arXiv Machine Learning

Reward-SQL: Boosting Text-to-SQL via Stepwise Execution-Aware Reasoning and Process-Supervised Rewards

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.

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 AI
Jun 4

Smart Picks in the Dark: Towards Efficient RLVR for Reasoning via Tracing Metacognitive Pivots

arXiv:2606. 04503v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has greatly advanced large reasoning models (LRMs), but it requires timely training on a huge fully-annotated dataset.

By Guangcheng Zhu, Shenzhi Yang, Haobo Wang, Xing Zheng, Yingfan MA, Xuening Feng, Zhongqi Chen, Bowen Song, Weiqiang Wang, Gang Chen
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

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.

By Yingnan Chen, Chun Ding, Tianshi Xu, Xu Yang, Si Wu
arXiv AI
6d ago

Stepwise Intrinsic Rewards for Reasoning in Large Language Models

The paper introduces Stepwise Marginal Information Gain (MIG), an intrinsic process reward that evaluates how each reasoning step of a large language model (LLM) or vision-language model (VLM) improves the likelihood of the reference answer. MIG rewards only new likelihood maxima, preventing duplicate credit, and is combined with outcome, format, and self‑distillation objectives to guide training. Experiments on eight benchmarks show that this method outperforms outcome‑only reinforcement learning and improves accuracy by up to 4.8 points over binary‑reward training, including a 12.6‑point gain on MathVerse and a 12.9‑point advantage on vision‑language transfer at 7B parameters.

By Xiangwei Wang, Wei Wang, Ken Chen, Nanduni Nimalsiri, Sachith Seneviratne, Saman Halgamuge
arXiv AI
Jun 16

STRIDE: Strategic Trajectory Reasoning via Discriminative Estimation for Verifiable Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 15866v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become an effective post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models.

By Qinjian Zhao, Zhihao Dou, Dinggen Zhang, Xiangyu Li, Chaoda Song, Zhongwei Wan, Xinpeng Li, Yanyan Zhang, Kaijie Chen, Qingtao Pan, Chengcheng Feng, Zhiqiang Gao, Xiaoyu Xia