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
arXiv:2606. 15598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-to-SQL aims to translate natural language questions into executable SQL queries over structured databases, enabling non-expert users to access data intuitively.
By Feng Lyu, Jinfeng Cen, Sijing Duan, Hao Wu, Shucheng Li, Weixu Zhang, Haolun Wu
arXiv:2505. 04671v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) trained with reinforcement learning (RL) have improved Text-to-SQL performance.
By Yuxin Zhang, Meihao Fan, Ju Fan, Mingyang Yi, Yuyu Luo, Guoliang Li, Bin Wu, Wenchao Zhou
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
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
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:2606. 06825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning has recently shown promise in improving large language models for Text-to-SQL generation, yet existing methods typically optimize one-shot rewards defined over a single SQL state.
By Shihao Zhang, Xiaoman Wang, Yuan Liu, Yunshi Lan, Weining Qian
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
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
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: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:2606. 17821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in translating natural language to SQL, yet existing methods still falter on complex queries requiring multi-step, data-aware reasoning.
By Esteban Schafir, Xu Zheng, Hojat Allah Salehi, Zhuomin Chen, Mo Sha, Wei Cheng, Dongsheng Luo