Papers by Shuai Zhen
Leveraging Large Language Models for NLG Evaluation: Advances and Challenges (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | introducing Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened new avenues for assessing generated content quality, e.g., coherence, creativity, and context relevance. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy for organizing existing LLM-based evaluation metrics and a structured framework to understand and compare them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy offers a framework to understand and compare LLM-based evaluation methods. |
When LLMs Read Tables Carelessly: Measuring and Reducing Data Referencing Errors (2026.acl-long)
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Yuqing Yang, Qi Zhu, Zhen Han, Boran Han, Zhengyuan Shen, Shuai Wang, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Huzefa Rangwala
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) perform well on table tasks, but they still make data referencing errors (DREs) prior studies have only offered limited, small-scale analyses. |
| Approach: | They propose inference-time strategies and lightweight critics to mitigate data referencing errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an average F1 score of 78.2% in detecting both in-distribution and out-of-difference DREs and assists inference for larger models. |
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Augmented Step-Level Transitions for LLM Agents (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing Large language model agents rely on increasingly long interaction histories, resulting in high computational cost and limited scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that enables step-level learning by conditioning only on single-step transitions rather than full interaction histories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on ScienceWorld and ALFWorld benchmarks in terms of performance and generalization while reducing token usage. |
SQL-Trail: Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning with Interleaved Feedback for Text-to-SQL (2026.acl-long)
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Harper Hua, Zhen Han, Zhengyuan Shen, Meng-Chieh Lee, Sheng Guan, Qi Zhu, Sullam Jeoung, Yueyan Chen, Yunfei Bai, Shuai Wang, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Huzefa Rangwala
| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved Text-to-SQL generation, but a gap remains between AI systems and human experts on challenging benchmarks such as BIRD-Sql. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn reinforcement learning agentic framework for Text-to-SQL that uses execution feedback to iteratively refine its predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms proprietary systems on 7B and 14B models by **5% on average, underscoring the effectiveness of interactive, agentic workflows for robust Text-to-SQL generation. |
Curriculum Learning based Hierarchical Scoring and Analysis Framework for Question Answering Task Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods rely on rule-based matching with shallow semantic understanding or adopt LLM-as-a-Judge approaches that incur high cost and latency while offering limited error interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose a curriculum learning based hierarchical framework for QA task evaluation that supports quick scoring and fine-grained error analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on quick scoring and error analysis tasks while being 25 faster. |