This work introduces ExpeSQL, a zero-shot, open-source–compatible, and efficient framework that combines divide-and-conquer reasoning, Best-of-N candidate selection, and self-critique with experience-guided refinement that establishes a new paradigm for deployable, self-improving Text-to-SQL systems in dynamic, real-world environments.
Large language models (LLMs) have advanced Text-to-SQL by enabling natural language interfaces to databases without task-specific fine-tuning. However, existing LLM-based systems remain unreliable, often generating SQL queries that are invalid under the database schema, referencing non-existent tables, attributes, functions, or values. Such errors persist because interactions with the database management system (DBMS) are typically limited to error messages, leaving it in a largely passive role during query refinement. This paper proposes SafeQL,
a search-based refinement paradigm that redefines the role of the DBMS as an active guide in the refinement process.
Instead of regenerating entire queries after execution failure, SafeQL interprets DBMS feedback to incrementally repair only the erroneous components. Each refinement step is formulated as a guided search within a
safe query space
, where candidate queries are progressively validated through DBMS execution, thereby converging to an executable query and preventing repeated regeneration of errors. Experiments on the Bird and Spider benchmarks show that SafeQL significantly improves execution accuracy and efficiency compared to regeneration-based methods.
Geonho Lee, Min-Soo Kim· Proceedings of the VLDB Endo...· 0 citations
This work presents a training-free framework that formulates SQL correction as a plan-guided, tree-structured debugging process that mitigates error accumulation during iterative refinement and demonstrates the effectiveness and stability of the approach in real-world deployments.
Xinmei Huang, Jie Song, Peng Li et al.· 0 citations
LLM-based Text-to-SQL progress is reported across heterogeneous benchmarks, backbones, and inference protocols, making cross-system comparison fragile. We reframe the field as a leaderboard aggregation: we collect the metrics authors themselves report and organize them along an inference-autonomy axis spanning constrained, in-context, iterative, agentic, and reasoning-internalized generation, with traceable provenance for every cell. To anchor the aggregation empirically, we run a focused case study on Spider, comparing 8B open-source backbones with and without chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision against few-shot DeepSeek~V3 and GLM-4 baselines. Four patterns emerge: Spider gains transfer unevenly to BIRD and Spider~2.0; autonomy buys robustness at non-trivial cost; reasoning internalization sits between answer-only decoding and externally orchestrated agents; and CoT gains concentrate on Hard and Extra-Hard queries. We release a Python harness mirroring the autonomy axis so that future methods can be added directly to the leaderboard.
Changruo Zhao, Zujun Peng, Yu Tian et al.· International Conference on...· 0 citations
A simple yet effective zero-shot ReAct-style framework built solely on iterative reasoning and a constrained action space defined by a typed Domain-Specific Language (DSL) of 15 relational operations, rather than free-form SQL generation.
Jian Lu, Haiwei Yu, Raymond M. Xiong et al.· 0 citations
guided table retrieval is presented, a four-phase pipeline that combines deterministic grounding via hash-based predictors, structural exploration of join-graph reachability, LLM-powered disambiguation of sources and targets, and algorithmic merging into minimal, topologically ordered join trees.
Alekh Jindal, J. Pandey, C. Pavlopoulou et al.· 0 citations
In this ablation, retrieved knowledge-base context provides the largest marginal improvement when added to the full oracle graph, and a distillation procedure that turns historical query profiles into reusable SQL reference cards is optimized.