Bowen Qin


2025

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SHARE: An SLM-based Hierarchical Action CorREction Assistant for Text-to-SQL
Ge Qu | Jinyang Li | Bowen Qin | Xiaolong Li | Nan Huo | Chenhao Ma | Reynold Cheng
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Current self-correction approaches in text-to-SQL face two critical limitations: 1) Conventional self-correction methods rely on recursive self-calls of LLMs, resulting in multiplicative computational overhead, and 2) LLMs struggle to implement effective error detection and correction for monolithic SQL queries, as they fail to demonstrate the underlying reasoning path. In this work, we propose **SHARE**, a **S**LM-based **H**ierarchical **A**ction cor**RE**ction assistant that enables LLMs to perform more precise error localization and efficient correction. SHARE orchestrates three specialized Small Language Models (SLMs) in a sequential pipeline, where it first transforms monolithic SQL queries into stepwise action trajectories that reveal underlying reasoning, followed by a two-phase granular refinement. We further propose a novel hierarchical self-evolution strategy for data-efficient training. Our experimental results demonstrate that SHARE effectively enhances self-correction capabilities while proving robust across various LLMs. Furthermore, our comprehensive analysis shows that SHARE maintains strong performance even in low-resource training settings, which is particularly valuable for text-to-SQL applications with data privacy constraints.

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Micro-Act: Mitigate Knowledge Conflict in Question Answering via Actionable Self-Reasoning
Nan Huo | Jinyang Li | Bowen Qin | Ge Qu | Xiaolong Li | Xiaodong Li | Chenhao Ma | Reynold Cheng
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems commonly suffer from **Knowledge Conflicts**, where retrieved external knowledge contradicts the inherent, parametric knowledge of large language models (LLMs). It adversely affects performance on downstream tasks such as question answering (QA). Existing approaches often attempt to mitigate conflicts by directly comparing two knowledge sources in a side-by-side manner, but this can overwhelm LLMs with extraneous or lengthy contexts, ultimately hindering their ability to identify and mitigate inconsistencies. To address this issue, we propose **Micro-Act** a framework with a hierarchical action space that automatically perceives context complexity and adaptively decomposes each knowledge source into a sequence of fine-grained comparisons. These comparisons are represented as actionable steps, enabling reasoning beyond the superficial context. Through extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets, Micro-Act consistently achieves significant increase in QA accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines across all 5 datasets and 3 conflict types, especially in temporal and semantic types where all baselines fail significantly. More importantly, Micro-Act exhibits robust performance on non-conflict questions simultaneously, highlighting its practical value in real-world RAG applications.

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FlagEvalMM: A Flexible Framework for Comprehensive Multimodal Model Evaluation
Zheqi He | Yesheng Liu | Jing-Shu Zheng | Xuejing Li | Jin-Ge Yao | Bowen Qin | Richeng Xuan | Xi Yang
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)

We present FlagEvalMM, an open-source evaluation framework designed to comprehensively assess multimodal models across a diverse range of vision-language understanding and generation tasks, such as visual question answering, text-to-image/video generation, and image-text retrieval. We decouple model inference from evaluation through an independent evaluation service, thus enabling flexible resource allocation and seamless integration of new tasks and models. Moreover, FlagEvalMM utilizes advanced inference acceleration tools (e.g., vLLM, SGLang) and asynchronous data loading to significantly enhance evaluation efficiency. Extensive experiments show that FlagEvalMM offers accurate and efficient insights into model strengths and limitations, making it a valuable tool for advancing multimodal research. The framework is publicly accessible at https://github.com/flageval-baai/FlagEvalMM, with a demonstration video available at https://youtu.be/L7EtacjoM0k.

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FlagEval-Arena: A Side-by-Side Comparative Evaluation Platform for Large Language Models and Text-Driven AIGC
Jing-Shu Zheng | Richeng Xuan | Bowen Qin | Zheqi He | Tongshuai.ren Tongshuai.ren | Xuejing Li | Jin-Ge Yao | Xi Yang
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)

We introduce FlagEval-Arena, an evaluation platform for side-by-side comparisons of large language models and text-driven AIGC systems.Compared with the well-known LM Arena (LMSYS Chatbot Arena), we reimplement our own framework with the flexibility to introduce new mechanisms or features. Our platform enables side-by-side evaluation not only for language models or vision-language models, but also text-to-image or text-to-video synthesis. We specifically target at Chinese audience with a more focus on the Chinese language, more models developed by Chinese institutes, and more general usage beyond the technical community. As a result, we currently observe very interesting differences from usual results presented by LM Arena. Our platform is available via this URL: https://flageval.baai.org/#/arena.

2024

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Before Generation, Align it! A Novel and Effective Strategy for Mitigating Hallucinations in Text-to-SQL Generation
Ge Qu | Jinyang Li | Bowen Li | Bowen Qin | Nan Huo | Chenhao Ma | Reynold Cheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) driven by In-Context Learning (ICL) have significantly improved the performance of text-to-SQL. Previous methods generally employ a two-stage reasoning framework, namely 1) schema linking and 2) logical synthesis, making the framework not only effective but also interpretable. Despite these advancements, the inherent bad nature of the generalization of LLMs often results in hallucinations, which limits the full potential of LLMs. In this work, we first identify and categorize the common types of hallucinations at each stage in text-to-SQL. We then introduce a novel strategy, Task Alignment (TA), designed to mitigate hallucinations at each stage. TA encourages LLMs to take advantage of experiences from similar tasks rather than starting the tasks from scratch. This can help LLMs reduce the burden of generalization, thereby mitigating hallucinations effectively. We further propose TA-SQL, a text-to-SQL framework based on this strategy. The experimental results and comprehensive analysis demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our framework. Specifically, it enhances the performance of the GPT-4 baseline by 21.23% relatively on BIRD dev and it yields significant improvements across six models and four mainstream, complex text-to-SQL benchmarks.

2022

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SUN: Exploring Intrinsic Uncertainties in Text-to-SQL Parsers
Bowen Qin | Lihan Wang | Binyuan Hui | Bowen Li | Xiangpeng Wei | Binhua Li | Fei Huang | Luo Si | Min Yang | Yongbin Li
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

This paper aims to improve the performance of text-to-SQL parsing by exploring the intrinsic uncertainties in the neural network based approaches (called SUN). From the data uncertainty perspective, it is indisputable that a single SQL can be learned from multiple semantically-equivalent questions. Different from previous methods that are limited to one-to-one mapping, we propose a data uncertainty constraint to explore the underlying complementary semantic information among multiple semantically-equivalent questions (many-to-one) and learn the robust feature representations with reduced spurious associations. In this way, we can reduce the sensitivity of the learned representations and improve the robustness of the parser. From the model uncertainty perspective, there is often structural information (dependence) among the weights of neural networks. To improve the generalizability and stability of neural text-to-SQL parsers, we propose a model uncertainty constraint to refine the query representations by enforcing the output representations of different perturbed encoding networks to be consistent with each other. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms strong competitors and achieves new state-of-the-art results.

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S2SQL: Injecting Syntax to Question-Schema Interaction Graph Encoder for Text-to-SQL Parsers
Binyuan Hui | Ruiying Geng | Lihan Wang | Bowen Qin | Yanyang Li | Bowen Li | Jian Sun | Yongbin Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

The task of converting a natural language question into an executable SQL query, known as text-to-SQL, is an important branch of semantic parsing. The state-of-the-art graph-based encoder has been successfully used in this task but does not model the question syntax well. In this paper, we propose S2SQL, injecting Syntax to question-Schema graph encoder for Text-to-SQL parsers, which effectively leverages the syntactic dependency information of questions in text-to-SQL to improve the performance. We also employ the decoupling constraint to induce diverse relational edge embedding, which further improves the network’s performance. Experiments on the Spider and robustness setting Spider-Syn demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms all existing methods when pre-training models are used, resulting in a performance ranks first on the Spider leaderboard.