Li, Alexander
UNITE: A Unified Benchmark for Text-to-SQL Evaluation
Lan, Wuwei, Wang, Zhiguo, Chauhan, Anuj, Zhu, Henghui, Li, Alexander, Guo, Jiang, Zhang, Sheng, Hang, Chung-Wei, Lilien, Joseph, Hu, Yiqun, Pan, Lin, Dong, Mingwen, Wang, Jun, Jiang, Jiarong, Ash, Stephen, Castelli, Vittorio, Ng, Patrick, Xiang, Bing
A practical text-to-SQL system should generalize well on a wide variety of natural language questions, unseen database schemas, and novel SQL query structures. To comprehensively evaluate text-to-SQL systems, we introduce a UNIfied benchmark for Text-to-SQL Evaluation (UNITE). It is composed of publicly available text-to-SQL datasets, containing natural language questions from more than 12 domains, SQL queries from more than 3.9K patterns, and 29K databases. Compared to the widely used Spider benchmark, we introduce $\sim$120K additional examples and a threefold increase in SQL patterns, such as comparative and boolean questions. We conduct a systematic study of six state-of-the-art (SOTA) text-to-SQL parsers on our new benchmark and show that: 1) Codex performs surprisingly well on out-of-domain datasets; 2) specially designed decoding methods (e.g. constrained beam search) can improve performance for both in-domain and out-of-domain settings; 3) explicitly modeling the relationship between questions and schemas further improves the Seq2Seq models. More importantly, our benchmark presents key challenges towards compositional generalization and robustness issues -- which these SOTA models cannot address well. Our code and data processing script are available at https://github.com/awslabs/unified-text2sql-benchmark
Importance of Synthesizing High-quality Data for Text-to-SQL Parsing
Zhao, Yiyun, Jiang, Jiarong, Hu, Yiqun, Lan, Wuwei, Zhu, Henry, Chauhan, Anuj, Li, Alexander, Pan, Lin, Wang, Jun, Hang, Chung-Wei, Zhang, Sheng, Dong, Marvin, Lilien, Joe, Ng, Patrick, Wang, Zhiguo, Castelli, Vittorio, Xiang, Bing
Recently, there has been increasing interest in synthesizing data to improve downstream text-to-SQL tasks. In this paper, we first examined the existing synthesized datasets and discovered that state-of-the-art text-to-SQL algorithms did not further improve on popular benchmarks when trained with augmented synthetic data. We observed two shortcomings: illogical synthetic SQL queries from independent column sampling and arbitrary table joins. To address these issues, we propose a novel synthesis framework that incorporates key relationships from schema, imposes strong typing, and conducts schema-distance-weighted column sampling. We also adopt an intermediate representation (IR) for the SQL-to-text task to further improve the quality of the generated natural language questions. When existing powerful semantic parsers are pre-finetuned on our high-quality synthesized data, our experiments show that these models have significant accuracy boosts on popular benchmarks, including new state-of-the-art performance on Spider.
Generative Models for Pose Transfer
Chao, Patrick, Li, Alexander, Swamy, Gokul
We investigate nearest neighbor and generative models for transferring pose between persons. We take in a video of one person performing a sequence of actions and attempt to generate a video of another person performing the same actions. Our generative model (pix2pix) outperforms k-NN at both generating corresponding frames and generalizing outside the demonstrated action set. Our most salient contribution is determining a pipeline (pose detection, face detection, k-NN based pairing) that is effective at perform-ing the desired task. We also detail several iterative improvements and failure modes.