DACO: Towards Application-Driven and Comprehensive Data Analysis via Code Generation

Data analysis is a crucial analytical process to generate in-depth studies and conclusive insights to comprehensively answer a given user query for tabular data. In this work, we aim to propose new resources and benchmarks to inspire future research on this crucial yet challenging and under-explored task. However, collecting data analysis annotations curated by experts can be prohibitively expensive. We propose to automatically generate high-quality answer annotations leveraging the code-generation capabilities of LLMs with a multi-turn prompting technique. We construct the DACO dataset, containing (1) 440 databases (of tabular data) collected from real-world scenarios, (2) ~2k query-answer pairs that can serve as weak supervision for model training, and (3) a concentrated but high-quality test set with human refined annotations that serves as our main evaluation benchmark. We train a 6B supervised fine-tuning (SFT) model on DACO dataset, and find that the SFT model learns reasonable data analysis capabilities. To further align the models with human preference, we use reinforcement learning to encourage generating analysis perceived by human as helpful, and design a set of dense rewards to propagate the sparse human preference reward to intermediate code generation steps. Our DACO-RL algorithm is evaluated by human annotators to produce more helpful answers than SFT model in 57.72% cases, validating the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. Data and code are released at https://github.com/shirley-wu/daco

Are LLMs Capable of Data-based Statistical and Causal Reasoning? Benchmarking Advanced Quantitative Reasoning with Data

Quantitative reasoning is a critical skill to analyze data, yet the assessment of such ability remains limited. To address this gap, we introduce the Quantitative Reasoning with Data (QRData) benchmark, aiming to evaluate Large Language Models' capability in statistical and causal reasoning with real-world data. The benchmark comprises a carefully constructed dataset of 411 questions accompanied by data sheets from textbooks, online learning materials, and academic papers. To compare models' quantitative reasoning abilities on data and text, we enrich the benchmark with an auxiliary set of 290 text-only questions, namely QRText. We evaluate natural language reasoning, program-based reasoning, and agent reasoning methods including Chain-of-Thought, Program-of-Thoughts, ReAct, and code interpreter assistants on diverse models. The strongest model GPT-4 achieves an accuracy of 58%, which has a large room for improvement. Among open-source models, Deepseek-coder-instruct, a code LLM pretrained on 2T tokens, gets the highest accuracy of 37%. Analysis reveals that models encounter difficulties in data analysis and causal reasoning, and struggle in using causal knowledge and provided data simultaneously. Code and data are in https://github.com/xxxiaol/QRData.

OpenPI-C: A Better Benchmark and Stronger Baseline for Open-Vocabulary State Tracking

Open-vocabulary state tracking is a more practical version of state tracking that aims to track state changes of entities throughout a process without restricting the state space and entity space. OpenPI is to date the only dataset annotated for open-vocabulary state tracking. However, we identify issues with the dataset quality and evaluation metric. For the dataset, we categorize 3 types of problems on the procedure level, step level and state change level respectively, and build a clean dataset OpenPI-C using multiple rounds of human judgment. For the evaluation metric, we propose a cluster-based metric to fix the original metric's preference for repetition. Model-wise, we enhance the seq2seq generation baseline by reinstating two key properties for state tracking: temporal dependency and entity awareness. The state of the world after an action is inherently dependent on the previous state. We model this dependency through a dynamic memory bank and allow the model to attend to the memory slots during decoding. On the other hand, the state of the world is naturally a union of the states of involved entities. Since the entities are unknown in the open-vocabulary setting, we propose a two-stage model that refines the state change prediction conditioned on entities predicted from the first stage. Empirical results show the effectiveness of our proposed model especially on the cluster-based metric. The code and data are released at https://github.com/shirley-wu/openpi-c

Retrieval-Based Transformer for Table Augmentation

Data preparation, also called data wrangling, is considered one of the most expensive and time-consuming steps when performing analytics or building machine learning models. Preparing data typically involves collecting and merging data from complex heterogeneous, and often large-scale data sources, such as data lakes. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach toward automatic data wrangling in an attempt to alleviate the effort of end-users, e.g. data analysts, in structuring dynamic views from data lakes in the form of tabular data. We aim to address table augmentation tasks, including row/column population and data imputation. Given a corpus of tables, we propose a retrieval augmented self-trained transformer model. Our self-learning strategy consists in randomly ablating tables from the corpus and training the retrieval-based model to reconstruct the original values or headers given the partial tables as input. We adopt this strategy to first train the dense neural retrieval model encoding table-parts to vectors, and then the end-to-end model trained to perform table augmentation tasks. We test on EntiTables, the standard benchmark for table augmentation, as well as introduce a new benchmark to advance further research: WebTables. Our model consistently and substantially outperforms both supervised statistical methods and the current state-of-the-art transformer-based models.

Text-to-Table: A New Way of Information Extraction

We study a new problem setting of information extraction (IE), referred to as text-to-table, which can be viewed as an inverse problem of the well-studied table-to-text. In text-to-table, given a text, one creates a table or several tables expressing the main content of the text, while the model is learned from text-table pair data. The problem setting differs from those of the existing methods for IE. First, the extraction can be carried out from long texts to large tables with complex structures. Second, the extraction is entirely data-driven, and there is no need to explicitly define the schemas. As far as we know, there has been no previous work that studies the problem. In this work, we formalize text-to-table as a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) problem. We first employ a seq2seq model fine-tuned from a pre-trained language model to perform the task. We also develop a new method within the seq2seq approach, exploiting two additional techniques in table generation: table constraint and table relation embeddings. We make use of four existing table-to-text datasets in our experiments on text-to-table. Experimental results show that the vanilla seq2seq model can outperform the baseline methods of using relation extraction and named entity extraction. The results also show that our method can further boost the performances of the vanilla seq2seq model. We further discuss the main challenges of the proposed task. The code and data will be made publicly available.

Learn to Use Future Information in Simultaneous Translation

Simultaneous neural machine translation (briefly, NMT) has attracted much attention recently. In contrast to standard NMT, where the NMT system can utilize the full input sentence, simultaneous NMT is formulated as a prefix-to-prefix problem, where the system can only utilize the prefix of the input sentence and more uncertainty is introduced to decoding. Wait-$k$ is a simple yet effective strategy for simultaneous NMT, where the decoder generates the output sequence $k$ words behind the input words. We observed that training simultaneous NMT systems with future information (i.e., trained with a larger $k$) generally outperforms the standard ones (i.e., trained with the given $k$). Based on this observation, we propose a framework that automatically learns how much future information to use in training for simultaneous NMT. We first build a series of tasks where each one is associated with a different $k$, and then learn a model on these tasks guided by a controller. The controller is jointly trained with the translation model through bi-level optimization. We conduct experiments on four datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Fast Detection of Maximum Common Subgraph via Deep Q-Learning

Detecting the Maximum Common Subgraph (MCS) between two input graphs is fundamental for applications in biomedical analysis, malware detection, cloud computing, etc. This is especially important in the task of drug design, where the successful extraction of common substructures in compounds can reduce the number of experiments needed to be conducted by humans. However, MCS computation is NP-hard, and state-of-the-art exact MCS solvers do not have worst-case time complexity guarantee and cannot handle large graphs in practice. Designing learning based models to find the MCS between two graphs in an approximate yet accurate way while utilizing as few labeled MCS instances as possible remains to be a challenging task. Here we propose RLMCS, a Graph Neural Network based model for MCS detection through reinforcement learning. Our model uses an exploration tree to extract subgraphs in two graphs one node pair at a time, and is trained to optimize subgraph extraction rewards via Deep Q-Networks. A novel graph embedding method is proposed to generate state representations for nodes and extracted subgraphs jointly at each step. Experiments on real graph datasets demonstrate that our model performs favorably to exact MCS solvers and supervised neural graph matching network models in terms of accuracy and efficiency.

Adaptive Period Embedding for Representing Oriented Objects in Aerial Images

We propose a novel method for representing oriented objects in aerial images named Adaptive Period Embedding (APE). While traditional object detection methods represent object with horizontal bounding boxes, the objects in aerial images are oritented. Calculating the angle of object is an yet challenging task. While almost all previous object detectors for aerial images directly regress the angle of objects, they use complex rules to calculate the angle, and their performance is limited by the rule design. In contrast, our method is based on the angular periodicity of oriented objects. The angle is represented by two two-dimensional periodic vectors whose periods are different, the vector is continuous as shape changes. The label generation rule is more simple and reasonable compared with previous methods. The proposed method is general and can be applied to other oriented detector. Besides, we propose a novel IoU calculation method for long objects named length independent IoU (LIIoU). We intercept part of the long side of the target box to get the maximum IoU between the proposed box and the intercepted target box. Thereby, some long boxes will have corresponding positive samples. Our method reaches the 1st place of DOAI2019 competition task1 (oriented object) held in workshop on Detecting Objects in Aerial Images in conjunction with IEEE CVPR 2019.