Qiuying Peng

Yingxuan Yang, Qiuying Peng, Jun Wang et al.

In the era of (multi-modal) large language models, most operational processes can be reformulated and reproduced using LLM agents. The LLM agents can perceive, control, and get feedback from the environment so as to accomplish the given tasks in an autonomous manner. Besides the environment-interaction property, the LLM agents can call various external tools to ease the task completion process. The tools can be regarded as a predefined operational process with private or real-time knowledge that does not exist in the parameters of LLMs. As a natural trend of development, the tools for calling are becoming autonomous agents, thus the full intelligent system turns out to be a LLM-based Multi-Agent System (LaMAS). Compared to the previous single-LLM-agent system, LaMAS has the advantages of i) dynamic task decomposition and organic specialization, ii) higher flexibility for system changing, iii) proprietary data preserving for each participating entity, and iv) feasibility of monetization for each entity. This paper discusses the technical and business landscapes of LaMAS. To support the ecosystem of LaMAS, we provide a preliminary version of such LaMAS protocol considering technical requirements, data privacy, and business incentives. As such, LaMAS would be a practical solution to achieve artificial collective intelligence in the near future.

Mingqian He, Yongliang Shen, Wenqi Zhang et al.

Generating step-by-step "chain-of-thought" rationales has proven effective for improving the performance of large language models on complex reasoning tasks. However, applying such techniques to structured tasks, such as text-to-SQL, remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce Self-Taught Reasoner for text-to-SQL (STaR-SQL), a novel approach that reframes SQL query generation as a reasoning-driven process. Our method prompts the LLM to produce detailed reasoning steps for SQL queries and fine-tunes it on rationales that lead to correct outcomes. Unlike traditional methods, STaR-SQL dedicates additional test-time computation to reasoning, thereby positioning LLMs as spontaneous reasoners rather than mere prompt-based agents. To further scale the inference process, we incorporate an outcome-supervised reward model (ORM) as a verifier, which enhances SQL query accuracy. Experimental results on the challenging Spider benchmark demonstrate that STaR-SQL significantly improves text-to-SQL performance, achieving an execution accuracy of 86.6%. This surpasses a few-shot baseline by 31.6% and a baseline fine-tuned to predict answers directly by 18.0%. Additionally, STaR-SQL outperforms agent-like prompting methods that leverage more powerful yet closed-source models such as GPT-4. These findings underscore the potential of reasoning-augmented training for structured tasks and open the door to extending self-improving reasoning models to text-to-SQL generation and beyond.