LearNAT: Learning NL2SQL with AST-guided Task Decomposition for Large Language Models

Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) has emerged as a critical task for enabling seamless interaction with databases. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in this domain. However, existing NL2SQL methods predominantly rely on closed-source LLMs leveraging prompt engineering, while open-source models typically require fine-tuning to acquire domain-specific knowledge. Despite these efforts, open-source LLMs struggle with complex NL2SQL tasks due to the indirect expression of user query objectives and the semantic gap between user queries and database schemas. Inspired by the application of reinforcement learning in mathematical problem-solving to encourage step-by-step reasoning in LLMs, we propose LearNAT (Learning NL2SQL with AST-guided Task Decomposition), a novel framework that improves the performance of open-source LLMs on complex NL2SQL tasks through task decomposition and reinforcement learning. LearNAT introduces three key components: (1) a Decomposition Synthesis Procedure that leverages Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) to guide efficient search and pruning strategies for task decomposition, (2) Margin-aware Reinforcement Learning, which employs fine-grained step-level optimization via DPO with AST margins, and (3) Adaptive Demonstration Reasoning, a mechanism for dynamically selecting relevant examples to enhance decomposition capabilities. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, Spider and BIRD, demonstrate that LearNAT enables a 7B-parameter open-source LLM to achieve performance comparable to GPT-4, while offering improved efficiency and accessibility.

GeoEdit: Geometric Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models

Regular updates are essential for maintaining up-to-date knowledge in large language models (LLMs). Consequently, various model editing methods have been developed to update specific knowledge within LLMs. However, training-based approaches often struggle to effectively incorporate new knowledge while preserving unrelated general knowledge. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework called Geometric Knowledge Editing (GeoEdit). GeoEdit utilizes the geometric relationships of parameter updates from fine-tuning to differentiate between neurons associated with new knowledge updates and those related to general knowledge perturbations. By employing a direction-aware knowledge identification method, we avoid updating neurons with directions approximately orthogonal to existing knowledge, thus preserving the model's generalization ability. For the remaining neurons, we integrate both old and new knowledge for aligned directions and apply a "forget-then-learn" editing strategy for opposite directions. Additionally, we introduce an importance-guided task vector fusion technique that filters out redundant information and provides adaptive neuron-level weighting, further enhancing model editing performance. Extensive experiments on two publicly available datasets demonstrate the superiority of GeoEdit over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Stackelberg Game Preference Optimization for Data-Efficient Alignment of Language Models

Aligning language models with human preferences is critical for real-world deployment, but existing methods often require large amounts of high-quality human annotations. Aiming at a data-efficient alignment method, we propose Stackelberg Game Preference Optimization (SGPO), a framework that models alignment as a two-player Stackelberg game, where a policy (leader) optimizes against a worst-case preference distribution (follower) within an $\epsilon$-Wasserstein ball, ensuring robustness to (self-)annotation noise and distribution shifts. SGPO guarantees $O(\epsilon)$-bounded regret, unlike Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), which suffers from linear regret growth in the distribution mismatch. We instantiate SGPO with the Stackelberg Self-Annotated Preference Optimization (SSAPO) algorithm, which iteratively self-annotates preferences and adversarially reweights synthetic annotated preferences. Using only 2K seed preferences, from the UltraFeedback dataset, i.e., 1/30 of human labels in the dataset, our method achieves 35.82% GPT-4 win-rate with Mistral-7B and 40.12% with Llama3-8B-Instruct within three rounds of SSAPO.

Recurrent Knowledge Identification and Fusion for Language Model Continual Learning

Continual learning (CL) is crucial for deploying large language models (LLMs) in dynamic real-world environments without costly retraining. While recent model ensemble and model merging methods guided by parameter importance have gained popularity, they often struggle to balance knowledge transfer and forgetting, mainly due to the reliance on static importance estimates during sequential training. In this paper, we present Recurrent-KIF, a novel CL framework for Recurrent Knowledge Identification and Fusion, which enables dynamic estimation of parameter importance distributions to enhance knowledge transfer. Inspired by human continual learning, Recurrent-KIF employs an inner loop that rapidly adapts to new tasks while identifying important parameters, coupled with an outer loop that globally manages the fusion of new and historical knowledge through redundant knowledge pruning and key knowledge merging. These inner-outer loops iteratively perform multiple rounds of fusion, allowing Recurrent-KIF to leverage intermediate training information and adaptively adjust fusion strategies based on evolving importance distributions. Extensive experiments on two CL benchmarks with various model sizes (from 770M to 13B) demonstrate that Recurrent-KIF effectively mitigates catastrophic forgetting and enhances knowledge transfer.

Game Theory Meets Large Language Models: A Systematic Survey

Game theory establishes a fundamental framework for analyzing strategic interactions among rational decision-makers. The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has sparked extensive research exploring the intersection of these two fields. Specifically, game-theoretic methods are being applied to evaluate and enhance LLM capabilities, while LLMs themselves are reshaping classic game models. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the intersection of these fields, exploring a bidirectional relationship from three perspectives: (1) Establishing standardized game-based benchmarks for evaluating LLM behavior; (2) Leveraging game-theoretic methods to improve LLM performance through algorithmic innovations; (3) Characterizing the societal impacts of LLMs through game modeling. Among these three aspects, we also highlight how the equilibrium analysis for traditional game models is impacted by LLMs' advanced language understanding, which in turn extends the study of game theory. Finally, we identify key challenges and future research directions, assessing their feasibility based on the current state of the field. By bridging theoretical rigor with emerging AI capabilities, this survey aims to foster interdisciplinary collaboration and drive progress in this evolving research area.

Domaino1s: Guiding LLM Reasoning for Explainable Answers in High-Stakes Domains

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely applied to downstream domains. However, current LLMs for high-stakes domain tasks, such as financial investment and legal QA, typically generate brief answers without reasoning processes and explanations. This limits users' confidence in making decisions based on their responses. While original CoT shows promise, it lacks self-correction mechanisms during reasoning. This work introduces Domain$o1$s, which enhances LLMs' reasoning capabilities on domain tasks through supervised fine-tuning and tree search. We construct CoT-stock-2k and CoT-legal-2k datasets for fine-tuning models that activate domain-specific reasoning steps based on their judgment. Additionally, we propose Selective Tree Exploration to spontaneously explore solution spaces and sample optimal reasoning paths to improve performance. We also introduce PROOF-Score, a new metric for evaluating domain models' explainability, complementing traditional accuracy metrics with richer assessment dimensions. Extensive experiments on stock investment recommendation and legal reasoning QA tasks demonstrate Domaino1s's leading performance and explainability. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Domaino1s-006F/.

DRESSing Up LLM: Efficient Stylized Question-Answering via Style Subspace Editing

We introduce DRESS, a novel approach for generating stylized large language model (LLM) responses through representation editing. Existing methods like prompting and fine-tuning are either insufficient for complex style adaptation or computationally expensive, particularly in tasks like NPC creation or character role-playing. Our approach leverages the over-parameterized nature of LLMs to disentangle a style-relevant subspace within the model's representation space to conduct representation editing, ensuring a minimal impact on the original semantics. By applying adaptive editing strengths, we dynamically adjust the steering vectors in the style subspace to maintain both stylistic fidelity and semantic integrity. We develop two stylized QA benchmark datasets to validate the effectiveness of DRESS, and the results demonstrate significant improvements compared to baseline methods such as prompting and ITI. In short, DRESS is a lightweight, train-free solution for enhancing LLMs with flexible and effective style control, making it particularly useful for developing stylized conversational agents. Codes and benchmark datasets are available at https://github.com/ArthurLeoM/DRESS-LLM.

GraphBC: Improving LLMs for Better Graph Data Processing

The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in various domains has led researchers to apply them to graph-related problems by converting graph data into natural language text. However, unlike graph data, natural language inherently has sequential order. We observe that when the order of nodes or edges in the natural language description of a graph is shuffled, despite describing the same graph, model performance fluctuates between high performance and random guessing. Additionally, due to the limited input context length of LLMs, current methods typically randomly sample neighbors of target nodes as representatives of their neighborhood, which may not always be effective for accurate reasoning. To address these gaps, we introduce GraphBC. This novel model framework features an Order Selector Module to ensure proper serialization order of the graph and a Subgraph Sampling Module to sample subgraphs with better structure for better reasoning. Furthermore, we propose Graph CoT obtained through distillation, and enhance LLM's reasoning and zero-shot learning capabilities for graph tasks through instruction tuning. Experiments on multiple datasets for node classification and graph question-answering demonstrate that GraphBC improves LLMs' performance and generalization ability on graph tasks.

Adaptive Spatiotemporal Augmentation for Improving Dynamic Graph Learning

Dynamic graph augmentation is used to improve the performance of dynamic GNNs. Most methods assume temporal locality, meaning that recent edges are more influential than earlier edges. However, for temporal changes in edges caused by random noise, overemphasizing recent edges while neglecting earlier ones may lead to the model capturing noise. To address this issue, we propose STAA (SpatioTemporal Activity-Aware Random Walk Diffusion). STAA identifies nodes likely to have noisy edges in spatiotemporal dimensions. Spatially, it analyzes critical topological positions through graph wavelet coefficients. Temporally, it analyzes edge evolution through graph wavelet coefficient change rates. Then, random walks are used to reduce the weights of noisy edges, deriving a diffusion matrix containing spatiotemporal information as an augmented adjacency matrix for dynamic GNN learning. Experiments on multiple datasets show that STAA outperforms other dynamic graph augmentation methods in node classification and link prediction tasks.

Mitigating Hallucinations on Object Attributes using Multiview Images and Negative Instructions

Current popular Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are suffering from Hallucinations on Object Attributes (HoOA), leading to incorrect determination of fine-grained attributes in the input images. Leveraging significant advancements in 3D generation from a single image, this paper proposes a novel method to mitigate HoOA in LVLMs. This method utilizes multiview images sampled from generated 3D representations as visual prompts for LVLMs, thereby providing more visual information from other viewpoints. Furthermore, we observe the input order of multiple multiview images significantly affects the performance of LVLMs. Consequently, we have devised Multiview Image Augmented VLM (MIAVLM), incorporating a Multiview Attributes Perceiver (MAP) submodule capable of simultaneously eliminating the influence of input image order and aligning visual information from multiview images with Large Language Models (LLMs). Besides, we designed and employed negative instructions to mitigate LVLMs' bias towards ``Yes" responses. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.