arXiv subjects

Bowen Qin

Publications and source records attributed to Bowen Qin.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

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↗

arXiv2026

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↗

arXiv2026

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↗

arXiv2026

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↗

arXiv2026

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↗

arXiv2026

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↗

arXiv2026

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↗

arXiv2025

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↗

arXiv2025

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↗

arXiv2025

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↗

arXiv2025

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↗

arXiv2025

Beyond Solving Math Quiz: Evaluating the Ability of Large Reasoning Models to Ask for Information

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable problem-solving abilities in mathematics, as evaluated by existing benchmarks exclusively on well-defined problems. However, such evaluation setup constitutes a critical gap, since a genuine intelligent agent should not only solve problems (as a math quiz solver), but also be able~to ask for information when the problems lack sufficient information, enabling proactivity in responding users' requests. To bridge such gap, we proposes a new dataset consisting of two types of incomplete problems with diverse contexts. Based on the dataset, our systematical evaluation of LRMs reveals their inability in proactively asking for information. In addition, we uncover the behaviors related to overthinking and hallucination of LRMs, and highlight the potential and challenges of supervised fine-tuning in learning such ability. We hope to provide new insights in developing LRMs with genuine intelligence, rather than just solving problems.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

FlagEvalMM: A Flexible Framework for Comprehensive Multimodal Model Evaluation

We present FlagEvalMM, an open-source evaluation framework designed to comprehensively assess multimodal models across a diverse range of vision-language understanding and generation tasks, such as visual question answering, text-to-image/video generation, and image-text retrieval. We decouple model inference from evaluation through an independent evaluation service, thus enabling flexible resource allocation and seamless integration of new tasks and models. Moreover, FlagEvalMM utilizes advanced inference acceleration tools (e.g., vLLM, SGLang) and asynchronous data loading to significantly enhance evaluation efficiency. Extensive experiments show that FlagEvalMM offers accurate and efficient insights into model strengths and limitations, making it a valuable tool for advancing multimodal research. The framework is publicly accessible at https://github.com/flageval-baai/FlagEvalMM.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

SHARE: An SLM-based Hierarchical Action CorREction Assistant for Text-to-SQL

Current self-correction approaches in text-to-SQL face two critical limitations: 1) Conventional self-correction methods rely on recursive self-calls of LLMs, resulting in multiplicative computational overhead, and 2) LLMs struggle to implement effective error detection and correction for declarative SQL queries, as they fail to demonstrate the underlying reasoning path. In this work, we propose SHARE, an SLM-based Hierarchical Action corREction assistant that enables LLMs to perform more precise error localization and efficient correction. SHARE orchestrates three specialized Small Language Models (SLMs) in a sequential pipeline, where it first transforms declarative SQL queries into stepwise action trajectories that reveal underlying reasoning, followed by a two-phase granular refinement. We further propose a novel hierarchical self-evolution strategy for data-efficient training. Experimental results demonstrate that SHARE effectively enhances self-correction capabilities while proving robust across various LLMs. Furthermore, our comprehensive analysis shows that SHARE maintains strong performance even in low-resource training settings, which is particularly valuable for text-to-SQL applications with data privacy constraints.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

FLM-101B: An Open LLM and How to Train It with $100K Budget

Large language models (LLMs) are considered important approaches towards foundational machine intelligence, achieving remarkable success in Natural Language Processing and multimodal tasks, among others. However, the carbon footprints and financial costs originating from heavy pre-training computation is a non-negligible issue. Progressive training methods, inspired by the neurogenesis process that grows neural structures, have shown potential to accelerate LLM pre-training. However, the algorithms, implementation, and practices for progressively training LLMs beyond 100B parameters remain underexplored. In this paper, we show that our model, namely FLM-101B, trained with our growth strategy under a budget of \$100K, reaches 80\% of the baselines' performances with only 10\% of their floating-point operations. We believe that further studies on progressive training will benefit the community by cutting down the costs and promoting green AI. The checkpoint of FLM-101B is released at https://huggingface.co/CofeAI/FLM-101B.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Legend: Leveraging Representation Engineering to Annotate Safety Margin for Preference Datasets

The success of the reward model in distinguishing between responses with subtle safety differences depends critically on the high-quality preference dataset, which should capture the fine-grained nuances of harmful and harmless responses. This motivates the need to develop a dataset involving preference margins, which accurately quantify how harmless one response is compared to another. In this paper, we take the first step to propose an effective and cost-efficient framework to promote the margin-enhanced preference dataset development. Our framework, Legend, Leverages representation engineering to annotate preference datasets. It constructs the specific direction within the LLM's embedding space that represents safety. By leveraging this safety direction, Legend can then leverage the semantic distances of paired responses along this direction to annotate margins automatically. We experimentally demonstrate our effectiveness in both reward modeling and harmless alignment for LLMs. Legend also stands out for its efficiency, requiring only the inference time rather than additional training. This efficiency allows for easier implementation and scalability, making Legend particularly valuable for practical applications in aligning LLMs with safe conversations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Before Generation, Align it! A Novel and Effective Strategy for Mitigating Hallucinations in Text-to-SQL Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) driven by In-Context Learning (ICL) have significantly improved the performance of text-to-SQL. Previous methods generally employ a two-stage reasoning framework, namely 1) schema linking and 2) logical synthesis, making the framework not only effective but also interpretable. Despite these advancements, the inherent bad nature of the generalization of LLMs often results in hallucinations, which limits the full potential of LLMs. In this work, we first identify and categorize the common types of hallucinations at each stage in text-to-SQL. We then introduce a novel strategy, Task Alignment (TA), designed to mitigate hallucinations at each stage. TA encourages LLMs to take advantage of experiences from similar tasks rather than starting the tasks from scratch. This can help LLMs reduce the burden of generalization, thereby mitigating hallucinations effectively. We further propose TA-SQL, a text-to-SQL framework based on this strategy. The experimental results and comprehensive analysis demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our framework. Specifically, it enhances the performance of the GPT-4 baseline by 21.23% relatively on BIRD dev and it yields significant improvements across six models and four mainstream, complex text-to-SQL benchmarks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Towards Understanding the Influence of Reward Margin on Preference Model Performance

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a widely used framework for the training of language models. However, the process of using RLHF to develop a language model that is well-aligned presents challenges, especially when it comes to optimizing the reward model. Our research has found that existing reward models, when trained using the traditional ranking objective based on human preference data, often struggle to effectively distinguish between responses that are more or less favorable in real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, our study introduces a novel method to estimate the preference differences without the need for detailed, exhaustive labels from human annotators. Our experimental results provide empirical evidence that incorporating margin values into the training process significantly improves the effectiveness of reward models. This comparative analysis not only demonstrates the superiority of our approach in terms of reward prediction accuracy but also highlights its effectiveness in practical applications.

cs.CL↗