VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Bowen Li 0002
dblp:75/10470-2
· DBLP profile ↗
15ranked-venue papers
3as first author
13since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-9444-7652ORCID · conflict
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 14 · 3 first-author · 12 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 2 · 2 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 1 · 1 first-author
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Powering Verifiable Learning via Automated Evolutionary Data SynthesisabstractReliable verifiable data has become a key driver of capability gains in modern language models, enabling stable reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards and effective distillation that transfers competence across math, coding, and agentic tasks.Yet constructing generalizable synthetic verifiable data remains difficult due to hallucination-prone generation, and weak or trivial verification artifacts that fail to separate strong from weak solutions.Existing approaches often rely on task-specific heuristics or post-hoc filters that do not transfer across domains and lack a principled, universal evaluator of verifiability.In this work, we introduce an evolutionary, task-agnostic, strategy-guided, executably-checkable data synthesis framework that, from minimal seed supervision, jointly synthesizes problems, diverse candidate solutions, and verification artifacts, and iteratively discovers strategies via a consistencybased evaluator that enforces agreement between human-annotated and strategy-induced checks.This pipeline upgrades filtering into principled synthesis: it reliably assembles coherent, verifiable training instances and generalizes without domain-specific rules.Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach under both RLVR and model distillation training paradigms.The results show that training with our synthesized data yields significant improvements on both the LiveCodeBench and AgentBench-OS tasks, highlighting the robust generalization of our framework 1 . He Du, Bowen Li 0002, Aijun Yang, Siyang He, Qipeng Guo, Kai Chen 0026, Dacheng Tao |
ACL (1) | 2 |
| 2025 | Prompting Large Language Models to Tackle the Full Software Development Lifecycle: A Case StudyabstractRecent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their coding capabilities. However, existing benchmarks predominantly focused on simplified or isolated aspects of coding, such as single-file code generation or repository issue debugging, falling short of measuring the full spectrum of challenges raised by real-world programming activities. In this case study, we explore the performance of LLMs across the entire software development lifecycle with DevEval, encompassing stages including software design, environment setup, implementation, acceptance testing, and unit testing. DevEval features four programming languages, multiple domains, high-quality data collection, and carefully designed and verified metrics for each task. Empirical studies show that current LLMs, including GPT-4, fail to solve the challenges presented within DevEval. Our findings offer actionable insights for the future development of LLMs toward real-world programming applications. Bowen Li 0002, Ziwei Tang, John Yang 0002, Jinyang Li 0003, Shunyu Yao 0006, Chen Qian 0006, Binyuan Hui, Qicheng Zhang, Zhiyin Yu, He Du, Dahua Lin, Chao Peng 0002, Kai Chen 0026 |
COLING | 1 |
| 2025 | OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist AgentsabstractSoftware is one of the most powerful tools that we humans have at our disposal; it allows a skilled programmer to interact with the world in complex and profound ways. At the same time, thanks to improvements in large language models (LLMs), there has also been a rapid development in AI agents that interact with and effect change in their surrounding environments. In this paper, we introduce OpenHands, a platform for the development of powerful and flexible AI agents that interact with the world in similar ways to a human developer: by writing code, interacting with a command line, and browsing the web. We describe how the platform allows for the implementation of new agents, utilization of various LLMs, safe interaction with sandboxed environments for code execution, and incorporation of evaluation benchmarks. Based on our currently incorporated benchmarks, we perform an evaluation of agents over 13 challenging tasks, including software engineering (e.g., SWE-Bench) and web browsing (e.g., WebArena), amongst others. Released under the permissive MIT license, OpenHands is a community project spanning academia and industry with more than 2K contributions from over 186 contributors in less than six months of development, and will improve going forward. Xingyao Wang 0002, Boxuan Li, Frank F. Xu, Xiangru Tang, Mingchen Zhuge, Yueqi Song, Bowen Li 0002, Hoang H. Tran, Fuqiang Li, Ren Ma, Mingzhang Zheng, Bill Qian, Yanjun Shao, Niklas Muennighoff, Yizhe Zhang 0002, Binyuan Hui, Junyang Lin |
ICLR | 9 |
| 2025 | Large Language Models Meet Symbolic Provers for Logical Reasoning EvaluationabstractFirst-order logic (FOL) reasoning, which involves sequential deduction, is pivotal for intelligent systems and serves as a valuable task for evaluating reasoning capabilities, particularly in chain-of-thought (CoT) contexts. Existing benchmarks often rely on extensive human annotation or handcrafted templates, making it difficult to achieve the necessary complexity, scalability, and diversity for robust evaluation. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework called ProverGen that synergizes the generative strengths of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the rigor and precision of symbolic provers, enabling the creation of a scalable, diverse, and high-quality FOL reasoning dataset, ProverQA. ProverQA is also distinguished by its inclusion of accessible and logically coherent intermediate reasoning steps for each problem. Our evaluation shows that state-of-the-art LLMs struggle to solve ProverQA problems, even with CoT prompting, highlighting the dataset's challenging nature. We also finetune Llama3.1-8B-Instruct on a separate training set generated by our framework.
The finetuned model demonstrates consistent improvements on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution test sets, suggesting the value of our proposed data generation framework. Code available at: \url{https://github.com/opendatalab/ProverGen} Chengwen Qi, Ren Ma, Bowen Li 0002, He Du, Binyuan Hui, Jinwang Wu, Yuanjun Laili, Conghui He |
ICLR | 3 |
| 2025 | SWE-bench Goes Live!abstractThe issue-resolving task, where a model generates patches to fix real-world bugs, has emerged as a key benchmark for evaluating the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While SWE-bench has become the dominant benchmark in this domain, it suffers from several limitations: it has not been updated since its release, is restricted to only 12 repositories, and relies heavily on manual effort for constructing test instances and setting up executable environments, significantly limiting its scalability. We present SWE-bench-Live, a live-updatable benchmark designed to address these limitations. SWE-bench-Live currently includes 1,890 tasks derived from real GitHub issues created since 2024, spanning 223 repositories. Each task is accompanied by a dedicated Docker image to ensure reproducible execution. Additionally, we introduce an automated curation pipeline that streamlines the entire process from instance creation to environment setup, removing manual bottlenecks and enabling scalability and continuous updates. We evaluate a range of state-of-the-art models and agent frameworks on SWE-bench-Live, offering detailed empirical insights into their real-world bug-fixing capabilities. By providing a fresh, diverse, and executable benchmark grounded in live repository activity, SWE-bench-Live supports reliable, large-scale assessment of code LLMs and code agents in realistic development settings. Linghao Zhang, Shilin He, Chaoyun Zhang, Yu Kang 0006, Bowen Li 0002, Chengxing Xie, Maoquan Wang, Yufan Huang, Shengyu Fu, Elsie Nallipogu, Qingwei Lin, Yingnong Dang, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang 0001 |
NeurIPS | 5 |
| 2024 | Iterative Forward Tuning Boosts In-Context Learning in Language ModelsabstractJiaxi Yang, Binyuan Hui, Min Yang, Bailin Wang, Bowen Li, Binhua Li, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024. Jiaxi Yang 0004, Binyuan Hui, Min Yang 0007, Bailin Wang, Bowen Li 0002, Binhua Li, Fei Huang 0002, Yongbin Li 0001 |
ACL (1) | 5 |
| 2023 | An Investigation of LLMs' Inefficacy in Understanding Converse RelationsabstractLarge Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in many formal language oriented tasks, such as structural data-to-text and semantic parsing.However current benchmarks mostly follow the data distribution of the pre-training data of LLMs.Therefore, a natural question rises that do LLMs really understand the structured semantics of formal languages.In this paper, we investigate this problem on a special case, converse binary relation.We introduce a new benchmark ConvRe focusing on converse relations, which contains 17 relations and 1240 triples extracted from popular knowledge graph completion datasets.Our ConvRe features two tasks, Re2Text and Text2Re, which are formulated as multi-choice question answering to evaluate LLMs' ability to determine the matching between relations and associated text.For the evaluation protocol, apart from different prompting methods, we further introduce variants to the test text and few-shot example text.We conduct experiments on three popular LLM families and have observed various scaling trends.The results suggest that LLMs often resort to shortcut learning and still face challenges on our proposed benchmark. Chengwen Qi, Bowen Li 0002, Binyuan Hui, Bailin Wang, Jinyang Li 0003, Jinwang Wu, Yuanjun Laili |
EMNLP | 2 |
| 2023 | Causal Document-Grounded Dialogue Pre-trainingabstractThe goal of document-grounded dialogue (DocGD) is to generate a response by anchoring the evidence in a supporting document in accordance with the dialogue context.This entails four causally interconnected variables.While task-specific pre-training has significantly enhanced performances on numerous downstream tasks, existing DocGD methods still rely on general pre-trained language models without a specifically tailored pre-training approach that explicitly captures the causal relationships.To address this, we present the first causallycomplete dataset construction strategy for developing million-scale DocGD pre-training corpora.Additionally, we propose a causallyperturbed pre-training strategy to better capture causality by introducing perturbations on the variables and optimizing the overall causal effect.Experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our causal pretraining yields substantial and consistent improvements in fully-supervised, low-resource, few-shot, and zero-shot settings 1 . Yingxiu Zhao, Bowen Yu 0002, Bowen Li 0002, Haiyang Yu 0003, Jinyang Li 0003, Fei Huang 0002, Yongbin Li 0001, Nevin Lianwen Zhang |
EMNLP | 3 |
| 2023 | Can LLM Already Serve as A Database Interface? A BIg Bench for Large-Scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQLsabstractText-to-SQL parsing, which aims at converting natural language instructions into executable SQLs, has gained increasing attention in recent years. In particular, GPT-4 and Claude-2 have shown impressive results in this task. However, most of the prevalent benchmarks, i.e., Spider, and WikiSQL, focus on database schema with few rows of database contents leaving the gap between academic study and real-world applications. To mitigate this gap, we present BIRD, a BIg benchmark for laRge-scale Database grounded in text-to-SQL tasks, containing 12,751 pairs of text-to-SQL data and 95 databases with a total size of 33.4 GB, spanning 37 professional domains. Our emphasis on database values highlights the new challenges of dirty database contents, external knowledge between NL questions and database contents, and SQL efficiency, particularly in the context of massive databases. To solve these problems, text-to-SQL models must feature database value comprehension in addition to semantic parsing. The experimental results demonstrate the significance of database values in generating accurate text-to-SQLs for big databases. Furthermore, even the most popular and effective text-to-SQL models, i.e. GPT-4, only achieve 54.89% in execution accuracy, which is still far from the human result of 92.96%, proving that challenges still stand. We also provide an efficiency analysis to offer insights into generating text-to-efficient-SQLs that are beneficial to industries. We believe that BIRD will contribute to advancing real-world applications of text-to-SQL research.The leaderboard and source code are available: https://bird-bench.github.io/. Jinyang Li 0003, Binyuan Hui, Ge Qu, Jiaxi Yang 0004, Binhua Li, Bowen Li 0002, Bailin Wang, Bowen Qin, Ruiying Geng, Nan Huo, Xuanhe Zhou, Chenhao Ma 0001, Guoliang Li 0001, Kevin Chen-Chuan Chang, Fei Huang 0002, Reynold Cheng, Yongbin Li 0001 |
NeurIPS | 6 |
| 2023 | ImDiffusion: Imputed Diffusion Models for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly DetectionabstractAnomaly detection in multivariate time series data is of paramount importance for large-scale systems. However, accurately detecting anomalies in such data poses significant challenges due to the need for precise data modeling capability. Existing forecasting and reconstruction-based methods struggle to address these challenges effectively. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel anomaly detection framework named ImDiffusion, which combines time series imputation and diffusion models to achieve accurate and robust anomaly detection. The imputation-based approach employed by ImDiffusion leverages the information from neighboring values in the time series, enabling precise modeling of temporal and inter-correlated dependencies, reducing uncertainty in the data, thereby enhancing the robustness of the anomaly detection process. ImDiffusion further leverages diffusion models as time series imputers to accurately capture complex dependencies. We leverage the step-by-step denoised outputs generated during the inference process to serve as valuable signals for anomaly prediction, resulting in improved accuracy and robustness of the detection process. We evaluate the performance of ImDiffusion via extensive experiments on benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that our proposed framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of detection accuracy and timeliness. ImDiffusion is further integrated into the real production system in Microsoft and observes a remarkable 11.4% increase in detection F1 score compared to the legacy approach. To the best of our knowledge, ImDiffusion represents a pioneering approach that combines imputation-based techniques with time series anomaly detection, while introducing the novel use of diffusion models to the field. Chaoyun Zhang, Minghua Ma, Ruomeng Ding, Bowen Li 0002, Shilin He, Saravan Rajmohan, Qingwei Lin, Dongmei Zhang 0001 |
Proc. VLDB Endow. | 6 |
| 2022 | SUN: Exploring Intrinsic Uncertainties in Text-to-SQL ParsersabstractThis paper aims to improve the performance of text-to-SQL parsing by exploring the intrinsic uncertainties in the neural network based approaches (called SUN). From the data uncertainty perspective, it is indisputable that a single SQL can be learned from multiple semantically-equivalent questions. Different from previous methods that are limited to one-to-one mapping, we propose a data uncertainty constraint to explore the underlying complementary semantic information among multiple semantically-equivalent questions (many-to-one) and learn the robust feature representations with reduced spurious associations. In this way, we can reduce the sensitivity of the learned representations and improve the robustness of the parser. From the model uncertainty perspective, there is often structural information (dependence) among the weights of neural networks. To improve the generalizability and stability of neural text-to-SQL parsers, we propose a model uncertainty constraint to refine the query representations by enforcing the output representations of different perturbed encoding networks to be consistent with each other. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms strong competitors and achieves new state-of-the-art results. Bowen Qin, Binyuan Hui, Bowen Li 0002, Xiangpeng Wei, Binhua Li, Fei Huang 0002, Luo Si, Min Yang 0007, Yongbin Li 0001 |
COLING | 4 |
| 2022 | CGoDial: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Chinese Goal-oriented Dialog EvaluationabstractPractical dialog systems need to deal with various knowledge sources, noisy user expressions, and the shortage of annotated data.To better solve the above problems, we propose CGoDial 1 , a new challenging and comprehensive Chinese benchmark for multi-domain Goal-oriented Dialog evaluation.It contains 96,763 dialog sessions, and 574,949 dialog turns totally, covering three datasets with different knowledge sources: 1) a slot-based dialog (SBD) dataset with table-formed knowledge, 2) a flow-based dialog (FBD) dataset with treeformed knowledge, and a retrieval-based dialog (RBD) dataset with candidate-formed knowledge.To bridge the gap between academic benchmarks and spoken dialog scenarios, we either collect data from real conversations or add spoken features to existing datasets via crowdsourcing.The proposed experimental settings include the combinations of training with either the entire training set or a few-shot training set, and testing with either the standard test set or a hard test subset, which can assess model capabilities in terms of general prediction, fast adaptability and reliable robustness. Yinpei Dai, Wanwei He, Bowen Li 0002, Yuchuan Wu, Zheng Cao 0003, Zhongqi An, Jian Sun 0021, Yongbin Li 0001 |
EMNLP | 3 |
| 2022 | Proton: Probing Schema Linking Information from Pre-trained Language Models for Text-to-SQL ParsingabstractThe importance of building text-to-SQL parsers which can be applied to new databases has long been acknowledged, and a critical step to achieve this goal is schema linking, i.e., properly recognizing mentions of unseen columns or tables when generating SQLs. In this work, we propose a novel framework to elicit relational structures from large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) via a probing procedure based on Poincaré distance metric, and use the induced relations to augment current graph-based parsers for better schema linking. Compared with commonly-used rule-based methods for schema linking, we found that probing relations can robustly capture semantic correspondences, even when surface forms of mentions and entities differ. Moreover, our probing procedure is entirely unsupervised and requires no additional parameters. Extensive experiments show that our framework sets new state-of-the-art performance on three benchmarks. We empirically verify that our probing procedure can indeed find desired relational structures through qualitative analysis. Bowen Qin, Binyuan Hui, Bowen Li 0002, Min Yang 0007, Bailin Wang, Binhua Li, Jian Sun 0021, Fei Huang 0002, Luo Si, Yongbin Li 0001 |
KDD | 4 |
| 2019 | Dependency Grammar Induction with a Neural Variational Transition-Based ParserabstractDependency grammar induction is the task of learning dependency syntax without annotated training data. Traditional graph-based models with global inference achieve state-ofthe-art results on this task but they require O(n3) run time. Transition-based models enable faster inference with O(n) time complexity, but their performance still lags behind. In this work, we propose a neural transition-based parser for dependency grammar induction, whose inference procedure utilizes rich neural features with O(n) time complexity. We train the parser with an integration of variational inference, posterior regularization and variance reduction techniques. The resulting framework outperforms previous unsupervised transition-based dependency parsers and achieves performance comparable to graph-based models, both on the English Penn Treebank and on the Universal Dependency Treebank. In an empirical comparison, we show that our approach substantially increases parsing speed over graphbased models. Bowen Li 0002, Jianpeng Cheng 0001, Yang Liu 0124, Frank Keller |
AAAI | 1 |
| 2019 | An Imitation Learning Approach to Unsupervised ParsingabstractRecently, there has been an increasing interest in unsupervised parsers that optimize semantically oriented objectives, typically using reinforcement learning.Unfortunately, the learned trees often do not match actual syntax trees well.Shen et al. (2018) propose a structured attention mechanism for language modeling (PRPN), which induces better syntactic structures but relies on ad hoc heuristics.Also, their model lacks interpretability as it is not grounded in parsing actions.In our work, we propose an imitation learning approach to unsupervised parsing, where we transfer the syntactic knowledge induced by the PRPN to a Tree-LSTM model with discrete parsing actions.Its policy is then refined by Gumbel-Softmax training towards a semantically oriented objective.We evaluate our approach on the All Natural Language Inference dataset and show that it achieves a new state of the art in terms of parsing F -score, outperforming our base models, including the PRPN. 1 Bowen Li 0002, Lili Mou, Frank Keller |
ACL (1) | 1 |