Qian-Wen Zhang

Dongling Xiao, Linzheng Chai, Qian-Wen Zhang et al.

Context-dependent text-to-SQL is the task of translating multi-turn questions into database-related SQL queries. Existing methods typically focus on making full use of history context or previously predicted SQL for currently SQL parsing, while neglecting to explicitly comprehend the schema and conversational dependency, such as co-reference, ellipsis and user focus change. In this paper, we propose CQR-SQL, which uses auxiliary Conversational Question Reformulation (CQR) learning to explicitly exploit schema and decouple contextual dependency for SQL parsing. Specifically, we first present a schema enhanced recursive CQR method to produce domain-relevant self-contained questions. Secondly, we train CQR-SQL models to map the semantics of multi-turn questions and auxiliary self-contained questions into the same latent space through schema grounding consistency task and tree-structured SQL parsing consistency task, which enhances the abilities of SQL parsing by adequately contextual understanding. At the time of writing, our CQR-SQL achieves new state-of-the-art results on two context-dependent text-to-SQL benchmarks SParC and CoSQL.

Shujuan Zhao, Lingfeng Qiao, Kangyang Luo et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have become powerful tools for advancing natural language processing applications in the financial industry. However, existing financial LLMs often face challenges such as hallucinations or superficial parameter training, resulting in suboptimal performance, particularly in financial computing and machine reading comprehension (MRC). To address these issues, we propose a novel large language model specifically designed for the Chinese financial domain, named SNFinLLM. SNFinLLM excels in domain-specific tasks such as answering questions, summarizing financial research reports, analyzing sentiment, and executing financial calculations. We then perform the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to enhance the model's proficiency across various financial domains. Specifically, we gather extensive financial data and create a high-quality instruction dataset composed of news articles, professional papers, and research reports of finance domain. Utilizing both domain-specific and general datasets, we proceed with continuous pre-training on an established open-source base model, resulting in SNFinLLM-base. Following this, we engage in supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to bolster the model's capability across multiple financial tasks. Crucially, we employ a straightforward Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) method to better align the model with human preferences. Extensive experiments conducted on finance benchmarks and our evaluation dataset demonstrate that SNFinLLM markedly outperforms other state-of-the-art financial language models. For more details, check out our demo video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYT-65HZwus.

Bing Wang, Changyu Ren, Jian Yang et al.

Recent LLM-based Text-to-SQL methods usually suffer from significant performance degradation on "huge" databases and complex user questions that require multi-step reasoning. Moreover, most existing methods neglect the crucial significance of LLMs utilizing external tools and model collaboration. To address these challenges, we introduce MAC-SQL, a novel LLM-based multi-agent collaborative framework. Our framework comprises a core decomposer agent for Text-to-SQL generation with few-shot chain-of-thought reasoning, accompanied by two auxiliary agents that utilize external tools or models to acquire smaller sub-databases and refine erroneous SQL queries. The decomposer agent collaborates with auxiliary agents, which are activated as needed and can be expanded to accommodate new features or tools for effective Text-to-SQL parsing. In our framework, We initially leverage GPT-4 as the strong backbone LLM for all agent tasks to determine the upper bound of our framework. We then fine-tune an open-sourced instruction-followed model, SQL-Llama, by leveraging Code Llama 7B, to accomplish all tasks as GPT-4 does. Experiments show that SQL-Llama achieves a comparable execution accuracy of 43.94, compared to the baseline accuracy of 46.35 for vanilla GPT-4. At the time of writing, MAC-SQL+GPT-4 achieves an execution accuracy of 59.59 when evaluated on the BIRD benchmark, establishing a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) on its holdout test set (https://github.com/wbbeyourself/MAC-SQL).

Qian-Wen Zhang, Haochen Wang, Fang Li et al.

Online education platforms have significantly transformed the dissemination of educational resources by providing a dynamic and digital infrastructure. With the further enhancement of this transformation, the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has elevated the intelligence levels of these platforms. However, current academic benchmarks provide limited guidance for real-world industry scenarios. This limitation arises because educational applications require more than mere test question responses. To bridge this gap, we introduce CJEval, a benchmark based on Chinese Junior High School Exam Evaluations. CJEval consists of 26,136 samples across four application-level educational tasks covering ten subjects. These samples include not only questions and answers but also detailed annotations such as question types, difficulty levels, knowledge concepts, and answer explanations. By utilizing this benchmark, we assessed LLMs' potential applications and conducted a comprehensive analysis of their performance by fine-tuning on various educational tasks. Extensive experiments and discussions have highlighted the opportunities and challenges of applying LLMs in the field of education.

Yilin Xiao, Junnan Dong, Chuang Zhou et al.

Graph Retrieval Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) has garnered increasing recognition for its potential to enhance large language models (LLMs) by structurally organizing domain-specific corpora and facilitating complex reasoning. However, current evaluations of GraphRAG models predominantly rely on traditional question-answering datasets. Their limited scope in questions and evaluation metrics fails to comprehensively assess the reasoning capacity improvements enabled by GraphRAG models. To address this gap, we introduce GraphRAG-Bench, a large-scale, domain-specific benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate GraphRAG models. Our benchmark offers three key superiorities: \((i)\) Challenging question design. Featuring college-level, domain-specific questions that demand multi-hop reasoning, the benchmark ensures that simple content retrieval is insufficient for problem-solving. For example, some questions require mathematical reasoning or programming. \((ii)\) Diverse task coverage. The dataset includes a broad spectrum of reasoning tasks, multiple-choice, true/false, multi-select, open-ended, and fill-in-the-blank. It spans 16 disciplines in twenty core textbooks. \((iii)\) Holistic evaluation framework. GraphRAG-Bench provides comprehensive assessment across the entire GraphRAG pipeline, including graph construction, knowledge retrieval, and answer generation. Beyond final-answer correctness, it evaluates the logical coherence of the reasoning process. By applying nine contemporary GraphRAG methods to GraphRAG-Bench, we demonstrate its utility in quantifying how graph-based structuring improves model reasoning capabilities. Our analysis reveals critical insights about graph architectures, retrieval efficacy, and reasoning capabilities, offering actionable guidance for the research community.

Yifei Yu, Qian-Wen Zhang, Lingfeng Qiao et al.

Evaluating the ability of large language models (LLMs) to process lengthy contexts is critical, especially for retrieving query-relevant information embedded within them. We introduce Sequential-NIAH, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the capability of LLMs to extract sequential information items (known as \emph{needles}) from long contexts. The benchmark includes three needle generation pipelines: synthetic-temporal, real-temporal, and real-logical orders, with context lengths ranging from 8K to 128K, which comprises 14,000 samples (2,000 for testing). To facilitate the evaluation of this benchmark, we trained an evaluation model that assesses the correctness of LLM responses by comparing their completeness and sequential consistency against the ground truth, which provides a more reliable evaluation metric than GPT-4 or Claude. We conducted experiments on six well-known LLMs, revealing that even the best-performing model achieved a maximum accuracy of only 63.50% on test set of this benchmark. Further analysis highlights the growing challenges posed by increasing the context length or the number of needles, underscoring substantial room for improvement of LLMs. Additionally, noise analysis validates the reliability and challenge of the benchmark, making Sequential-NIAH an important reference for advancing research on long text information extraction capabilities of LLMs.

Qian-Wen Zhang, Fang Li, Jie Wang et al.

Extractive reading comprehension systems are designed to locate the correct answer to a question within a given text. However, a persistent challenge lies in ensuring these models maintain high accuracy in answering questions while reliably recognizing unanswerable queries. Despite significant advances in large language models (LLMs) for reading comprehension, this issue remains critical, particularly as the length of supported contexts continues to expand. To address this challenge, we propose an innovative data augmentation methodology grounded in a multi-agent collaborative framework. Unlike traditional methods, such as the costly human annotation process required for datasets like SQuAD 2.0, our method autonomously generates evidence-based question-answer pairs and systematically constructs unanswerable questions. Using this methodology, we developed the FactGuard-Bench dataset, which comprises 25,220 examples of both answerable and unanswerable question scenarios, with context lengths ranging from 8K to 128K. Experimental evaluations conducted on seven popular LLMs reveal that even the most advanced models achieve only 61.79% overall accuracy. Furthermore, we emphasize the importance of a model's ability to reason about unanswerable questions to avoid generating plausible but incorrect answers. By implementing efficient data selection and generation within the multi-agent collaborative framework, our method significantly reduces the traditionally high costs associated with manual annotation and provides valuable insights for the training and optimization of LLMs.

Zixin Song, Bowen Zhang, Qian-Wen Zhang et al.

Conditional Semantic Textual Similarity (C-STS) measures the semantic proximity between text segments under a specific condition, thereby overcoming the ambiguity inherent in traditional STS. However, existing methods are largely confined to discriminative models, failing to fully integrate recent breakthroughs in the NLP community concerning Large Language Models (LLMs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL). RL is a particularly well-suited paradigm for this task, as it can directly optimize the non-differentiable Spearman ranking metric and guide the reasoning process required by C-STS. However, we find that naively applying listwise RL fails to produce meaningful improvements, as the model is overwhelmed by complex, coarse-grained reward signals. To address this challenge, we introduce PoLi-RL, a novel Point-to-List Reinforcement Learning framework. PoLi-RL employs a two-stage curriculum: it first trains the model with simple pointwise rewards to establish fundamental scoring capabilities, then transitions to a hybrid reward that combines pointwise, pairwise, and listwise objectives to refine the model's ability to discern subtle semantic distinctions. Crucially, we propose an innovative Parallel Slice Ranking Reward (PSRR) mechanism that computes ranking rewards in parallel slices, where each slice comprises same-indexed completions from different samples. This provides a precise, differentiated learning signal for each individual completion, enabling granular credit assignment and effective optimization. On the official C-STS benchmark, PoLi-RL achieves a Spearman correlation coefficient of 48.18, establishing a new SOTA for the cross-encoder architecture. As the first work to successfully apply RL to C-STS, our study introduces a powerful and precise paradigm for training LLMs on complex, ranking-based conditional judgment tasks.

Bowen Zhang, Zixin Song, Chunquan Chen et al.

Learning unified text embeddings that excel across diverse downstream tasks is a central goal in representation learning, yet negative transfer remains a persistent obstacle. This challenge is particularly pronounced when jointly training a single encoder for Information Retrieval (IR) and Semantic Textual Similarity (STS), two essential but fundamentally disparate tasks for which naive co-training typically yields steep performance trade-offs. We argue that resolving this conflict requires systematically decoupling task-specific learning signals throughout the training pipeline. To this end, we introduce CoDiEmb, a unified framework that reconciles the divergent requirements of IR and STS in a collaborative yet distinct manner. CoDiEmb integrates three key innovations for effective joint optimization: (1) Task-specialized objectives paired with a dynamic sampler that forms single-task batches and balances per-task updates, thereby preventing gradient interference. For IR, we employ a contrastive loss with multiple positives and hard negatives, augmented by cross-device sampling. For STS, we adopt order-aware objectives that directly optimize correlation and ranking consistency. (2) A delta-guided model fusion strategy that computes fine-grained merging weights for checkpoints by analyzing each parameter's deviation from its pre-trained initialization, proving more effective than traditional Model Soups. (3) An efficient, single-stage training pipeline that is simple to implement and converges stably. Extensive experiments on 15 standard IR and STS benchmarks across three base encoders validate CoDiEmb. Our results and analysis demonstrate that the framework not only mitigates cross-task trade-offs but also measurably improves the geometric properties of the embedding space.

Linzheng Chai, Dongling Xiao, Jian Yang et al.

Context-dependent Text-to-SQL aims to translate multi-turn natural language questions into SQL queries. Despite various methods have exploited context-dependence information implicitly for contextual SQL parsing, there are few attempts to explicitly address the dependencies between current question and question context. This paper presents QURG, a novel Question Rewriting Guided approach to help the models achieve adequate contextual understanding. Specifically, we first train a question rewriting model to complete the current question based on question context, and convert them into a rewriting edit matrix. We further design a two-stream matrix encoder to jointly model the rewriting relations between question and context, and the schema linking relations between natural language and structured schema. Experimental results show that QURG significantly improves the performances on two large-scale context-dependent datasets SParC and CoSQL, especially for hard and long-turn questions.

Ximing Zhang, Qian-Wen Zhang, Zhao Yan et al.

In multi-label text classification (MLTC), each given document is associated with a set of correlated labels. To capture label correlations, previous classifier-chain and sequence-to-sequence models transform MLTC to a sequence prediction task. However, they tend to suffer from label order dependency, label combination over-fitting and error propagation problems. To address these problems, we introduce a novel approach with multi-task learning to enhance label correlation feedback. We first utilize a joint embedding (JE) mechanism to obtain the text and label representation simultaneously. In MLTC task, a document-label cross attention (CA) mechanism is adopted to generate a more discriminative document representation. Furthermore, we propose two auxiliary label co-occurrence prediction tasks to enhance label correlation learning: 1) Pairwise Label Co-occurrence Prediction (PLCP), and 2) Conditional Label Co-occurrence Prediction (CLCP). Experimental results on AAPD and RCV1-V2 datasets show that our method outperforms competitive baselines by a large margin. We analyze low-frequency label performance, label dependency, label combination diversity and coverage speed to show the effectiveness of our proposed method on label correlation learning.