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.
- 2026.05 I received the Merit Prize of the INFH Research Excellence Award.
- 2026.04 Our papers "DPC" and "ROSE" have been accepted by ACL 2026 Main Conference.
- 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.
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
Merit Prize
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
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
Services
General Chair
Conference Reviewer