Zhitao Hou

Author directory

2026

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for enterprise information extraction (IE), where the same document must be reorganized differently for each user. Existing prompt optimization methods, however, rely on a single prompt optimized against a global objective, which is misaligned with the inherent user heterogeneity of real workplaces. We formulate enterprise IE as per-user prompt adaptation under interaction feedback and propose Self-Meta-Evolve, a hierarchical framework that maintains a dedicated prompt for each user and continuously refines it through a dual-loop process: an inner loop that edits structured prompts based on persona-conditioned feedback, and an outer loop that evolves the meta-prompt itself by distilling successful editing patterns. To enable scalable training and evaluation, we release a persona-driven IE benchmark of 292 simulated enterprise users, paired with a reproducible persona-generation pipeline grounded in O*NET occupational taxonomies. On this benchmark, Self-Meta-Evolve achieves a 74.58% success rate, outperforming the strongest prompt-optimization baseline by 13.56 absolute points, and reaches 52.54% within only two iterations. A double-blind human study with twenty real professionals further confirms that prompts adapted by our framework win against static baselines in 71% of pairwise comparisons.

2024

Writing formulas on spreadsheets, such as Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, is a widespread practice among users performing data analysis. However, crafting formulas on spreadsheets remains a tedious and error-prone task for many end-users, particularly when dealing with complex operations. To alleviate the burden associated with writing spreadsheet formulas, this paper introduces a novel benchmark task called NL2Formula, with the aim to generate executable formulas that are grounded on a spreadsheet table, given a Natural Language (NL) query as input. To accomplish this, we construct a comprehensive dataset consisting of 70,799 paired NL queries and corresponding spreadsheet formulas, covering 21,670 tables and 37 types of formula functions. We realize the NL2Formula task by providing a sequence-to-sequence baseline implementation called fCoder. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of fCoder, demonstrating its superior performance compared to the baseline models. Furthermore, we also compare fCoder with an initial GPT-3.5 model (i.e., text-davinci-003). Lastly, through in-depth error analysis, we identify potential challenges in the NL2Formula task and advocate for further investigation.

2023

We propose HermEs, the first approach for spreadsheet formula prediction via HiEraRchical forMulet ExpanSion, where hierarchical expansion means generating formulas following the underlying parse tree structure, and Formulet refers to commonly-used multi-level patterns mined from real formula parse trees. HermEs improves the formula prediction accuracy by (1) guaranteeing correct grammar by hierarchical generation rather than left-to-right generation and (2) significantly streamlining the token-level decoding with high-level Formulet. Notably, instead of generating formulas in a pre-defined fixed order, we propose a novel sampling strategy to systematically exploit a variety of hierarchical and multi-level expansion orders and provided solid mathematical proof, with the aim of meeting diverse human needs of the formula writing order in real applications. We further develop an interactive formula completion interface based on HermEs, which shows a new user experience in https://github.com/formulet/HERMES.