@inproceedings{gu-etal-2025-toward,
    title = "Toward Structured Knowledge Reasoning: Contrastive Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Experience",
    author = "Gu, Jiawei  and
      Xian, Ziting  and
      Xie, Yuanzhen  and
      Liu, Ye  and
      Liu, Enjie  and
      Zhong, Ruichao  and
      Gao, Mochi  and
      Tan, Yunzhi  and
      Hu, Bo  and
      Li, Zang",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/acl25-workshop-ingestion/2025.findings-acl.1224/",
    pages = "23891--23910",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5",
    abstract = "Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on plain text tasks but underperform on structured data like tables and databases. Potential challenges arise from their underexposure during pre-training and rigid text-to-structure transfer mechanisms. Unlike humans who seamlessly apply learned patterns across data modalities, LLMs struggle to infer implicit relationships embedded in tabular formats, especially in the absence of explicit structural guidance. To bridge this cognitive gap, we introduce Contrastive Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Experience (CoRE), a framework that builds experience memory representations and enhances generalization through contrastive In-Context Learning (ICL) to simulate human-like knowledge transfer. Experiments on Text-to-SQL and TableQA show CoRE significantly improves performance, achieving average gains of 3.44{\%} and 4.24{\%}, with up to 17.2{\%} on challenging tasks. Our Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-generated Experience Memory expands training data 8-9{\texttimes}, enhancing diversity and domain coverage. This training-free and continual method propels LLMs toward structured knowledge expertise."
}