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Nianwen Xue

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4 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

CA-SQL: Complexity-Aware Inference Time Reasoning for Text-to-SQL via Exploration and Compute Budget Allocation

While recent advancements in inference-time learning have improved LLM reasoning on Text-to-SQL tasks, current solutions still struggle to perform well on the most challenging tasks in the Bird-Bench (BIRD) benchmark. This is due to inadequate solution space exploration, which is necessary to uncover promising candidate queries that can be further refined to produce the correct output. To address this challenge, we introduce CA-SQL, a novel Text-to-SQL pipeline that utilizes the estimated difficulty of a task to dynamically scale the breadth of the exploration for generating solution candidates. In addition, we use a custom prompt seeding method, based on principles of evolutionary search, to further elicit exploratory behavior from the base LLM and a novel voting method to select the best candidate solution at the end of the search. Experiments demonstrate that our solution achieves a state-of-the-art score of 51.72% on the "challenging" tier of BIRD development set problems, using only GPT-4o-mini, out-performing other in-context learning approaches, even those that leverage larger models. Overall, our method attains a competitive 61.06% execution accuracy and 68.77% Soft F1 score on the BIRD development dataset.

preprint2026arXiv

VecCISC: Improving Confidence-Informed Self-Consistency with Reasoning Trace Clustering and Candidate Answer Selection

A standard technique for scaling inference-time reasoning is Self-Consistency, whereby multiple candidate answers are sampled from an LLM and the most common answer is selected. More recently, it has been shown that weighted majority voting (e.g. Confidence-Informed Self Consistency (CISC)), which assigns a confidence value to each candidate answer and chooses the answer with the largest accumulated score, tends to be more accurate on a wide range of popular benchmarks. In practice, weighted majority voting necessitates calling a critic LLM on each candidate's reasoning trace to produce the answer's confidence score. This secondary series of LLM calls greatly increases the overhead and cost of weighted majority voting, despite its potential performance benefits. To reduce this expense, we propose VecCISC, a lightweight, adaptive framework that uses a measure of semantic similarity to filter reasoning traces that are semantically equivalent to others, degenerate, or hallucinated, thus decreasing the number of candidate answers that must be evaluated by the critic. To ensure adequate experimental thoroughness, we evaluate VecCISC on five challenging, widely-adopted datasets spanning the domains of mathematics, chemistry, biology, commonsense reasoning, and the humanities. Our results demonstrate that VecCISC reduces the total token usage by 47%, while maintaining or exceeding the accuracy of CISC.

preprint2016arXiv

Neural Network Models for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification in English and Chinese without Surface Features

Inferring implicit discourse relations in natural language text is the most difficult subtask in discourse parsing. Surface features achieve good performance, but they are not readily applicable to other languages without semantic lexicons. Previous neural models require parses, surface features, or a small label set to work well. Here, we propose neural network models that are based on feedforward and long-short term memory architecture without any surface features. To our surprise, our best configured feedforward architecture outperforms LSTM-based model in most cases despite thorough tuning. Under various fine-grained label sets and a cross-linguistic setting, our feedforward models perform consistently better or at least just as well as systems that require hand-crafted surface features. Our models present the first neural Chinese discourse parser in the style of Chinese Discourse Treebank, showing that our results hold cross-linguistically.

preprint2016arXiv

Towards Accurate Word Segmentation for Chinese Patents

A patent is a property right for an invention granted by the government to the inventor. An invention is a solution to a specific technological problem. So patents often have a high concentration of scientific and technical terms that are rare in everyday language. The Chinese word segmentation model trained on currently available everyday language data sets performs poorly because it cannot effectively recognize these scientific and technical terms. In this paper we describe a pragmatic approach to Chinese word segmentation on patents where we train a character-based semi-supervised sequence labeling model by extracting features from a manually segmented corpus of 142 patents, enhanced with information extracted from the Chinese TreeBank. Experiments show that the accuracy of our model reached 95.08% (F1 score) on a held-out test set and 96.59% on development set, compared with an F1 score of 91.48% on development set if the model is trained on the Chinese TreeBank. We also experimented with some existing domain adaptation techniques, the results show that the amount of target domain data and the selected features impact the performance of the domain adaptation techniques.