Hima Patel
2026
Think Like You Execute: Verifiable Chain of Thought from Program Traces
Shailja Thakur | Vaibhav Saxena | Rohan Kulkarni | Shivdeep Singh | Parameswaran Selvam | Hiroshi Kanayama | Hima Patel
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Shailja Thakur | Vaibhav Saxena | Rohan Kulkarni | Shivdeep Singh | Parameswaran Selvam | Hiroshi Kanayama | Hima Patel
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)
Teaching language models to reason about code execution is still an open problem. Current synthetic Chain-of-Thought (CoT) training data often consists of plausible-sounding explanations generated by teacher models, not verifiable accounts of actual program behavior. This causes models to learn logically flawed reasoning patterns despite syntactic correctness.We address this by grounding CoT generation directly in program execution traces. Our pipeline instruments code to capture dynamic behavior, narrates execution traces into natural language, and actively verifies each rationale against the trace. We systematically create 54,000 execution-verified, bi-directional rationales that teach models to reason both forward (input→output) and backward (output→input). Models fine-tuned on our verified data achieve substantial improvements, with a performance boost of +24.2 on LiveCodeBench-Exec, +22.3 on CruxEval-Output, and +21.1 on CruxEval-Input, demonstrating that verification quality directly determines both reasoning and code generation capabilities.
2024
An Automatic Prompt Generation System for Tabular Data Tasks
Ashlesha Akella | Abhijit Manatkar | Brijkumar Chavda | Hima Patel
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 6: Industry Track)
Ashlesha Akella | Abhijit Manatkar | Brijkumar Chavda | Hima Patel
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 6: Industry Track)
Efficient processing of tabular data is important in various industries, especially when working with datasets containing a large number of columns. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability on several tasks through carefully crafted prompts. However, creating effective prompts for tabular datasets is challenging due to the structured nature of the data and the need to manage numerous columns. This paper presents an innovative auto-prompt generation system suitable for multiple LLMs, with minimal training. It proposes two novel methods; 1) A Reinforcement Learning-based algorithm for identifying and sequencing task-relevant columns 2) cell-level similarity-based approach for enhancing few-shot example selection. Our approach has been extensively tested across 66 datasets, demonstrating improved performance in three downstream tasks: data imputation, error detection, and entity matching using two distinct LLMs; Google/flant-t5xxl and Mixtral 8x7B.