Prompt Template-Driven Large Model SQL Generation

Iteration Without Elaboration: A Simple ReAct Architecture Suffices for Text-to-SQL Generation

Modern text-to-SQL systems have become increasingly elaborate, relying on schema-linking modules, retrieval-augmented prompting, candidate generation, and multi-stage refinement pipelines. While effective, these additions introduce substantial latency and engineering overhead. To this end, we present \textbf{ReAct-SQL}, 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. The model incrementally issues DSL calls, observes compiled-SQL execution feedback, and revises its reasoning through interaction. On corrected BIRD mini-dev and EHR-SQL, ReAct-SQL achieves \textbf{84.5\%} and \textbf{73.9\%} accuracy, respectively, matching substantially more elaborate baselines while running up to $8\times$ faster. Incremental ablations further show that iteration primarily improves grounding, while the DSL improves compositional reliability.

ExpeSQL: An Efficient, Experience-Guided Decompositional Search Framework for Text-to-SQL

ACTS-SQL: Agentic and Critic-Oriented Tree-Structured SQL Correctness with Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly adopted in Text-to-SQL systems, yet SQL errors remain a major obstacle in real-world Text-to-SQL inference pipelines. Existing SQL correction approaches either rely on large-scale, high-quality training data with substantial overhead, or adopt single-path agentic workflows that are brittle to early mistakes and prone to error propagation. To develop a practical SQL correctness system for industrial scenarios, we present a training-free framework that formulates SQL correction as a plan-guided, tree-structured debugging process. By maintaining multiple correction strategies and enabling backtracking, the framework mitigates error accumulation during iterative refinement. We further integrate execution-based verification and clause-level diagnostic tools to support strategy pruning and precise error localization. We evaluate the system on the BIRD-Critic benchmark and observe consistent accuracy gains over strong LLM backbones and representative agent-based baselines, achieving a 9.42% improvement over the previous state-of-the-art method. The framework is also deployed in the Torch Log Service (TLS) of Volcano Engine to support an online Text-to-TLS API. In production, it improves execution accuracy from 36.77% to 53.61% on real user queries with a representative strong LLM backbone (GPT-5). These results demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of our approach in real-world deployments.

GradeSQL: Outcome reward models for intelligent Text-to-SQL generation from LLMs

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.

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

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.

Validating LLM-Generated SQL Queries through Metamorphic Prompting

Large Language Models (LLMs) can translate natural language (NL) into SQL, enabling non-experts to query databases via conversational interfaces. However, the generated SQL often contains intent-violating hallucinations—queries that are syntactically valid and executable, yet semantically misaligned with the user’s question. These failures are especially risky in real-world settings where users cannot verify the correctness. In this paper, we propose MRSQLGen, a framework for detecting intent-violating hallucinations, built on the metamorphic prompting paradigm. MRSQLGen rewrites the input prompt using task-specific transformation rules derived from a hallucination taxonomy, and validates the generated SQL by checking behavioral consistency across multiple executions. Each transformation is associated with a metamorphic relationship (MR) that defines the expected relation between results; discrepancies are aggregated through a majority-vote strategy to robustly flag hallucinations without ground-truth SQL. We evaluate MRSQLGen on two benchmarks (Spider and Bird) using five representative LLMs, including GPT-4o. Experimental results demonstrate that MRSQLGen consistently outperforms state-of-the-art hallucination detection techniques, achieving higher precision and recall in detecting hallucinated SQL queries.