Boyan Li
2026
ErrorRadar: Benchmarking Complex Mathematical Reasoning of Multimodal Large Language Models Via Error Detection
Yibo Yan | Shen Wang | Jiahao Huo | Hang Li | Boyan Li | Jiamin Su | Xiong Gao | YiFan Zhang | Tianlong Xu | Zhendong Chu | Aoxiao Zhong | Kun Wang | Hui Xiong | Philip S. Yu | Xuming Hu | Qingsong Wen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yibo Yan | Shen Wang | Jiahao Huo | Hang Li | Boyan Li | Jiamin Su | Xiong Gao | YiFan Zhang | Tianlong Xu | Zhendong Chu | Aoxiao Zhong | Kun Wang | Hui Xiong | Philip S. Yu | Xuming Hu | Qingsong Wen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
As the field of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) continues to evolve, their potential to handle mathematical reasoning tasks is promising, as they can handle multimodal questions via cross-modal understanding capabilities compared to text-only LLMs. Current mathematical benchmarks predominantly focus on evaluating MLLMs’ problem-solving ability, yet there is a crucial gap in addressing more complex scenarios such as error detection, for enhancing reasoning capability in complicated settings. To fill this gap, we formally formulate the new task — multimodal error detection, and introduce **ErrorRadar, the first benchmark designed to assess MLLMs’ capabilities in such a task. ErrorRadar evaluates two sub-tasks: error step identification and error categorization**, providing a framework for evaluating MLLMs’ complex mathematical reasoning ability. It consists of 2,500 high-quality multimodal K-12 mathematical problems, collected from real-world student interactions in an educational organization, with expert-based annotation and metadata such as problem type and error category. Through extensive experiments, we evaluated both open-source and closed-source representative MLLMs, benchmarking their performance against educational expert evaluators. Results indicate challenges still remain, as GPT-4o with best model performance is still around 10% behind human evaluation
ROSE: An Intent-Centered Evaluation Metric for NL2SQL
Wenqi Pei | Shizheng Hou | Boyan Li | Chen Han | Zhichao Shi | Yuyu Luo
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Wenqi Pei | Shizheng Hou | Boyan Li | Chen Han | Zhichao Shi | Yuyu Luo
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Execution Accuracy (EX), the widely used metric for evaluating the effectiveness of Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) solutions, is becoming increasingly unreliable. It is sensitive to syntactic variation, ignores that questions may admit multiple interpretations, and is easily misled by erroneous ground-truth SQL. To address this, we introduce **ROSE**, an intent-centered metric that focuses on whether the predicted SQL answers the question, rather than consistency with the ground-truth SQL under the reference-dependent paradigm. ROSE employs an adversarial Prover-Refuter cascade: SQL Prover assesses the semantic correctness of a predicted SQL against the user’s intent independently, while Adversarial Refuter uses the ground-truth SQL as evidence to challenge and refine this judgment. On our expert-aligned validation set **ROSE-VEC**, ROSE achieves the best agreement with human experts, outperforming the next-best metric by nearly 24% in Cohen’s Kappa. We also conduct a large-scale re-evaluation of 19 NL2SQL methods, revealing four valuable insights. We release ROSE and ROSE-VEC to facilitate more reliable NL2SQL research.
DPC: Training-Free Text-to-SQL Candidate Selection via Dual-Paradigm Consistency
Boyan Li | Ou Ocean Kun Hei | Yue Yu | Yuyu Luo
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Boyan Li | Ou Ocean Kun Hei | Yue Yu | Yuyu Luo
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive proficiency in generating SQL queries, they fundamentally lack the capability to self-evaluate correctness without an execution oracle. This limitation creates a stark Generation-Selection Gap, where high potential accuracy (Pass@K) fails to translate into execution accuracy (Pass@1). Although supervised verifiers offer mitigation, they incur prohibitive annotation costs and suffer from domain fragility. Consequently, recent research has pivoted to the training-free setting. However, existing methods—such as Self-Consistency or LLM-as-a-Judge—remain hampered by systematic bias (consensus on hallucinations) and symbolic blindness (inability to simulate execution states). We introduce DPC (Dual-Paradigm Consistency), a multi-agent framework that reformulates SQL selection from a probabilistic guessing task on hidden data into a deterministic verification task on visible data. Specifically, DPC employs a Slicer and a Tester agent to collaboratively construct a Minimal Distinguishing Database (MDD)—an adversarial, fully observable micro-environment engineered to expose logical discrepancies between candidates. To break the self-correction bias, a Solver agent then verifies the SQL candidates by cross-referencing their execution against a parallel Python/Pandas solution. By validating execution consistency between declarative (SQL) and imperative (Python) paradigms, DPC robustly discriminates correct logic from systematic hallucinations. Experiments on BIRD and Spider across multiple LLMs demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing selection baselines, achieving absolute accuracy improvements of up to 2.2% over strong competitors like Self-Consistency.
Beyond Single-shot Writing: Deep Research Agents are Unreliable at Multi-turn Report Revision
Bingsen Chen | Boyan Li | Ping Nie | Yuyu Zhang | Xi Ye | Chen Zhao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Bingsen Chen | Boyan Li | Ping Nie | Yuyu Zhang | Xi Ye | Chen Zhao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Existing benchmarks for Deep Research Agents (DRAs) treat report generation as a single-shot writing task, which fundamentally diverges from how human researchers iteratively draft and revise reports via self-reflection or peer feedback. Whether DRAs can reliably revise reports with user feedback remains unexplored. We introduce Mr Dre, an evaluation suite that establishes multi-turn report revision as a new axis. Mr Dre consists of (1) a unified long-form report evaluation protocol spanning comprehensiveness, factuality, and presentation, and (2) a human-verified feedback simulation pipeline for systematic multi-turn revision evaluation. Our analysis of five diverse DRAs reveals a critical limitation: while agents can address most user feedback, they also regress on 16–27% of previously covered content and citation quality. Over multiple revision turns, even the best-performing agents leave significant headroom, as they continue to disrupt content outside the feedback’s scope and fail to preserve earlier edits. We further show that these issues are not easily resolvable through inference-time fixes such as prompt engineering and a dedicated sub-agent for revision.