Daily Papers

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) is critically dependent on the availability of high-quality datasets for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), alignment tasks like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), etc. In this work, we present a comprehensive synthetic data generation framework that facilitates scalable, configurable, and high-fidelity generation of synthetic data tailored for these training paradigms. Our approach employs a modular and configuration-based pipeline capable of modeling complex dialogue flows with minimal manual intervention. This framework uses a dual-stage quality tagging mechanism, combining heuristic rules and LLM-based evaluations, to automatically filter and score data extracted from OASST-formatted conversations, ensuring the curation of high-quality dialogue samples. The resulting datasets are structured under a flexible schema supporting both SFT and DPO use cases, enabling seamless integration into diverse training workflows. Together, these innovations offer a robust solution for generating and managing synthetic conversational data at scale, significantly reducing the overhead of data preparation in LLM training pipelines.

Transferring latent structure from one environment or problem to another is a mechanism by which humans and animals generalize with very little data. Inspired by cognitive and neurobiological insights, we propose graph schemas as a mechanism of abstraction for transfer learning. Graph schemas start with latent graph learning where perceptually aliased observations are disambiguated in the latent space using contextual information. Latent graph learning is also emerging as a new computational model of the hippocampus to explain map learning and transitive inference. Our insight is that a latent graph can be treated as a flexible template -- a schema -- that models concepts and behaviors, with slots that bind groups of latent nodes to the specific observations or groundings. By treating learned latent graphs (schemas) as prior knowledge, new environments can be quickly learned as compositions of schemas and their newly learned bindings. We evaluate graph schemas on two previously published challenging tasks: the memory & planning game and one-shot StreetLearn, which are designed to test rapid task solving in novel environments. Graph schemas can be learned in far fewer episodes than previous baselines, and can model and plan in a few steps in novel variations of these tasks. We also demonstrate learning, matching, and reusing graph schemas in more challenging 2D and 3D environments with extensive perceptual aliasing and size variations, and show how different schemas can be composed to model larger and more complex environments. To summarize, our main contribution is a unified system, inspired and grounded in cognitive science, that facilitates rapid transfer learning of new environments using schemas via map-induction and composition that handles perceptual aliasing.

Existing Text-to-SQL generators require the entire schema to be encoded with the user text. This is expensive or impractical for large databases with tens of thousands of columns. Standard dense retrieval techniques are inadequate for schema subsetting of a large structured database, where the correct semantics of retrieval demands that we rank sets of schema elements rather than individual elements. In response, we propose a two-stage process for effective coverage during retrieval. First, we instruct an LLM to hallucinate a minimal DB schema deemed adequate to answer the query. We use the hallucinated schema to retrieve a subset of the actual schema, by composing the results from multiple dense retrievals. Remarkably, hallucination x2013 generally considered a nuisance x2013 turns out to be actually useful as a bridging mechanism. Since no existing benchmarks exist for schema subsetting on large databases, we introduce three benchmarks. Two semi-synthetic datasets are derived from the union of schemas in two well-known datasets, SPIDER and BIRD, resulting in 4502 and 798 schema elements respectively. A real-life benchmark called SocialDB is sourced from an actual large data warehouse comprising 17844 schema elements. We show that our method1 leads to significantly higher recall than SOTA retrieval-based augmentation methods.

Universal information extraction (UIE) primarily employs an extractive generation approach with large language models (LLMs), typically outputting structured information based on predefined schemas such as JSON or tables. UIE suffers from a lack of adaptability when selecting between predefined schemas and on-the-fly schema generation within the in-context learning paradigm, especially when there are numerous schemas to choose from. In this paper, we propose a unified adaptive text-to-structure generation framework, called Schema as Parameterized Tools (SPT), which reimagines the tool-calling capability of LLMs by treating predefined schemas as parameterized tools for tool selection and parameter filling. Specifically, our SPT method can be applied to unify closed, open, and on-demand IE tasks by adopting Schema Retrieval by fetching the relevant schemas from a predefined pool, Schema Filling by extracting information and filling slots as with tool parameters, or Schema Generation by synthesizing new schemas with uncovered cases. Experiments show that the SPT method can handle four distinct IE tasks adaptively, delivering robust schema retrieval and selection performance. SPT also achieves comparable extraction performance to LoRA baselines and current leading UIE systems with significantly fewer trainable parameters.

Several approaches are proposed to deal with the problem of the Automatic Schema Matching (ASM). The challenges and difficulties caused by the complexity and uncertainty characterizing both the process and the outcome of Schema Matching motivated us to investigate how bio-inspired emerging paradigm can help with understanding, managing, and ultimately overcoming those challenges. In this paper, we explain how we approached Automatic Schema Matching as a systemic and Complex Adaptive System (CAS) and how we modeled it using the approach of Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS). This effort gives birth to a tool (prototype) for schema matching called Reflex-SMAS. A set of experiments demonstrates the viability of our approach on two main aspects: (i) effectiveness (increasing the quality of the found matchings) and (ii) efficiency (reducing the effort required for this efficiency). Our approach represents a significant paradigm-shift, in the field of Automatic Schema Matching.

JSON Schema is an important, evolving standard schema language for families of JSON documents. It is based on a complex combination of structural and Boolean assertions, and features negation and recursion. The static analysis of JSON Schema documents comprises practically relevant problems, including schema satisfiability, inclusion, and equivalence. These three problems can be reduced to witness generation: given a schema, generate an element of the schema, if it exists, and report failure otherwise. Schema satisfiability, inclusion, and equivalence have been shown to be decidable, by reduction to reachability in alternating tree automata. However, no witness generation algorithm has yet been formally described. We contribute a first, direct algorithm for JSON Schema witness generation. We study its effectiveness and efficiency, in experiments over several schema collections, including thousands of real-world schemas. Our focus is on the completeness of the language, where we only exclude the uniqueItems operator, and on the ability of the algorithm to run in a reasonable time on a large set of real-world examples, despite the exponential complexity of the underlying problem.

Schema linking is a critical bottleneck in applying existing Text-to-SQL models to real-world, large-scale, multi-database environments. Through error analysis, we identify two major challenges in schema linking: (1) Database Retrieval: accurately selecting the target database from a large schema pool, while effectively filtering out irrelevant ones; and (2) Schema Item Grounding: precisely identifying the relevant tables and columns within complex and often redundant schemas for SQL generation. Based on these, we introduce LinkAlign, a novel framework tailored for large-scale databases with thousands of fields. LinkAlign comprises three key steps: multi-round semantic enhanced retrieval and irrelevant information isolation for Challenge 1, and schema extraction enhancement for Challenge 2. Each stage supports both Agent and Pipeline execution modes, enabling balancing efficiency and performance via modular design. To enable more realistic evaluation, we construct AmbiDB, a synthetic dataset designed to reflect the ambiguity of real-world schema linking. Experiments on widely-used Text-to-SQL benchmarks demonstrate that LinkAlign consistently outperforms existing baselines on all schema linking metrics. Notably, it improves the overall Text-to-SQL pipeline and achieves a new state-of-the-art score of 33.09% on the Spider 2.0-Lite benchmark using only open-source LLMs, ranking first on the leaderboard at the time of submission. The codes are available at https://github.com/Satissss/LinkAlign

In the quest to facilitate the deep intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs) accessible in final-end user-bot interactions, the art of prompt crafting emerges as a critical yet complex task for the average user. Contrast to previous model-oriented yet instruction-agnostic Automatic Prompt Optimization methodologies, yielding polished results for predefined target models while suffering rapid degradation with out-of-box models, we present Free-form Instruction-oriented Prompt Optimization (FIPO). This approach is supported by our large-scale prompt preference dataset and employs a modular fine-tuning schema. The FIPO schema reimagines the optimization process into manageable modules, anchored by a meta prompt that dynamically adapts content. This allows for the flexible integration of the raw task instruction, the optional instruction response, and the optional ground truth to produce finely optimized task prompts. The FIPO preference dataset is meticulously constructed using the optimal and suboptimal LLMs, undergoing rigorous cross-verification by human experts and analytical models. Applying the insights from the data with Tulu2 models and fine-tuning strategies, we validate the efficacy of FIPO schema across five public benchmarks. Codes, data and scripts are here: https://github.com/LuJunru/FIPO_Project.

Utilizing large language models (LLMs) for transforming natural language questions into SQL queries (text-to-SQL) is a promising yet challenging approach, particularly when applied to real-world databases with complex and extensive schemas. In particular, effectively incorporating data catalogs and database values for SQL generation remains an obstacle, leading to suboptimal solutions. We address this problem by proposing a new pipeline that effectively retrieves relevant data and context, selects an efficient schema, and synthesizes correct and efficient SQL queries. To increase retrieval precision, our pipeline introduces a hierarchical retrieval method leveraging model-generated keywords, locality-sensitive hashing indexing, and vector databases. Additionally, we have developed an adaptive schema pruning technique that adjusts based on the complexity of the problem and the model's context size. Our approach generalizes to both frontier proprietary models like GPT-4 and open-source models such as Llama-3-70B. Through a series of ablation studies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of each component of our pipeline and its impact on the end-to-end performance. Our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the cross-domain challenging BIRD dataset.

Schemata are structured representations of complex tasks that can aid artificial intelligence by allowing models to break down complex tasks into intermediate steps. We propose a novel system that induces schemata from web videos and generalizes them to capture unseen tasks with the goal of improving video retrieval performance. Our system proceeds in three major phases: (1) Given a task with related videos, we construct an initial schema for a task using a joint video-text model to match video segments with text representing steps from wikiHow; (2) We generalize schemata to unseen tasks by leveraging language models to edit the text within existing schemata. Through generalization, we can allow our schemata to cover a more extensive range of tasks with a small amount of learning data; (3) We conduct zero-shot instructional video retrieval with the unseen task names as the queries. Our schema-guided approach outperforms existing methods for video retrieval, and we demonstrate that the schemata induced by our system are better than those generated by other models.

Schema linking -- the process of aligning natural language questions with database schema elements -- is a critical yet underexplored component of Text-to-SQL systems. While recent methods have focused primarily on improving SQL generation, they often neglect the retrieval of relevant schema elements, which can lead to hallucinations and execution failures. In this work, we propose a context-aware bidirectional schema retrieval framework that treats schema linking as a standalone problem. Our approach combines two complementary strategies: table-first retrieval followed by column selection, and column-first retrieval followed by table selection. It is further augmented with techniques such as question decomposition, keyword extraction, and keyphrase extraction. Through comprehensive evaluations on challenging benchmarks such as BIRD and Spider, we demonstrate that our method significantly improves schema recall while reducing false positives. Moreover, SQL generation using our retrieved schema consistently outperforms full-schema baselines and closely approaches oracle performance, all without requiring query refinement. Notably, our method narrows the performance gap between full and perfect schema settings by 50\%. Our findings highlight schema linking as a powerful lever for enhancing Text-to-SQL accuracy and efficiency.

Schema linking is a crucial step in Text-to-SQL pipelines, which translate natural language queries into SQL. The goal of schema linking is to retrieve relevant tables and columns (signal) while disregarding irrelevant ones (noise). However, imperfect schema linking can often exclude essential columns needed for accurate query generation. In this work, we revisit the need for schema linking when using the latest generation of large language models (LLMs). We find empirically that newer models are adept at identifying relevant schema elements during generation, without the need for explicit schema linking. This allows Text-to-SQL pipelines to bypass schema linking entirely and instead pass the full database schema to the LLM, eliminating the risk of excluding necessary information. Furthermore, as alternatives to schema linking, we propose techniques that improve Text-to-SQL accuracy without compromising on essential schema information. Our approach achieves 71.83\% execution accuracy on the BIRD benchmark, ranking first at the time of submission.

Conventional Knowledge Graph Construction (KGC) approaches typically follow the static information extraction paradigm with a closed set of pre-defined schema. As a result, such approaches fall short when applied to dynamic scenarios or domains, whereas a new type of knowledge emerges. This necessitates a system that can handle evolving schema automatically to extract information for KGC. To address this need, we propose a new task called schema-adaptable KGC, which aims to continually extract entity, relation, and event based on a dynamically changing schema graph without re-training. We first split and convert existing datasets based on three principles to build a benchmark, i.e., horizontal schema expansion, vertical schema expansion, and hybrid schema expansion; then investigate the schema-adaptable performance of several well-known approaches such as Text2Event, TANL, UIE and GPT-3.5. We further propose a simple yet effective baseline dubbed AdaKGC, which contains schema-enriched prefix instructor and schema-conditioned dynamic decoding to better handle evolving schema. Comprehensive experimental results illustrate that AdaKGC can outperform baselines but still have room for improvement. We hope the proposed work can deliver benefits to the community. Code and datasets will be available in https://github.com/zjunlp/AdaKGC.

The scientific literature's exponential growth makes it increasingly challenging to navigate and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Large language models (LLMs) are powerful tools for understanding scientific text, but they fail to capture detailed relationships across large bodies of work. Unstructured approaches, like retrieval augmented generation, can sift through such corpora to recall relevant facts; however, when millions of facts influence the answer, unstructured approaches become cost prohibitive. Structured representations offer a natural complement -- enabling systematic analysis across the whole corpus. Recent work enhances LLMs with unstructured or semistructured representations of scientific concepts; to complement this, we try extracting structured representations using LLMs. By combining LLMs' semantic understanding with a schema of scientific concepts, we prototype a system that answers precise questions about the literature as a whole. Our schema applies across scientific fields and we extract concepts from it using only 20 manually annotated abstracts. To demonstrate the system, we extract concepts from 30,000 papers on arXiv spanning astrophysics, fluid dynamics, and evolutionary biology. The resulting database highlights emerging trends and, by visualizing the knowledge graph, offers new ways to explore the ever-growing landscape of scientific knowledge. Demo: abby101/surveyor-0 on HF Spaces. Code: https://github.com/chiral-carbon/kg-for-science.

Long-range tasks require reasoning over long inputs. Existing solutions either need large compute budgets, training data, access to model weights, or use complex, task-specific approaches. We present PRISM, which alleviates these concerns by processing information as a stream of chunks, maintaining a structured in-context memory specified by a typed hierarchy schema. This approach demonstrates superior performance to baselines on diverse tasks while using at least 4x smaller contexts than long-context models. Moreover, PRISM is token-efficient. By producing short outputs and efficiently leveraging key-value (KV) caches, it achieves up to 54% cost reduction when compared to alternative short-context approaches. The method also scales down to tiny information chunks (e.g., 500 tokens) without increasing the number of tokens encoded or sacrificing quality. Furthermore, we show that it is possible to generate schemas to generalize our approach to new tasks with minimal effort.

Recent advancements in Text-to-SQL (Text2SQL) emphasize stimulating the large language models (LLM) on in-context learning, achieving significant results. Nevertheless, they face challenges when dealing with verbose database information and complex user intentions. This paper presents a two-stage framework to enhance the performance of current LLM-based natural language to SQL systems. We first introduce a novel prompt representation, called reference-enhanced representation, which includes schema information and randomly sampled cell values from tables to instruct LLMs in generating SQL queries. Then, in the first stage, question-SQL pairs are retrieved as few-shot demonstrations, prompting the LLM to generate a preliminary SQL (PreSQL). After that, the mentioned entities in PreSQL are parsed to conduct schema linking, which can significantly compact the useful information. In the second stage, with the linked schema, we simplify the prompt's schema information and instruct the LLM to produce the final SQL. Finally, as the post-refinement module, we propose using cross-consistency across different LLMs rather than self-consistency within a particular LLM. Our methods achieve new SOTA results on the Spider benchmark, with an execution accuracy of 87.6%.

To tackle the challenges of large language model performance in natural language to SQL tasks, we introduce XiYan-SQL, an innovative framework that employs a multi-generator ensemble strategy to improve candidate generation. We introduce M-Schema, a semi-structured schema representation method designed to enhance the understanding of database structures. To enhance the quality and diversity of generated candidate SQL queries, XiYan-SQL integrates the significant potential of in-context learning (ICL) with the precise control of supervised fine-tuning. On one hand, we propose a series of training strategies to fine-tune models to generate high-quality candidates with diverse preferences. On the other hand, we implement the ICL approach with an example selection method based on named entity recognition to prevent overemphasis on entities. The refiner optimizes each candidate by correcting logical or syntactical errors. To address the challenge of identifying the best candidate, we fine-tune a selection model to distinguish nuances of candidate SQL queries. The experimental results on multiple dialect datasets demonstrate the robustness of XiYan-SQL in addressing challenges across different scenarios. Overall, our proposed XiYan-SQL achieves the state-of-the-art execution accuracy of 89.65% on the Spider test set, 69.86% on SQL-Eval, 41.20% on NL2GQL, and a competitive score of 72.23% on the Bird development benchmark. The proposed framework not only enhances the quality and diversity of SQL queries but also outperforms previous methods.

Designing adaptive documents that are visually appealing across various devices and for diverse viewers is a challenging task. This is due to the wide variety of devices and different viewer requirements and preferences. Alterations to a document's content, style, or layout often necessitate numerous adjustments, potentially leading to a complete layout redesign. We introduce FlexDoc, a framework for creating and consuming documents that seamlessly adapt to different devices, author, and viewer preferences and interactions. It eliminates the need for manually creating multiple document layouts, as FlexDoc enables authors to define desired document properties using templates and employs both discrete and continuous optimization in a novel comprehensive optimization process, which leverages automatic text summarization and image carving techniques to adapt both layout and content during consumption dynamically. Furthermore, we demonstrate FlexDoc in multiple real-world application scenarios, such as news readers and academic papers.

Extracting structured information from unstructured text is crucial for modeling real-world processes, but traditional schema mining relies on semi-structured data, limiting scalability. This paper introduces schema-miner, a novel tool that combines large language models with human feedback to automate and refine schema extraction. Through an iterative workflow, it organizes properties from text, incorporates expert input, and integrates domain-specific ontologies for semantic depth. Applied to materials science--specifically atomic layer deposition--schema-miner demonstrates that expert-guided LLMs generate semantically rich schemas suitable for diverse real-world applications.

In this paper, we explore the question of whether large language models can support cost-efficient information extraction from tables. We introduce schema-driven information extraction, a new task that transforms tabular data into structured records following a human-authored schema. To assess various LLM's capabilities on this task, we present a benchmark comprised of tables from four diverse domains: machine learning papers, chemistry literature, material science journals, and webpages. We use this collection of annotated tables to evaluate the ability of open-source and API-based language models to extract information from tables covering diverse domains and data formats. Our experiments demonstrate that surprisingly competitive performance can be achieved without requiring task-specific pipelines or labels, achieving F1 scores ranging from 74.2 to 96.1, while maintaining cost efficiency. Moreover, through detailed ablation studies and analyses, we investigate the factors contributing to model success and validate the practicality of distilling compact models to reduce API reliance.

Schema matching -- the task of finding matches between attributes across disparate data sources with different tables and hierarchies -- is critical for creating interoperable machine learning (ML)-ready data. Addressing this fundamental data-centric problem has wide implications, especially in domains like healthcare, finance and e-commerce -- but also has the potential to benefit ML models more generally, by increasing the data available for ML model training. However, schema matching is a challenging ML task due to structural/hierarchical and semantic heterogeneity between different schemas. Previous ML approaches to automate schema matching have either required significant labeled data for model training, which is often unrealistic or suffer from poor zero-shot performance. To this end, we propose Matchmaker - a compositional language model program for schema matching, comprised of candidate generation, refinement and confidence scoring. Matchmaker also self-improves in a zero-shot manner without the need for labeled demonstrations via a novel optimization approach, which constructs synthetic in-context demonstrations to guide the language model's reasoning process. Empirically, we demonstrate on real-world medical schema matching benchmarks that Matchmaker outperforms previous ML-based approaches, highlighting its potential to accelerate data integration and interoperability of ML-ready data.

Paper search is an important activity for researchers, typically involving using a query with description of a topic to find relevant papers. As research deepens, paper search requirements may become more flexible, sometimes involving specific details such as module configuration rather than being limited to coarse-grained topics. However, previous paper search systems are unable to meet these flexible-grained requirements, as these systems mainly collect paper abstracts to construct index of corpus, which lack detailed information to support retrieval by finer-grained queries. In this work, we propose PaperRegister, consisted of offline hierarchical indexing and online adaptive retrieval, transforming traditional abstract-based index into hierarchical index tree for paper search, thereby supporting queries at flexible granularity. Experiments on paper search tasks across a range of granularity demonstrate that PaperRegister achieves the state-of-the-art performance, and particularly excels in fine-grained scenarios, highlighting the good potential as an effective solution for flexible-grained paper search in real-world applications. Code for this work is in https://github.com/Li-Z-Q/PaperRegister.

Even for a conservative estimate, 80% of enterprise data reside in unstructured files, stored in data lakes that accommodate heterogeneous formats. Classical search engines can no longer meet information seeking needs, especially when the task is to browse and explore for insight formulation. In other words, there are no obvious search keywords to use. Knowledge graphs, due to their natural visual appeals that reduce the human cognitive load, become the winning candidate for heterogeneous data integration and knowledge representation. In this paper, we introduce Docs2KG, a novel framework designed to extract multimodal information from diverse and heterogeneous unstructured documents, including emails, web pages, PDF files, and Excel files. Dynamically generates a unified knowledge graph that represents the extracted key information, Docs2KG enables efficient querying and exploration of document data lakes. Unlike existing approaches that focus on domain-specific data sources or pre-designed schemas, Docs2KG offers a flexible and extensible solution that can adapt to various document structures and content types. The proposed framework unifies data processing supporting a multitude of downstream tasks with improved domain interpretability. Docs2KG is publicly accessible at https://docs2kg.ai4wa.com, and a demonstration video is available at https://docs2kg.ai4wa.com/Video.

We introduce a versatile flexible-captioning vision-language model (VLM) capable of generating region-specific descriptions of varying lengths. The model, FlexCap, is trained to produce length-conditioned captions for input bounding boxes, and this allows control over the information density of its output, with descriptions ranging from concise object labels to detailed captions. To achieve this we create large-scale training datasets of image region descriptions of varying length, starting from captioned images. This flexible-captioning capability has several valuable applications. First, FlexCap demonstrates superior performance in dense captioning tasks on the Visual Genome dataset. Second, a visual question answering (VQA) system can be built by employing FlexCap to generate localized descriptions as inputs to a large language model. The resulting system achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on a number of VQA datasets. We also demonstrate a localize-then-describe approach with FlexCap can be better at open-ended object detection than a describe-then-localize approach with other VLMs. We highlight a novel characteristic of FlexCap, which is its ability to extract diverse visual information through prefix conditioning. Finally, we qualitatively demonstrate FlexCap's broad applicability in tasks such as image labeling, object attribute recognition, and visual dialog. Project webpage: https://flex-cap.github.io .

The progression from traditional prompt engineering to a more rigorous discipline of prompt design marks a pivotal shift in human-LLM interaction. As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly embedded in mission-critical applications, there emerges a pressing need for frameworks that are not only explicit and systematic but also minimal enough to remain practical and broadly accessible. While many existing approaches address prompt structuring through elaborate Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) or multi-layered templates, such methods can impose significant token and cognitive overhead, potentially constraining the model's creative capacity. In this context, we propose the 5C Prompt Contract, a framework that distills prompt design into five intuitive components: Character, Cause, Constraint, Contingency, and Calibration. This minimal cognitive schema explicitly integrates fallback and output optimization directives, fostering reliable, interpretable, and creatively flexible AI interactions. Experimental results demonstrate that the 5C framework consistently achieves superior input token efficiency while maintaining rich and consistent outputs across diverse LLM architectures (OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and Gemini), making it particularly suited for individuals and Small-to-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) with limited AI engineering resources.

Text-to-SQL systems have unlocked easier access to critical data insights by enabling natural language queries over structured databases. However, deploying such systems in enterprise environments remains challenging due to factors such as large, complex schemas (> 3000 columns), diverse SQL dialects (e.g., BigQuery, Snowflake) and sophisticated query requirements (e.g., transformation, analytics). Current state-of-the-art performance on the Spider 2.0 dataset -- a benchmark built to mimic such complex environments -- remains limited at 20%. Key limitations include inadequate instruction-following, poor long-context comprehension, weak self-refinement, and insufficient dialect-specific knowledge. To address these gaps, we propose ReFoRCE (Self-Refinement Agent with Format Restriction and Column Exploration) which introduces (1) table compression to mitigate long-context limitations (2) format restriction to ensure accurate answer format, and (3) iterative column exploration for enhanced schema understanding. Additionally, it employs self-refinement pipeline consisting of (1) parallelized workflows with voting mechanisms and (2) a Common Table Expression (CTE) based refinement approach to handle unresolved cases. ReFoRCE achieves state-of-the-art results scoring 31.26 on the Spider 2.0-Snow and scoring 30.35 on the Spider 2.0-Lite tasks.

Enterprises often own large collections of structured data in the form of large databases or an enterprise data lake. Such data collections come with limited metadata and strict access policies that could limit access to the data contents and, therefore, limit the application of classic retrieval and analysis solutions. As a result, there is a need for solutions that can effectively utilize the available metadata. In this paper, we study the problem of matching table metadata to a business glossary containing data labels and descriptions. The resulting matching enables the use of an available or curated business glossary for retrieval and analysis without or before requesting access to the data contents. One solution to this problem is to use manually-defined rules or similarity measures on column names and glossary descriptions (or their vector embeddings) to find the closest match. However, such approaches need to be tuned through manual labeling and cannot handle many business glossaries that contain a combination of simple as well as complex and long descriptions. In this work, we leverage the power of large language models (LLMs) to design generic matching methods that do not require manual tuning and can identify complex relations between column names and glossaries. We propose methods that utilize LLMs in two ways: a) by generating additional context for column names that can aid with matching b) by using LLMs to directly infer if there is a relation between column names and glossary descriptions. Our preliminary experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

Creating knowledge bases and ontologies is a time consuming task that relies on a manual curation. AI/NLP approaches can assist expert curators in populating these knowledge bases, but current approaches rely on extensive training data, and are not able to populate arbitrary complex nested knowledge schemas. Here we present Structured Prompt Interrogation and Recursive Extraction of Semantics (SPIRES), a Knowledge Extraction approach that relies on the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform zero-shot learning (ZSL) and general-purpose query answering from flexible prompts and return information conforming to a specified schema. Given a detailed, user-defined knowledge schema and an input text, SPIRES recursively performs prompt interrogation against GPT-3+ to obtain a set of responses matching the provided schema. SPIRES uses existing ontologies and vocabularies to provide identifiers for all matched elements. We present examples of use of SPIRES in different domains, including extraction of food recipes, multi-species cellular signaling pathways, disease treatments, multi-step drug mechanisms, and chemical to disease causation graphs. Current SPIRES accuracy is comparable to the mid-range of existing Relation Extraction (RE) methods, but has the advantage of easy customization, flexibility, and, crucially, the ability to perform new tasks in the absence of any training data. This method supports a general strategy of leveraging the language interpreting capabilities of LLMs to assemble knowledge bases, assisting manual knowledge curation and acquisition while supporting validation with publicly-available databases and ontologies external to the LLM. SPIRES is available as part of the open source OntoGPT package: https://github.com/ monarch-initiative/ontogpt.

Recently, there has been increasing interest in synthesizing data to improve downstream text-to-SQL tasks. In this paper, we first examined the existing synthesized datasets and discovered that state-of-the-art text-to-SQL algorithms did not further improve on popular benchmarks when trained with augmented synthetic data. We observed two shortcomings: illogical synthetic SQL queries from independent column sampling and arbitrary table joins. To address these issues, we propose a novel synthesis framework that incorporates key relationships from schema, imposes strong typing, and conducts schema-distance-weighted column sampling. We also adopt an intermediate representation (IR) for the SQL-to-text task to further improve the quality of the generated natural language questions. When existing powerful semantic parsers are pre-finetuned on our high-quality synthesized data, our experiments show that these models have significant accuracy boosts on popular benchmarks, including new state-of-the-art performance on Spider.

Data scientists today search large data lakes to discover and integrate datasets. In order to bring together disparate data sources, dataset discovery methods rely on some form of schema matching: the process of establishing correspondences between datasets. Traditionally, schema matching has been used to find matching pairs of columns between a source and a target schema. However, the use of schema matching in dataset discovery methods differs from its original use. Nowadays schema matching serves as a building block for indicating and ranking inter-dataset relationships. Surprisingly, although a discovery method's success relies highly on the quality of the underlying matching algorithms, the latest discovery methods employ existing schema matching algorithms in an ad-hoc fashion due to the lack of openly-available datasets with ground truth, reference method implementations, and evaluation metrics. In this paper, we aim to rectify the problem of evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of schema matching methods for the specific needs of dataset discovery. To this end, we propose Valentine, an extensible open-source experiment suite to execute and organize large-scale automated matching experiments on tabular data. Valentine includes implementations of seminal schema matching methods that we either implemented from scratch (due to absence of open source code) or imported from open repositories. The contributions of Valentine are: i) the definition of four schema matching scenarios as encountered in dataset discovery methods, ii) a principled dataset fabrication process tailored to the scope of dataset discovery methods and iii) the most comprehensive evaluation of schema matching techniques to date, offering insight on the strengths and weaknesses of existing techniques, that can serve as a guide for employing schema matching in future dataset discovery methods.

Despite the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, they still struggle with tasks that require generating complex, structured outputs. In this study, we assess the capability of Current LLMs in generating complex structured data and propose a structure-aware fine-tuning approach as a solution to improve this ability. To perform a comprehensive evaluation, we propose Struc-Bench, include five representative LLMs (i.e., GPT-NeoX 20B, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Vicuna) and evaluate them on our carefully constructed datasets spanning raw text, HTML, and LaTeX tables. Based on our analysis of current model performance, we identify specific common formatting errors and areas of potential improvement. To address complex formatting requirements, we utilize FormatCoT (Chain-of-Thought) to generate format instructions from target outputs. Our experiments show that our structure-aware fine-tuning method, when applied to LLaMA-7B, significantly improves adherence to natural language constraints, outperforming other evaluated LLMs. Based on these results, we present an ability map of model capabilities from six dimensions (i.e., coverage, formatting, reasoning, comprehension, pragmatics, and hallucination). This map highlights the weaknesses of LLMs in handling complex structured outputs and suggests promising directions for future work. Our code and models can be found at https://github.com/gersteinlab/Struc-Bench.

Knowledge Bases (KBs) find applications in many knowledge-intensive tasks and, most notably, in information retrieval. Wikidata is one of the largest public general-purpose KBs. Yet, its collaborative nature has led to a convoluted schema and taxonomy. The YAGO 4 KB cleaned up the taxonomy by incorporating the ontology of Schema.org, resulting in a cleaner structure amenable to automated reasoning. However, it also cut away large parts of the Wikidata taxonomy, which is essential for information retrieval. In this paper, we extend YAGO 4 with a large part of the Wikidata taxonomy - while respecting logical constraints and the distinction between classes and instances. This yields YAGO 4.5, a new, logically consistent version of YAGO that adds a rich layer of informative classes. An intrinsic and an extrinsic evaluation show the value of the new resource.

Semi-structured tables, widely used in real-world applications (e.g., financial reports, medical records, transactional orders), often involve flexible and complex layouts (e.g., hierarchical headers and merged cells). These tables generally rely on human analysts to interpret table layouts and answer relevant natural language questions, which is costly and inefficient. To automate the procedure, existing methods face significant challenges. First, methods like NL2SQL require converting semi-structured tables into structured ones, which often causes substantial information loss. Second, methods like NL2Code and multi-modal LLM QA struggle to understand the complex layouts of semi-structured tables and cannot accurately answer corresponding questions. To this end, we propose ST-Raptor, a tree-based framework for semi-structured table question answering using large language models. First, we introduce the Hierarchical Orthogonal Tree (HO-Tree), a structural model that captures complex semi-structured table layouts, along with an effective algorithm for constructing the tree. Second, we define a set of basic tree operations to guide LLMs in executing common QA tasks. Given a user question, ST-Raptor decomposes it into simpler sub-questions, generates corresponding tree operation pipelines, and conducts operation-table alignment for accurate pipeline execution. Third, we incorporate a two-stage verification mechanism: forward validation checks the correctness of execution steps, while backward validation evaluates answer reliability by reconstructing queries from predicted answers. To benchmark the performance, we present SSTQA, a dataset of 764 questions over 102 real-world semi-structured tables. Experiments show that ST-Raptor outperforms nine baselines by up to 20% in answer accuracy. The code is available at https://github.com/weAIDB/ST-Raptor.

While extensive research has explored the use of large language models (LLMs) for table-based reasoning, most approaches struggle with scalability when applied to large tables. To maintain the superior comprehension abilities of LLMs in these scenarios, we introduce ALTER(Augmentation for Large-Table-Based Reasoning)-a framework designed to harness the latent augmentation potential in both free-form natural language (NL) questions, via the query augmentor, and semi-structured tabular data, through the table augmentor. By utilizing only a small subset of relevant data from the table and supplementing it with pre-augmented schema, semantic, and literal information, ALTER achieves outstanding performance on table-based reasoning benchmarks. We also provide a detailed analysis of large-table scenarios, comparing different methods and various partitioning principles. In these scenarios, our method outperforms all other approaches and exhibits robustness and efficiency against perturbations.

Tables have gained significant attention in large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) due to their complex and flexible structure. Unlike linear text inputs, tables are two-dimensional, encompassing formats that range from well-structured database tables to complex, multi-layered spreadsheets, each with different purposes. This diversity in format and purpose has led to the development of specialized methods and tasks, instead of universal approaches, making navigation of table understanding tasks challenging. To address these challenges, this paper introduces key concepts through a taxonomy of tabular input representations and an introduction of table understanding tasks. We highlight several critical gaps in the field that indicate the need for further research: (1) the predominance of retrieval-focused tasks that require minimal reasoning beyond mathematical and logical operations; (2) significant challenges faced by models when processing complex table structures, large-scale tables, length context, or multi-table scenarios; and (3) the limited generalization of models across different tabular representations and formats.

Reliably generating structured outputs has become a critical capability for modern language model (LM) applications. Constrained decoding has emerged as the dominant technology across sectors for enforcing structured outputs during generation. Despite its growing adoption, little has been done with the systematic evaluation of the behaviors and performance of constrained decoding. Constrained decoding frameworks have standardized around JSON Schema as a structured data format, with most uses guaranteeing constraint compliance given a schema. However, there is poor understanding of the effectiveness of the methods in practice. We present an evaluation framework to assess constrained decoding approaches across three critical dimensions: efficiency in generating constraint-compliant outputs, coverage of diverse constraint types, and quality of the generated outputs. To facilitate this evaluation, we introduce JSONSchemaBench, a benchmark for constrained decoding comprising 10K real-world JSON schemas that encompass a wide range of constraints with varying complexity. We pair the benchmark with the existing official JSON Schema Test Suite and evaluate six state-of-the-art constrained decoding frameworks, including Guidance, Outlines, Llamacpp, XGrammar, OpenAI, and Gemini. Through extensive experiments, we gain insights into the capabilities and limitations of constrained decoding on structured generation with real-world JSON schemas. Our work provides actionable insights for improving constrained decoding frameworks and structured generation tasks, setting a new standard for evaluating constrained decoding and structured generation. We release JSONSchemaBench at https://github.com/guidance-ai/jsonschemabench

We introduce OneKE, a dockerized schema-guided knowledge extraction system, which can extract knowledge from the Web and raw PDF Books, and support various domains (science, news, etc.). Specifically, we design OneKE with multiple agents and a configure knowledge base. Different agents perform their respective roles, enabling support for various extraction scenarios. The configure knowledge base facilitates schema configuration, error case debugging and correction, further improving the performance. Empirical evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate OneKE's efficacy, while case studies further elucidate its adaptability to diverse tasks across multiple domains, highlighting its potential for broad applications. We have open-sourced the Code at https://github.com/zjunlp/OneKE and released a Video at http://oneke.openkg.cn/demo.mp4.

Metadata plays a critical role in indexing, documenting, and analyzing scientific literature, yet extracting it accurately and efficiently remains a challenging task. Traditional approaches often rely on rule-based or task-specific models, which struggle to generalize across domains and schema variations. In this paper, we present MeXtract, a family of lightweight language models designed for metadata extraction from scientific papers. The models, ranging from 0.5B to 3B parameters, are built by fine-tuning Qwen 2.5 counterparts. In their size family, MeXtract achieves state-of-the-art performance on metadata extraction on the MOLE benchmark. To further support evaluation, we extend the MOLE benchmark to incorporate model-specific metadata, providing an out-of-domain challenging subset. Our experiments show that fine-tuning on a given schema not only yields high accuracy but also transfers effectively to unseen schemas, demonstrating the robustness and adaptability of our approach. We release all the code, datasets, and models openly for the research community.

The Universal Morphology (UniMorph) project is a collaborative effort providing broad-coverage instantiated normalized morphological inflection tables for hundreds of diverse world languages. The project comprises two major thrusts: a language-independent feature schema for rich morphological annotation and a type-level resource of annotated data in diverse languages realizing that schema. This paper presents the expansions and improvements made on several fronts over the last couple of years (since McCarthy et al. (2020)). Collaborative efforts by numerous linguists have added 67 new languages, including 30 endangered languages. We have implemented several improvements to the extraction pipeline to tackle some issues, e.g. missing gender and macron information. We have also amended the schema to use a hierarchical structure that is needed for morphological phenomena like multiple-argument agreement and case stacking, while adding some missing morphological features to make the schema more inclusive. In light of the last UniMorph release, we also augmented the database with morpheme segmentation for 16 languages. Lastly, this new release makes a push towards inclusion of derivational morphology in UniMorph by enriching the data and annotation schema with instances representing derivational processes from MorphyNet.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems are required to identify key information from conversations for the completion of given tasks. Such information is conventionally specified in terms of intents and slots contained in task-specific ontology or schemata. Since these schemata are designed by system developers, the naming convention for slots and intents is not uniform across tasks, and may not convey their semantics effectively. This can lead to models memorizing arbitrary patterns in data, resulting in suboptimal performance and generalization. In this paper, we propose that schemata should be modified by replacing names or notations entirely with natural language descriptions. We show that a language description-driven system exhibits better understanding of task specifications, higher performance on state tracking, improved data efficiency, and effective zero-shot transfer to unseen tasks. Following this paradigm, we present a simple yet effective Description-Driven Dialog State Tracking (D3ST) model, which relies purely on schema descriptions and an "index-picking" mechanism. We demonstrate the superiority in quality, data efficiency and robustness of our approach as measured on the MultiWOZ (Budzianowski et al.,2018), SGD (Rastogi et al., 2020), and the recent SGD-X (Lee et al., 2021) benchmarks.

In this paper, we address the challenge of enforcing strict schema adherence in large language model (LLM) generation by leveraging LLM reasoning capabilities. Building on the DeepSeek R1 reinforcement learning framework, our approach trains structured reasoning skills of a 1.5B parameter model through a novel pipeline that combines synthetic reasoning dataset construction with custom reward functions under Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Specifically, we first perform R1 reinforcement learning on a 20K sample unstructured-to-structured dataset, mirroring the original DeepSeek R1 methods, to establish core reasoning abilities. Subsequently, we performed supervised fine-tuning on a separate 10K reasoning sample dataset, focusing on refining schema adherence for downstream tasks. Despite the relatively modest training scope, requiring approximately 20 hours on an 8xH100 GPU cluster for GRPO training and 3 hours on 1xA100 for SFT, our model demonstrates robust performance in enforcing schema consistency. We compare our ThinkJSON approach against the original DeepSeek R1 (671B), distilled versions of DeepSeek R1 (Qwen-1.5B and Qwen-7B), and Gemini 2.0 Flash (70B), showcasing its effectiveness in real-world applications. Our results underscore the practical utility of a resource-efficient framework for schema-constrained text generation.

Text-to-SQL aims to map natural language questions to SQL queries. The sketch-based method combined with execution-guided (EG) decoding strategy has shown a strong performance on the WikiSQL benchmark. However, execution-guided decoding relies on database execution, which significantly slows down the inference process and is hence unsatisfactory for many real-world applications. In this paper, we present the Schema Dependency guided multi-task Text-to-SQL model (SDSQL) to guide the network to effectively capture the interactions between questions and schemas. The proposed model outperforms all existing methods in both the settings with or without EG. We show the schema dependency learning partially cover the benefit from EG and alleviates the need for it. SDSQL without EG significantly reduces time consumption during inference, sacrificing only a small amount of performance and provides more flexibility for downstream applications.

Understanding visually-rich business documents to extract structured data and automate business workflows has been receiving attention both in academia and industry. Although recent multi-modal language models have achieved impressive results, we find that existing benchmarks do not reflect the complexity of real documents seen in industry. In this work, we identify the desiderata for a more comprehensive benchmark and propose one we call Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU). VRDU contains two datasets that represent several challenges: rich schema including diverse data types as well as hierarchical entities, complex templates including tables and multi-column layouts, and diversity of different layouts (templates) within a single document type. We design few-shot and conventional experiment settings along with a carefully designed matching algorithm to evaluate extraction results. We report the performance of strong baselines and offer three observations: (1) generalizing to new document templates is still very challenging, (2) few-shot performance has a lot of headroom, and (3) models struggle with hierarchical fields such as line-items in an invoice. We plan to open source the benchmark and the evaluation toolkit. We hope this helps the community make progress on these challenging tasks in extracting structured data from visually rich documents.

The task of converting natural language queries into SQL queries is intricate, necessitating a blend of precise techniques for an accurate translation. The DIN-SQL (Decomposed-In-Context SQL) methodology represents a significant development in this domain. This paper introduces DFIN (Decomposed Focused-In-Context), an innovative extension of DIN-SQL that enhances Text-to-SQL conversion by addressing schema linking errors, which are a major source of inaccuracies. DFIN uniquely alternates between prompting techniques and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), adapting to the size and complexity of the database schema. A preprocessing phase embeds database definitions and leverages annotated files, akin to those in the BIRD dataset, facilitating the runtime retrieval of pertinent schema information. This strategy significantly reduces the token count for schema linking prompts, enabling the use of a standard GPT-4 model over its larger context variant, thus handling large-scale databases more effectively and economically. Our evaluation on the BIRD dataset, a challenging real-world benchmark, demonstrates that DFIN not only scales efficiently but also improves accuracy, achieving a score of 51.69. This improvement surpasses DIN-SQL method (the current third-place), which is the highest-ranked model employing in-context learning rather than fine-tuning, previously scoring 50.72. The advancement of DFIN underscores the evolving capabilities of in-context learning methodologies combined with advanced language models, offering a promising avenue for future research in complex Text-to-SQL conversion tasks.

Research on parsing language to SQL has largely ignored the structure of the database (DB) schema, either because the DB was very simple, or because it was observed at both training and test time. In Spider, a recently-released text-to-SQL dataset, new and complex DBs are given at test time, and so the structure of the DB schema can inform the predicted SQL query. In this paper, we present an encoder-decoder semantic parser, where the structure of the DB schema is encoded with a graph neural network, and this representation is later used at both encoding and decoding time. Evaluation shows that encoding the schema structure improves our parser accuracy from 33.8% to 39.4%, dramatically above the current state of the art, which is at 19.7%.

In this paper, we propose KnowCoder, a Large Language Model (LLM) to conduct Universal Information Extraction (UIE) via code generation. KnowCoder aims to develop a kind of unified schema representation that LLMs can easily understand and an effective learning framework that encourages LLMs to follow schemas and extract structured knowledge accurately. To achieve these, KnowCoder introduces a code-style schema representation method to uniformly transform different schemas into Python classes, with which complex schema information, such as constraints among tasks in UIE, can be captured in an LLM-friendly manner. We further construct a code-style schema library covering over 30,000 types of knowledge, which is the largest one for UIE, to the best of our knowledge. To ease the learning process of LLMs, KnowCoder contains a two-phase learning framework that enhances its schema understanding ability via code pretraining and its schema following ability via instruction tuning. After code pretraining on around 1.5B automatically constructed data, KnowCoder already attains remarkable generalization ability and achieves relative improvements by 49.8% F1, compared to LLaMA2, under the few-shot setting. After instruction tuning, KnowCoder further exhibits strong generalization ability on unseen schemas and achieves up to 12.5% and 21.9%, compared to sota baselines, under the zero-shot setting and the low resource setting, respectively. Additionally, based on our unified schema representations, various human-annotated datasets can simultaneously be utilized to refine KnowCoder, which achieves significant improvements up to 7.5% under the supervised setting.

We introduce SMUTF, a unique approach for large-scale tabular data schema matching (SM), which assumes that supervised learning does not affect performance in open-domain tasks, thereby enabling effective cross-domain matching. This system uniquely combines rule-based feature engineering, pre-trained language models, and generative large language models. In an innovative adaptation inspired by the Humanitarian Exchange Language, we deploy 'generative tags' for each data column, enhancing the effectiveness of SM. SMUTF exhibits extensive versatility, working seamlessly with any pre-existing pre-trained embeddings, classification methods, and generative models. Recognizing the lack of extensive, publicly available datasets for SM, we have created and open-sourced the HDXSM dataset from the public humanitarian data. We believe this to be the most exhaustive SM dataset currently available. In evaluations across various public datasets and the novel HDXSM dataset, SMUTF demonstrated exceptional performance, surpassing existing state-of-the-art models in terms of accuracy and efficiency, and} improving the F1 score by 11.84% and the AUC of ROC by 5.08%.

Entity resolution is a widely studied problem with several proposals to match records across relations. Matching textual content is a widespread task in many applications, such as question answering and search. While recent methods achieve promising results for these two tasks, there is no clear solution for the more general problem of matching textual content and structured data. We introduce a framework that supports this new task in an unsupervised setting for any pair of corpora, being relational tables or text documents. Our method builds a fine-grained graph over the content of the corpora and derives word embeddings to represent the objects to match in a low dimensional space. The learned representation enables effective and efficient matching at different granularity, from relational tuples to text sentences and paragraphs. Our flexible framework can exploit pre-trained resources, but it does not depends on their existence and achieves better quality performance in matching content when the vocabulary is domain specific. We also introduce optimizations in the graph creation process with an "expand and compress" approach that first identifies new valid relationships across elements, to improve matching, and then prunes nodes and edges, to reduce the graph size. Experiments on real use cases and public datasets show that our framework produces embeddings that outperform word embeddings and fine-tuned language models both in results' quality and in execution times.

We present a comprehensive evaluation of structured decoding for text-to-table generation with large language models (LLMs). While previous work has primarily focused on unconstrained generation of tables, the impact of enforcing structural constraints during generation remains underexplored. We systematically compare schema-guided (structured) decoding to standard one-shot prompting across three diverse benchmarks - E2E, Rotowire, and Livesum - using open-source LLMs of up to 32B parameters, assessing the performance of table generation approaches in resource-constrained settings. Our experiments cover a wide range of evaluation metrics at cell, row, and table levels. Results demonstrate that structured decoding significantly enhances the validity and alignment of generated tables, particularly in scenarios demanding precise numerical alignment (Rotowire), but may degrade performance in contexts involving densely packed textual information (E2E) or extensive aggregation over lengthy texts (Livesum). We further analyze the suitability of different evaluation metrics and discuss the influence of model size.

In many use-cases, information is stored in text but not available in structured data. However, extracting data from natural language text to precisely fit a schema, and thus enable querying, is a challenging task. With the rise of pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs), there is now an effective solution to store and use information extracted from massive corpora of text documents. Thus, we envision the use of SQL queries to cover a broad range of data that is not captured by traditional databases by tapping the information in LLMs. To ground this vision, we present Galois, a prototype based on a traditional database architecture, but with new physical operators for querying the underlying LLM. The main idea is to execute some operators of the the query plan with prompts that retrieve data from the LLM. For a large class of SQL queries, querying LLMs returns well structured relations, with encouraging qualitative results. Preliminary experimental results make pre-trained LLMs a promising addition to the field of database systems, introducing a new direction for hybrid query processing. However, we pinpoint several research challenges that must be addressed to build a DBMS that exploits LLMs. While some of these challenges necessitate integrating concepts from the NLP literature, others offer novel research avenues for the DB community.

Graph retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG) has effectively enhanced large language models in complex reasoning by organizing fragmented knowledge into explicitly structured graphs. Prior efforts have been made to improve either graph construction or graph retrieval in isolation, yielding suboptimal performance, especially when domain shifts occur. In this paper, we propose a vertically unified agentic paradigm, Youtu-GraphRAG, to jointly connect the entire framework as an intricate integration. Specifically, (i) a seed graph schema is introduced to bound the automatic extraction agent with targeted entity types, relations and attribute types, also continuously expanded for scalability over unseen domains; (ii) To obtain higher-level knowledge upon the schema, we develop novel dually-perceived community detection, fusing structural topology with subgraph semantics for comprehensive knowledge organization. This naturally yields a hierarchical knowledge tree that supports both top-down filtering and bottom-up reasoning with community summaries; (iii) An agentic retriever is designed to interpret the same graph schema to transform complex queries into tractable and parallel sub-queries. It iteratively performs reflection for more advanced reasoning; (iv) To alleviate the knowledge leaking problem in pre-trained LLM, we propose a tailored anonymous dataset and a novel 'Anonymity Reversion' task that deeply measures the real performance of the GraphRAG frameworks. Extensive experiments across six challenging benchmarks demonstrate the robustness of Youtu-GraphRAG, remarkably moving the Pareto frontier with up to 90.71% saving of token costs and 16.62% higher accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines. The results indicate our adaptability, allowing seamless domain transfer with minimal intervention on schema.

Relational structures such as schema linking and schema encoding have been validated as a key component to qualitatively translating natural language into SQL queries. However, introducing these structural relations comes with prices: they often result in a specialized model structure, which largely prohibits using large pretrained models in text-to-SQL. To address this problem, we propose RASAT: a Transformer seq2seq architecture augmented with relation-aware self-attention that could leverage a variety of relational structures while inheriting the pretrained parameters from the T5 model effectively. Our model can incorporate almost all types of existing relations in the literature, and in addition, we propose introducing co-reference relations for the multi-turn scenario. Experimental results on three widely used text-to-SQL datasets, covering both single-turn and multi-turn scenarios, have shown that RASAT could achieve state-of-the-art results across all three benchmarks (75.5% EX on Spider, 52.6% IEX on SParC, and 37.4% IEX on CoSQL).

We propose STRuCT-LLM, a unified framework for training large language models (LLMs) to perform structured reasoning over both relational and graph-structured data. Our approach jointly optimizes Text-to-SQL and Text-to-Cypher tasks using reinforcement learning (RL) combined with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) supervision. To support fine-grained optimization in graph-based parsing, we introduce a topology-aware reward function based on graph edit distance. Unlike prior work that treats relational and graph formalisms in isolation, STRuCT-LLM leverages shared abstractions between SQL and Cypher to induce cross-formalism transfer, enabling SQL training to improve Cypher performance and vice versa - even without shared schemas. Our largest model (QwQ-32B) achieves substantial relative improvements across tasks: on semantic parsing, Spider improves by 13.5\% and Text2Cypher by 73.1\%. The model also demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization, improving performance on downstream tabular QA (TableBench: 8.5\%) and knowledge graph QA (CR-LT-KGQA: 1.7\%) without any QA-specific supervision. These results demonstrate both the effectiveness of executable queries as scaffolds for structured reasoning and the synergistic benefits of jointly training on SQL and Cypher (code available at https://github.com/bouv/STRuCT-LLM).

Language models have shown promising performance on the task of translating natural language questions into SQL queries (Text-to-SQL). However, most of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches rely on powerful yet closed-source large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, which may have the limitations of unclear model architectures, data privacy risks, and expensive inference overheads. To address the limitations, we introduce CodeS, a series of pre-trained language models with parameters ranging from 1B to 15B, specifically designed for the text-to-SQL task. CodeS is a fully open-source language model, which achieves superior accuracy with much smaller parameter sizes. This paper studies the research challenges in building CodeS. To enhance the SQL generation abilities of CodeS, we adopt an incremental pre-training approach using a specifically curated SQL-centric corpus. Based on this, we address the challenges of schema linking and rapid domain adaptation through strategic prompt construction and a bi-directional data augmentation technique. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on multiple datasets, including the widely used Spider benchmark, the newly released BIRD benchmark, robustness-diagnostic benchmarks such as Spider-DK, Spider-Syn, Spider-Realistic, and Dr.Spider, as well as two real-world datasets created for financial and academic applications. The experimental results show that our CodeS achieves new SOTA accuracy and robustness on nearly all challenging text-to-SQL benchmarks.

Recently, there is a growing interest in creating computer-aided design (CAD) models based on user intent, known as controllable CAD generation. Existing work offers limited controllability and needs separate models for different types of control, reducing efficiency and practicality. To achieve controllable generation across all CAD construction hierarchies, such as sketch-extrusion, extrusion, sketch, face, loop and curve, we propose FlexCAD, a unified model by fine-tuning large language models (LLMs). First, to enhance comprehension by LLMs, we represent a CAD model as a structured text by abstracting each hierarchy as a sequence of text tokens. Second, to address various controllable generation tasks in a unified model, we introduce a hierarchy-aware masking strategy. Specifically, during training, we mask a hierarchy-aware field in the CAD text with a mask token. This field, composed of a sequence of tokens, can be set flexibly to represent various hierarchies. Subsequently, we ask LLMs to predict this masked field. During inference, the user intent is converted into a CAD text with a mask token replacing the part the user wants to modify, which is then fed into FlexCAD to generate new CAD models. Comprehensive experiments on public dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of FlexCAD in both generation quality and controllability. Code will be available at https://github.com/microsoft/FlexCAD.

The existence of a plethora of language models makes the problem of selecting the best one for a custom task challenging. Most state-of-the-art methods leverage transformer-based models (e.g., BERT) or their variants. Training such models and exploring their hyperparameter space, however, is computationally expensive. Prior work proposes several neural architecture search (NAS) methods that employ performance predictors (e.g., surrogate models) to address this issue; however, analysis has been limited to homogeneous models that use fixed dimensionality throughout the network. This leads to sub-optimal architectures. To address this limitation, we propose a suite of heterogeneous and flexible models, namely FlexiBERT, that have varied encoder layers with a diverse set of possible operations and different hidden dimensions. For better-posed surrogate modeling in this expanded design space, we propose a new graph-similarity-based embedding scheme. We also propose a novel NAS policy, called BOSHNAS, that leverages this new scheme, Bayesian modeling, and second-order optimization, to quickly train and use a neural surrogate model to converge to the optimal architecture. A comprehensive set of experiments shows that the proposed policy, when applied to the FlexiBERT design space, pushes the performance frontier upwards compared to traditional models. FlexiBERT-Mini, one of our proposed models, has 3% fewer parameters than BERT-Mini and achieves 8.9% higher GLUE score. A FlexiBERT model with equivalent performance as the best homogeneous model achieves 2.6x smaller size. FlexiBERT-Large, another proposed model, achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming the baseline models by at least 5.7% on the GLUE benchmark.

Recent In-Context Learning based methods have achieved remarkable success in Text-to-SQL task. However, there is still a large gap between the performance of these models and human performance on datasets with complex database schema and difficult questions, such as BIRD. Besides, existing work has neglected to supervise intermediate steps when solving questions iteratively with question decomposition methods, and the schema linking methods used in these works are very rudimentary. To address these issues, we propose MAG-SQL, a multi-agent generative approach with soft schema linking and iterative Sub-SQL refinement. In our framework, an entity-based method with tables' summary is used to select the columns in database, and a novel targets-conditions decomposition method is introduced to decompose those complex questions. Additionally, we build a iterative generating module which includes a Sub-SQL Generator and Sub-SQL Refiner, introducing external oversight for each step of generation. Through a series of ablation studies, the effectiveness of each agent in our framework has been demonstrated. When evaluated on the BIRD benchmark with GPT-4, MAG-SQL achieves an execution accuracy of 61.08\%, compared to the baseline accuracy of 46.35\% for vanilla GPT-4 and the baseline accuracy of 57.56\% for MAC-SQL. Besides, our approach makes similar progress on Spider.

Translating Natural Language Queries into Structured Query Language (Text-to-SQL or NLQ-to-SQL) is a critical task extensively studied by both the natural language processing and database communities, aimed at providing a natural language interface to databases (NLIDB) and lowering the barrier for non-experts. Despite recent advancements made through the use of Large Language Models (LLMs), significant challenges remain. These include handling complex database schemas, resolving ambiguity in user queries, and generating SQL queries with intricate structures that accurately reflect the user's intent. In this work, we introduce E-SQL, a novel pipeline specifically designed to address these challenges through direct schema linking and candidate predicate augmentation. E-SQL enhances the natural language query by incorporating relevant database items (i.e., tables, columns, and values) and conditions directly into the question and SQL construction plan, bridging the gap between the query and the database structure. The pipeline leverages candidate predicate augmentation to mitigate erroneous or incomplete predicates in generated SQLs. Comprehensive evaluations on the BIRD benchmark illustrate that E-SQL achieves competitive performance, particularly excelling in complex queries with a 66.29% execution accuracy on the test set. A further observation from our experiments reveals that incorporating schema filtering into the translation pipeline does not have a positive impact on performance when the most advanced proprietary LLMs are used. Additionally, our experiments with small LLMs highlight the importance and positive impact of enriched questions on their performance. Without fine-tuning, single-prompt SQL generation using enriched questions with DeepSeek Coder 7B Instruct 1.5v achieves 56.45% execution accuracy on the BIRD development set.

LLMs when used with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), are greatly improving the SOTA of translating natural language queries to structured and correct SQL. Unlike previous reviews, this survey provides a comprehensive study of the evolution of LLM-based text-to-SQL systems, from early rule-based models to advanced LLM approaches that use (RAG) systems. We discuss benchmarks, evaluation methods, and evaluation metrics. Also, we uniquely study the use of Graph RAGs for better contextual accuracy and schema linking in these systems. Finally, we highlight key challenges such as computational efficiency, model robustness, and data privacy toward improvements of LLM-based text-to-SQL systems.

Foundation models, particularly those that incorporate Transformer architectures, have demonstrated exceptional performance in domains such as natural language processing and image processing. Adapting these models to structured data, like tables, however, introduces significant challenges. These difficulties are even more pronounced when addressing multi-table data linked via foreign key, which is prevalent in the enterprise realm and crucial for empowering business use cases. Despite its substantial impact, research focusing on such linked business tables within enterprise settings remains a significantly important yet underexplored domain. To address this, we introduce a curated dataset sourced from an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, featuring extensive linked tables. This dataset is specifically designed to support research endeavors in table representation learning. By providing access to authentic enterprise data, our goal is to potentially enhance the effectiveness and applicability of models for real-world business contexts.

Recent developments show that Large Language Models (LLMs) produce state-of-the-art performance on natural language (NL) to code generation for resource-rich general-purpose languages like C++, Java, and Python. However, their practical usage for structured domain-specific languages (DSLs) such as YAML, JSON is limited due to domain-specific schema, grammar, and customizations generally unseen by LLMs during pre-training. Efforts have been made to mitigate this challenge via in-context learning through relevant examples or by fine-tuning. However, it suffers from problems, such as limited DSL samples and prompt sensitivity but enterprises maintain good documentation of the DSLs. Therefore, we propose DocCGen, a framework that can leverage such rich knowledge by breaking the NL-to-Code generation task for structured code languages into a two-step process. First, it detects the correct libraries using the library documentation that best matches the NL query. Then, it utilizes schema rules extracted from the documentation of these libraries to constrain the decoding. We evaluate our framework for two complex structured languages, Ansible YAML and Bash command, consisting of two settings: Out-of-domain (OOD) and In-domain (ID). Our extensive experiments show that DocCGen consistently improves different-sized language models across all six evaluation metrics, reducing syntactic and semantic errors in structured code. We plan to open-source the datasets and code to motivate research in constrained code generation.

Scientific texts often convey authority due to their technical language and complex data. However, this complexity can sometimes lead to the spread of misinformation. Non-experts are particularly susceptible to misleading claims based on scientific tables due to their high information density and perceived credibility. Existing table claim verification models, including state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), often struggle with precise fine-grained reasoning, resulting in errors and a lack of precision in verifying scientific claims. Inspired by Cognitive Load Theory, we propose that enhancing a model's ability to interpret table-based claims involves reducing cognitive load by developing modular, reusable reasoning components (i.e., atomic skills). We introduce a skill-chaining schema that dynamically composes these skills to facilitate more accurate and generalizable reasoning with a reduced cognitive load. To evaluate this, we create SciAtomicBench, a cross-domain benchmark with fine-grained reasoning annotations. With only 350 fine-tuning examples, our model trained by atomic reasoning outperforms GPT-4o's chain-of-thought method, achieving state-of-the-art results with far less training data.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) plays a pivotal role in modern large language model applications, with numerous existing frameworks offering a wide range of functionalities to facilitate the development of RAG systems. However, we have identified several persistent challenges in these frameworks, including difficulties in algorithm reproduction and sharing, lack of new techniques, and high system overhead. To address these limitations, we introduce FlexRAG, an open-source framework specifically designed for research and prototyping. FlexRAG supports text-based, multimodal, and network-based RAG, providing comprehensive lifecycle support alongside efficient asynchronous processing and persistent caching capabilities. By offering a robust and flexible solution, FlexRAG enables researchers to rapidly develop, deploy, and share advanced RAG systems. Our toolkit and resources are available at https://github.com/ictnlp/FlexRAG{https://github.com/ictnlp/FlexRAG}.

Zero/few-shot transfer to unseen services is a critical challenge in task-oriented dialogue research. The Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) dataset introduced a paradigm for enabling models to support any service in zero-shot through schemas, which describe service APIs to models in natural language. We explore the robustness of dialogue systems to linguistic variations in schemas by designing SGD-X - a benchmark extending SGD with semantically similar yet stylistically diverse variants for every schema. We observe that two top state tracking models fail to generalize well across schema variants, measured by joint goal accuracy and a novel metric for measuring schema sensitivity. Additionally, we present a simple model-agnostic data augmentation method to improve schema robustness.

In this paper we introduce the olog, or ontology log, a category-theoretic model for knowledge representation (KR). Grounded in formal mathematics, ologs can be rigorously formulated and cross-compared in ways that other KR models (such as semantic networks) cannot. An olog is similar to a relational database schema; in fact an olog can serve as a data repository if desired. Unlike database schemas, which are generally difficult to create or modify, ologs are designed to be user-friendly enough that authoring or reconfiguring an olog is a matter of course rather than a difficult chore. It is hoped that learning to author ologs is much simpler than learning a database definition language, despite their similarity. We describe ologs carefully and illustrate with many examples. As an application we show that any primitive recursive function can be described by an olog. We also show that ologs can be aligned or connected together into a larger network using functors. The various methods of information flow and institutions can then be used to integrate local and global world-views. We finish by providing several different avenues for future research.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have issues with document question answering (QA) in situations where the document is unable to fit in the small context length of an LLM. To overcome this issue, most existing works focus on retrieving the relevant context from the document, representing them as plain text. However, documents such as PDFs, web pages, and presentations are naturally structured with different pages, tables, sections, and so on. Representing such structured documents as plain text is incongruous with the user's mental model of these documents with rich structure. When a system has to query the document for context, this incongruity is brought to the fore, and seemingly trivial questions can trip up the QA system. To bridge this fundamental gap in handling structured documents, we propose an approach called PDFTriage that enables models to retrieve the context based on either structure or content. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed PDFTriage-augmented models across several classes of questions where existing retrieval-augmented LLMs fail. To facilitate further research on this fundamental problem, we release our benchmark dataset consisting of 900+ human-generated questions over 80 structured documents from 10 different categories of question types for document QA.

One of the recent best attempts at Text-to-SQL is the pre-trained language model. Due to the structural property of the SQL queries, the seq2seq model takes the responsibility of parsing both the schema items (i.e., tables and columns) and the skeleton (i.e., SQL keywords). Such coupled targets increase the difficulty of parsing the correct SQL queries especially when they involve many schema items and logic operators. This paper proposes a ranking-enhanced encoding and skeleton-aware decoding framework to decouple the schema linking and the skeleton parsing. Specifically, for a seq2seq encoder-decode model, its encoder is injected by the most relevant schema items instead of the whole unordered ones, which could alleviate the schema linking effort during SQL parsing, and its decoder first generates the skeleton and then the actual SQL query, which could implicitly constrain the SQL parsing. We evaluate our proposed framework on Spider and its three robustness variants: Spider-DK, Spider-Syn, and Spider-Realistic. The experimental results show that our framework delivers promising performance and robustness. Our code is available at https://github.com/RUCKBReasoning/RESDSQL.

For a full-stack web or app development, it requires a software firm or more specifically a team of experienced developers to contribute a large portion of their time and resources to design the website and then convert it to code. As a result, the efficiency of the development team is significantly reduced when it comes to converting UI wireframes and database schemas into an actual working system. It would save valuable resources and fasten the overall workflow if the clients or developers can automate this process of converting the pre-made full-stack website design to get a partially working if not fully working code. In this paper, we present a novel approach of generating the skeleton code from sketched images using Deep Learning and Computer Vision approaches. The dataset for training are first-hand sketched images of low fidelity wireframes, database schemas and class diagrams. The approach consists of three parts. First, the front-end or UI elements detection and extraction from custom-made UI wireframes. Second, individual database table creation from schema designs and lastly, creating a class file from class diagrams.

Understanding a long document requires tracking how entities are introduced and evolve over time. We present a new type of language model, EntityNLM, that can explicitly model entities, dynamically update their representations, and contextually generate their mentions. Our model is generative and flexible; it can model an arbitrary number of entities in context while generating each entity mention at an arbitrary length. In addition, it can be used for several different tasks such as language modeling, coreference resolution, and entity prediction. Experimental results with all these tasks demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms strong baselines and prior work.

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables transformer-based language models to adapt to new tasks by conditioning on demonstration examples. However, traditional example-driven in-context learning lacks explicit modules for knowledge retrieval and transfer at the abstraction level. Inspired by cognitive science, specifically schema theory, which holds that humans interpret new information by activating pre-existing mental frameworks (schemas) to structure understanding, we introduce SCHEMA ACTIVATED IN CONTEXT LEARNING (SA-ICL). This framework extracts the representation of the building blocks of cognition for the reasoning process instilled from prior examples, creating an abstracted schema, a lightweight, structured template of key inferential steps and their relationships, which is then used to augment a model's reasoning process when presented with a novel question. We demonstrate that a broad range of large language models (LLMs) lack the capacity to form and utilize internal schema-based learning representations implicitly, but instead benefit significantly from explicit schema-based scaffolding. Across chemistry and physics questions from the GPQA dataset, our experiments show that SA-ICL consistently boosts performance, up to 36.19 percent, when the single demonstration example is of high quality, which simultaneously reduces reliance on the number of demonstrations and enhances interpretability. SCHEMA ACTIVATED IN CONTEXT LEARNING not only bridges disparate ICL strategies ranging from pattern priming to Chain-of-Thought prompting, but also paves a new path for enhancing human-like reasoning in LLMs.

Previous works on Natural Language Generation (NLG) from structured data have primarily focused on surface-level descriptions of record sequences. However, for complex structured data, e.g., multi-row tables, it is often desirable for an NLG system to describe interesting facts from logical inferences across records. If only provided with the table, it is hard for existing models to produce controllable and high-fidelity logical generations. In this work, we formulate logical level NLG as generation from logical forms in order to obtain controllable, high-fidelity, and faithful generations. We present a new large-scale dataset, Logic2Text, with 10,753 descriptions involving common logic types paired with the underlying logical forms. The logical forms show diversified graph structure of free schema, which poses great challenges on the model's ability to understand the semantics. We experiment on (1) Fully-supervised training with the full datasets, and (2) Few-shot setting, provided with hundreds of paired examples; We compare several popular generation models and analyze their performances. We hope our dataset can encourage research towards building an advanced NLG system capable of natural, faithful, and human-like generation. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/czyssrs/Logic2Text.

Recent advances in language models opened new opportunities to address complex schema matching tasks. Schema matching approaches have been proposed that demonstrate the usefulness of language models, but they have also uncovered important limitations: Small language models (SLMs) require training data (which can be both expensive and challenging to obtain), and large language models (LLMs) often incur high computational costs and must deal with constraints imposed by context windows. We present Magneto, a cost-effective and accurate solution for schema matching that combines the advantages of SLMs and LLMs to address their limitations. By structuring the schema matching pipeline in two phases, retrieval and reranking, Magneto can use computationally efficient SLM-based strategies to derive candidate matches which can then be reranked by LLMs, thus making it possible to reduce runtime without compromising matching accuracy. We propose a self-supervised approach to fine-tune SLMs which uses LLMs to generate syntactically diverse training data, and prompting strategies that are effective for reranking. We also introduce a new benchmark, developed in collaboration with domain experts, which includes real biomedical datasets and presents new challenges to schema matching methods. Through a detailed experimental evaluation, using both our new and existing benchmarks, we show that Magneto is scalable and attains high accuracy for datasets from different domains.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in stand-alone code tasks like HumanEval and MBPP, but struggle with handling entire code repositories. This challenge has prompted research on enhancing LLM-codebase interaction at a repository scale. Current solutions rely on similarity-based retrieval or manual tools and APIs, each with notable drawbacks. Similarity-based retrieval often has low recall in complex tasks, while manual tools and APIs are typically task-specific and require expert knowledge, reducing their generalizability across diverse code tasks and real-world applications. To mitigate these limitations, we introduce \framework, a system that integrates LLM agents with graph database interfaces extracted from code repositories. By leveraging the structural properties of graph databases and the flexibility of the graph query language, \framework enables the LLM agent to construct and execute queries, allowing for precise, code structure-aware context retrieval and code navigation. We assess \framework using three benchmarks: CrossCodeEval, SWE-bench, and EvoCodeBench. Additionally, we develop five real-world coding applications. With a unified graph database schema, \framework demonstrates competitive performance and potential in both academic and real-world environments, showcasing its versatility and efficacy in software engineering. Our application demo: https://github.com/modelscope/modelscope-agent/tree/master/apps/codexgraph_agent.

Large language models (LLMs) call for extension of context to handle many critical applications. However, the existing approaches are prone to expensive costs and inferior quality of context extension. In this work, we proposeExtensible Embedding, which realizes high-quality extension of LLM's context with strong flexibility and cost-effectiveness. Extensible embedding stand as an enhancement of typical token embedding, which represents the information for an extensible scope of context instead of a single token. By leveraging such compact input units of higher information density, the LLM can access to a vast scope of context even with a small context window. Extensible embedding is systematically optimized in architecture and training method, which leads to multiple advantages. 1) High flexibility of context extension, which flexibly supports ad-hoc extension of diverse context lengths. 2) Strong sample efficiency of training, which enables the embedding model to be learned in a cost-effective way. 3) Superior compatibility with the existing LLMs, where the extensible embedding can be seamlessly introduced as a plug-in component. Comprehensive evaluations on long-context language modeling and understanding tasks verify extensible embedding as an effective, efficient, flexible, and compatible method to extend the LLM's context.

Creative workflows for generating graphical documents involve complex inter-related tasks, such as aligning elements, choosing appropriate fonts, or employing aesthetically harmonious colors. In this work, we attempt at building a holistic model that can jointly solve many different design tasks. Our model, which we denote by FlexDM, treats vector graphic documents as a set of multi-modal elements, and learns to predict masked fields such as element type, position, styling attributes, image, or text, using a unified architecture. Through the use of explicit multi-task learning and in-domain pre-training, our model can better capture the multi-modal relationships among the different document fields. Experimental results corroborate that our single FlexDM is able to successfully solve a multitude of different design tasks, while achieving performance that is competitive with task-specific and costly baselines.

The Text-to-SQL task, aiming to translate the natural language of the questions into SQL queries, has drawn much attention recently. One of the most challenging problems of Text-to-SQL is how to generalize the trained model to the unseen database schemas, also known as the cross-domain Text-to-SQL task. The key lies in the generalizability of (i) the encoding method to model the question and the database schema and (ii) the question-schema linking method to learn the mapping between words in the question and tables/columns in the database schema. Focusing on the above two key issues, we propose a Structure-Aware Dual Graph Aggregation Network (SADGA) for cross-domain Text-to-SQL. In SADGA, we adopt the graph structure to provide a unified encoding model for both the natural language question and database schema. Based on the proposed unified modeling, we further devise a structure-aware aggregation method to learn the mapping between the question-graph and schema-graph. The structure-aware aggregation method is featured with Global Graph Linking, Local Graph Linking, and Dual-Graph Aggregation Mechanism. We not only study the performance of our proposal empirically but also achieved 3rd place on the challenging Text-to-SQL benchmark Spider at the time of writing.

Large language models (LLMs) are often augmented with tools to solve complex tasks. By generating code snippets and executing them through task-specific Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), they can offload certain functions to dedicated external modules, such as image encoding and performing calculations. However, most existing approaches to augment LLMs with tools are constrained by general-purpose APIs and lack the flexibility for tailoring them to specific tasks. In this work, we present CRAFT, a general tool creation and retrieval framework for LLMs. It creates toolsets specifically curated for the tasks and equips LLMs with a component that retrieves tools from these sets to enhance their capability to solve complex tasks. For each task, we collect specific code solutions by prompting GPT-4 to solve the training examples. Following a validation step ensuring the correctness, these solutions are abstracted into code snippets to enhance reusability, and deduplicated for higher quality. At inference time, the language model retrieves snippets from the toolsets and then executes them or generates the output conditioning on the retrieved snippets. Our method is designed to be flexible and offers a plug-and-play approach to adapt off-the-shelf LLMs to unseen domains and modalities, without any finetuning. Experiments on vision-language, tabular processing, and mathematical reasoning tasks show that our approach achieves substantial improvements compared to strong baselines. In addition, our in-depth analysis reveals that: (1) consistent performance improvement can be achieved by scaling up the number of tools and the capability of the backbone models; (2) each component of our approach contributes to the performance gains; (3) the created tools are well-structured and reliable with low complexity and atomicity. The code is available at https://github.com/lifan-yuan/CRAFT.

Text-to-SQL aims to translate natural language queries into SQL statements, which is practical as it enables anyone to easily retrieve the desired information from databases. Recently, many existing approaches tackle this problem with Large Language Models (LLMs), leveraging their strong capability in understanding user queries and generating corresponding SQL code. Yet, the parametric knowledge in LLMs might be limited to covering all the diverse and domain-specific queries that require grounding in various database schemas, which makes generated SQLs less accurate oftentimes. To tackle this, we propose constructing the knowledge base for text-to-SQL, a foundational source of knowledge, from which we retrieve and generate the necessary knowledge for given queries. In particular, unlike existing approaches that either manually annotate knowledge or generate only a few pieces of knowledge for each query, our knowledge base is comprehensive, which is constructed based on a combination of all the available questions and their associated database schemas along with their relevant knowledge, and can be reused for unseen databases from different datasets and domains. We validate our approach on multiple text-to-SQL datasets, considering both the overlapping and non-overlapping database scenarios, where it outperforms relevant baselines substantially.

Metadata extraction is essential for cataloging and preserving datasets, enabling effective research discovery and reproducibility, especially given the current exponential growth in scientific research. While Masader (Alyafeai et al.,2021) laid the groundwork for extracting a wide range of metadata attributes from Arabic NLP datasets' scholarly articles, it relies heavily on manual annotation. In this paper, we present MOLE, a framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically extract metadata attributes from scientific papers covering datasets of languages other than Arabic. Our schema-driven methodology processes entire documents across multiple input formats and incorporates robust validation mechanisms for consistent output. Additionally, we introduce a new benchmark to evaluate the research progress on this task. Through systematic analysis of context length, few-shot learning, and web browsing integration, we demonstrate that modern LLMs show promising results in automating this task, highlighting the need for further future work improvements to ensure consistent and reliable performance. We release the code: https://github.com/IVUL-KAUST/MOLE and dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/IVUL-KAUST/MOLE for the research community.

When conducting literature reviews, scientists often create literature review tables - tables whose rows are publications and whose columns constitute a schema, a set of aspects used to compare and contrast the papers. Can we automatically generate these tables using language models (LMs)? In this work, we introduce a framework that leverages LMs to perform this task by decomposing it into separate schema and value generation steps. To enable experimentation, we address two main challenges: First, we overcome a lack of high-quality datasets to benchmark table generation by curating and releasing arxivDIGESTables, a new dataset of 2,228 literature review tables extracted from ArXiv papers that synthesize a total of 7,542 research papers. Second, to support scalable evaluation of model generations against human-authored reference tables, we develop DecontextEval, an automatic evaluation method that aligns elements of tables with the same underlying aspects despite differing surface forms. Given these tools, we evaluate LMs' abilities to reconstruct reference tables, finding this task benefits from additional context to ground the generation (e.g. table captions, in-text references). Finally, through a human evaluation study we find that even when LMs fail to fully reconstruct a reference table, their generated novel aspects can still be useful.

Text-to-SQL semantic parsing is an important NLP task, which greatly facilitates the interaction between users and the database and becomes the key component in many human-computer interaction systems. Much recent progress in text-to-SQL has been driven by large-scale datasets, but most of them are centered on English. In this work, we present MultiSpider, the largest multilingual text-to-SQL dataset which covers seven languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese). Upon MultiSpider, we further identify the lexical and structural challenges of text-to-SQL (caused by specific language properties and dialect sayings) and their intensity across different languages. Experimental results under three typical settings (zero-shot, monolingual and multilingual) reveal a 6.1% absolute drop in accuracy in non-English languages. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are conducted to understand the reason for the performance drop of each language. Besides the dataset, we also propose a simple schema augmentation framework SAVe (Schema-Augmentation-with-Verification), which significantly boosts the overall performance by about 1.8% and closes the 29.5% performance gap across languages.

We introduce Trove, an easy-to-use open-source retrieval toolkit that simplifies research experiments without sacrificing flexibility or speed. For the first time, we introduce efficient data management features that load and process (filter, select, transform, and combine) retrieval datasets on the fly, with just a few lines of code. This gives users the flexibility to easily experiment with different dataset configurations without the need to compute and store multiple copies of large datasets. Trove is highly customizable: in addition to many built-in options, it allows users to freely modify existing components or replace them entirely with user-defined objects. It also provides a low-code and unified pipeline for evaluation and hard negative mining, which supports multi-node execution without any code changes. Trove's data management features reduce memory consumption by a factor of 2.6. Moreover, Trove's easy-to-use inference pipeline incurs no overhead, and inference times decrease linearly with the number of available nodes. Most importantly, we demonstrate how Trove simplifies retrieval experiments and allows for arbitrary customizations, thus facilitating exploratory research.

Structured generation, the process of producing content in standardized formats like JSON and XML, is widely utilized in real-world applications to extract key output information from large language models (LLMs). This study investigates whether such constraints on generation space impact LLMs' abilities, including reasoning and domain knowledge comprehension. Specifically, we evaluate LLMs' performance when restricted to adhere to structured formats versus generating free-form responses across various common tasks. Surprisingly, we observe a significant decline in LLMs' reasoning abilities under format restrictions. Furthermore, we find that stricter format constraints generally lead to greater performance degradation in reasoning tasks.

Generating accurate SQL for user queries (text-to-SQL) is a long-standing problem since the generation of the SQL requires comprehending the query and database and retrieving the accurate data from the database accordingly. Existing models rely on the comprehensive ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate the SQL according to the database schema. However, there is some necessary knowledge that is not explicitly included in the database schema or has been learned by LLMs. Thus, the generated SQL of the knowledge-insufficient queries may be inaccurate, which negatively impacts the robustness of the text-to-SQL models. To deal with this situation, we propose the Knowledge-to-SQL framework, which employs tailored Data Expert LLM (DELLM) to provide helpful knowledge for all types of text-to-SQL models. Specifically, we provide the detailed design of DELLM, in terms of table reading, and the basic fine-tuning process. We further provide a Preference Learning via Database Feedback (PLDBF) training strategy to guide the DELLM to generate more helpful knowledge for LLMs. Extensive experiments verify DELLM can enhance the state-of-the-art LLMs on text-to-SQL tasks. The model structure and the parameter weight of DELLM are released for further research.

Real-world text applications often involve composing a wide range of text control operations, such as editing the text w.r.t. an attribute, manipulating keywords and structure, and generating new text of desired properties. Prior work typically learns/finetunes a language model (LM) to perform individual or specific subsets of operations. Recent research has studied combining operations in a plug-and-play manner, often with costly search or optimization in the complex sequence space. This paper proposes a new efficient approach for composable text operations in the compact latent space of text. The low-dimensionality and differentiability of the text latent vector allow us to develop an efficient sampler based on ordinary differential equations (ODEs) given arbitrary plug-in operators (e.g., attribute classifiers). By connecting pretrained LMs (e.g., GPT2) to the latent space through efficient adaption, we then decode the sampled vectors into desired text sequences. The flexible approach permits diverse control operators (sentiment, tense, formality, keywords, etc.) acquired using any relevant data from different domains. Experiments show that composing those operators within our approach manages to generate or edit high-quality text, substantially improving over previous methods in terms of generation quality and efficiency.

Image Schemas are repetitive cognitive patterns that influence the way we conceptualize and reason about various concepts present in speech. These patterns are deeply embedded within our cognitive processes and are reflected in our bodily expressions including gestures. Particularly, metaphoric gestures possess essential characteristics and semantic meanings that align with Image Schemas, to visually represent abstract concepts. The shape and form of gestures can convey abstract concepts, such as extending the forearm and hand or tracing a line with hand movements to visually represent the image schema of PATH. Previous behavior generation models have primarily focused on utilizing speech (acoustic features and text) to drive the generation model of virtual agents. They have not considered key semantic information as those carried by Image Schemas to effectively generate metaphoric gestures. To address this limitation, we introduce META4, a deep learning approach that generates metaphoric gestures from both speech and Image Schemas. Our approach has two primary goals: computing Image Schemas from input text to capture the underlying semantic and metaphorical meaning, and generating metaphoric gestures driven by speech and the computed image schemas. Our approach is the first method for generating speech driven metaphoric gestures while leveraging the potential of Image Schemas. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and highlight the importance of both speech and image schemas in modeling metaphoric gestures.

Text-to-SQL simplifies database interactions by enabling non-experts to convert their natural language (NL) questions into Structured Query Language (SQL) queries. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have improved the zero-shot text-to-SQL paradigm, existing methods face scalability challenges when dealing with massive, dynamically changing databases. This paper introduces DBCopilot, a framework that addresses these challenges by employing a compact and flexible copilot model for routing across massive databases. Specifically, DBCopilot decouples the text-to-SQL process into schema routing and SQL generation, leveraging a lightweight sequence-to-sequence neural network-based router to formulate database connections and navigate natural language questions through databases and tables. The routed schemas and questions are then fed into LLMs for efficient SQL generation. Furthermore, DBCopilot also introduced a reverse schema-to-question generation paradigm, which can learn and adapt the router over massive databases automatically without requiring manual intervention. Experimental results demonstrate that DBCopilot is a scalable and effective solution for real-world text-to-SQL tasks, providing a significant advancement in handling large-scale schemas.

One impressive emergent capability of large language models (LLMs) is generation of code, including Structured Query Language (SQL) for databases. For the task of converting natural language text to SQL queries, Text-to-SQL, adaptation of LLMs is of paramount importance, both in in-context learning and fine-tuning settings, depending on the amount of adaptation data used. In this paper, we propose an LLM-based Text-to-SQL model SQL-PaLM, leveraging on PaLM-2, that pushes the state-of-the-art in both settings. Few-shot SQL-PaLM is based on an execution-based self-consistency prompting approach designed for Text-to-SQL, and achieves 77.3% in test-suite accuracy on Spider, which to our best knowledge is the first to outperform previous state-of-the-art with fine-tuning by a significant margin, 4%. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the fine-tuned SQL-PALM outperforms it further by another 1%. Towards applying SQL-PaLM to real-world scenarios we further evaluate its robustness on other challenging variants of Spider and demonstrate the superior generalization capability of SQL-PaLM. In addition, via extensive case studies, we demonstrate the impressive intelligent capabilities and various success enablers of LLM-based Text-to-SQL.

Knowledge graph embedding refers to projecting entities and relations in knowledge graph into continuous vector spaces. State-of-the-art methods, such as TransE, TransH, and TransR build embeddings by treating relation as translation from head entity to tail entity. However, previous models can not deal with reflexive/one-to-many/many-to-one/many-to-many relations properly, or lack of scalability and efficiency. Thus, we propose a novel method, flexible translation, named TransF, to address the above issues. TransF regards relation as translation between head entity vector and tail entity vector with flexible magnitude. To evaluate the proposed model, we conduct link prediction and triple classification on benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that our method remarkably improve the performance compared with several state-of-the-art baselines.

Traditional similarity-based schema matching methods are incapable of resolving semantic ambiguities and conflicts in domain-specific complex mapping scenarios due to missing commonsense and domain-specific knowledge. The hallucination problem of large language models (LLMs) also makes it challenging for LLM-based schema matching to address the above issues. Therefore, we propose a Knowledge Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation model for Schema Matching, referred to as the KG-RAG4SM. In particular, KG-RAG4SM introduces novel vector-based, graph traversal-based, and query-based graph retrievals, as well as a hybrid approach and ranking schemes that identify the most relevant subgraphs from external large knowledge graphs (KGs). We showcase that KG-based retrieval-augmented LLMs are capable of generating more accurate results for complex matching cases without any re-training. Our experimental results show that KG-RAG4SM outperforms the LLM-based state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods (e.g., Jellyfish-8B) by 35.89% and 30.50% in terms of precision and F1 score on the MIMIC dataset, respectively; KG-RAG4SM with GPT-4o-mini outperforms the pre-trained language model (PLM)-based SOTA methods (e.g., SMAT) by 69.20% and 21.97% in terms of precision and F1 score on the Synthea dataset, respectively. The results also demonstrate that our approach is more efficient in end-to-end schema matching, and scales to retrieve from large KGs. Our case studies on the dataset from the real-world schema matching scenario exhibit that the hallucination problem of LLMs for schema matching is well mitigated by our solution.

Relational databases often suffer from uninformative descriptors of table contents, such as ambiguous columns and hard-to-interpret values, impacting both human users and Text-to-SQL models. This paper explores the use of large language models (LLMs) to generate informative column descriptions as a semantic layer for relational databases. Using the BIRD-Bench development set, we created ColSQL, a dataset with gold-standard column descriptions generated and refined by LLMs and human annotators. We evaluated several instruction-tuned models, finding that GPT-4o and Command R+ excelled in generating high-quality descriptions. Additionally, we applied an LLM-as-a-judge to evaluate model performance. Although this method does not align well with human evaluations, we included it to explore its potential and to identify areas for improvement. More work is needed to improve the reliability of automatic evaluations for this task. We also find that detailed column descriptions significantly improve Text-to-SQL execution accuracy, especially when columns are uninformative. This study establishes LLMs as effective tools for generating detailed metadata, enhancing the usability of relational databases.

In this work, we dive into the fundamental challenges of evaluating Text2SQL solutions and highlight potential failure causes and the potential risks of relying on aggregate metrics in existing benchmarks. We identify two largely unaddressed limitations in current open benchmarks: (1) data quality issues in the evaluation data, mainly attributed to the lack of capturing the probabilistic nature of translating a natural language description into a structured query (e.g., NL ambiguity), and (2) the bias introduced by using different match functions as approximations for SQL equivalence. To put both limitations into context, we propose a unified taxonomy of all Text2SQL limitations that can lead to both prediction and evaluation errors. We then motivate the taxonomy by providing a survey of Text2SQL limitations using state-of-the-art Text2SQL solutions and benchmarks. We describe the causes of limitations with real-world examples and propose potential mitigation solutions for each category in the taxonomy. We conclude by highlighting the open challenges encountered when deploying such mitigation strategies or attempting to automatically apply the taxonomy.

Query-focused table summarization requires generating natural language summaries of tabular data conditioned on a user query, enabling users to access insights beyond fact retrieval. Existing approaches face key limitations: table-to-text models require costly fine-tuning and struggle with complex reasoning, prompt-based LLM methods suffer from token-limit and efficiency issues while exposing sensitive data, and prior agentic pipelines often rely on decomposition, planning, or manual templates that lack robustness and scalability. To mitigate these issues, we introduce an agentic workflow, FACTS, a Fast, Accurate, and Privacy-Compliant Table Summarization approach via Offline Template Generation. FACTS produces offline templates, consisting of SQL queries and Jinja2 templates, which can be rendered into natural language summaries and are reusable across multiple tables sharing the same schema. It enables fast summarization through reusable offline templates, accurate outputs with executable SQL queries, and privacy compliance by sending only table schemas to LLMs. Evaluations on widely-used benchmarks show that FACTS consistently outperforms baseline methods, establishing it as a practical solution for real-world query-focused table summarization.

Language models (LMs) are challenging to adapt to new data distributions by simple finetuning. This is due to the rigidity of their subword tokenizers, which typically remain unchanged during adaptation. This inflexibility often leads to inefficient tokenization, causing overfragmentation of out-of-distribution domains, unseen languages, or scripts. In this work, we develop byte-level LMs with learnable tokenizers to make tokenization adaptive. Our models include a submodule that learns to predict boundaries between the input byte sequence, encoding it into variable-length segments. Existing tokenizer-free methods train this boundary predictor using an auxiliary loss that enforces a fixed compression rate across the training corpus, introducing a new kind of rigidity. We propose FLEXITOKENS, a simplified training objective that enables significantly greater flexibility during adaptation. Evaluating across multiple multilingual benchmarks, morphologically diverse tasks, and domains, we demonstrate that FLEXITOKENS consistently reduces token over-fragmentation and achieves up to 10\% improvements on downstream task performance compared to subword and other gradient-based tokenizers. Code and data for our experiments will be released at https://github.com/owos/flexitokens

Translating users' natural language queries (NL) into SQL queries (i.e., NL2SQL) can significantly reduce barriers to accessing relational databases and support various commercial applications. The performance of NL2SQL has been greatly enhanced with the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs). In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of NL2SQL techniques powered by LLMs, covering its entire lifecycle from the following four aspects: (1) Model: NL2SQL translation techniques that tackle not only NL ambiguity and under-specification, but also properly map NL with database schema and instances; (2) Data: From the collection of training data, data synthesis due to training data scarcity, to NL2SQL benchmarks; (3) Evaluation: Evaluating NL2SQL methods from multiple angles using different metrics and granularities; and (4) Error Analysis: analyzing NL2SQL errors to find the root cause and guiding NL2SQL models to evolve. Moreover, we provide a rule of thumb for developing NL2SQL solutions. Finally, we discuss the research challenges and open problems of NL2SQL in the LLMs era.

All tables can be represented as grids. Based on this observation, we propose GridFormer, a novel approach for interpreting unconstrained table structures by predicting the vertex and edge of a grid. First, we propose a flexible table representation in the form of an MXN grid. In this representation, the vertexes and edges of the grid store the localization and adjacency information of the table. Then, we introduce a DETR-style table structure recognizer to efficiently predict this multi-objective information of the grid in a single shot. Specifically, given a set of learned row and column queries, the recognizer directly outputs the vertexes and edges information of the corresponding rows and columns. Extensive experiments on five challenging benchmarks which include wired, wireless, multi-merge-cell, oriented, and distorted tables demonstrate the competitive performance of our model over other methods.

Structured knowledge bases (KBs) are the backbone of many know\-ledge-intensive applications, and their automated construction has received considerable attention. In particular, open information extraction (OpenIE) is often used to induce structure from a text. However, although it allows high recall, the extracted knowledge tends to inherit noise from the sources and the OpenIE algorithm. Besides, OpenIE tuples contain an open-ended, non-canonicalized set of relations, making the extracted knowledge's downstream exploitation harder. In this paper, we study the problem of mapping an open KB into the fixed schema of an existing KB, specifically for the case of commonsense knowledge. We propose approaching the problem by generative translation, i.e., by training a language model to generate fixed-schema assertions from open ones. Experiments show that this approach occupies a sweet spot between traditional manual, rule-based, or classification-based canonicalization and purely generative KB construction like COMET. Moreover, it produces higher mapping accuracy than the former while avoiding the association-based noise of the latter.

This paper introduces layout-aware graph modeling for multimodal RAG. Different from traditional RAG methods that mostly deal with flat text chunks, the proposed method takes into account the relationship of multimodalities by using a graph structure. To do that, a graph modeling structure is defined based on document layout parsing. The structure of an input document is retained with the connection of text chunks, tables, and figures. This representation allows the method to handle complex questions that require information from multimodalities. To confirm the efficiency of the graph modeling, a flexible RAG pipeline is developed using robust components. Experimental results on four benchmark test sets confirm the contribution of the layout-aware modeling for performance improvement of the RAG pipeline.

When translating natural language questions into SQL queries to answer questions from a database, contemporary semantic parsing models struggle to generalize to unseen database schemas. The generalization challenge lies in (a) encoding the database relations in an accessible way for the semantic parser, and (b) modeling alignment between database columns and their mentions in a given query. We present a unified framework, based on the relation-aware self-attention mechanism, to address schema encoding, schema linking, and feature representation within a text-to-SQL encoder. On the challenging Spider dataset this framework boosts the exact match accuracy to 57.2%, surpassing its best counterparts by 8.7% absolute improvement. Further augmented with BERT, it achieves the new state-of-the-art performance of 65.6% on the Spider leaderboard. In addition, we observe qualitative improvements in the model's understanding of schema linking and alignment. Our implementation will be open-sourced at https://github.com/Microsoft/rat-sql.

Recent text-to-SQL systems powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in translating natural language queries into SQL. However, these systems often struggle with complex database structures and domain-specific queries, as they primarily focus on enhancing logical reasoning and SQL syntax while overlooking the critical need for comprehensive database understanding. To address this limitation, we propose DB-Explore, a novel framework that systematically aligns LLMs with database knowledge through automated exploration and instruction synthesis. DB-Explore constructs database graphs to capture complex relational schemas, leverages GPT-4 to systematically mine structural patterns and semantic knowledge, and synthesizes instructions to distill this knowledge for efficient fine-tuning of LLMs. Our framework enables comprehensive database understanding through diverse sampling strategies and automated instruction generation, bridging the gap between database structures and language models. Experiments conducted on the SPIDER and BIRD benchmarks validate the effectiveness of DB-Explore, achieving an execution accuracy of 52.1% on BIRD and 84.0% on SPIDER. Notably, our open-source implementation, based on the Qwen2.5-coder-7B model, outperforms multiple GPT-4-driven text-to-SQL systems in comparative evaluations, and achieves near state-of-the-art performance with minimal computational cost.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents, expected to decompose goals, invoke tools, and verify results in dynamic environments. Realizing these capabilities requires access to agentic data-structured interaction records that couple user intents with tool specifications, argument-grounded calls, and verifiable execution traces. However, collecting such data from human annotators is costly, time-consuming, and difficult to scale. We present a unified framework for synthesizing agentic data using only LLMs, without any human-in-the-loop supervision. This framework decomposes generation into modular pipelines that produce complete interaction records spanning task specifications, tool definitions, policy pseudocode, natural language exchanges, and execution traces. Records conform to strict syntactic and semantic constraints, ensuring machine-parseability and faithful alignment across inputs, outputs, and tool calls. Beyond single tasks, there is support for both multi-task and multi-turn agent interactions, enabling the construction of datasets that reflect the full spectrum of tool-use competencies. To ensure quality and consistency, the framework integrates constrained generation formats, JSON-schema validation, and judge-based filtering. This paper formalizes the schema for agentic records, details the prompt design principles that guide generation, and introduces scalable pipelines for high-quality synthetic data. By providing a reproducible, LLM-only alternative to manual collection, hence advancing the development of agentic LLMs capable of robust tool use.

Document AI has advanced rapidly and is attracting increasing attention. Yet, while most efforts have focused on document layout analysis (DLA), its generative counterpart, document layout generation, remains underexplored. A major obstacle lies in the scarcity of diverse layouts: academic papers with Manhattan-style structures dominate existing studies, while open-world genres such as newspapers and magazines remain severely underrepresented. To address this gap, we curate OmniLayout-1M, the first million-scale dataset of diverse document layouts, covering six common document types and comprising contemporary layouts collected from multiple sources. Moreover, since existing methods struggle in complex domains and often fail to arrange long sequences coherently, we introduce OmniLayout-LLM, a 0.5B model with designed two-stage Coarse-to-Fine learning paradigm: 1) learning universal layout principles from OmniLayout-1M with coarse category definitions, and 2) transferring the knowledge to a specific domain with fine-grained annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves strong performance on multiple domains in M^{6}Doc dataset, substantially surpassing both existing layout generation experts and several latest general-purpose LLMs. Our code, models, and dataset will be publicly released.

In this work, we present X-SQL, a new network architecture for the problem of parsing natural language to SQL query. X-SQL proposes to enhance the structural schema representation with the contextual output from BERT-style pre-training model, and together with type information to learn a new schema representation for down-stream tasks. We evaluated X-SQL on the WikiSQL dataset and show its new state-of-the-art performance.

Engineering efficient implementations of compact and succinct structures is a time-consuming and challenging task, since there is no standard library of easy-to- use, highly optimized, and composable components. One consequence is that measuring the practical impact of new theoretical proposals is a difficult task, since older base- line implementations may not rely on the same basic components, and reimplementing from scratch can be very time-consuming. In this paper we present a framework for experimentation with succinct data structures, providing a large set of configurable components, together with tests, benchmarks, and tools to analyze resource requirements. We demonstrate the functionality of the framework by recomposing succinct solutions for document retrieval.

Tabular reasoning involves multi-step information extraction and logical inference over tabular data. While recent advances have leveraged large language models (LLMs) for reasoning over structured tables, such high-quality textual representations are often unavailable in real-world settings, where tables typically appear as images. In this paper, we tackle the task of tabular reasoning from table images, leveraging privileged structured information available during training to enhance multimodal large language models (MLLMs). The key challenges lie in the complexity of accurately aligning structured information with visual representations, and in effectively transferring structured reasoning skills to MLLMs despite the input modality gap. To address these, we introduce TabUlar Reasoning with Bridged infOrmation ({\sc Turbo}), a new framework for multimodal tabular reasoning with privileged structured tables. {\sc Turbo} benefits from a structure-aware reasoning trace generator based on DeepSeek-R1, contributing to high-quality modality-bridged data. On this basis, {\sc Turbo} repeatedly generates and selects the advantageous reasoning paths, further enhancing the model's tabular reasoning ability. Experimental results demonstrate that, with limited (9k) data, {\sc Turbo} achieves state-of-the-art performance (+7.2% vs. previous SOTA) across multiple datasets.

Training modern LLMs is extremely resource intensive, and customizing them for various deployment scenarios characterized by limited compute and memory resources through repeated training is impractical. In this paper, we introduce Flextron, a network architecture and post-training model optimization framework supporting flexible model deployment. The Flextron architecture utilizes a nested elastic structure to rapidly adapt to specific user-defined latency and accuracy targets during inference with no additional fine-tuning required. It is also input-adaptive, and can automatically route tokens through its sub-networks for improved performance and efficiency. We present a sample-efficient training method and associated routing algorithms for systematically transforming an existing trained LLM into a Flextron model. We evaluate Flextron on the GPT-3 and LLama-2 family of LLMs, and demonstrate superior performance over multiple end-to-end trained variants and other state-of-the-art elastic networks, all with a single pretraining run that consumes a mere 7.63% tokens compared to original pretraining.

We argue that progress toward general intelligence requires complementary foundation models grounded in language, the physical world, and structured data. This report presents LimiX, the first installment of our large structured-data models (LDMs). LimiX treats structured data as a joint distribution over variables and missingness, thus capable of addressing a wide range of tabular tasks through query-based conditional prediction via a single model. LimiX is pretrained using masked joint-distribution modeling with an episodic, context-conditional objective, where the model predicts for query subsets conditioned on dataset-specific contexts, supporting rapid, training-free adaptation at inference. We evaluate LimiX across 10 large structured-data benchmarks with broad regimes of sample size, feature dimensionality, class number, categorical-to-numerical feature ratio, missingness, and sample-to-feature ratios. With a single model and a unified interface, LimiX consistently surpasses strong baselines including gradient-boosting trees, deep tabular networks, recent tabular foundation models, and automated ensembles, as shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2. The superiority holds across a wide range of tasks, such as classification, regression, missing value imputation, and data generation, often by substantial margins, while avoiding task-specific architectures or bespoke training per task. All LimiX models are publicly accessible under Apache 2.0.

Existing dialog state tracking (DST) models are trained with dialog data in a random order, neglecting rich structural information in a dataset. In this paper, we propose to use curriculum learning (CL) to better leverage both the curriculum structure and schema structure for task-oriented dialogs. Specifically, we propose a model-agnostic framework called Schema-aware Curriculum Learning for Dialog State Tracking (SaCLog), which consists of a preview module that pre-trains a DST model with schema information, a curriculum module that optimizes the model with CL, and a review module that augments mispredicted data to reinforce the CL training. We show that our proposed approach improves DST performance over both a transformer-based and RNN-based DST model (TripPy and TRADE) and achieves new state-of-the-art results on WOZ2.0 and MultiWOZ2.1.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are driving advancements in artificial intelligence by increasing the scale of model parameters, which has significantly enhanced generalization ability and unlocked new capabilities in practice. However, their performance in specific downstream tasks is usually hindered by their knowledge boundaries on these tasks. Thus, fine-tuning techniques, especially the widely used Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) method, have been introduced to expand the boundaries on these tasks, whereas LoRA would underperform on certain tasks owing to its potential overfitting on these tasks. To overcome this overfitting and improve the performance of LoRA, we propose the flexible low rank adaptation (Flexora) method to automatically and flexibly select the most important layers needing to be fine-tuned to achieve the best performance on different downstream tasks. Specifically, Flexora firstly frames this layer selection problem as a well-defined hyperparameter optimization (HPO) problem, then addresses it using the unrolled differentiation (UD) method, and finally selects the most useful layers based on the optimized hyperparameters. Our extensive experiments on many pretrained models and natural language tasks show that Flexora is able to consistently improve over the existing baselines, indicating the effectiveness of our Flexora in practice. We additionally provide insightful theoretical results and many ablation studies to deliver a comprehensive understanding of our Flexora.

Context-dependent text-to-SQL task has drawn much attention in recent years. Previous models on context-dependent text-to-SQL task only concentrate on utilizing historical user inputs. In this work, in addition to using encoders to capture historical information of user inputs, we propose a database schema interaction graph encoder to utilize historicalal information of database schema items. In decoding phase, we introduce a gate mechanism to weigh the importance of different vocabularies and then make the prediction of SQL tokens. We evaluate our model on the benchmark SParC and CoSQL datasets, which are two large complex context-dependent cross-domain text-to-SQL datasets. Our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art model by a large margin and achieves new state-of-the-art results on the two datasets. The comparison and ablation results demonstrate the efficacy of our model and the usefulness of the database schema interaction graph encoder.

Language models and specialized table embedding models have recently demonstrated strong performance on many tasks over tabular data. Researchers and practitioners are keen to leverage these models in many new application contexts; but limited understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of these models, and the table representations they generate, makes the process of finding a suitable model for a given task reliant on trial and error. There is an urgent need to gain a comprehensive understanding of these models to minimize inefficiency and failures in downstream usage. To address this need, we propose Observatory, a formal framework to systematically analyze embedding representations of relational tables. Motivated both by invariants of the relational data model and by statistical considerations regarding data distributions, we define eight primitive properties, and corresponding measures to quantitatively characterize table embeddings for these properties. Based on these properties, we define an extensible framework to evaluate language and table embedding models. We collect and synthesize a suite of datasets and use Observatory to analyze nine such models. Our analysis provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses of learned representations over tables. We find, for example, that some models are sensitive to table structure such as column order, that functional dependencies are rarely reflected in embeddings, and that specialized table embedding models have relatively lower sample fidelity. Such insights help researchers and practitioners better anticipate model behaviors and select appropriate models for their downstream tasks, while guiding researchers in the development of new models.

The Land Matrix initiative (https://landmatrix.org) and its global observatory aim to provide reliable data on large-scale land acquisitions to inform debates and actions in sectors such as agriculture, extraction, or energy in low- and middle-income countries. Although these data are recognized in the academic world, they remain underutilized in public policy, mainly due to the complexity of access and exploitation, which requires technical expertise and a good understanding of the database schema. The objective of this work is to simplify access to data from different database systems. The methods proposed in this article are evaluated using data from the Land Matrix. This work presents various comparisons of Large Language Models (LLMs) as well as combinations of LLM adaptations (Prompt Engineering, RAG, Agents) to query different database systems (GraphQL and REST queries). The experiments are reproducible, and a demonstration is available online: https://github.com/tetis-nlp/landmatrix-graphql-python.

We study the problem of procedure planning in instructional videos, which aims to make a goal-oriented sequence of action steps given partial visual state observations. The motivation of this problem is to learn a structured and plannable state and action space. Recent works succeeded in sequence modeling of steps with only sequence-level annotations accessible during training, which overlooked the roles of states in the procedures. In this work, we point out that State CHangEs MAtter (SCHEMA) for procedure planning in instructional videos. We aim to establish a more structured state space by investigating the causal relations between steps and states in procedures. Specifically, we explicitly represent each step as state changes and track the state changes in procedures. For step representation, we leveraged the commonsense knowledge in large language models (LLMs) to describe the state changes of steps via our designed chain-of-thought prompting. For state change tracking, we align visual state observations with language state descriptions via cross-modal contrastive learning, and explicitly model the intermediate states of the procedure using LLM-generated state descriptions. Experiments on CrossTask, COIN, and NIV benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed SCHEMA model achieves state-of-the-art performance and obtains explainable visualizations.

There is a compelling necessity from enterprises for fine tuning LLMs (Large Language Models) o get them trained on proprietary domain knowledge. The challenge is to imbibe the LLMs with domain specific knowledge using the most optimial resource and cost and in the best possible time. Many enterprises rely on RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) which does not need LLMs to be ine-tuned but they are limited by the quality of vector databases and their retrieval capabilities rather than the intrinsic capabilities of the LLMs themselves. In our current work we focus on fine tuning LLaMA, an open source LLM using proprietary documents and code from an enterprise repository and use the fine tuned models to evaluate the quality of responses. As part of this work, we aim to guide beginners on how to start with fine tuning an LLM for documentation and code by making educated guesses on size of GPU required and options that are available for formatting the data. We also propose pre processing recipes for both documentation and code to prepare dataset in different formats. The proposed methods of data preparation for document datasets are forming paragraph chunks, forming question and answer pairs and forming keyword and paragraph chunk pairs. For code dataset we propose forming summary and function pairs. Further, we qualitatively evaluate the results of the models for domain specific queries. Finally, we also propose practical guidelines and recommendations for fine tuning LLMs.

Integrating structured knowledge from tabular formats poses significant challenges within natural language processing (NLP), mainly when dealing with complex, semi-structured tables like those found in the FeTaQA dataset. These tables require advanced methods to interpret and generate meaningful responses accurately. Traditional approaches, such as SQL and SPARQL, often fail to fully capture the semantics of such data, especially in the presence of irregular table structures like web tables. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a novel approach that extracts triples straightforward from tabular data and integrates it with a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model to enhance the accuracy, coherence, and contextual richness of responses generated by a fine-tuned GPT-3.5-turbo-0125 model. Our approach significantly outperforms existing baselines on the FeTaQA dataset, particularly excelling in Sacre-BLEU and ROUGE metrics. It effectively generates contextually accurate and detailed long-form answers from tables, showcasing its strength in complex data interpretation.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and task generalization. However, their application to structured data analysis remains fragile due to inconsistencies in schema interpretation, misalignment between user intent and model output, and limited mechanisms for self-correction when failures occur. This paper introduces the STROT Framework (Structured Task Reasoning and Output Transformation), a method for structured prompting and feedback-driven transformation logic generation aimed at improving the reliability and semantic alignment of LLM-based analytical workflows. STROT begins with lightweight schema introspection and sample-based field classification, enabling dynamic context construction that captures both the structure and statistical profile of the input data. This contextual information is embedded in structured prompts that guide the model toward generating task-specific, interpretable outputs. To address common failure modes in complex queries, STROT incorporates a refinement mechanism in which the model iteratively revises its outputs based on execution feedback and validation signals. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on static prompts or single-shot inference, STROT treats the LLM as a reasoning agent embedded within a controlled analysis loop -- capable of adjusting its output trajectory through planning and correction. The result is a robust and reproducible framework for reasoning over structured data with LLMs, applicable to diverse data exploration and analysis tasks where interpretability, stability, and correctness are essential.

E-commerce search and recommendation usually operate on structured data such as product catalogs and taxonomies. However, creating better search and recommendation systems often requires a large variety of unstructured data including customer reviews and articles on the web. Traditionally, the solution has always been converting unstructured data into structured data through information extraction, and conducting search over the structured data. However, this is a costly approach that often has low quality. In this paper, we envision a solution that does entirely the opposite. Instead of converting unstructured data (web pages, customer reviews, etc) to structured data, we instead convert structured data (product inventory, catalogs, taxonomies, etc) into textual data, which can be easily integrated into the text corpus that trains LLMs. Then, search and recommendation can be performed through a Q/A mechanism through an LLM instead of using traditional information retrieval methods over structured data.

We introduce FinTagging, the first full-scope, table-aware XBRL benchmark designed to evaluate the structured information extraction and semantic alignment capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in the context of XBRL-based financial reporting. Unlike prior benchmarks that oversimplify XBRL tagging as flat multi-class classification and focus solely on narrative text, FinTagging decomposes the XBRL tagging problem into two subtasks: FinNI for financial entity extraction and FinCL for taxonomy-driven concept alignment. It requires models to jointly extract facts and align them with the full 10k+ US-GAAP taxonomy across both unstructured text and structured tables, enabling realistic, fine-grained evaluation. We assess a diverse set of LLMs under zero-shot settings, systematically analyzing their performance on both subtasks and overall tagging accuracy. Our results reveal that, while LLMs demonstrate strong generalization in information extraction, they struggle with fine-grained concept alignment, particularly in disambiguating closely related taxonomy entries. These findings highlight the limitations of existing LLMs in fully automating XBRL tagging and underscore the need for improved semantic reasoning and schema-aware modeling to meet the demands of accurate financial disclosure. Code is available at our GitHub repository and data is at our Hugging Face repository.

Information extraction suffers from its varying targets, heterogeneous structures, and demand-specific schemas. In this paper, we propose a unified text-to-structure generation framework, namely UIE, which can universally model different IE tasks, adaptively generate targeted structures, and collaboratively learn general IE abilities from different knowledge sources. Specifically, UIE uniformly encodes different extraction structures via a structured extraction language, adaptively generates target extractions via a schema-based prompt mechanism - structural schema instructor, and captures the common IE abilities via a large-scale pre-trained text-to-structure model. Experiments show that UIE achieved the state-of-the-art performance on 4 IE tasks, 13 datasets, and on all supervised, low-resource, and few-shot settings for a wide range of entity, relation, event and sentiment extraction tasks and their unification. These results verified the effectiveness, universality, and transferability of UIE.

Extending Large Language Models (LLMs) to advanced applications requires reliable structured output generation. Existing methods which often rely on rigid JSON schemas, can lead to unreliable outputs, diminished reasoning capabilities, and increased computational overhead, limiting LLMs' adaptability for complex tasks. We introduce Meaning Typed Prompting (MTP), a technique for efficient structured output generation that integrates types, meanings, and abstractions, such as variables and classes, into the prompting process. By utilizing expressive type definitions, MTP enhances output clarity and reduces dependence on complex abstractions, simplifying development, and improving implementation efficiency. This enables LLMs to understand relationships and generate structured data more effectively. Empirical evaluations on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MTP outperforms existing frameworks in accuracy, reliability, consistency, and token efficiency. We present Semantix, a framework that implements MTP, providing practical insights into its application.