2025
pdf
bib
abs
Uncovering the Impact of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Direct Preference Optimization: Lessons from Text-to-SQL
Hanbing Liu
|
Haoyang Li
|
Xiaokang Zhang
|
Ruotong Chen
|
Haiyong Xu
|
Tian Tian
|
Qi Qi
|
Jing Zhang
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has proven effective in complex reasoning tasks like math word problems and code generation. However, when applied to Text-to-SQL datasets, it often fails to improve performance and can even degrade it. Our investigation reveals the root cause: unlike math and code tasks, which naturally integrate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with DPO, Text-to-SQL datasets typically include only final answers (gold SQL queries) without detailed CoT solutions. By augmenting Text-to-SQL datasets with synthetic CoT solutions, we achieve, for the first time, consistent and significant performance improvements using DPO.Our analysis shows that CoT reasoning is crucial for unlocking DPO’s potential, as it mitigates reward hacking, strengthens discriminative capabilities, and improves scalability. These findings offer valuable insights for building more robust Text-to-SQL models. To support further research, we publicly release the code and CoT-enhanced datasets: https://github.com/RUCKBReasoning/DPO_Text2SQL.
pdf
bib
abs
LLMs Caught in the Crossfire: Malware Requests and Jailbreak Challenges
Haoyang Li
|
Huan Gao
|
Zhiyuan Zhao
|
Zhiyu Lin
|
Junyu Gao
|
Xuelong Li
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has heightened concerns about their security, particularly their vulnerability to jailbreak attacks that leverage crafted prompts to generate malicious outputs. While prior research has been conducted on general security capabilities of LLMs, their specific susceptibility to jailbreak attacks in code generation remains largely unexplored. To fill this gap, we propose MalwareBench, a benchmark dataset containing 3,520 jailbreaking prompts for malicious code-generation, designed to evaluate LLM robustness against such threats. MalwareBench is based on 320 manually crafted malicious code generation requirements, covering 11 jailbreak methods and 29 code functionality categories. Experiments show that mainstream LLMs exhibit limited ability to reject malicious code-generation requirements, and the combination of multiple jailbreak methods further reduces the model’s security capabilities: specifically, the average rejection rate for malicious content is 60.93%, dropping to 39.92% when combined with jailbreak attack algorithms. Our work highlights that the code security capabilities of LLMs still pose significant challenges.
pdf
bib
abs
Exposing Numeracy Gaps: A Benchmark to Evaluate Fundamental Numerical Abilities in Large Language Models
Haoyang Li
|
Xuejia Chen
|
Zhanchao Xu
|
Darian Li
|
Nicole Hu
|
Fei Teng
|
Yiming Li
|
Luyu Qiu
|
Chen Jason Zhang
|
Li Qing
|
Lei Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language processing tasks, such as text generation and semantic understanding. However, their performance on numerical reasoning tasks, such as basic arithmetic, numerical retrieval, and magnitude comparison, remains surprisingly poor. This gap arises from their reliance on surface-level statistical patterns rather than understanding numbers as continuous magnitudes. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on either linguistic competence or structured mathematical problem-solving, neglecting fundamental numerical reasoning required in real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose NumericBench, a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate six fundamental numerical capabilities: number recognition, arithmetic operations, contextual retrieval, comparison, summary, and multi-step reasoning. NumericBench includes datasets ranging from synthetic number lists to crawled real-world data, addressing challenges like long contexts, noise, and multi-step reasoning. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art LLMs, including GPT-4 and DeepSeek, reveal persistent weaknesses in numerical reasoning, highlighting the urgent need to improve numerically-aware language modeling. The benchmark is released in: https://github.com/TreeAI-Lab/NumericBench.
2023
pdf
bib
abs
A Generation-based Deductive Method for Math Word Problems
Yuxuan Hu
|
Jing Zhang
|
Haoyang Li
|
Cuiping Li
|
Hong Chen
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Math word problems (MWP) involving advanced operators such as linear equation solver cannot be easily tackled by earlier MWP methods, because the existing generation methods suffer from repeated sub-expression generation and deductive methods are restricted to dealing with binary operations. This paper propose a new multivariate directed acyclic graph (mDAG) as an alternative to the generation methods’ binary expression tree or the deductive methods’ binary directed acyclic graph. Then to produce the topological ordering of mDAG, we propose a generation-based deductive (GeDe) model, which equips a generation model with a re-encoder to keep the deductive property but avoid the expensive enumeration of the deductive methods. GeDe performs well on math problems with many operators on the widely used benchmarks as well as solving multivariate operators on our own CMWPA benchmark. Our code is available at https://github.com/hyx1999/GeDe