Query and Conquer: Execution-Guided SQL Generation

2025-03-31

AI Summary

In text-to-SQL tasks, lightweight models suffer from low accuracy on complex queries and high inference overhead. This paper proposes an execution-result-guided multi-candidate SQL filtering framework, introducing the first execution-feedback-driven candidate reranking paradigm. Leveraging a lightweight semantic consistency scoring mechanism, it reranks sampled SQL queries based on actual database execution validation—requiring no fine-tuning and enabling plug-and-play adaptation to any SQL generation model. Our method significantly improves semantic correctness and execution accuracy of small models on complex queries. It outperforms large reasoning models—including o1, o3-mini, and DeepSeek R1—across multiple standard benchmarks, while reducing inference cost by up to 30×. To our knowledge, this is the first approach to achieve simultaneous superiority in both accuracy and efficiency for lightweight models in text-to-SQL.

Technology Category

Natural Language Processing: Sentence-level Semantics, Textual Inference, etc.Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Intelligent Query ProcessingSearch and Optimization: Learning to Search

Application Category

Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web search models and rankingSemantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMsUser Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Fairness-aware retrieval and ranking

Abstract

We propose a novel approach for generating complex outputs that significantly improves accuracy in text-to-SQL tasks. Our method leverages execution results to select the most semantically consistent query from multiple candidates, enabling smaller, cost-effective models to surpass computationally intensive reasoning methods such as o1, o3-mini, and DeepSeek R1 while reducing inference cost by as much as 30 times. It integrates effortlessly with existing models, offering a practical and scalable pathway to state-of-the-art SQL generation.

Problem

• Improving accuracy in text-to-SQL tasks
• Using execution results to select best query
• Reducing inference cost by 30 times

Innovation

• Execution-guided SQL query selection
• Cost-effective models outperform intensive methods
• Seamless integration with existing models