SPOC-SQL is proposed, which decomposes Text-to-SQL into four sequential subtasks following standard SQL execution logic and designs stage-specific optimization strategies for the model to learn key decisions, with the objective of enhancing structured decision-making during query construction.
Abstract
Text-to-SQL aims to translate natural language questions into executable SQL queries over relational databases, requiring multi-stage structured reasoning over database schemas and query constraints. However, existing methods treat this task as single-step generation, where models optimize entire SQL sequences without targeted feedback at key decision points and lack support for interacting with and controlling the intermediate generation process. To address this issue, we propose SPOC-SQL, which decomposes Text-to-SQL into four sequential subtasks following standard SQL execution logic and designs stage-specific optimization strategies for the model to learn key decisions. Specifically, we propose the implementation of fine-grained preference optimisation at key decision points across SQL stages, with the objective of enhancing structured decision-making during query construction. Furthermore, a structured decomposition strategy is designed, facilitating stage-wise intervention and correction through explicit intermediate representations. This results in more controllable and reliable SQL generation. Experiments demonstrate that incorporating stage-wise human knowledge consistently improves performance, validating the effectiveness of stage perception controllable generation.
It is suggested that structured prompt engineering provides a practical alternative to model fine-tuning for locally deployed LLMs, offering an effective balance between SQL generation accuracy, computational efficiency, and data privacy.
Nurjayanti Nurjayanti, A. Adiwijaya, A. Romadhony et al.· Jurnal RESTI (Rekayasa Siste...· 0 citations
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become foundational to next-generation Intelligent Information Systems, the bridge between natural language interfaces and structured database systems remains a critical bottleneck. While Text-to-SQL generation enables cooperative support for complex query formulation, ensuring the reliability of these generated queries at inference time is a central challenge. Conventional methods rely on coarse execution-based signals, which may limit their ability to capture the nuanced semantic alignment required for high-stakes database environments. In this work, we propose the use of Outcome Reward Models (ORMs) as a fine-grained, probabilistic feedback mechanism for test-time verification in Text-to-SQL tasks. We introduce GradeSQL, a framework for training task-specific ORMs that assign scalar utility scores to candidate SQL queries based on their semantic correctness and alignment with database schema. Our approach is evaluated on the BIRD and Spider benchmarks across multiple open-source LLM families. Experimental results demonstrate that ORM-based verification consistently outperforms traditional execution-based heuristics.
M. Tritto, G. Farano, Dario Di Palma et al.· Journal of Intelligence and...· 2 citations
SQuaD-SQL (Small-Qualified and Distilled for SQL), a novel approach that empowers small language models to approach the performance of LLMs on the Text-to-SQL task while significantly improving efficiency through knowledge distillation and synthetic data generation, is introduced.
Wangyu Wu, Xiaojian Lin, Rong Fu et al.· 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
Given a database S and a natural language question Q, text-to-SQL systems aim to generate an SQL query that correctly answers Q when executed against S. Currently, popular text-to-SQL benchmarks mostly assume unrestricted access to S; in practice, however, user access is often restricted, e.g., through role-based access control (RBAC) policies. This leads to a potential disconnect between benchmarking results and real-world performance: an LLM with high benchmark scores might perform poorly in an access-controlled environment, by frequently violating RBAC, or rejecting a query q that could be answered with only permitted data in S. Motivated by this, we present a comprehensive text-to-SQL benchmarking framework with realistic RBAC constraints, which features an LLM-assisted workflow that augments existing text-to-SQL benchmarks with plausible user roles and access policies. To do so, we formulate the problem of role synthesis as a structured reasoning process over the database schema, in which the LLM first infers the application context from the schema, and then derives role responsibilities and access scopes consistent with this context. This process is audited by human-in-the-loop quality control, in which domain experts perform metric-guided screening on the generated roles. Besides the augmented dataset, the proposed framework also contains evaluation metrics that identify RBAC-specific failure modes, and disentangle SQL utility from access-control compliance. We apply the proposed framework to several widely-used benchmarks, and conduct a systematic empirical study of state-of-the-art text-to-SQL systems. The results show that many solutions (especially open-weight LLMs) with high benchmarking scores under an unrestricted setting suffer sharp performance degradation once access constraints are in place, due to frequent RBAC violations.
Yang Fei, Yangfan Jiang, Yin Yang et al.· 0 citations