arXiv Computation and Language

SPOC-SQL: Stage-wise Preference Optimization for Controllable Text-to-SQL

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.

arXiv AI
Sep 4

Reflect-SQL: A Self-Reflection Based Framework for Text-to-SQL

Reflect‑SQL is a new framework for converting natural language into SQL queries. It tackles challenges such as large, obscure database schemas, poor table and column retrieval, and syntactically or logically flawed SQL by using a multi‑stage self‑reflection approach. The system iteratively refines queries and SQL through feedback loops driven by an LLM‑as‑a‑judge, achieving 72.03% execution accuracy on the BIRD benchmark, outperforming existing baselines.

By Anupreksha Jain, Manish Shrivastava
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Replacing Training with Memory: Listwise Selection for Text-to-SQL

The paper proposes a fine‑tuning‑free listwise selector for Text‑to‑SQL systems that replaces traditional learning objectives with inference‑time strategies. It introduces reusable structured memories (MaP‑SQL) that encode mappings from natural language to schema elements, SQL operations, and expected outputs, and uses these memories to evaluate candidate queries. To reduce positional bias, the method aggregates rankings across multiple input permutations, optimizing inference cost through execution results and pointwise scoring. The approach achieves higher selection accuracy, fewer unnecessary comparisons, and outperforms the prior state‑of‑the‑art R^3‑SQL on the BIRD‑dev benchmark while using fewer tokens.

By Yeonseok Jeong, Soyoung Yoon, Seongjun Lee, Seung-won Hwang
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Towards Optimizing SQL Generation via LLM Routing

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 AI
Sep 23

LIMIT: Less Is More for Instruction Tuning in Text-to-SQL

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