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Bowen Qin

Publications and source records attributed to Bowen Qin.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

BIRD-RL: Scaling Agentic Reinforcement Learning over Stateful Data-Centric Environments

While agentic reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for training small language models (SLMs), existing frameworks are predominantly tool-centric and struggle with data-centric environments. Specifically, applying tool-centric frameworks to stateful tasks like SQL debugging introduces severe spatial inefficiencies since proper environment isolation typically requires a separate database container per rollout. Naively reusing databases without tracking evolving states across multi-turn interactions causes trajectory contamination and cross-trajectory interference, which severely destabilizes policy updates. To overcome these bottlenecks, we introduce BIRD-RL, a novel four-stage agentic RL curriculum that alternately enhances foundational agent reasoning and trajectory-adaptive on-policy exploration to circumvent the instability inherently associated with direct end-to-end learning. Crucially, to support this curriculum, BIRD-RL is driven by a Trajectory-scoped Persistent Execution Infrastructure, which enables safe database replica reuse while preserving trajectory isolation. This design improves spatial RL efficiency by 12.8x, successfully enabling scalable agentic RL for complex data-centric tasks without needs of Kubernettes. Empirical evaluations on the BIRD-CRITIC-SQLite benchmark demonstrate that our 7B and 14B models achieve Success Rates of 44.40% and 48.00%, respectively, showing competitive performance against strong proprietary model-based agents such as Claude-Opus-4.6 Agent (48.20%). Furthermore, BIRD-RL successfully trains unified SLMs capable of both advanced SQL debugging and generation, highlighting its broader potential for multi-objective optimization across heterogeneous, real-world data-centric tasks.

cs.LG↗

Agentic Image Generation in the Wild

Agentic image generation pairs an image generator with a search agent that retrieves references from the web, extending generation beyond the generator's training data. Real-world requests, however, often concern entities that appeared only days ago. We call this setting Image Generation in the Wild. In this setting, the web offers limited visual evidence, search results are crowded with easily confused entities, and the target is rarely shown on its own. To study this setting, we build an automated pipeline that synthesizes prompts from recent headlines and keeps only those whose real search results are highly confusing, yielding requests that are hard to solve yet natural to ask. With it, we construct Savanna, a benchmark of 500 prompts across 16 subcategories. On Savanna, even harness frameworks built on the frontier models retrieve a correct reference for only about half of the prompts. We then propose Locate-Corroborate-Isolate, a paradigm in which the agent first pins down the target's identity through text search, then verifies candidate images against multiple sources, and finally crops a clean reference for the generator. Trained on 15K trajectories that follow this paradigm, Ranger-8B achieves a search score of 67.2, outperforming harnesses equipped with frontier models. It also achieves the best generation quality with every generator we test, and surpasses prior agentic methods on other image generation benchmarks. We release the pipeline, benchmark, training data and model at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Agentic-ImageGen-Wild.

cs.CV↗

Benchmarking and Training Reward Models for Cross-Source Evidence Grounding in Search Agents

Existing approaches to training and evaluating search agents focus heavily on final-answer quality, largely neglecting how generated answers map back to retrieved evidence. Recent methods track citations to enforce grounding, but citation support alone does not establish source independence or whether an answer appropriately handles conflicting evidence. We argue that credibility in open-web retrieval depends on principled cross-source evidence grounding that accounts for source independence and systematically attributes and adjudicates conflicting evidence, while hierarchical judgments of these grounding decisions provide a unified signal for training and evaluation. To this end, we propose an evaluation framework, Cross-Source Evidence Grounding (CSEG), that employs a fine-grained, six-layer decision tree over the complete search trajectory. We introduce CSEG-Bench and trainable reward models to provide targeted supervision following this framework. Our approach helps eliminating the severe data skew of natural trajectories by providing targeted coverage over complex, deep-layer decision paths, such as cross-source conflict resolution and nuanced attribution, that standard rollouts fail to capture. Specifically, (1) we define the hierarchy at label, node, and path levels; (2) we construct 1,160 verified trajectories over nine canonical paths by rewriting answers on real retrieved document pools, with independent frontier judges reproducing the entire gold path and human experts deciding inclusion; (3) we train CSEG-RM, which reaches 83.9% exact accuracy on our benchmark while lying on the performance-token efficiency Pareto frontier. Experiments that use this reward alone to supervise a frozen-retrieval answer policy raise the independently judged mean label from 2.83 to 4.19, and show that learning the hierarchy generalizes across layers at a fraction of frontier-judge cost.

cs.AI↗

ORCA: Evaluating LLMs on Data Science Code Translation

Data Science Code Translation (DSCT) is the process of converting code between data science libraries while preserving functional equivalence and enabling interoperability across data science ecosystems. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated considerable progress in Data Science Code Generation (DSCG), their performance in DSCT remains insufficiently studied. To address this gap, we introduce ORCA, a comprehensive benchmark with two complementary settings: ORCA-MAIN, which comprises 1,600 carefully curated grounding-level tasks across 3 representative domains: Data Querying, Data Manipulation, and Deep Learning; and ORCA-PROJECT, which contains 200 translation tasks over complete data science projects across 7 data science task types. Each task is accompanied by annotated reference translations and test cases for validating functional equivalence. We further incorporate a multi-stage quality verification process that thoroughly verifies task correctness and test case robustness. Experimental results demonstrate challenges in DSCT, with even frontier LLMs showing limited performance. Specifically, Claude-Opus-4.6 achieves a success rate of 56.92% on ORCA-MAIN and 33.67% on ORCA-PROJECT, indicating considerable room for improvement in DSCT. We also observe a clear directional preference in DSCT, where translation is consistently easier when the source code expresses the task through more explicit, fine-grained operations. Motivated by this, we propose an intent-augmented method, in which the model first infers source-code intent and then uses it as additional context for translation, achieving average absolute success-rate gains of 4.80% and 5.33% on ORCA-MAIN and ORCA-PROJECT, respectively.

cs.AI↗

ImpossibleRubrics: Stress-Testing Generated Rubrics as Reward Signals

Language model-generated rubrics are increasingly used as reward signals for rubric-based reinforcement learning, LLM-as-a-judge evaluation, and automated grading. Such rubrics are reliable only if they reward honest answers over adversarial answers optimized to exploit them. Yet their robustness to such optimization remains poorly understood. We isolate the hardest regime: impossible tasks, where the prompt pressures the model toward an unsupported conclusion, so the only honest response is to acknowledge the impossibility. We introduce ImpossibleRubrics, a benchmark of 169 impossible tasks spanning six impossibility categories, each paired with a verifiable oracle certificate specifying what an honest answer may and may not claim, together with 48 answerable controls. Rather than providing fixed rubrics, ImpossibleRubrics provides task environments and certificates, allowing rubrics to be generated downstream and then adversarially tested for whether they reward certificate-violating answers. Eleven generators are exploited 8--26% of the time on the unbiased 150-of-169 environment cut; on a deliberately selected stress cut the strongest generator we measured is still exploited 36% while a certificate-faithful rubric is exploited 0%, so what we measure is a rubric-quality gap, not task impossibility. One result runs against intuition. A single generic rubric ("be decisive, penalize hedging") used unchanged for every task is exploited 64% of the time, and seven of the eleven generators are exploited more often than that while writing a rubric tailored to each one. The tailored criteria appear to tell an attacker which claim to fabricate. The problem is not that rubrics are vague; it is that they are specific about the wrong things.

cs.LG↗

MoM: Memory of Memory

For a long-horizon LLM agent, the memory question is not what was once recorded but what \emph{currently holds}. Most designs answer it only indirectly: every interaction is stored, and the present is reconstructed at query time by retrieving and reconciling records, so stale values re-enter and the same conflicts are re-litigated. Committing the current value at write time avoids this, but existing write-time (CRUD) memories overwrite, so a wrong update is unrecoverable and prior state is lost. We take the missing combination---\emph{commit on arrival while retaining what is displaced}---and formalize it as \textsc{Memory of Memory} (MoM): memory tracks not only content but the provenance, status, and history of its own entries. We instantiate MoM as \textsc{Provenant Memory} (P-Mem), a typed provenance graph whose \emph{active frontier} exposes one current value per resolved key while displaced values are retained as provenance; typed operations decide whether a new observation supports, supersedes, contests, rejects, revokes, or resolves an existing value. P-Mem's decisive gain is validity rather than accuracy: its turn-level read matches the strongest retrieval memory in accuracy at $\sim$4$\times$ fewer read tokens---a retrieval-granularity effect---while graph-guided turn pruning cuts the knowledge-update stale-answer rate (19.4\%$\rightarrow$10.9\%); on revision chains it stays at 100\% where query-time reading collapses to 25\%, and, because displaced values are retained rather than overwritten, it recovers committed errors a CRUD memory cannot (100\% vs.\ 0\%).

cs.CL↗

Cross-Domain Hybrid OPD for Generalizable Search Agents

Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning (RL) have substantially improved the capabilities of autonomous search agents, enabling sophisticated planning, and iterative retrieval over dynamic information sources. However, optimizing language models for specialized search behaviors often incurs an alignment tax, where gains in search performance come at the expense of general-purpose capabilities, limiting their effectiveness as universal assistants. In this technical report, we present the training framework behind the Yuanbao search agent, designed to achieve search specialization without sacrificing general intelligence. Built upon the Hunyuan3 architecture, our framework combines agentic reinforcement learning for autonomous search with a cross-domain expert On-Policy Distillation (OPD) pipeline. Experts specializing in complementary general-purpose domains are distilled into the search-specialized student, restoring and further enhancing its broad capabilities. Rather than treating specialization and general capability as competing objectives, our hybrid training strategy jointly optimizes both, effectively mitigating the alignment tax. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the resulting model achieves competitive search performance while consistently improving its general-purpose capabilities, providing a favorable balance between specialized execution and broad generalization in real-world search scenarios.

cs.CL↗

Agent Retrieval Bench: Evaluating Repository Context Retrieval for Coding Agents

Modern coding agents are usually evaluated by whether they eventually produce a correct patch, but patch generation depends on an earlier context-acquisition stage: finding the repository files needed for the task. We introduce Agent Retrieval Bench, a file-level benchmark for this upstream retrieval problem. Samples are built from real coding-workflow signals and evaluated against frozen base-commit repositories, with relevance defined by what an agent needs next rather than direct query-file semantic similarity. The benchmark covers four positive-retrieval tasks: code2test, comment2context, trace2code, and edit2ripple; a fifth subset evaluates selective retrieval using natural evidence-backed no-gold cases and counterfactual wrong-repository controls. Agent Retrieval Bench contains 427 samples across 25 repositories: 345 positive examples, 50 natural no-gold examples, and 32 counterfactual controls. The corpus includes 308 base-commit snapshots, 392,000 files, and 7.9 million chunks. We evaluate lexical retrieval, RepoMap, open-source embeddings, selective abstention, and logged agent context selection. No single retrieval family dominates: Qwen3-Embedding-4B has the best sample-weighted MRR on positive samples, Qwen3-Embedding-8B the best Recall@20, and RepoMap the best budgeted context yield at 8K tokens, with task-level winners differing substantially. Selective thresholds calibrated with counterfactual controls do not improve selective success on natural no-gold cases, revealing a calibration gap. Logged trajectories also miss every gold file on 27-35 percent of samples. A controlled seed-intervention pilot finds that retrieval-derived initial context yields higher file F1 with less post-seed exploration than random non-gold context, while oracle gold context shows substantial remaining headroom.

cs.IR↗

Hint Tuning: Less Data Makes Better Reasoners

Large reasoning models achieve high accuracy through extended chain-of-thought but generate 5--8 more tokens than necessary, applying verbose reasoning uniformly regardless of problem difficulty. We propose Hint Tuning, a data-efficient approach that teaches models to calibrate reasoning depth. Our key insight: the corresponding instruct model serves as an ideal difficulty probe. By testing what the instruct model can solve with varying guidance, we automatically construct training data across three states: No-Hint (direct answer), Sparse-Hint (minimal prefix), and Full-Hint (complete reasoning). This converts the abstract challenge of difficulty labeling into a measurable consistency check between the instruct and reasoning models. With only 1K self-annotated samples, Hint Tuning achieves 24--66% token reduction (31.5% average) across mainstream reasoning models (Qwen3-Thinking, DeepSeek-R1-Distill) at multiple scales (4B--32B) while maintaining competitive accuracy on five benchmarks. Unlike methods requiring massive distillation datasets or expensive RL, we achieve superior efficiency through simple alignment with the instruct model's capabilities. Code and data are available at https://github.com/redai-infra/hint-tuning.

cs.CL↗

Diff-SQL: SQL Efficiency Optimization via Patch Generation and Constraint Alignment

SQL efficiency optimization aims to transform slow queries into semantically equivalent but faster alternatives. However, directly optimizing SQL with large language models in an end-to-end fashion often induces Objective Misalignment which creates a fundamental tension between optimization and correctness, making direct full SQL rewriting unreliable for execution-facing database applications. To address this problem, we propose Diff-SQL, a two-stage framework that decouples efficiency-oriented optimization from constraint-aware alignment. The first stage identifies optimization opportunities and proposes targeted edits in the form of a unified diff patch, while the second stage is trained with on-policy reinforcement learning to revise outputs under executability and semantic-equivalence constraints. To train and evaluate Diff-SQL, we construct an automated pipeline that mines optimization knowledge from StackOverflow and builds Slow-Fast SQL pairs through cascaded filtering. We further introduce Effi-SQL, a benchmark containing 1,100 human-verified Slow-Fast pairs across five SQL dialects. Experiments show that Objective Misalignment is widespread across existing LLM-based SQL optimization methods, where direct full SQL optimization causes an average 22.7% execution accuracy degradation across frontier models such as Claude-Opus-4.6, with the worst model dropping by 43.0%. Diff-SQL alleviates this trade-off. As an inference-only strategy, it improves R-VES by 10.0% on average while reducing execution accuracy degradation by 6.11% on average across three strong base models. With execution-grounded training, Diff-SQL further enables a 7B model to improve R-VES from 33.42% to 46.83%, demonstrating that the proposed two-stage optimization-and-alignment paradigm can deliver both stronger efficiency and better correctness in local, small model deployment settings.

cs.DB↗

LogDx-CI: Benchmarking Log Reduction Tools for LLM Root-Cause Diagnosis

CI failure logs are large (median 5k lines, max 200k in this corpus) and noisy. Coding agents that try to debug them depend on an upstream tool to reduce the log to a manageable context, but the field has had no public empirical comparison of which reductions preserve enough evidence for downstream LLM diagnosis. We introduce LogDx-CI, a benchmark that compares 11 context-reduction tools (raw, tail, grep, three RTK modes, two real LLM map-reduce summarizers, three hybrid routers) on 35 real GitHub Actions failure cases, scored by 3 LLM debugger families (Claude Haiku 4.5, Claude Sonnet 4.6, OpenAI gpt-5-mini) plus a Sonnet 4.6 tool-using agent. We report three load-bearing findings. (1)~Hybrid grep+tail routers dominate the cost-quality Pareto frontier; the top two methods score 0.670 / 0.666 at $\sim$ \$0.03 per case, same-ballpark quality as standalone grep at $4.5\times$ fewer tokens. (2)~In the agent-loop regime, the quality range across reduction tools collapses $7\times$ (single-shot spread 0.42 $\to$ agent-loop spread 0.059); the agent rescues weak contexts via follow-up tool calls. However, cost differences persist: weak contexts force the agent to issue 2--4$\times$ more tool calls to recover. (3)~A cross-family LLM-summary pair (gpt-5-mini summarizer feeding a Claude Haiku debugger) beats the same-family pair by $+0.071$ averaged across four diagnoser variants, falsifying the self-call-bias hypothesis on this task. The gpt-5-mini summarizer is also the agent-loop \#1 method (score 0.749) at $0.37$ tool-calls per case and $10\times$ lower reducer cost than the Haiku summarizer (\$0.18 vs \$1.75 per case). All data, code, per-case bundles, and reproducibility infrastructure are public.

cs.SE↗

LaoBench: A Large-Scale Multidimensional Lao Benchmark for Large Language Models

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has not been matched by their evaluation in low-resource languages, especially Southeast Asian languages like Lao. To fill this gap, we introduce \textbf{LaoBench}, the first large-scale, high-quality, and multidimensional benchmark for assessing LLM language understanding and reasoning in Lao. LaoBench contains \textbf{17,000+} expert-curated samples across three dimensions: culturally grounded knowledge application, curriculum-aligned K12 education, and bilingual translation among Lao, Chinese, and English. It includes open-source and held-out subsets, where the held-out portion enables secure black-box evaluation via a controlled service to improve fairness and data security. We construct LaoBench with a hybrid pipeline that combines expert authoring with agent-assisted verification, ensuring linguistic accuracy, cultural relevance, and educational validity. We evaluate diverse state-of-the-art open-source and closed-source LLMs, and find that even strong multilingual models lag behind human experts, particularly in culturally grounded reasoning and translation fidelity. We hope LaoBench will catalyze research on Lao and other underrepresented Southeast Asian languages for more inclusive multilingual evaluation.

cs.CL↗

BIRD-INTERACT: Re-imagining Text-to-SQL Evaluation for Large Language Models via Lens of Dynamic Interactions

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on single-turn text-to-SQL tasks, but real-world database applications predominantly require multi-turn interactions to handle ambiguous queries, execution errors, and evolving user requirements. Existing multi-turn benchmarks fall short by treating conversation histories as static context or limiting evaluation to read-only operations, failing to reflect production-grade database assistant challenges. We introduce BIRD-INTERACT, a benchmark that restores this realism through: (1) a comprehensive interaction environment coupling each database with a hierarchical knowledge base, metadata files, and a function-driven user simulator, enabling models to solicit clarifications, retrieve knowledge, and recover from errors without human supervision; (2) two evaluation settings consisting of a pre-defined conversational protocol (c-Interact) and an open-ended agentic setting (a-Interact) where models autonomously decide when to query the user simulator or explore the environment; (3) a challenging task suite covering the full CRUD spectrum for business-intelligence and operational use cases, guarded by executable test cases. Each task features ambiguous and follow-up sub-tasks requiring dynamic interaction. The suite comprises BIRD-INTERACT-FULL (600 tasks, up to 11,796 interactions) for comprehensive performance assessment, and BIRD-INTERACT-LITE (300 tasks with simplified databases) for detailed behavioral analysis and rapid method development. Our empirical results highlight BIRD-INTERACT's difficulty: GPT-5 completes only 8.67% of tasks in c-Interact and 17.00% in a-Interact. Analysis via memory grafting and Interaction Test-time Scaling validates the importance of effective interaction for complex, dynamic text-to-SQL tasks.

cs.AI↗

SWE-SQL: Illuminating LLM Pathways to Solve User SQL Issues in Real-World Applications

Resolution of complex SQL issues persists as a significant bottleneck in real-world database applications. Current Large Language Models (LLMs), while adept at text-to-SQL translation, have not been rigorously evaluated on the more challenging task of debugging SQL issues. To address this gap, we introduce BIRD-CRITIC, a new SQL issue debugging benchmark comprising 530 PostgreSQL tasks (BIRD-CRITIC-PG) and 570 multi-dialect tasks (BIRD-CRITIC-Multi), distilled from authentic user issues and replayed within new environments to facilitate rigorous evaluation. Baseline evaluations underscore the task's complexity, with the leading reasoning model O3-Mini achieving only 38.87% success rate on BIRD-CRITIC-PG and 33.33% on BIRD-CRITIC-Multi. Meanwhile, advancing open-source models for database tasks is crucial for empowering local development while safeguarding data privacy. Therefore, we present Six-Gym (Sql-fIX-Gym), a training environment for elevating open-source model capabilities for SQL issue debugging. This environment leverages SQL-Rewind strategy, which automatically generates executable issue-solution datasets by reverse-engineering issues from verified SQLs. However, popular trajectory-based fine-tuning methods do not explore substantial supervisory signals. We further propose f-Plan Boosting, which extracts high-level debugging plans from SQL solutions, enabling teacher LLMs to produce 73.7% more successful trajectories for training. We integrate these components into an open-source agent, Bird-Fixer. Based on Qwen-2.5-Coder-14B, Bird-Fixer achieves 38.11% success rate on BIRD-CRITIC-PG and 29.65% on BIRD-CRITIC-Multi, surpassing leading proprietary models such as Claude-3.7-Sonnet and GPT-4.1, marking a significant step toward democratizing sophisticated SQL-debugging capabilities. The leaderboard and source code are available: https://bird-critic.github.io/

cs.DB↗

FlagEval Findings Report: A Preliminary Evaluation of Large Reasoning Models on Automatically Verifiable Textual and Visual Questions

We conduct a moderate-scale contamination-free (to some extent) evaluation of current large reasoning models (LRMs) with some preliminary findings. We also release ROME, our evaluation benchmark for vision language models intended to test reasoning from visual clues. We attach links to the benchmark, evaluation data, and other updates on this website: https://flageval-baai.github.io/LRM-Eval/

cs.CL↗

Beyond Multiple Choice: Verifiable OpenQA for Robust Vision-Language RFT

Multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) has been a popular format for evaluating and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) of modern multimodal language models. Its constrained output format allows for simplified, deterministic automatic verification. However, we find that the options may leak exploitable signals, which makes the accuracy metrics unreliable for indicating real capabilities and encourages explicit or implicit answer guessing behaviors during RFT. We propose ReVeL (Rewrite and Verify by LLM), a framework that rewrites multiple-choice questions into open-form questions while keeping answers verifiable whenever possible. The framework categorizes questions according to different answer types, apply different rewriting and verification schemes, respectively. When applied for RFT, we converted 20k MCQA examples and use GRPO to finetune Qwen2.5-VL models. Models trained on ReVeL-OpenQA match MCQA accuracy on multiple-choice benchmarks and improve OpenQA accuracy by about six percentage points, indicating better data efficiency and more robust reward signals than MCQA-based training. When used for evaluation, ReVeL also reveals up to 20 percentage points of score inflation in MCQA benchmarks (relative to OpenQA), improves judging accuracy, and reduces both cost and latency. We will release code and data publicly.

cs.CL↗

The Price of a Second Thought: On the Evaluation of Reasoning Efficiency in Large Language Models

Recent thinking models trained with reinforcement learning and backward-checking CoT often suffer from overthinking: they produce excessively long outputs even on simple problems, wasting computation. Existing evaluations, based on token efficiency, give an incomplete view as they neglect problem difficulty and intermediate computation costs. We formalize reasoning efficiency as a relative measure between thinking and instruct models, treating instruct models as the minimal-effort baseline. A systematic study across four thinking models and multiple benchmarks reveals two consistent patterns: (i) instruct models achieve higher efficiency overall, and (ii) problem difficulty affects efficiency, with thinking models wasting computation on easy problems but providing value on harder ones. Building on this insight, we propose COTHINK, a simple two-stage pipeline: an instruct model drafts a brief outline, and a thinking model expands it. On GSM8K, MATH500, and AIME24, COTHINK cuts token usage by 21.1% while keeping accuracy on four thinking models, and remains competitive with strong efficiency baselines.

cs.CL↗

Micro-Act: Mitigating Knowledge Conflict in LLM-based RAG via Actionable Self-Reasoning

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems commonly suffer from Knowledge Conflicts, where retrieved external knowledge contradicts the inherent, parametric knowledge of large language models (LLMs). It adversely affects performance on downstream tasks such as question answering (QA). Existing approaches often attempt to mitigate conflicts by directly comparing two knowledge sources in a side-by-side manner, but this can overwhelm LLMs with extraneous or lengthy contexts, ultimately hindering their ability to identify and mitigate inconsistencies. To address this issue, we propose Micro-Act a framework with a hierarchical action space that automatically perceives context complexity and adaptively decomposes each knowledge source into a sequence of fine-grained comparisons. These comparisons are represented as actionable steps, enabling reasoning beyond the superficial context. Through extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets, Micro-Act consistently achieves significant increase in QA accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines across all 5 datasets and 3 conflict types, especially in temporal and semantic types where all baselines fail significantly. More importantly, Micro-Act exhibits robust performance on non-conflict questions simultaneously, highlighting its practical value in real-world RAG applications.

cs.CL↗