Meina Song

Haoran Luo, Haihong E, Yikai Guo et al. · mit

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) aims to answer natural language questions with a large-scale structured knowledge base (KB). Despite advancements with large language models (LLMs), KBQA still faces challenges in weak KB awareness, imbalance between effectiveness and efficiency, and high reliance on annotated data. To address these challenges, we propose KBQA-o1, a novel agentic KBQA method with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). It introduces a ReAct-based agent process for stepwise logical form generation with KB environment exploration. Moreover, it employs MCTS, a heuristic search method driven by policy and reward models, to balance agentic exploration's performance and search space. With heuristic exploration, KBQA-o1 generates high-quality annotations for further improvement by incremental fine-tuning. Experimental results show that KBQA-o1 outperforms previous low-resource KBQA methods with limited annotated data, boosting Llama-3.1-8B model's GrailQA F1 performance to 78.5% compared to 48.5% of the previous sota method with GPT-3.5-turbo. Our code is publicly available.

Shuai Lyu, Haoran Luo, Ripeng Li et al.

Text-to-SQL (Text2SQL) aims to map natural language questions to executable SQL queries. Although large language models (LLMs) have driven significant progress, current approaches struggle with poor transferability to open-source LLMs, limited robustness against logic and function errors in complex queries, and inefficiencies in structured search. We introduce SQL-o1, a self-reward-driven heuristic search framework built on an agent-based architecture to enhance model reasoning capabilities. SQL-o1 leverages Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for structured, multi-step exploration, and incorporates a dynamic pruning strategy to accelerate inference without sacrificing accuracy. On the Spider and Bird benchmarks, SQL-o1 achieves a +10.8 execution accuracy improvement on the complex Bird dataset, surpassing even GPT-4-based models. Notably, it exhibits strong few-shot generalization and robust cross-model transferability across open-source LLMs. Our code is available at:https://github.com/ShuaiLyu0110/SQL-o1.