Hongshen Xu

Zihan Zhao, Lu Chen, Ruisheng Cao et al.

Recently, the structural reading comprehension (SRC) task on web pages has attracted increasing research interests. Although previous SRC work has leveraged extra information such as HTML tags or XPaths, the informative topology of web pages is not effectively exploited. In this work, we propose a Topological Information Enhanced model (TIE), which transforms the token-level task into a tag-level task by introducing a two-stage process (i.e. node locating and answer refining). Based on that, TIE integrates Graph Attention Network (GAT) and Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) to leverage the topological information of both logical structures and spatial structures. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms strong baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performances on the web-based SRC benchmark WebSRC at the time of writing. The code of TIE will be publicly available at https://github.com/X-LANCE/TIE.

Ruisheng Cao, Fangyu Lei, Haoyuan Wu et al. · tsinghua

Data science and engineering workflows often span multiple stages, from warehousing to orchestration, using tools like BigQuery, dbt, and Airbyte. As vision language models (VLMs) advance in multimodal understanding and code generation, VLM-based agents could potentially automate these workflows by generating SQL queries, Python code, and GUI operations. This automation can improve the productivity of experts while democratizing access to large-scale data analysis. In this paper, we introduce Spider2-V, the first multimodal agent benchmark focusing on professional data science and engineering workflows, featuring 494 real-world tasks in authentic computer environments and incorporating 20 enterprise-level professional applications. These tasks, derived from real-world use cases, evaluate the ability of a multimodal agent to perform data-related tasks by writing code and managing the GUI in enterprise data software systems. To balance realistic simulation with evaluation simplicity, we devote significant effort to developing automatic configurations for task setup and carefully crafting evaluation metrics for each task. Furthermore, we supplement multimodal agents with comprehensive documents of these enterprise data software systems. Our empirical evaluation reveals that existing state-of-the-art LLM/VLM-based agents do not reliably automate full data workflows (14.0% success). Even with step-by-step guidance, these agents still underperform in tasks that require fine-grained, knowledge-intensive GUI actions (16.2%) and involve remote cloud-hosted workspaces (10.6%). We hope that Spider2-V paves the way for autonomous multimodal agents to transform the automation of data science and engineering workflow. Our code and data are available at https://spider2-v.github.io.

Danyang Zhang, Lu Chen, Situo Zhang et al.

Inspired by the insights in cognitive science with respect to human memory and reasoning mechanism, a novel evolvable LLM-based (Large Language Model) agent framework is proposed as REMEMBERER. By equipping the LLM with a long-term experience memory, REMEMBERER is capable of exploiting the experiences from the past episodes even for different task goals, which excels an LLM-based agent with fixed exemplars or equipped with a transient working memory. We further introduce Reinforcement Learning with Experience Memory (RLEM) to update the memory. Thus, the whole system can learn from the experiences of both success and failure, and evolve its capability without fine-tuning the parameters of the LLM. In this way, the proposed REMEMBERER constitutes a semi-parametric RL agent. Extensive experiments are conducted on two RL task sets to evaluate the proposed framework. The average results with different initialization and training sets exceed the prior SOTA by 4% and 2% for the success rate on two task sets and demonstrate the superiority and robustness of REMEMBERER.

Hanchong Zhang, Ruisheng Cao, Lu Chen et al.

Recently Large Language Models (LLMs) have been proven to have strong abilities in various domains and tasks. We study the problem of prompt designing in the text-to-SQL task and attempt to improve the LLMs' reasoning ability when generating SQL queries. Besides the trivial few-shot in-context learning setting, we design our chain-of-thought (CoT) prompt with a similar method to schema linking. We provide a method named ACT-SQL to automatically generate auto-CoT exemplars and thus the whole process doesn't need manual labeling. Our approach is cost-saving since we only use the LLMs' API call once when generating one SQL query. Furthermore, we extend our in-context learning method to the multi-turn text-to-SQL task. The experiment results show that the LLMs' performance can benefit from our ACT-SQL approach. Our approach achieves SOTA performance on the Spider dev set among existing in-context learning approaches.

Jieyu Li, Lu Chen, Ruisheng Cao et al.

Exploring the generalization of a text-to-SQL parser is essential for a system to automatically adapt the real-world databases. Previous works provided investigations focusing on lexical diversity, including the influence of the synonym and perturbations in both natural language questions and databases. However, research on the structure variety of database schema~(DS) is deficient. Specifically, confronted with the same input question, the target SQL is probably represented in different ways when the DS comes to a different structure. In this work, we provide in-deep discussions about the structural generalization of text-to-SQL tasks. We observe that current datasets are too templated to study structural generalization. To collect eligible test data, we propose a framework to generate novel text-to-SQL data via automatic and synchronous (DS, SQL) pair altering. In the experiments, significant performance reduction when evaluating well-trained text-to-SQL models on the synthetic samples demonstrates the limitation of current research regarding structural generalization. According to comprehensive analysis, we suggest the practical reason is the overfitting of (NL, SQL) patterns.

Da Ma, Lu Chen, Pengyu Wang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks but often require additional training, such as continual pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. However, the costs associated with this, primarily due to their large parameter count, remain high. This paper proposes leveraging \emph{sparsity} in pre-trained LLMs to expedite this training process. By observing sparsity in activated neurons during forward iterations, we identify the potential for computational speed-ups by excluding inactive neurons. We address associated challenges by extending existing neuron importance evaluation metrics and introducing a ladder omission rate scheduler. Our experiments on Llama-2 demonstrate that Sparsity-Accelerated Training (SAT) achieves comparable or superior performance to standard training while significantly accelerating the process. Specifically, SAT achieves a $45\%$ throughput improvement in continual pre-training and saves $38\%$ training time in supervised fine-tuning in practice. It offers a simple, hardware-agnostic, and easily deployable framework for additional LLM training. Our code is available at https://github.com/OpenDFM/SAT.

Zihan Zhao, Da Ma, Lu Chen et al.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has played an increasingly important role in chemical research. However, most models currently used in chemistry are specialist models that require training and tuning for specific tasks. A more generic and efficient solution would be an AI model that could address many tasks and support free-form dialogue in the broad field of chemistry. In its utmost form, such a generalist AI chemist could be referred to as Chemical General Intelligence. Large language models (LLMs) have recently logged tremendous success in the general domain of natural language processing, showing emerging task generalization and free-form dialogue capabilities. However, domain knowledge of chemistry is largely missing when training general-domain LLMs. The lack of such knowledge greatly hinders the performance of generalist LLMs in the field of chemistry. To this end, we develop ChemDFM, a pioneering LLM for chemistry trained on 34B tokens from chemical literature and textbooks, and fine-tuned using 2.7M instructions. As a result, it can understand and reason with chemical knowledge in free-form dialogue. Quantitative evaluations show that ChemDFM significantly surpasses most representative open-source LLMs. It outperforms GPT-4 on a great portion of chemical tasks, despite the substantial size difference. We have open-sourced the inference codes, evaluation datasets, and model weights of ChemDFM on Huggingface (https://huggingface.co/OpenDFM/ChemDFM-v1.0-13B).

Hanchong Zhang, Ruisheng Cao, Hongshen Xu et al.

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been demonstrated to possess impressive capabilities in a variety of domains and tasks. We investigate the issue of prompt design in the multi-turn text-to-SQL task and attempt to enhance the LLMs' reasoning capacity when generating SQL queries. In the conversational context, the current SQL query can be modified from the preceding SQL query with only a few operations due to the context dependency. We introduce our method called CoE-SQL which can prompt LLMs to generate the SQL query based on the previously generated SQL query with an edition chain. We also conduct extensive ablation studies to determine the optimal configuration of our approach. Our approach outperforms different in-context learning baselines stably and achieves state-of-the-art performances on two benchmarks SParC and CoSQL using LLMs, which is also competitive to the SOTA fine-tuned models.

Hongchuan Zeng, Hongshen Xu, Lu Chen et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have ushered in a new era in Natural Language Processing, but their massive size demands effective compression techniques for practicality. Although numerous model compression techniques have been investigated, they typically rely on a calibration set that overlooks the multilingual context and results in significant accuracy degradation for low-resource languages. This paper introduces Multilingual Brain Surgeon (MBS), a novel calibration data sampling method for multilingual LLMs compression. MBS overcomes the English-centric limitations of existing methods by sampling calibration data from various languages proportionally to the language distribution of the model training datasets. Our experiments, conducted on the BLOOM multilingual LLM, demonstrate that MBS improves the performance of existing English-centric compression methods, especially for low-resource languages. We also uncover the dynamics of language interaction during compression, revealing that the larger the proportion of a language in the training set and the more similar the language is to the calibration language, the better performance the language retains after compression. In conclusion, MBS presents an innovative approach to compressing multilingual LLMs, addressing the performance disparities and improving the language inclusivity of existing compression techniques.

Hongshen Xu, Ruisheng Cao, Su Zhu et al.

Previous work on spoken language understanding (SLU) mainly focuses on single-intent settings, where each input utterance merely contains one user intent. This configuration significantly limits the surface form of user utterances and the capacity of output semantics. In this work, we first propose a Multi-Intent dataset which is collected from a realistic in-Vehicle dialogue System, called MIVS. The target semantic frame is organized in a 3-layer hierarchical structure to tackle the alignment and assignment problems in multi-intent cases. Accordingly, we devise a BiRGAT model to encode the hierarchy of ontology items, the backbone of which is a dual relational graph attention network. Coupled with the 3-way pointer-generator decoder, our method outperforms traditional sequence labeling and classification-based schemes by a large margin.