as outputs. By adding only 4M additional parameters for state encoding, we convert an off-the-shelf dense retriever into a stateful iterative retriever, outperforming previous methods in selecting ICL exemplars on semantic parsing datasets such as CalFlow, TreeDST, and MTOP. Additionally, the trained iterative retriever generalizes across different inference LLMs beyond the one used during training.

Richard Shin, Benjamin Van Durme

Large language models can perform semantic parsing with little training data, when prompted with in-context examples. It has been shown that this can be improved by formulating the problem as paraphrasing into canonical utterances, which casts the underlying meaning representation into a controlled natural language-like representation. Intuitively, such models can more easily output canonical utterances as they are closer to the natural language used for pre-training. Recently, models also pre-trained on code, like OpenAI Codex, have risen in prominence. For semantic parsing tasks where we map natural language into code, such models may prove more adept at it. In this paper, we test this hypothesis and find that Codex performs better on such tasks than equivalent GPT-3 models. We evaluate on Overnight and SMCalFlow and find that unlike GPT-3, Codex performs similarly when targeting meaning representations directly, perhaps because meaning representations are structured similar to code in these datasets.

Patrick Xia, Richard Shin

The sizes of pretrained language models make them challenging and expensive to use when there are multiple desired downstream tasks. In this work, we adopt recent strategies for model pruning during finetuning to explore the question of whether it is possible to prune a single encoder so that it can be used for multiple tasks. We allocate a fixed parameter budget and compare pruning a single model with a multitask objective against the best ensemble of single-task models. We find that under two pruning strategies (element-wise and rank pruning), the approach with the multitask objective outperforms training models separately when averaged across all tasks, and it is competitive on each individual one. Additional analysis finds that using a multitask objective during pruning can also be an effective method for reducing model sizes for low-resource tasks.

Richard Shin, Christopher H. Lin, Sam Thomson et al.

We explore the use of large pretrained language models as few-shot semantic parsers. The goal in semantic parsing is to generate a structured meaning representation given a natural language input. However, language models are trained to generate natural language. To bridge the gap, we use language models to paraphrase inputs into a controlled sublanguage resembling English that can be automatically mapped to a target meaning representation. Our results demonstrate that with only a small amount of data and very little code to convert into English-like representations, our blueprint for rapidly bootstrapping semantic parsers leads to surprisingly effective performance on multiple community tasks, greatly exceeding baseline methods also trained on the same limited data.

Roy Fox, Richard Shin, William Paul et al.

Autonomous agents can learn by imitating teacher demonstrations of the intended behavior. Hierarchical control policies are ubiquitously useful for such learning, having the potential to break down structured tasks into simpler sub-tasks, thereby improving data efficiency and generalization. In this paper, we propose a variational inference method for imitation learning of a control policy represented by parametrized hierarchical procedures (PHP), a program-like structure in which procedures can invoke sub-procedures to perform sub-tasks. Our method discovers the hierarchical structure in a dataset of observation-action traces of teacher demonstrations, by learning an approximate posterior distribution over the latent sequence of procedure calls and terminations. Samples from this learned distribution then guide the training of the hierarchical control policy. We identify and demonstrate a novel benefit of variational inference in the context of hierarchical imitation learning: in decomposing the policy into simpler procedures, inference can leverage acausal information that is unused by other methods. Training PHP with variational inference outperforms LSTM baselines in terms of data efficiency and generalization, requiring less than half as much data to achieve a 24% error rate in executing the bubble sort algorithm, and to achieve no error in executing Karel programs.

Richard Shin, Neel Kant, Kavi Gupta et al.

The goal of program synthesis is to automatically generate programs in a particular language from corresponding specifications, e.g. input-output behavior. Many current approaches achieve impressive results after training on randomly generated I/O examples in limited domain-specific languages (DSLs), as with string transformations in RobustFill. However, we empirically discover that applying test input generation techniques for languages with control flow and rich input space causes deep networks to generalize poorly to certain data distributions; to correct this, we propose a new methodology for controlling and evaluating the bias of synthetic data distributions over both programs and specifications. We demonstrate, using the Karel DSL and a small Calculator DSL, that training deep networks on these distributions leads to improved cross-distribution generalization performance.

Richard Shin

When translating natural language questions into SQL queries to answer questions from a database, we would like our methods to generalize to domains and database schemas outside of the training set. To handle complex questions and database schemas with a neural encoder-decoder paradigm, it is critical to properly encode the schema as part of the input with the question. In this paper, we use relation-aware self-attention within the encoder so that it can reason about how the tables and columns in the provided schema relate to each other and use this information in interpreting the question. We achieve significant gains on the recently-released Spider dataset with 42.94% exact match accuracy, compared to the 18.96% reported in published work.

Richard Shin, Miltiadis Allamanis, Marc Brockschmidt et al.

Program synthesis of general-purpose source code from natural language specifications is challenging due to the need to reason about high-level patterns in the target program and low-level implementation details at the same time. In this work, we present PATOIS, a system that allows a neural program synthesizer to explicitly interleave high-level and low-level reasoning at every generation step. It accomplishes this by automatically mining common code idioms from a given corpus, incorporating them into the underlying language for neural synthesis, and training a tree-based neural synthesizer to use these idioms during code generation. We evaluate PATOIS on two complex semantic parsing datasets and show that using learned code idioms improves the synthesizer's accuracy.

Jonathon Cai, Richard Shin, Dawn Song

Empirically, neural networks that attempt to learn programs from data have exhibited poor generalizability. Moreover, it has traditionally been difficult to reason about the behavior of these models beyond a certain level of input complexity. In order to address these issues, we propose augmenting neural architectures with a key abstraction: recursion. As an application, we implement recursion in the Neural Programmer-Interpreter framework on four tasks: grade-school addition, bubble sort, topological sort, and quicksort. We demonstrate superior generalizability and interpretability with small amounts of training data. Recursion divides the problem into smaller pieces and drastically reduces the domain of each neural network component, making it tractable to prove guarantees about the overall system's behavior. Our experience suggests that in order for neural architectures to robustly learn program semantics, it is necessary to incorporate a concept like recursion.

Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Altay Ozen, Yu Wu et al.

Voice is envisioned to be a popular way for humans to interact with Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. We propose a proximity-based user authentication method (called PIANO) for access control on such voice-powered IoT devices. PIANO leverages the built-in speaker, microphone, and Bluetooth that voice-powered IoT devices often already have. Specifically, we assume that a user carries a personal voice-powered device (e.g., smartphone, smartwatch, or smartglass), which serves as the user's identity. When another voice-powered IoT device of the user requires authentication, PIANO estimates the distance between the two devices by playing and detecting certain acoustic signals; PIANO grants access if the estimated distance is no larger than a user-selected threshold. We implemented a proof-of-concept prototype of PIANO. Through theoretical and empirical evaluations, we find that PIANO is secure, reliable, personalizable, and efficient.

Xinyun Chen, Chang Liu, Richard Shin et al.

Automatic translation from natural language descriptions into programs is a longstanding challenging problem. In this work, we consider a simple yet important sub-problem: translation from textual descriptions to If-Then programs. We devise a novel neural network architecture for this task which we train end-to-end. Specifically, we introduce Latent Attention, which computes multiplicative weights for the words in the description in a two-stage process with the goal of better leveraging the natural language structures that indicate the relevant parts for predicting program elements. Our architecture reduces the error rate by 28.57% compared to prior art. We also propose a one-shot learning scenario of If-Then program synthesis and simulate it with our existing dataset. We demonstrate a variation on the training procedure for this scenario that outperforms the original procedure, significantly closing the gap to the model trained with all data.

Frank Li, Richard Shin, Vern Paxson

The k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) algorithm is a popular and effective classification algorithm. Due to its large storage and computational requirements, it is suitable for cloud outsourcing. However, k-NN is often run on sensitive data such as medical records, user images, or personal information. It is important to protect the privacy of data in an outsourced k-NN system. Prior works have all assumed the data owners (who submit data to the outsourced k-NN system) are a single trusted party. However, we observe that in many practical scenarios, there may be multiple mutually distrusting data owners. In this work, we present the first framing and exploration of privacy preservation in an outsourced k-NN system with multiple data owners. We consider the various threat models introduced by this modification. We discover that under a particularly practical threat model that covers numerous scenarios, there exists a set of adaptive attacks that breach the data privacy of any exact k-NN system. The vulnerability is a result of the mathematical properties of k-NN and its output. Thus, we propose a privacy-preserving alternative system supporting kernel density estimation using a Gaussian kernel, a classification algorithm from the same family as k-NN. In many applications, this similar algorithm serves as a good substitute for k-NN. We additionally investigate solutions for other threat models, often through extensions on prior single data owner systems.