Boyan Li · Second-year PhD Student · HKUST(GZ)
I am a second-year PhD student at HKUST(GZ), honored to be advised by Professor Yuyu Luo. Previously, I worked with Professor Guoliang Li at Tsinghua University and received my bachelor's degree from Southern University of Science and Technology.
My current research interests focus on Text-to-SQL and Data Agents, which are intelligent systems that can autonomously handle data-related tasks such as query generation, data analysis, and visualization through natural language interaction. I am currently looking for collaborators on interesting projects in these areas, and I would be happy to connect if you are interested.
Recent News
The latest updates are shown here; older news stays available in the archive.
- 2026.03 We are organizing KDD Cup 2026: Data Agents for Complex Data Analysis.
- 2026.03 Our "DeepEye" data agent system received the Silver Medal at the 51st Geneva Inventions Exhibition.
- 2026.03 Our low-altitude economy digital-twin project received the Silver Medal at the 51st Geneva Inventions Exhibition.
- 2026.03 Our demonstration paper "DeepEye: A Steerable Self-driving Data Agent System" has been accepted by SIGMOD 2026.
- 2026.02 Our DeepEye-SQL paper has been accepted by SIGMOD 2026.
- 2026.01 I was invited to give a talk at Huawei Squirrel Webinar on "DeepEye-SQL: A Software-Engineering-Inspired Text-to-SQL Framework".
Show earlier updates
- 2025.12 I was awarded the DSA Excellence Awards 2025 - Research Excellence Awards.
- 2025.10 We proposed A Survey of Data Agents: Emerging Paradigm or Overstated Hype?, introducing a systematic taxonomy for data agents with six levels of autonomy. Ranked Top-3 in Hugging Face Daily Papers.
- 2025.10 We proposed DeepEye-SQL, a software-engineering-inspired Text-to-SQL framework achieving 73.5% EX on BIRD-Dev and 89.8% EX on Spider-Test using a ~30B LLM without fine-tuning.
- 2025.09 Our nvBench 2.0 paper has been accepted by NeurIPS 2025.
- 2025.07 Our DeepVIS paper has been accepted by VIS 2025.
- 2025.07 Our NL2SQL-Survey paper has been accepted by TKDE 2025. We also maintain the NL2SQL Handbook.
- 2025.07 Our EllieSQL paper has been accepted by COLM 2025.
- 2025.05 Our NL2SQL-BUGs paper has been accepted by KDD 2025.
- 2025.05 Our Alpha-SQL paper has been accepted by ICML 2025.
- 2025.04 We proposed Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents, a survey on modular, collaborative, and safe agent systems.
- 2025.04 We proposed EllieSQL, a complexity-aware routing framework for Text-to-SQL.
- 2025.03 We proposed NL2SQL-BUGs, a benchmark for detecting semantic errors in NL2SQL translation.
- 2025.03 We proposed nvBench 2.0, a benchmark for ambiguous NL2VIS queries.
- 2025.01 We proposed Alpha-SQL.
- 2025.01 Our paper Augmenting Realistic Charts with Virtual Overlays has been accepted by CHI 2025.
- 2025.01 I was awarded the Merit Prize for the 2024 DSA Excellent Research Award.
- 2024.09 Our paper Are Large Language Models Good Statisticians? has been accepted by NeurIPS 2024.
- 2024.06 Our paper The Dawn of Natural Language to SQL: Are We Fully Ready? has been accepted by VLDB 2024.
- 2024.04 Our paper Efficient Deep Spiking Multilayer Perceptrons With Multiplication-Free Inference has been accepted by TNNLS 2024.
Publications
Full publication list in reverse chronological order.
2026
🏅 Silver Medal, 51st Geneva International Exhibition of Inventions
🏆 Best Open-source Project Award, AI Agent 2025 Competition
2025
2024
Honors and Awards
2026
Silver Medal, 51st Geneva Inventions Exhibition
Silver Medal, 51st Geneva Inventions Exhibition
2025
Research Excellence Awards
Runner-up, Best Project Award
Best Open-source Project Award
2024
Merit Prize
Best Project Award
2023
Highest Honors in Computer Science & Engineering
Outstanding Graduate
2022
Huawei Scholarship
2020-2022
Excellent Student Scholarship
2020
National Encouragement Scholarship
Education
2024.09 - Present
PhD Student
Pursuing doctoral studies in Data Science and Analytics
2019.09 - 2023.07
Bachelor of Computer Science and Technology
GPA 3.91/4.0, Ranking 2/183
Experience
2025.06 - 2025.12
Exchange Student
Tsinghua University · Beijing, China
Worked as a research intern in the Database Group led by Professor Guoliang Li
2023.07 - 2024.09
Research Assistant
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · Guangzhou, China
Conducted research in Text-to-SQL and Data Agent systems
2022.07 - 2022.09
Research Intern
Huawei Central Research Institute · Shenzhen, China
Services
General Chair
Invited Talk
Conference Reviewer