Yingcai Wu
Author directory2026
BIRD-History: A Benchmark for History-Driven Text-to-SQL with Fine-Grained Knowledge Annotations
Yunfan Zhou | Qiming Shi | Yizhou Yang | Di Weng | Yingcai Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Yunfan Zhou | Qiming Shi | Yizhou Yang | Di Weng | Yingcai Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
While recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based text-to-SQL systems achieve impressive performance on standard benchmarks, they struggle when user queries implicitly rely on domain-specific knowledge, such as business logic, data conventions, and analytical practices, that is neither captured by the schema nor explicitly stated in the natural language question. Historical SQL query logs offer a valuable source of such knowledge, yet existing benchmarks do not adequately support evaluation of history-driven approaches. To address this gap, we introduce BIRD-History, a benchmark consisting of 1,393 tasks across 11 databases, designed to evaluate text-to-SQL systems’ ability to ground underspecified natural language questions using historical SQL scripts. Each task is annotated with ground-truth labels specifying which historical queries contain relevant knowledge and which SQL clauses encode it, enabling systematic evaluation of both retrieval effectiveness and knowledge utilization. Alongside the benchmark, we propose a plug-in retriever that extracts five types of external knowledge from historical SQL scripts, then retrieves and reranks relevant fragments for query generation. The retriever integrates seamlessly into existing few-shot text-to-SQL pipelines without requiring prompt modifications. Experiments demonstrate consistent improvements across four text-to-SQL systems, highlighting the value of leveraging historical query logs for handling underspecified queries. Dataset and code are open-sourced on https://github.com/zjuidg/BIRD-History.
PuzzleClone: A DSL-Powered Framework for Synthesizing Verifiable Data
Kai Xiong | Yanwei Huang | Rongjunchen Zhang | Kun Chen | Haipang WU | Yingcai Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Kai Xiong | Yanwei Huang | Rongjunchen Zhang | Kun Chen | Haipang WU | Yingcai Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
High-quality mathematical and logical datasets with verifiable answers are essential for strengthening the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While recent data augmentation techniques have facilitated the creation of large-scale benchmarks, existing LLM-generated datasets often suffer from limited reliability, diversity, and scalability. To address these challenges, we introduce PuzzleClone, a formal framework for synthesizing verifiable data at scale using a novel DSL-driven approach. Our approach features three key innovations: (1) encoding seed puzzles into structured logical specifications, (2) generating scalable variants through systematic variable and constraint randomization, and (3) ensuring validity via a reproduction mechanism. Applying PuzzleClone, we construct PC-83K, a benchmark comprising over 83K diverse and programmatically validated puzzles. The generated puzzles span a wide spectrum of difficulty and formats, posing significant challenges to current state-of-the-art models. Experimental results show that post training (SFT and RL) on PC-83K yields substantial improvements not only on the testset but also on various logic and mathematical benchmarks. Post training raises average performance on PC-83K from 14.5 to 66.0 and delivers consistent improvements across 7 logic and mathematical benchmarks up to 18.4 absolute percentage points (SATBench from 51.6 to 70.0). Our code and data are available at https://github.com/HiThink-Research/PuzzleClone.
SPADER: Step-wise Peer Advantage with Diversity-Aware Exploration Rewards for Multi-Answer Question Answering
Qiming Shi | Zhaolu Kang | Yunfan Zhou | Di Weng | Yingcai Wu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Qiming Shi | Zhaolu Kang | Yunfan Zhou | Di Weng | Yingcai Wu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language models are increasingly deployed as tool-augmented agents to acquire information beyond parametric knowledge. While recent work has improved long-horizon tool-use reasoning, most approaches focus on tasks with a single correct answer. In contrast, many real-world queries require discovering a comprehensive set of valid answers, a setting known as Multi-Answer QA. This setting raises two challenges: fine-grained credit assignment over long search trajectories and reward alignment for sustained exploration beyond easy high-frequency entities.We propose SPADER, a reinforcement learning framework for long-horizon tool use in Multi-Answer QA. SPADER includes Step-wise Peer Advantage (SPA), a critic-free step-level credit assignment mechanism that aligns parallel trajectories by decision step and estimates advantages from peer returns. It also includes a diversity-aware exploration reward that promotes long-tail entity discovery by upweighting rare findings and downweighting redundant ones.Experiments on QAMPARI, Mintaka, WebQSP, and QUEST show that SPADER generally improves recall and overall F1 over prompting-based agents, outcome-supervised RL methods, and recent step-level supervision approaches.Our code and model weights are available at https://github.com/KhanCold/spader.
StealthGraph: Exposing Domain-Specific Risks in LLMs through Knowledge-Graph-Guided Harmful Prompt Generation
Huawei Zheng | Xinqi Jiang | Sen Yang | Shouling Ji | Yingcai Wu | Dazhen Deng
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Huawei Zheng | Xinqi Jiang | Sen Yang | Shouling Ji | Yingcai Wu | Dazhen Deng
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in specialized domains such as finance and healthcare, where they introduce unique safety risks. Domain-specific datasets of harmful prompts remain scarce and still largely rely on manual construction; public datasets mainly focus on explicit harmful prompts, which modern LLM defenses can often detect and refuse. In contrast, implicit harmful prompts—expressed through indirect domain knowledge—are harder to detect and better reflect real-world threats. We identify two challenges: transforming domain knowledge into actionable constraints and increasing the implicitness of generated harmful prompts. To address them, we propose an end-to-end framework that first performs knowledge-graph-guided harmful prompt generation to systematically produce domain-relevant prompts, and then applies two-strategy obfuscation rewriting to convert explicit harmful prompts into implicit variants via direct and context-enhanced rewriting. This framework yields high-quality datasets combining strong domain relevance with implicitness, enabling more realistic red-teaming and advancing LLM safety research. We release our code and datasets on GitHub.