arXiv subjects

Ruoxi Sun

Publications and source records attributed to Ruoxi Sun.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

On the Role of Feedback in Test-Time Scaling of Agentic AI Workflows

Agentic AI workflows (systems that autonomously plan and act) are becoming widespread, yet their task success rate on complex tasks remains low. A promising solution is inference-time alignment, which uses extra compute at test time to improve performance. Inference-time alignment relies on three components: sampling, evaluation, and feedback. While most prior work studies sampling and automatic evaluation, feedback remains underexplored. To study the role of feedback, we introduce Iterative Agent Decoding (IAD), a procedure that repeatedly inserts feedback extracted from different forms of critiques (reward models or AI-generated textual feedback) between decoding steps. Through IAD, we analyze feedback along four dimensions: (1) its role in the accuracy-compute trade-offs with limited inference budget, (2) quantifying the gains over diversity-only baselines such as best-of-N sampling, (3) effectiveness of composing feedback from reward models versus textual critique, and (4) robustness to noisy or low-quality feedback. Across Sketch2Code, Text2SQL, Intercode, and WebShop, we show that IAD with proper integration of high fidelity feedback leads to consistent gains up to 10 percent absolute performance improvement over various baselines such as best-of-N. Our findings underscore feedback as a crucial knob for inference-time alignment of agentic AI workflows with limited inference budget.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

LOOM-Scope: a comprehensive and efficient LOng-cOntext Model evaluation framework

Long-context processing has become a fundamental capability for large language models~(LLMs). To assess model's long-context performance, numerous long-context evaluation benchmarks have been proposed. However, variations in evaluation settings across these benchmarks lead to inconsistent results, making it difficult to draw reliable comparisons. Besides, the high computational cost of long-context evaluation poses a significant barrier for the community to conduct comprehensive assessments of long-context models. In this paper, we propose LOOM-Scope, a comprehensive and efficient framework for long-context evaluation. LOOM-Scope standardizes evaluation settings across diverse benchmarks, supports deployment of efficient long-context inference acceleration methods, and introduces a holistic yet lightweight benchmark suite to evaluate models comprehensively. Homepage: https://loomscope.github.io

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

DynScaling: Efficient Verifier-free Inference Scaling via Dynamic and Integrated Sampling

Inference-time scaling has proven effective in boosting large language model (LLM) performance through increased test-time computation. Yet, its practical application is often hindered by reliance on external verifiers or a lack of optimization for realistic computational constraints. We propose DynScaling, which addresses these limitations through two primary innovations: an integrated parallel-sequential sampling strategy and a bandit-based dynamic budget allocation framework. The integrated sampling strategy unifies parallel and sequential sampling by constructing synthetic sequential reasoning chains from initially independent parallel responses, promoting diverse and coherent reasoning trajectories. The dynamic budget allocation framework formulates the allocation of computational resources as a multi-armed bandit problem, adaptively distributing the inference budget across queries based on the uncertainty of previously sampled responses, thereby maximizing computational efficiency. By combining these components, DynScaling effectively improves LLM performance under practical resource constraints without the need for external verifiers. Experimental results demonstrate that DynScaling consistently surpasses existing verifier-free inference scaling baselines in both task performance and computational cost.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Astute RAG: Overcoming Imperfect Retrieval Augmentation and Knowledge Conflicts for Large Language Models

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG), while effectively integrating external knowledge to address the inherent limitations of large language models (LLMs), can be hindered by imperfect retrieval that contain irrelevant, misleading, or even malicious information. Previous studies have rarely connected the behavior of RAG through joint analysis, particularly regarding error propagation coming from imperfect retrieval and potential conflicts between LLMs' internal knowledge and external sources. Through comprehensive and controlled analyses under realistic conditions, we find that imperfect retrieval augmentation is inevitable, common, and harmful. We identify the knowledge conflicts between LLM-internal and external knowledge from retrieval as a bottleneck to overcome imperfect retrieval in the post-retrieval stage of RAG. To address this, we propose Astute RAG, a novel RAG approach designed to be resilient to imperfect retrieval augmentation. It adaptively elicits essential information from LLMs' internal knowledge, iteratively consolidates internal and external knowledge with source-awareness, and finalizes the answer according to information reliability. Our experiments with Gemini and Claude demonstrate the superior performance of Astute RAG compared to previous robustness-enhanced RAG approaches. Specifically, Astute RAG is the only RAG method that achieves performance comparable to or even surpassing conventional use of LLMs under the worst-case scenario. Further analysis reveals the effectiveness of Astute RAG in resolving knowledge conflicts, thereby improving the trustworthiness of RAG.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Reasoning-SQL: Reinforcement Learning with SQL Tailored Partial Rewards for Reasoning-Enhanced Text-to-SQL

Text-to-SQL is a challenging task involving multiple reasoning-intensive subtasks, including natural language understanding, database schema comprehension, and precise SQL query formulation. Existing approaches often rely on handcrafted reasoning paths with inductive biases that can limit their overall effectiveness. Motivated by the recent success of reasoning-enhanced models such as DeepSeek R1 and OpenAI o1, which effectively leverage reward-driven self-exploration to enhance reasoning capabilities and generalization, we propose a novel set of partial rewards tailored specifically for the Text-to-SQL task. Our reward set includes schema-linking, AI feedback, n-gram similarity, and syntax check, explicitly designed to address the reward sparsity issue prevalent in reinforcement learning (RL). Leveraging group relative policy optimization (GRPO), our approach explicitly encourages large language models (LLMs) to develop intrinsic reasoning skills necessary for accurate SQL query generation. With models of different sizes, we demonstrate that RL-only training with our proposed rewards consistently achieves higher accuracy and superior generalization compared to supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Remarkably, our RL-trained 14B-parameter model significantly outperforms larger proprietary models, e.g. o3-mini by 4% and Gemini-1.5-Pro-002 by 3% on the BIRD benchmark. These highlight the efficacy of our proposed RL-training framework with partial rewards for enhancing both accuracy and reasoning capabilities in Text-to-SQL tasks.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

BRIGHT: A Realistic and Challenging Benchmark for Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval

Existing retrieval benchmarks primarily consist of information-seeking queries (e.g., aggregated questions from search engines) where keyword or semantic-based retrieval is usually sufficient. However, many complex real-world queries require in-depth reasoning to identify relevant documents that go beyond surface form matching. For example, finding documentation for a coding question requires understanding the logic and syntax of the functions involved. To better benchmark retrieval on such challenging queries, we introduce BRIGHT, the first text retrieval benchmark that requires intensive reasoning to retrieve relevant documents. Our dataset consists of 1,384 real-world queries spanning diverse domains, such as economics, psychology, mathematics, and coding. These queries are drawn from naturally occurring and carefully curated human data. Extensive evaluation reveals that even state-of-the-art retrieval models perform poorly on BRIGHT. The leading model on the MTEB leaderboard (Muennighoff et al., 2023) SFR-Embedding-Mistral (Meng et al., 2024), which achieves a score of 59.0 nDCG@10,1 produces a score of nDCG@10 of 18.3 on BRIGHT. We show that incorporating explicit reasoning about the query improves retrieval performance by up to 12.2 points. Moreover, incorporating retrieved documents from the top-performing retriever boosts question-answering performance. We believe that BRIGHT paves the way for future research on retrieval systems in more realistic and challenging settings.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Spider 2.0: Evaluating Language Models on Real-World Enterprise Text-to-SQL Workflows

Real-world enterprise text-to-SQL workflows often involve complex cloud or local data across various database systems, multiple SQL queries in various dialects, and diverse operations from data transformation to analytics. We introduce Spider 2.0, an evaluation framework comprising 632 real-world text-to-SQL workflow problems derived from enterprise-level database use cases. The databases in Spider 2.0 are sourced from real data applications, often containing over 1,000 columns and stored in local or cloud database systems such as BigQuery and Snowflake. We show that solving problems in Spider 2.0 frequently requires understanding and searching through database metadata, dialect documentation, and even project-level codebases. This challenge calls for models to interact with complex SQL workflow environments, process extremely long contexts, perform intricate reasoning, and generate multiple SQL queries with diverse operations, often exceeding 100 lines, which goes far beyond traditional text-to-SQL challenges. Our evaluations indicate that based on o1-preview, our code agent framework successfully solves only 21.3% of the tasks, compared with 91.2% on Spider 1.0 and 73.0% on BIRD. Our results on Spider 2.0 show that while language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in code generation -- especially in prior text-to-SQL benchmarks -- they require significant improvement in order to achieve adequate performance for real-world enterprise usage. Progress on Spider 2.0 represents crucial steps towards developing intelligent, autonomous, code agents for real-world enterprise settings. Our code, baseline models, and data are available at https://spider2-sql.github.io

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

50 Shades of Deceptive Patterns: A Unified Taxonomy, Multimodal Detection, and Security Implications

Deceptive patterns (DPs) are user interface designs deliberately crafted to manipulate users into unintended decisions, often by exploiting cognitive biases for the benefit of companies or services. While numerous studies have explored ways to identify these deceptive patterns, many existing solutions require significant human intervention and struggle to keep pace with the evolving nature of deceptive designs. To address these challenges, we expanded the deceptive pattern taxonomy from security and privacy perspectives, refining its categories and scope. We created a comprehensive dataset of deceptive patterns by integrating existing small-scale datasets with new samples, resulting in 6,725 images and 10,421 DP instances from mobile apps and websites. We then developed DPGuard, a novel automatic tool leveraging commercial multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for deceptive pattern detection. Experimental results show that DPGuard outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Finally, we conducted an extensive empirical evaluation on 2,000 popular mobile apps and websites, revealing that 23.61% of mobile screenshots and 47.27% of website screenshots feature at least one deceptive pattern instance. Through four unexplored case studies that inform security implications, we highlight the critical importance of the unified taxonomy in addressing the growing challenges of Internet deception.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

From Few to Many: Self-Improving Many-Shot Reasoners Through Iterative Optimization and Generation

Recent advances in long-context large language models (LLMs) have led to the emerging paradigm of many-shot in-context learning (ICL), where it is observed that scaling many more demonstrating examples beyond the conventional few-shot setup in the context can lead to performance benefits. However, despite its promise, it is unclear what aspects dominate the benefits and whether simply scaling to more examples is the most effective way of improving many-shot ICL. In this work, we first provide an analysis of the factors driving many-shot ICL, and we find that 1) many-shot performance can still be attributed to often a few disproportionately influential examples and 2) identifying such influential examples ("optimize") and using them as demonstrations to regenerate new examples ("generate") can lead to further improvements. Inspired by the findings, we propose BRIDGE, an algorithm that alternates between the optimize step with Bayesian optimization to discover the influential sets of examples and the generate step to reuse this set to expand the reasoning paths of the examples back to the many-shot regime automatically. On Gemini, Claude, and Mistral LLMs of different sizes, we show that BRIDGE to significant improvements across a diverse set of tasks, including symbolic reasoning, numerical reasoning, and code generation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Learn-by-interact: A Data-Centric Framework for Self-Adaptive Agents in Realistic Environments

Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have the potential to enhance human capabilities, assisting with digital tasks from sending emails to performing data analysis. The abilities of existing LLMs at such tasks are often hindered by the lack of high-quality agent data from the corresponding environments they interact with. We propose Learn-by-interact, a data-centric framework to adapt LLM agents to any given environments without human annotations. Learn-by-interact synthesizes trajectories of agent-environment interactions based on documentations, and constructs instructions by summarizing or abstracting the interaction histories, a process called backward construction. We assess the quality of our synthetic data by using them in both training-based scenarios and training-free in-context learning (ICL), where we craft innovative retrieval approaches optimized for agents. Extensive experiments on SWE-bench, WebArena, OSWorld and Spider2-V spanning across realistic coding, web, and desktop environments show the effectiveness of Learn-by-interact in various downstream agentic tasks -- baseline results are improved by up to 12.2\% for ICL with Claude-3.5 and 19.5\% for training with Codestral-22B. We further demonstrate the critical role of backward construction, which provides up to 14.0\% improvement for training. Our ablation studies demonstrate the efficiency provided by our synthesized data in ICL and the superiority of our retrieval pipeline over alternative approaches like conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We expect that Learn-by-interact will serve as a foundation for agent data synthesis as LLMs are increasingly deployed at real-world environments.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Data-Centric Improvements for Enhancing Multi-Modal Understanding in Spoken Conversation Modeling

Conversational assistants are increasingly popular across diverse real-world applications, highlighting the need for advanced multimodal speech modeling. Speech, as a natural mode of communication, encodes rich user-specific characteristics such as speaking rate and pitch, making it critical for effective interaction. Our work introduces a data-centric customization approach for efficiently enhancing multimodal understanding in conversational speech modeling. Central to our contributions is a novel multi-task learning paradigm that involves designing auxiliary tasks to utilize a small amount of speech data. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Spoken-SQuAD benchmark, using only 10% of the training data with open-weight models, establishing a robust and efficient framework for audio-centric conversational modeling. We also introduce ASK-QA, the first dataset for multi-turn spoken dialogue with ambiguous user requests and dynamic evaluation inputs. Code and data forthcoming.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

AI-Compass: A Comprehensive and Effective Multi-module Testing Tool for AI Systems

AI systems, in particular with deep learning techniques, have demonstrated superior performance for various real-world applications. Given the need for tailored optimization in specific scenarios, as well as the concerns related to the exploits of subsurface vulnerabilities, a more comprehensive and in-depth testing AI system becomes a pivotal topic. We have seen the emergence of testing tools in real-world applications that aim to expand testing capabilities. However, they often concentrate on ad-hoc tasks, rendering them unsuitable for simultaneously testing multiple aspects or components. Furthermore, trustworthiness issues arising from adversarial attacks and the challenge of interpreting deep learning models pose new challenges for developing more comprehensive and in-depth AI system testing tools. In this study, we design and implement a testing tool, \tool, to comprehensively and effectively evaluate AI systems. The tool extensively assesses multiple measurements towards adversarial robustness, model interpretability, and performs neuron analysis. The feasibility of the proposed testing tool is thoroughly validated across various modalities, including image classification, object detection, and text classification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \tool is the state-of-the-art tool for a comprehensive assessment of the robustness and trustworthiness of AI systems. Our research sheds light on a general solution for AI systems testing landscape.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Teach Better or Show Smarter? On Instructions and Exemplars in Automatic Prompt Optimization

Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their performance is heavily reliant on effective prompt engineering. Automatic prompt optimization (APO) methods are designed to automate this and can be broadly categorized into those targeting instructions (instruction optimization, IO) vs. those targeting exemplars (exemplar optimization, EO). Despite their shared objective, these have evolved rather independently, with IO receiving more research attention recently. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by comprehensively comparing the performance of representative IO and EO techniques both isolation and combination on a diverse set of challenging tasks. Our findings reveal that intelligently reusing model-generated input-output pairs obtained from evaluating prompts on the validation set as exemplars, consistently improves performance on top of IO methods but is currently under-investigated. We also find that despite the recent focus on IO, how we select exemplars can outweigh how we optimize instructions, with EO strategies as simple as random search outperforming state-of-the-art IO methods with seed instructions without any optimization. Moreover, we observe a synergy between EO and IO, with optimal combinations surpassing the individual contributions. We conclude that studying exemplar optimization both as a standalone method and its optimal combination with instruction optimization remain a crucial aspect of APO and deserve greater consideration in future research, even in the era of highly capable instruction-following models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Iterative Window Mean Filter: Thwarting Diffusion-based Adversarial Purification

Face authentication systems have brought significant convenience and advanced developments, yet they have become unreliable due to their sensitivity to inconspicuous perturbations, such as adversarial attacks. Existing defenses often exhibit weaknesses when facing various attack algorithms and adaptive attacks or compromise accuracy for enhanced security. To address these challenges, we have developed a novel and highly efficient non-deep-learning-based image filter called the Iterative Window Mean Filter (IWMF) and proposed a new framework for adversarial purification, named IWMF-Diff, which integrates IWMF and denoising diffusion models. These methods can function as pre-processing modules to eliminate adversarial perturbations without necessitating further modifications or retraining of the target system. We demonstrate that our proposed methodologies fulfill four critical requirements: preserved accuracy, improved security, generalizability to various threats in different settings, and better resistance to adaptive attacks. This performance surpasses that of the state-of-the-art adversarial purification method, DiffPure.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Edge Unlearning is Not "on Edge"! An Adaptive Exact Unlearning System on Resource-Constrained Devices

The right to be forgotten mandates that machine learning models enable the erasure of a data owner's data and information from a trained model. Removing data from the dataset alone is inadequate, as machine learning models can memorize information from the training data, increasing the potential privacy risk to users. To address this, multiple machine unlearning techniques have been developed and deployed. Among them, approximate unlearning is a popular solution, but recent studies report that its unlearning effectiveness is not fully guaranteed. Another approach, exact unlearning, tackles this issue by discarding the data and retraining the model from scratch, but at the cost of considerable computational and memory resources. However, not all devices have the capability to perform such retraining. In numerous machine learning applications, such as edge devices, Internet-of-Things (IoT), mobile devices, and satellites, resources are constrained, posing challenges for deploying existing exact unlearning methods. In this study, we propose a Constraint-aware Adaptive Exact Unlearning System at the network Edge (CAUSE), an approach to enabling exact unlearning on resource-constrained devices. Aiming to minimize the retrain overhead by storing sub-models on the resource-constrained device, CAUSE innovatively applies a Fibonacci-based replacement strategy and updates the number of shards adaptively in the user-based data partition process. To further improve the effectiveness of memory usage, CAUSE leverages the advantage of model pruning to save memory via compression with minimal accuracy sacrifice. The experimental results demonstrate that CAUSE significantly outperforms other representative systems in realizing exact unlearning on the resource-constrained device by 9.23%-80.86%, 66.21%-83.46%, and 5.26%-194.13% in terms of unlearning speed, energy consumption, and accuracy.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

SQL-GEN: Bridging the Dialect Gap for Text-to-SQL Via Synthetic Data And Model Merging

Recent advances in Text-to-SQL have largely focused on the SQLite dialect, neglecting the diverse landscape of SQL dialects like BigQuery and PostgreSQL. This limitation is due to the diversity in SQL syntaxes and functions, along with the high cost of collecting and curating SQL-specific training data. To address this, we introduce SQL-GEN, a framework for generating high-quality synthetic training data for any SQL dialect, guided by readily available dialect-specific tutorials. SQL-GEN significantly improves cross-dialect Text-to-SQL performance, boosting execution accuracy by up to 20\% over existing methods. This performance gain narrows the gap with models trained on large-scale human-annotated data. Furthermore, combining synthetic data from SQL-GEN with human-annotated data yields additional improvements of up to 5.6\%. To unify multi-dialect capabilities within a single model, we propose a novel Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) initialization that leverages the shared knowledge across dialects. Our approach merges self-attention layers from dialect-specific models and initializes expert gates using dialect-specific keywords. This leads to a versatile model optimized for multiple SQL dialects, outperforming single-dialect models and significantly enhancing overall performance.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

CHASE-SQL: Multi-Path Reasoning and Preference Optimized Candidate Selection in Text-to-SQL

In tackling the challenges of large language model (LLM) performance for Text-to-SQL tasks, we introduce CHASE-SQL, a new framework that employs innovative strategies, using test-time compute in multi-agent modeling to improve candidate generation and selection. CHASE-SQL leverages LLMs' intrinsic knowledge to generate diverse and high-quality SQL candidates using different LLM generators with: (1) a divide-and-conquer method that decomposes complex queries into manageable sub-queries in a single LLM call; (2) chain-of-thought reasoning based on query execution plans, reflecting the steps a database engine takes during execution; and (3) a unique instance-aware synthetic example generation technique, which offers specific few-shot demonstrations tailored to test questions.To identify the best candidate, a selection agent is employed to rank the candidates through pairwise comparisons with a fine-tuned binary-candidates selection LLM. This selection approach has been demonstrated to be more robust over alternatives. The proposed generators-selector framework not only enhances the quality and diversity of SQL queries but also outperforms previous methods. Overall, our proposed CHASE-SQL achieves the state-of-the-art execution accuracy of 73.0% and 73.01% on the test set and development set of the notable BIRD Text-to-SQL dataset benchmark, rendering CHASE-SQL the top submission of the leaderboard (at the time of paper submission).

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Spider2-V: How Far Are Multimodal Agents From Automating Data Science and Engineering Workflows?

Data science and engineering workflows often span multiple stages, from warehousing to orchestration, using tools like BigQuery, dbt, and Airbyte. As vision language models (VLMs) advance in multimodal understanding and code generation, VLM-based agents could potentially automate these workflows by generating SQL queries, Python code, and GUI operations. This automation can improve the productivity of experts while democratizing access to large-scale data analysis. In this paper, we introduce Spider2-V, the first multimodal agent benchmark focusing on professional data science and engineering workflows, featuring 494 real-world tasks in authentic computer environments and incorporating 20 enterprise-level professional applications. These tasks, derived from real-world use cases, evaluate the ability of a multimodal agent to perform data-related tasks by writing code and managing the GUI in enterprise data software systems. To balance realistic simulation with evaluation simplicity, we devote significant effort to developing automatic configurations for task setup and carefully crafting evaluation metrics for each task. Furthermore, we supplement multimodal agents with comprehensive documents of these enterprise data software systems. Our empirical evaluation reveals that existing state-of-the-art LLM/VLM-based agents do not reliably automate full data workflows (14.0% success). Even with step-by-step guidance, these agents still underperform in tasks that require fine-grained, knowledge-intensive GUI actions (16.2%) and involve remote cloud-hosted workspaces (10.6%). We hope that Spider2-V paves the way for autonomous multimodal agents to transform the automation of data science and engineering workflow. Our code and data are available at https://spider2-v.github.io.

cs.AI↗