arXiv Computation and Language

SERL-SQL: Selective Hindsight Distillation for Text-to-SQL Reinforcement Agentic Learning

SERL‑SQL introduces a selective execution‑grounded reinforcement learning framework for multi‑turn Text‑to‑SQL agents. It samples on‑policy interaction trajectories and employs a training‑only teacher to re‑score student actions using execution feedback, converting the teacher‑student likelihood gap into bounded, masked weights that reweight GRPO advantages only on SQL and tool‑action tokens. Experiments on BIRD, Spider, and cross‑domain benchmarks show competitive performance, achieving 76.56% execution accuracy on BIRD‑Dev and 89.92% on Spider‑Test, and the reward‑based selection strategy approaches the oracle Best‑of‑N upper bound.

arXiv AI
Sep 17

DualSQL: Text-to-SQL with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

DualSQL is a Text-to-SQL system that uses two agents sharing a single model backbone, enabling joint optimization via multi-agent reinforcement learning. The approach incorporates three database access tools for multi-step reasoning, rollout guardrails to stabilize training, and a new SQL correctness metric called robust execution match (REX). Trained on only 3,755 examples, DualSQL-4B reaches 68.0% execution accuracy on the BIRD dev set, while DualSQL-8B achieves 71.1%, surpassing prior state‑of‑the‑art single‑model solutions with 32B parameters.

By Shijie Chen, Yu Gan, Yeounoh Chung, Jiani Zhang, Quannan Li, Sravan Babu Bodapati, Cody J. Greer, Yu Su, Fatma Ozcan
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 9

HarnessSQL: Harness-Native Training for SQL Agents in Realistic Database Environments

HarnessSQL introduces a harness‑native post‑training framework that keeps the full stateful, multi‑turn interaction structure of real‑world database agents during both supervised fine‑tuning and reinforcement learning. By building isolated executable database environments with hidden execution oracles and retaining only verified trajectories for full‑sequence SFT, the method enables execution‑reward RL that aligns training with inference. Experiments on Spider 2.0‑SQLite show dramatic gains in execution accuracy for compact models, and the approach transfers effectively to out‑of‑distribution interactive benchmarks such as BIRD‑Interact and LiveSQLBench.

By Haolin Yang, Jipeng Zhang, Jian Xie, Shuaishuai Gong, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
arXiv AI
Sep 7

SQL-Zero: Self-Evolving Text-to-SQL

SQL-Zero is a self‑playing framework that trains a Text‑to‑SQL agent without any human‑annotated natural‑language/SQL pairs. It uses a challenger and a solver, both based on the same large language model, to generate SQL queries that are only validated by execution against the database. On the BIRD dataset, self‑play improves performance over a zero‑shot baseline by 6.6 to 7.3 points and shows promising transfer to unseen Spider databases, especially at 3B parameter scale.

By Daniel Machado Pedrozo, Julia Soares Dollis, Bryan Lincoln Marques de Oliveira, Vinicius Alboneti Aguiar, S\'avio Salvarino Teles de Oliveira, Telma Woerle de Lima Soares
arXiv AI
Sep 12

TRUST-SQL: Tool-Integrated Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQL over Unknown Schemas

TRUST‑SQL tackles Text‑to‑SQL parsing in environments where the full database schema is unknown, a common scenario in enterprise settings with many noisy tables. The method models the problem as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process and uses a four‑phase protocol to verify only relevant metadata, guided by a Dual‑Track GRPO strategy that separates exploration from execution rewards. Experiments on five benchmarks show significant gains, with the 4B and 8B variants outperforming base models by 30.6% and 16.6% respectively, while matching or exceeding baselines that rely on pre‑loaded schemas.

By Ai Jian, Xiaoyun Zhang, Eryu Guo, Wanrou Du, Jingqing Ruan, Jiangbo Pei, Weipeng Zhang, Ke Zeng, Xunliang Cai