Shayan Talaei

Mohammadreza Pourreza, Shayan Talaei, Ruoxi Sun et al.

Text-to-SQL is a challenging task involving multiple reasoning-intensive subtasks, including natural language understanding, database schema comprehension, and precise SQL query formulation. Existing approaches often rely on handcrafted reasoning paths with inductive biases that can limit their overall effectiveness. Motivated by the recent success of reasoning-enhanced models such as DeepSeek R1 and OpenAI o1, which effectively leverage reward-driven self-exploration to enhance reasoning capabilities and generalization, we propose a novel set of partial rewards tailored specifically for the Text-to-SQL task. Our reward set includes schema-linking, AI feedback, n-gram similarity, and syntax check, explicitly designed to address the reward sparsity issue prevalent in reinforcement learning (RL). Leveraging group relative policy optimization (GRPO), our approach explicitly encourages large language models (LLMs) to develop intrinsic reasoning skills necessary for accurate SQL query generation. With models of different sizes, we demonstrate that RL-only training with our proposed rewards consistently achieves higher accuracy and superior generalization compared to supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Remarkably, our RL-trained 14B-parameter model significantly outperforms larger proprietary models, e.g. o3-mini by 4% and Gemini-1.5-Pro-002 by 3% on the BIRD benchmark. These highlight the efficacy of our proposed RL-training framework with partial rewards for enhancing both accuracy and reasoning capabilities in Text-to-SQL tasks.

Shayan Talaei, Meijin Li, Kanu Grover et al.

Every individual carries a unique and personal life story shaped by their memories and experiences. However, these memories are often scattered and difficult to organize into a coherent narrative, a challenge that defines the task of autobiography writing. Existing conversational writing assistants tend to rely on generic user interactions and pre-defined guidelines, making it difficult for these systems to capture personal memories and develop a complete biography over time. We introduce StorySage, a user-driven software system designed to meet the needs of a diverse group of users that supports a flexible conversation and a structured approach to autobiography writing. Powered by a multi-agent framework composed of an Interviewer, Session Scribe, Planner, Section Writer, and Session Coordinator, our system iteratively collects user memories, updates their autobiography, and plans for future conversations. In experimental simulations, StorySage demonstrates its ability to navigate multiple sessions and capture user memories across many conversations. User studies (N=28) highlight how StorySage maintains improved conversational flow, narrative completeness, and higher user satisfaction when compared to a baseline. In summary, StorySage contributes both a novel architecture for autobiography writing and insights into how multi-agent systems can enhance human-AI creative partnerships.