Yan Gao

Bing Wang, Yan Gao, Zhoujun Li et al.

The task of text-to-SQL aims to convert a natural language question into its corresponding SQL query within the context of relational tables. Existing text-to-SQL parsers generate a "plausible" SQL query for an arbitrary user question, thereby failing to correctly handle problematic user questions. To formalize this problem, we conduct a preliminary study on the observed ambiguous and unanswerable cases in text-to-SQL and summarize them into 6 feature categories. Correspondingly, we identify the causes behind each category and propose requirements for handling ambiguous and unanswerable questions. Following this study, we propose a simple yet effective counterfactual example generation approach that automatically produces ambiguous and unanswerable text-to-SQL examples. Furthermore, we propose a weakly supervised DTE (Detecting-Then-Explaining) model for error detection, localization, and explanation. Experimental results show that our model achieves the best result on both real-world examples and generated examples compared with various baselines. We release our data and code at: \href{https://github.com/wbbeyourself/DTE}{https://github.com/wbbeyourself/DTE}.

Longxu Dou, Yan Gao, Mingyang Pan et al.

Existing text-to-SQL semantic parsers are typically designed for particular settings such as handling queries that span multiple tables, domains or turns which makes them ineffective when applied to different settings. We present UniSAr (Unified Structure-Aware Autoregressive Language Model), which benefits from directly using an off-the-shelf language model architecture and demonstrates consistently high performance under different settings. Specifically, UniSAr extends existing autoregressive language models to incorporate three non-invasive extensions to make them structure-aware: (1) adding structure mark to encode database schema, conversation context, and their relationships; (2) constrained decoding to decode well structured SQL for a given database schema; and (3) SQL completion to complete potential missing JOIN relationships in SQL based on database schema. On seven well-known text-to-SQL datasets covering multi-domain, multi-table and multi-turn, UniSAr demonstrates highly comparable or better performance to the most advanced specifically-designed text-to-SQL models. Importantly, our UniSAr is non-invasive, such that other core model advances in text-to-SQL can also adopt our extensions to further enhance performance.

Linquan Yu, Yan Gao, Yangtian Yan et al.

Bullet time is a type of visual effect commonly used in film, television and games that makes time seem to slow down or stop while still preserving dynamic details in the scene. It usually requires multiple sets of cameras to move slowly with the subject and is synthesized using post-production techniques, which is costly and one-time. The dynamic scene perspective reconstruction technology based on neural rendering field can be used to solve this requirement, but most of the current methods are poor in reconstruction accuracy due to the blurred input image and overfitting of dynamic and static regions. Based on the NSFF algorithm, this paper reconstructed the common time special effects scenes in movies and television from a new perspective. To improve the accuracy of the reconstructed images, fuzzy kernel was added to the network for reconstruction and analysis of the fuzzy process, and the clear perspective after analysis was input into the NSFF to improve the accuracy. By using the optical flow prediction information to suppress the dynamic network timely, the network is forced to improve the reconstruction effect of dynamic and static networks independently, and the ability to understand and reconstruct dynamic and static scenes is improved. To solve the overfitting problem of dynamic and static scenes, a new dynamic and static cross entropy loss is designed. Experimental results show that compared with original NSFF and other new perspective reconstruction algorithms of dynamic scenes, the improved NSFF-RFCT improves the reconstruction accuracy and enhances the understanding ability of dynamic and static scenes.

Yan Liu, Yan Gao, Zhe Su et al.

Content Warning: This work contains examples that potentially implicate stereotypes, associations, and other harms that could be offensive to individuals in certain social groups.} Large pre-trained language models are acknowledged to carry social biases towards different demographics, which can further amplify existing stereotypes in our society and cause even more harm. Text-to-SQL is an important task, models of which are mainly adopted by administrative industries, where unfair decisions may lead to catastrophic consequences. However, existing Text-to-SQL models are trained on clean, neutral datasets, such as Spider and WikiSQL. This, to some extent, cover up social bias in models under ideal conditions, which nevertheless may emerge in real application scenarios. In this work, we aim to uncover and categorize social biases in Text-to-SQL models. We summarize the categories of social biases that may occur in structured data for Text-to-SQL models. We build test benchmarks and reveal that models with similar task accuracy can contain social biases at very different rates. We show how to take advantage of our methodology to uncover and assess social biases in the downstream Text-to-SQL task. We will release our code and data.