arXiv subjects

Xialie Zhuang

Publications and source records attributed to Xialie Zhuang.

9 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Are Diffusion Language Models Good Database Analysts?

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) enable iterative global refinement, but their effectiveness in Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) remains unclear because heterogeneous architectures and evaluation setups hinder fair comparison with autoregressive (AR) models. Their iterative denoising process permits sequence-wide revision, offering a different way to handle the long-range structural dependencies in SQL. We present a systematic study of DLM-based NL2SQL under a unified framework that standardizes generation and execution across DLM architectures. We further introduce SQL-D1, an agentic inference framework combining database-aware retrieval, multi-trajectory denoising, execution-guided verification, and selection based on execution denotations. Across diverse benchmark settings, strong DLMs are competitive with some open-source AR models and offer flexible trade-offs between efficiency and accuracy, although they still trail the strongest AR systems on difficult queries. Test-time scaling yields substantial gains, whereas standard supervised fine-tuning yields unstable outcomes across the evaluated DLMs. Stronger model variants exhibit fewer schema-grounding errors, but failures involving complex clauses and query nesting persist. These results clarify the capabilities and limitations of DLMs for database analysis and provide a standardized foundation for future work. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SQL-D1-82DF.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2026

StartLux-Decision: AutoThink Decision Models with Reinforcement Learning for Calibrated Deliberative Decisions

We introduce StartLux-Decision, decision models from 0.8B to 27B parameters that combine efficient single-pass prediction with adaptive, confidence-guided reasoning. The Instant models use bidirectional attention in full-attention layers to improve decision accuracy while keeping single-pass inference. The AutoThink models invoke explicit reasoning for uncertain decisions and answer confident cases directly. A three-stage training pipeline establishes shared decision capabilities, specializes the two variants, and equips AutoThink with reasoning through reasoning supervision and reinforcement learning. We introduce Reinforcement Learning for Calibrated Deliberative Decisions (RLCD$^2$), which uses a frozen model and proper scoring rules to reward improvements in decision probability quality and applies a soft penalty to overlong reasoning traces. RLCD$^2$ raises the share of reasoning traces that terminate within the generation limit by up to 48 percentage points and cuts average reasoning length by up to 65%, while largely preserving decision accuracy. On the public subset of Decision Index 0.3, the Instant models outperform the strongest evaluated comparable-scale open-weight decision models by 7.4-16.9 points, and the 27B AutoThink model reaches 73.4. We also introduce DecisionPivot, a programmatically verifiable benchmark of computational decisions built from contrast pairs that differ in a single answer-changing detail. On DecisionPivot, AutoThink outperforms its Instant counterparts by 11.5-18.4 points in pair accuracy and leads among evaluated systems. The models run on vLLM, llama.cpp and MLX, with quantized variants for lower memory use.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

OScaR: The Occam's Razor for Extreme KV Cache Quantization in LLMs and Beyond

The rapid advancement toward long-context reasoning and multi-modal intelligence has made the memory footprint of the Key-Value (KV) cache a dominant memory bottleneck for efficient deployment. While the established per-channel quantization effectively accommodates intrinsic channel-wise outliers in Key tensors, its efficacy diminishes under extreme compression. In this work, we revisit the inherent limitations of the per-channel quantization paradigm from both empirical and theoretical perspectives. Our analysis identifies Token Norm Imbalance (TNI) as the primary bottleneck to quantization fidelity. We demonstrate that TNI systematically amplifies errors when shared quantization parameters are required to span token groups exhibiting substantial norm disparities. Instead of relying on intricate quantization pipelines (e.g., TurboQuant), we propose OScaR (Omni-Scaled Canalized Rotation), an accurate and lightweight KV cache compression framework for X-LLMs (i.e., text-only, multi-modal, and omni-modal LLMs). Advancing the per-channel paradigm, OScaR employs Canalized Rotation followed by Omni-Token Scaling to mitigate TNI-induced sequence-dimensional variance both effectively and efficiently, further supported by our optimized system design and CUDA kernels. Extensive evaluations across X-LLMs show that OScaR consistently outperforms existing methods and achieves near-lossless performance under INT2 quantization, establishing it as a robust, low-complexity, and universal framework that defines a new Pareto front. Compared with the BF16 FlashDecoding-v2 baseline, our OScaR implementation achieves a notable up to 3.0x speedup in decoding, reduces memory footprint by 5.3x, and increases throughput by 4.1x. The code for OScaR is publicly available at https://github.com/ZunhaiSu/OScaR-KV-Quant.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Massive Activations in Hybrid Linear Attention Large Language Models: Pre-Attention Spikes and Inter-Spike Plateaus

We present the first systematic study of massive activations (MAs) in layer-interleaved Hybrid linear attention large language models (HLA LLMs), examining their architectural organization, training-time emergence, underlying mechanisms, and functional significance. Across five linear attention architectures, six hybridization configurations, and five input domains, we identify two architecture-aligned morphologies: pre-attention spikes (PAS) immediately before full attention and inter-spike plateaus (ISP) persisting through intervening linear attention layers. Denser full attention increasingly connects PAS through ISP, approaching the persistent MAs of conventional Transformers. This organization also recurs across 12 public checkpoints spanning 1.2B-397B parameters, covering linear attention and state-space hybrids. Controlled pretraining of Gated DeltaNet (GDN) hybrids up to 1.3B reveals early emergence and consolidation of both morphologies, alongside asymmetric gating effects. Specifically, full attention output gates strongly attenuate MA magnitudes without eliminating their organization, whereas removing GDN output gates yields modest amplification. Mechanistically, we develop a shared systematic-outlier account: PAS follows a localized write-sink-cancel process, while ISP is consistent with delayed cancellation. Functionally, our interventions show that deleting only the four largest-magnitude PAS coordinates at each full attention input reduces mean downstream accuracy by 21.9%-63.6% relative to normal inference. Moreover, reference-conditioned spike-to-plateau connection consistently improves mean real-world retrieval accuracy, yielding relative gains of 1.1%-12.6% without retraining. Our code is available at https://github.com/StartLuxLabs/Massive-Activations-HLA.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

EpochX: Building the Infrastructure for an Emergent Agent Civilization

General-purpose technologies reshape economies less by improving individual tools than by enabling new ways to organize production and coordination. We believe AI agents are approaching a similar inflection point: as foundation models make broad task execution and tool use increasingly accessible, the binding constraint shifts from raw capability to how work is delegated, verified, and rewarded at scale. We introduce EpochX, a credits-native marketplace infrastructure for human-agent production networks. EpochX treats humans and agents as peer participants who can post tasks or claim them. Claimed tasks can be decomposed into subtasks and executed through an explicit delivery workflow with verification and acceptance. Crucially, EpochX is designed so that each completed transaction can produce reusable ecosystem assets, including skills, workflows, execution traces, and distilled experience. These assets are stored with explicit dependency structure, enabling retrieval, composition, and cumulative improvement over time. EpochX also introduces a native credit mechanism to make participation economically viable under real compute costs. Credits lock task bounties, budget delegation, settle rewards upon acceptance, and compensate creators when verified assets are reused. By formalizing the end-to-end transaction model together with its asset and incentive layers, EpochX reframes agentic AI as an organizational design problem: building infrastructures where verifiable work leaves persistent, reusable artifacts, and where value flows support durable human-agent collaboration.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Mask-Enhanced Autoregressive Prediction: Pay Less Attention to Learn More

Large Language Models (LLMs) are discovered to suffer from accurately retrieving key information. To address this, we propose Mask-Enhanced Autoregressive Prediction (MEAP), a simple yet effective training paradigm that seamlessly integrates Masked Language Modeling (MLM) into Next-Token Prediction (NTP) to enhance the latter's in-context retrieval capabilities. Specifically, MEAP first randomly masks a small fraction of input tokens and then directly performs the standard next-token prediction autoregressive using a decoder-only Transformer. MEAP eliminates the need for bidirectional attention or encoder-decoder architectures for MLM, incurring no additional computational overhead during pre-training or inference. Intensive experiments demonstrate that MEAP substantially outperforms NTP on key information retrieval and long-context reasoning tasks, while performing on par or better on commonsense reasoning tasks. The benefits of MEAP also extend to supervised fine-tuning, where it shows remarkable advantages in lost-in-the-middle scenarios, outperforming NTP by 11.77 percentage points. Our analysis indicates that MEAP's effectiveness arises from its ability to promote more distinguishable attention scores by concentrating on a reduced set of non-masked tokens. This mechanism improves the model's focus on task-relevant signals while mitigating the influence of peripheral context. These findings position MEAP as a promising training paradigm for large language models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Effective Learning for Small Reasoning Models: An Empirical Study on 0.5B Reasoning LLMs

The ongoing evolution of language models has led to the development of large-scale architectures that demonstrate exceptional performance across a wide range of tasks. However, these models come with significant computational and energy demands, as well as potential privacy implications. In this context, Small Reasoning Language Models (SRLMs) with approximately 0.5 billion parameters present a compelling alternative due to their remarkable computational efficiency and cost-effectiveness, particularly in resource-constrained environments. Despite these advantages, the limited capacity of 0.5 billion parameter models poses challenges in handling complex tasks such as mathematical reasoning. This research investigates various training strategies, including supervised fine-tuning (SFT), knowledge distillation (KD), and reinforcement learning (RL), as well as their hybrid implementations, to enhance the performance of 0.5B SRLMs. We analyze effective methodologies to bridge the performance gap between SRLMS and larger models and present insights into optimal training pipelines tailored for these smaller architectures. Through extensive experimental validation and analysis, our work aims to provide actionable recommendations for maximizing the reasoning capabilities of 0.5B models.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

SQL-R1: Training Natural Language to SQL Reasoning Model By Reinforcement Learning

Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) enables intuitive interactions with databases by transforming natural language queries into structured SQL statements. Despite recent advancements in enhancing human-computer interaction within database applications, significant challenges persist, particularly regarding the reasoning performance in complex scenarios involving multi-table joins and nested queries. Current methodologies primarily utilize supervised fine-tuning~(SFT) to train the NL2SQL model, which may limit adaptability and interpretability in new environments~(e.g., finance and healthcare). In order to enhance the reasoning performance of the NL2SQL model in the above complex situations, we introduce SQL-R1, a novel NL2SQL reasoning model trained by the reinforcement learning~(RL) algorithms. We design a specialized RL-based reward function tailored for NL2SQL tasks and discussed the impact of cold start and synthetic data on the effectiveness of intensive training. In addition, we achieve competitive accuracy using only a tiny amount of synthetic NL2SQL data for augmented training and further explore data engineering for RL. In existing experiments, SQL-R1 achieves execution accuracy of 88.6\% and 67.1\% on the benchmark Spider and BIRD, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/IDEA-FinAI/SQL-R1 .

cs.DB↗

arXiv2025

ReEx-SQL: Reasoning with Execution-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQL

In Text-to-SQL, execution feedback is essential for guiding large language models (LLMs) to reason accurately and generate reliable SQL queries. However, existing methods treat execution feedback solely as a post-hoc signal for correction or selection, failing to integrate it into the generation process. This limitation hinders their ability to address reasoning errors as they occur, ultimately reducing query accuracy and robustness. To address this issue, we propose ReEx-SQL (Reasoning with Execution-Aware Reinforcement Learning), a framework for Text-to-SQL that enables models to interact with the database during decoding and dynamically adjust their reasoning based on execution feedback. ReEx-SQL introduces an execution-aware reasoning paradigm that interleaves intermediate SQL execution into reasoning paths, facilitating context-sensitive revisions. It achieves this through structured prompts with markup tags and a stepwise rollout strategy that integrates execution feedback into each stage of generation. To supervise policy learning, we develop a composite reward function that includes an exploration reward, explicitly encouraging effective database interaction. Additionally, ReEx-SQL adopts a tree-based decoding strategy to support exploratory reasoning, enabling dynamic expansion of alternative reasoning paths. Notably, ReEx-SQL achieves 88.8% on Spider and 64.9% on BIRD at the 7B scale, surpassing the standard reasoning baseline by 2.7% and 2.6%, respectively. It also shows robustness, achieving 85.2% on Spider-Realistic with leading performance. In addition, its tree-structured decoding improves efficiency and performance over linear decoding, reducing inference time by 51.9% on the BIRD development set.

cs.CL↗