LIMIT (Less Is More for Instruction Tuning in Text-to-SQL) challenges the belief that large instruction corpora are necessary for effective Text-to-SQL models. The framework uses a four‑stage data‑centric process—difficulty‑aware filtering, chain‑of‑thought synthesis, LLM‑as‑judge quality scoring, and genetic algorithm optimization—to select a compact set of examples that still achieve full schema coverage. On the BIRD and Spider benchmarks, LIMIT’s 796 and 863 samples enable Qwen3‑8B to reach 69.1% and 88.9% execution accuracy, outperforming methods trained on twenty times more data and setting a new state‑of‑the‑art for open‑source approaches.
By Haoyuan Ma, Hengwei Liu, Linjuan Wu, Yongliang Shen, Weiming Lu
arXiv:2606. 30851v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Improving the reliability of large language models (LLMs) at inference time is a central challenge in structured reasoning tasks such as Text-to-SQL.
By Mattia Tritto, Giuseppe Farano, Dario Di Palma, Gaetano Rossiello, Fedelucio Narducci, Dharmashankar Subramanian, Tommaso Di Noia
arXiv:2601.13111v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Realistic text-to-SQL workflows often require joining multiple tables. As a result, accurately retrieving the relevant set of tables becomes...
By Hassan Soliman, Vivek Gupta, Dan Roth, Iryna Gurevych
arXiv:2607. 22624v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recently, there have been several works in the Text-to-SQL domain that utilize Small Language Models (SLMs) for training.
By Minghao Yang, Yanjun Xu
arXiv:2603.20004v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Translating natural language questions to SQL queries (Text-to-SQL) is a long-standing problem in database research. Recent efforts have focu...
By Yuxuan Zhu, Tengjun Jin, Yoojin Choi, Daniel Kang
arXiv:2602. 14696v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) often involves selecting a subset of instruction training data from a large candidate pool, using a small query set from the target task.
By Nihal V. Nayak, Paula Rodriguez-Diaz, Neha Hulkund, Sara Beery, David Alvarez-Melis
arXiv:2607. 22622v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent Text-to-SQL methods rely heavily on reasoning-centric paradigms such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), achieving substantial gains on complex benchmarks at the cost of high inference-time overhead.
By Soohyuk Jang, Jiheum Yeom, Nohil Park, Sang Hun Kim, Yoonyoung Choi, Kiwook Bae, Sungroh Yoon
The paper "Towards Optimizing SQL Generation via LLM Routing" proposes a routing approach for Text-to-SQL tasks that dynamically selects the most cost‑effective large language model (LLM) for each query. Two routing strategies—score‑based and classification‑based—are introduced, achieving accuracy comparable to the best LLM while reducing latency and monetary cost. The authors design the routers for easy training and efficient inference, and demonstrate a practical accuracy‑cost trade‑off on the BIRD dataset.
By Mohammadhossein Malekpour, Nour Shaheen, Foutse Khomh, Amine Mhedhbi
arXiv:2608.29345v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: While recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based text-to-SQL systems achieve impressive performance on standard benchmarks, they struggle when user querie...
By Yunfan Zhou, Qiming Shi, Yizhou Yang, Di Weng, Yingcai Wu
arXiv:2607. 20489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-to-SQL has advanced rapidly with large language models, but complex database queries still require reasoning beyond one-shot generation, including multi-step decomposition, execution-based diagnosis, and targeted correction.
By Jiawei Zhou, Jianwei Wang, Chenyu Zhou, Chaojian Shi, Ming Dong, Kai Wang
arXiv:2605.24981v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Choosing a Large Language Model (LLM) for a given task requires comparing many strong candidates, yet standard evaluation relies on costly annotati...
By Yavuz Durmazkeser, Patrik Okanovic, Andreas Kirsch, Torsten Hoefler, Nezihe Merve G\"urel
SPOC-SQL introduces a stage-wise approach to Text-to-SQL, breaking the task into four sequential subtasks aligned with standard SQL execution logic. It applies fine-grained preference optimization at key decision points and a structured decomposition strategy, enabling explicit intermediate representations for stage-wise intervention and correction. The method yields more controllable and reliable SQL generation, with experiments showing that incorporating stage-wise human knowledge consistently improves performance.
By Yingnan Chen, Chun Ding, Tianshi Xu, Xu Yang, Si Wu