Papers by Zhengyuan Shen
Automatic Table Union Search with Tabular Representation Learning (2023.findings-acl)
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Xuming Hu, Shen Wang, Xiao Qin, Chuan Lei, Zhengyuan Shen, Christos Faloutsos, Asterios Katsifodimos, George Karypis, Lijie Wen, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify uniability based on column representations are insufficient to reveal latent relational features to describe column relation between pair of columns. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised table union search framework called AutoTUS to learn column relational representations in a multi-stage manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the SOTA baseline and on real-world datasets. |
SLOT: Structuring the Output of Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Structured outputs are essential for large language models (LLMs) but often deviate from predefined schemas hampering reliable application development. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic approach that transforms unstructured LLM outputs into precise structured formats. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-agnostic approach transforms unstructured LLM outputs into precise structured formats. |
A Systematic Survey of Automatic Prompt Optimization Techniques (2025.emnlp-main)
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Kiran Ramnath, Kang Zhou, Sheng Guan, Soumya Smruti Mishra, Xuan Qi, Zhengyuan Shen, Shuai Wang, Sangmin Woo, Sullam Jeoung, Yawei Wang, Haozhu Wang, Han Ding, Yuzhe Lu, Zhichao Xu, Yun Zhou, Balasubramaniam Srinivasan, Qiaojing Yan, Yueyan Chen, Haibo Ding, Panpan Xu, Lin Lee Cheong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in prompt engineering have created impediments for end users to adopt . however, prompt engineering remains an impedance due to rapid advances in models, tasks, and associated best practices. |
| Approach: | They propose to define APO as a 5-part unifying framework and categorize all relevant works based on their salient features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework aims to improve the performance of large language models on various tasks. |
NameGuess: Column Name Expansion for Tabular Data (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Tabular data is used for storing and organizing information in web and enterprise applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to expand column names as a natural language generation problem by conditioning on table content and column header names to improve auto-regressive models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves auto-regressive models on table content and column header names to match human performance. |
CoverICL: Selective Annotation for In-Context Learning via Active Graph Coverage (2024.emnlp-main)
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Costas Mavromatis, Balasubramaniam Srinivasan, Zhengyuan Shen, Jiani Zhang, Huzefa Rangwala, Christos Faloutsos, George Karypis
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) uses few-shot labeled examples to perform selective annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that incorporates uncertainty sampling into selective annotation for ICL . CoverICL builds a nearest-neighbor graph based on the semantic similarity between candidate ICL examples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods for low-budget active learning (AL) it is up to 2x more budget-efficient than SOTA methods for high-budge AL. |
BoundRL: Efficient Token-level Structured Text Segmentation through Reinforced Boundary Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Haoyuan Li, Zhengyuan Shen, Sullam Jeoung, Yueyan Chen, Jiayu Li, Qi Zhu, Shuai Wang, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Huzefa Rangwala
| Challenge: | Structured texts often contain elements beyond plain language, such as code snippets, which conventional sentence-level segmentation methods cannot handle effectively. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level approach that performs efficient token-based text segmentation and label prediction for long structured texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing models on short-shot prompts and SFT and standard RLVR models on complex LLM prompts. |
IPR: Intelligent Prompt Routing with User-Controlled Quality-Cost Trade-offs (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Aosong Feng, Balasubramaniam Srinivasan, Yun Zhou, Zhichao Xu, Kang Zhou, Sheng Guan, Yueyan Chen, Xian Wu, Ninad Kulkarni, Yi Zhang, Zhengyuan Shen, Dmitriy Bespalov, Soumya Smruti Mishra, Yifei Teng, Darren Yow-Bang Wang, Haibo Ding, Lin Lee Cheong
| Challenge: | Existing systems require users to manually select models or employ rigid routing rules that fail to capture the continuous spectrum of query complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a quality-constrained intelligent prompt routing framework that automatically selects optimal models based on predicted response quality and user-specified tolerance levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 43.9% cost reduction while maintaining quality parity with strongest model in the Claude family and processes requests with sub-150ms latency. |
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. |
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. |
DiscoverGPT: Multi-task Fine-tuning Large Language Model for Related Table Discovery (2025.findings-naacl)
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Xuming Hu, Xiao Qin, Chuan Lei, Asterios Katsifodimos, Zhengyuan Shen, Balasubramaniam Srinivasan, Huzefa Rangwala
| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn and evaluate the table semantic relatedness of tabular data are based on pretrain-and-finetune paradigms. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task fine-tuning framework that holistically discovers and leverages the intricate relationships among the supervisions to optimize the performance on the data discovery task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the best performing baseline by up to 7% in F1 score. |