Kang Yang

Chunxi Guo, Zhiliang Tian, Jintao Tang et al.

Text-to-SQL is a task that converts a natural language question into a structured query language (SQL) to retrieve information from a database. Large language models (LLMs) work well in natural language generation tasks, but they are not specifically pre-trained to understand the syntax and semantics of SQL commands. In this paper, we propose an LLM-based framework for Text-to-SQL which retrieves helpful demonstration examples to prompt LLMs. However, questions with different database schemes can vary widely, even if the intentions behind them are similar and the corresponding SQL queries exhibit similarities. Consequently, it becomes crucial to identify the appropriate SQL demonstrations that align with our requirements. We design a de-semanticization mechanism that extracts question skeletons, allowing us to retrieve similar examples based on their structural similarity. We also model the relationships between question tokens and database schema items (i.e., tables and columns) to filter out scheme-related information. Our framework adapts the range of the database schema in prompts to balance length and valuable information. A fallback mechanism allows for a more detailed schema to be provided if the generated SQL query fails. Ours outperforms state-of-the-art models and demonstrates strong generalization ability on three cross-domain Text-to-SQL benchmarks.

Tanghaoran Zhang, Yue Yu, Xinjun Mao et al.

Code snippet adaptation is a fundamental activity in the software development process. Unlike code generation, code snippet adaptation is not a "free creation", which requires developers to tailor a given code snippet in order to fit specific requirements and the code context. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have confirmed their effectiveness in the code generation task with promising results. However, their performance on adaptation, a reuse-oriented and context-dependent code change prediction task, is still unclear. To bridge this gap, we conduct an empirical study to investigate the performance and issues of LLMs on the adaptation task. We first evaluate the adaptation performances of three popular LLMs and compare them to the code generation task. Our result indicates that their adaptation ability is weaker than generation, with a nearly 15% decrease on pass@1 and more context-related errors. By manually inspecting 200 cases, we further investigate the causes of LLMs' sub-optimal performance, which can be classified into three categories, i.e., Unclear Requirement, Requirement Misalignment and Context Misapplication. Based on the above empirical research, we propose an interactive prompting approach to eliciting LLMs' adaptation ability. Experimental result reveals that our approach greatly improve LLMs' adaptation performance. The best-performing Human-LLM interaction successfully solves 159 out of the 202 identified defects and improves the pass@1 and pass@5 by over 40% compared to the initial instruction-based prompt. Considering human efforts, we suggest multi-agent interaction as a trade-off, which can achieve comparable performance with excellent generalization ability. We deem that our approach could provide methodological assistance for autonomous code snippet reuse and adaptation with LLMs.

Kamal Al-Sabahi, Kang Yang, Wangwang Liu et al.

To solve the Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) problem , a mapping between a source sequence and a target one is needed, where the two differ only on few spans. For this reason, the attention has been shifted to the non-autoregressive or sequence tagging models. In which, the GEC has been simplified from Seq2Seq to labeling the input tokens with edit commands chosen from a large edit space. Due to this large number of classes and the limitation of the available datasets, the current sequence tagging approaches still have some issues handling a broad range of grammatical errors just by being laser-focused on one single task. To this end, we simplified the GEC further by dividing it into seven related subtasks: Insertion, Deletion, Merge, Substitution, Transformation, Detection, and Correction, with Correction being our primary focus. A distinct classification head is dedicated to each of these subtasks. the novel multi-head and multi-task learning model is proposed to effectively utilize training data and harness the information from related task training signals. To mitigate the limited number of available training samples, a new denoising autoencoder is used to generate a new synthetic dataset to be used for pretraining. Additionally, a new character-level transformation is proposed to enhance the sequence-to-edit function and improve the model's vocabulary coverage. Our single/ensemble model achieves an F0.5 of 74.4/77.0, and 68.6/69.1 on BEA-19 (test) and CoNLL-14 (test) respectively. Moreover, evaluated on JFLEG test set, the GLEU scores are 61.6 and 61.7 for the single and ensemble models, respectively. It mostly outperforms recently published state-of-the-art results by a considerable margin.

Kang Yang, Kunhao Lai

Deep neural network (DNN) models have become a critical asset of the model owner as training them requires a large amount of resource (i.e. labeled data). Therefore, many fingerprinting schemes have been proposed to safeguard the intellectual property (IP) of the model owner against model extraction and illegal redistribution. However, previous schemes adopt unnatural images as the fingerprint, such as adversarial examples and noisy images, which can be easily perceived and rejected by the adversary. In this paper, we propose NaturalFinger which generates natural fingerprint with generative adversarial networks (GANs). Besides, our proposed NaturalFinger fingerprints the decision difference areas rather than the decision boundary, which is more robust. The application of GAN not only allows us to generate more imperceptible samples, but also enables us to generate unrestricted samples to explore the decision boundary.To demonstrate the effectiveness of our fingerprint approach, we evaluate our approach against four model modification attacks including adversarial training and two model extraction attacks. Experiments show that our approach achieves 0.91 ARUC value on the FingerBench dataset (154 models), exceeding the optimal baseline (MetaV) over 17\%.