We present PLSQLBench, to our knowledge the first benchmark for evaluating whether LLMs can write executable PL/SQL programs, with correctness measured through execution-based tests. Existing LLM evaluations largely target general-purpose code generation or declarative text-to-SQL, leaving procedural database programming underexplored. PLSQLBench contains 2,865 instances: 2,594 single-turn tasks and 271 multi-turn conversations spanning 978 turns. The benchmark combines complex schema-grounded tasks over enterprise-style Spider 2 databases, simpler schema-grounded tasks derived from Spider, and MBPP-derived procedural problems, covering varying levels of database grounding and procedural complexity. Experiments with eight LLMs reveal recurring difficulties in schema grounding, PL/SQL dialect fidelity, procedural control flow, exception handling, and cross-turn consistency. Tool-augmented LLM agents improve performance on several schema-grounded evaluations, although substantial gaps remain. These results highlight procedural database-programming capabilities not directly assessed by conventional code-generation or text-to-SQL benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/oracle-samples/plsqlbench.

Entities can be expressed in diverse formats, such as texts, images, or column names and cell values in tables. While existing entity linking (EL) models work well on per modality configuration, such as text-only EL, visual grounding or schema linking, it is more challenging to design a unified model for diverse modality configurations. To bring various modality configurations together, we constructed a benchmark for diverse-modal EL (DMEL) from existing EL datasets, covering all three modalities including text, image and table. To approach the DMEL task, we proposed a generative diverse-modal model (GDMM) following a multimodal-encoder-decoder paradigm. Pre-training GDMM with rich corpora builds a solid foundation for DMEL without storing the entire KB for inference. Fine-tuning GDMM builds a stronger DMEL baseline, outperforming state-of-the-art task-specific EL models by 8.51 F1 score on average. Additionally, extensive error analyses are conducted to highlight the challenge of DMEL, facilitating future researches on this task.

The open-ended Visual Question Answering (VQA) task requires AI models to jointly reason over visual and natural language inputs using world knowledge. Recently, pre-trained Language Models (PLM) such as GPT-3 have been applied to the task and shown to be powerful world knowledge sources. However, these methods suffer from low knowledge coverage caused by PLM bias – the tendency to generate certain tokens over other tokens regardless of prompt changes, and high dependency on the PLM quality – only models using GPT-3 can achieve the best result. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose RASO: a new VQA pipeline that deploys a generate-then-select strategy guided by world knowledge for the first time. Rather than following the de facto standard to train a multi-modal model that directly generates the VQA answer, {pasted macro ‘MODEL’}name first adopts PLM to generate all the possible answers, and then trains a lightweight answer selection model for the correct answer. As proved in our analysis, RASO expands the knowledge coverage from in-domain training data by a large margin. We provide extensive experimentation and show the effectiveness of our pipeline by advancing the state-of-the-art by 4.1% on OK-VQA, without additional computation cost.