Wenqi Pei

Shizheng Hou, Wenqi Pei, Nuo Chen et al.

Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) technology empowers non-expert users to query relational databases without requiring SQL expertise. While large language models (LLMs) have greatly improved NL2SQL algorithms, their rapid development outpaces systematic evaluation, leaving a critical gap in understanding their effectiveness, efficiency, and limitations. To this end, we present NL2SQLBench, the first modular evaluation and benchmarking framework for LLM-enabled NL2SQL approaches. Specifically, we dissect NL2SQL systems into three core modules: Schema Selection, Candidate Generation, and Query Revision. For each module, we comprehensively review existing strategies and propose novel fine-grained metrics that systematically quantify module-level effectiveness and efficiency. We further implement these metrics in a flexible multi-agent framework, allowing configurable benchmarking across diverse NL2SQL approaches. Leveraging NL2SQLBench, we rigorously evaluate ten representative open-source methods on two datasets, the BIRD development set and the ScienceBenchmark development set, using two LLMs, DeepSeek-V3 and GPT-4o mini. We systematically assess each approach across the three core modules and evaluate multiple critical performance dimensions. Our evaluation reveals significant gaps in existing NL2SQL methods, highlighting not only substantial room for accuracy improvements but also the significant computational inefficiency, which severely hampers real-world adoption. Furthermore, our analysis identifies critical shortcomings in current benchmark datasets and evaluation rules, emphasizing issues such as inaccurate gold SQL annotations and limitations in existing evaluation rules. By synthesizing these insights into a unified benchmarking, our study establishes a clear reference point for fair comparison and serves as essential guidance for future targeted innovation in NL2SQL technology.

Wenqi Pei, Shizheng Hou, Boyan Li et al.

Execution Accuracy (EX), the widely used metric for evaluating the effectiveness of Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) solutions, is becoming increasingly unreliable. It is sensitive to syntactic variation, ignores that questions may admit multiple interpretations, and is easily misled by erroneous ground-truth SQL. To address this, we introduce ROSE, an intent-centered metric that focuses on whether the predicted SQL answers the question, rather than consistency with the ground-truth SQL under the reference-dependent paradigm. ROSE employs an adversarial Prover-Refuter cascade: SQL Prover assesses the semantic correctness of a predicted SQL against the user's intent independently, while Adversarial Refuter uses the ground-truth SQL as evidence to challenge and refine this judgment. On our expert-aligned validation set ROSE-VEC, ROSE achieves the best agreement with human experts, outperforming the next-best metric by nearly 24% in Cohen's Kappa. We also conduct a largescale re-evaluation of 19 NL2SQL methods, revealing four valuable insights. We release ROSE and ROSE-VEC to facilitate more reliable NL2SQL research.

Han Chen, Zining Zhang, Wenqi Pei et al.

Memory is a fundamental component for enabling long-context LLM agents, supporting persistent state across interactions through a continuous serve-and-update lifecycle. Despite substantial prior work, existing systems suffer from significant maintenance overhead due to two key limitations: coarse-grained state management and inherently sequential update pipelines. In particular, updates are often tightly coupled with LLM inference and require full-state rewrites, leading to poor scalability and growing latency as memory accumulates. To address these challenges, we present MemForest, a memory framework that reformulates agent memory as a write-efficient temporal data management problem. MemForest breaks the sequential bottleneck via parallel chunk extraction, decoupling memory construction into concurrent, independent operations. To further eliminate coarse-grained maintenance, we introduce MemTree, a hierarchical temporal index that organizes memory as time-ordered trees rather than flat global summaries. This design replaces full-state rewrites with localized per-node updates, reducing maintenance cost to the affected tree paths while naturally preserving temporally evolving states. We evaluate MemForest on two long-context memory benchmarks, LongMemEval-S and LoCoMo. On LongMemEval-S, MemForest achieves the best overall performance among stateful baselines, reaching 79.8% pass@1 accuracy while sustaining a memory construction throughput approximately 6x higher than state-of-the-art approaches including EverMemOS.

Henry Hengyuan Zhao, Wenqi Pei, Yifei Tao et al.

Existing benchmarks do not test Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) on their interactive intelligence with human users, which is vital for developing general-purpose AI assistants. We design InterFeedback, an interactive framework, which can be applied to any LMM and dataset to assess this ability autonomously. On top of this, we introduce InterFeedback-Bench which evaluates interactive intelligence using two representative datasets, MMMU-Pro and MathVerse, to test 10 different open-source LMMs. Additionally, we present InterFeedback-Human, a newly collected dataset of 120 cases designed for manually testing interactive performance in leading models such as OpenAI-o1 and Claude-Sonnet-4. Our evaluation results indicate that even the state-of-the-art LMM, OpenAI-o1, struggles to refine its responses based on human feedback, achieving an average score of less than 50%. Our findings point to the need for methods that can enhance LMMs' capabilities to interpret and benefit from feedback.

Wenqi Pei, Hailing Xu, Hengyuan Zhao et al.

Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) has seen significant advancements with large language models (LLMs). However, these models often depend on closed-source systems and high computational resources, posing challenges in data privacy and deployment. In contrast, small language models (SLMs) struggle with NL2SQL tasks, exhibiting poor performance and incompatibility with existing frameworks. To address these issues, we introduce Feather-SQL, a new lightweight framework tailored for SLMs. Feather-SQL improves SQL executability and accuracy through 1) schema pruning and linking, 2) multi-path and multi-candidate generation. Additionally, we introduce the 1+1 Model Collaboration Paradigm, which pairs a strong general-purpose chat model with a fine-tuned SQL specialist, combining strong analytical reasoning with high-precision SQL generation. Experimental results on BIRD demonstrate that Feather-SQL improves NL2SQL performance on SLMs, with around 10% boost for models without fine-tuning. The proposed paradigm raises the accuracy ceiling of SLMs to 54.76%, highlighting its effectiveness.