Learning from Near-Misses: Error-Aware Contrastive Few-Shot Learning for NL2Formula
Zhihao Shuai, Yiyun Chen The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Maolin Ma, Yutong Chen, Hanjia Qiu, Jing Xu The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guanzhou), Ziye Chen, Weikai Yang Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)
Natural Language to Excel Formula (NL2Formula) translates user intent into executable spreadsheet formulas. However, current models often produce near-miss outputs—formulas that parse correctly yet fail at execution due to an incorrect function, operator, or reference. Through a systematic error analysis, we find that these errors repeatedly arise from a small set of structural decision points, motivating the need for typed error supervision rather than general error signals. To this end, we introduce an abstract syntax tree (AST)-based error taxonomy that organizes common error modes by the kind of decision that goes wrong in the parse tree. Building on this taxonomy, we propose Error-Aware Contrastive Few-Shot Learning (ECFL), an error-aware framework that unifies training and inference around typed error supervision. During offline training, ECFL mines near-miss errors, assigns error types under the taxonomy, and builds error-aware contrastive demonstrations for fine-tuning. During online inference, a lightweight predictor estimates likely error types and triggers targeted retrieval of contrastive demonstrations to guide single-pass decoding. Experiments show ECFL improves Exact Match (EM) by 6.4 points over supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and matches self-consistency (SC@5) accuracy at substantially lower inference cost.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表