Papers by Yuxiong He
Arctic-Text2SQL-R1: Simple Rewards, Strong Reasoning in Text-to-SQL (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhewei Yao, Guoheng Sun, Łukasz Borchmann, Zheyu Shen, Minghang Deng, Bohan Zhai, Hao Zhang, Ang Li, Yuxiong He
| Challenge: | Translating natural language questions into SQL is a core challenge in natural language understanding and human-computer interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework and model family to generate accurate, executable SQL using a lightweight reward signal based solely on execution correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms previous versions of 70B-class systems and achieves state-of-the-art execution accuracy across six diverse Text2SQL benchmarks. |
GRAD: Generalizing RAG Adaptation with Decoding (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using GRAD, we can steer Retrieval-augmented generation objectives without retraining large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive decoding-time framework that keeps the base generator fixed and composes small, objective-specific guidance at inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy with favorable latency across public benchmarks and private settings with no in-domain labels while reliably activating helpful objectives and suppressing harmful ones, adaptively to tasks. |
TAGQuant: Token-Aware Clustering for Group-Wise Quantization (2026.eacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing work clusters channels using token dimension, which is suboptimal for grouping . a common challenge in LLM quantization is supporting "group-wise" quantization . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to group channels with similar activation distributions using tokens . they propose shuffle operation that reduces relative GSM8K error by 86% . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces GSM8K error by 86% in both INT4 and MXFP4 formats compared to baselines . |
R3-SQL: Ranking Reward and Resampling for Text-to-SQL (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing rankers assign inconsistent scores to functionally equivalent SQL queries . ranking cannot recover when the correct SQL is absent from the pool. |
| Approach: | They propose a Text-to-SQL framework that rewards ranking and resampling . it first groups candidates by execution result and ranks groups for consistency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 75.03 execution accuracy on BIRD-dev, a new state of the art among methods using models with disclosed sizes. |
CORD: Balancing COnsistency and Rank Distillation for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to ground large language models fail to adequately attend to all contexts . position bias is hindered by retrieval-augmented generation, which requires constant attention . |
| Approach: | They propose to augment and distill training instances with their perturbed positions to encourage consistent predictions . they also propose to balance COnsistency and Rank Distillation by combining noise-controlled perturbations with augmentation and distillation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in diverse RAG benchmarks. |
Optimizing Reasoning for Text-to-SQL with Execution Feedback (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models excel in many reasoning tasks, but their ability to leverage Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that iteratively optimizes open-source LLMs by combining CoT reasoning with off-policy and on-poly DPO, relying solely on execution accuracy as feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves execution accuracy on BIRD and Spider datasets. |
Agentic Verification for Ambiguous Query Disambiguation (2026.findings-acl)
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Youngwon Lee, Seung-won Hwang, Ruofan Wu, Feng Yan, Danmei Xu, Moutasem Akkad, Zhewei Yao, Yuxiong He
| Challenge: | Prior Diversify-then-Verify pipelines generate interpretations and then retrieve evidence . ambiguous queries require RAG to disambiguate into interpretations that can be answered from corpus . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that unifies diversification with verification by integrating retriever relevance and generator answerability feedback early. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves grounding-aware F1 by 23% over baselines across multiple LLMs. |
Scaling Vision-Language Models with Sparse Mixture of Experts (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a study explores the effectiveness of mixture-of-experts (MoE) techniques in scaling vision-language models . alayrac and colleagues demonstrate the effectiveness and performance of MoE in scaling VLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose to use sparsely-gated mixture-of-experts techniques to scale vision-language models . they show that MoE can achieve state-of the-art performance over dense models a range of benchmarks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance over dense models of equivalent computational cost. |
Inference Scaling for Bridging Retrieval and Augmented Generation (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work observed the generator bias, such that improving the retrieval results may negatively affect the outcome. |
| Approach: | They propose to use inference scaling to aggregate inference calls from the permuted order of retrieved contexts to create a new ranking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves ROUGE-L on MS MARCO and EM on HotpotQA benchmarks by 7 points. |
STUN: Structured-Then-Unstructured Pruning for Scalable MoE Pruning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Mixture-of-experts (MoEs) have been adopted for reducing inference costs by sparsely activating experts in large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a structured-then-unstructured approach outperforming both of structured and unstructured pruning for MoEs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms both of structured and unstructured pruning, especially for MoEs with hundreds of experts. |
SwiftKV: Fast Prefill-Optimized Inference with Knowledge-Preserving Model Transformation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are an integral enabler of enterprise applications such as summarization, retrieval augmented generation, and agentic workflows. |
| Approach: | They propose a model transformation and distillation procedure that prefills later layers’ KV cache using an earlier layer’s output, allowing prompt tokens to skip those later layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed procedure can reduce prefill computation by 25-50% across several LLM families while incurring minimum quality degradation. |