Papers with BIRD
MCS-SQL: Leveraging Multiple Prompts and Multiple-Choice Selection For Text-to-SQL Generation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have enabled in-context learning (ICL)-based methods to outperform fine-tuning approaches for text-to-SQL tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages multiple prompts to explore a broader search space for possible answers and effectively aggregate them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves execution accuracies of 65.5% and 89.6% on BIRD and Spider benchmarks. |
ReEx-SQL: Reasoning with Execution-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQL (2026.acl-long)
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Yaxun Dai, Wenxuan Xie, Xialie Zhuang, Tianyu Yang, Ziyi Liu, Haiqin Yang, Yiying Yang, Yuhang Zhao, Pingfu Chao, Wenhao Jiang
| Challenge: | Current Text-to-SQL reasoning models lack integrated execution feedback during generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-SQL framework that interacts with the SQL execution engine during decoding and dynamically adjusts reasoning based on execution feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 89.1% accuracy on Spider and 65.3% on BIRD at the 7B scale. |
PARSQL: Enhancing Text-to-SQL through SQL Parsing and Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have made significant strides in text-to-SQL tasks, but small language models struggle to accurately interpret natural language questions due to resource limitations. |
| Approach: | They propose a SQL parser that extracts constraints from SQL to generate sub-SQLs . they use a rule-based and LLM-based method to generate step-by-step SQL explanations based on the results . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms models with the same model size on BIRD and Spider benchmarks. |
SQLGenie: A Practical LLM based System for Reliable and Efficient SQL Generation (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) enable natural language to SQL conversion, but generating accurate, efficient queries is challenging due to ambiguous intent, domain knowledge requirements and database constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a system for reliable SQL generation that integrates Table Onboarder, SQL Generator and Feedback Augmentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system surpasses the best single-LLM baseline by 21.5% and the strongest pipeline competitor by 5.3% on public benchmarks and internal datasets. |
CLARITY: A Framework and Benchmark for Conversational Language Ambiguity and Unanswerability in Interactive NL2SQL Systems (2026.acl-industry)
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Tabinda Sarwar, Farhad Moghimifar, Cong Duy Vu Hoang, Xiaoxiao Ma, Shawn Chang Xu, Fahimeh Saleh, Poorya Zaremoodi, Avirup Sil, Katrin Kirchhoff
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks assume a single source of ambiguity and rely on user interaction for resolution, overlooking realistic failure modes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automatically generating an NL2SQL benchmark with multi-faceted ambiguities and diverse user behaviors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework transforms executable SQL into ambiguous queries with a conversational continuation and schema-level metadata. |
TTD-SQL: Tree-Guided Token Decoding for Efficient and Schema-Aware SQL Generation (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Chetan Sharma, Ramasuri Narayanam, Soumyabrata Pal, Kalidas Yeturu, Shiv Kumar Saini, Koyel Mukherjee
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy on benchmarks like Spider and BIRD, but inference latency due to sequential autoregressive decoding remains a challenge for real-time deployments. |
| Approach: | a new framework integrates SQL grammar and database schema constraints into the decoding process . tree-Guided Token Decoding (TTD-SQL) precomputes token-level decision trees over SQL keywords, table names, and column identifiers . |
| Outcome: | a new framework reduces schema hallucinations and inference latency due to autoregressive decoding . tree-Guided Token Decoding achieves 19.96% token-rate speedups . |
SchemaGraphSQL: Efficient Schema Linking with Pathfinding Graph Algorithms for Text-to-SQL on Large-Scale Databases (2026.findings-eacl)
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AmirHossein Safdarian, Milad Mohammadi, Ehsan Jahanbakhsh Bashirloo, Mona Shahamat Naderi, Heshaam Faili
| Challenge: | Text-to-SQL systems translate natural language questions into executable SQL queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a schema linking approach that first constructs a graph based on foreign key relations and then uses a single prompt to a lightweight LLM to extract source and destination tables from the user query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms specialized, fine-tuned, and complex multi-step approaches on BIRD and Spider 2.0 benchmarks. |
LitE-SQL: A Lightweight and Efficient Text-to-SQL Framework with Vector-based Schema Linking and Execution-Guided Self-Correction (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on proprietary models to generate SQL queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight framework that translates natural language questions into SQL queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 72.10% execution accuracy on BIRD and 88.45% on Spider 1.0 . it offers a practical solution for privacy-sensitive and resource-constrained settings. |
Rethinking Schema Linking: A Context-Aware Bidirectional Retrieval Approach for Text-to-SQL (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent methods focus on improving SQL generation but neglect retrieval of relevant schema elements. |
| Approach: | They propose a context-aware bidirectional schema retrieval framework that treats schema linking as a standalone problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves schema recall while reducing false positives. |
Memo-SQL: Structured Decomposition and Experience-Driven Self-Correction for Training-Free NL2SQL (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing NL2SQL systems rely on in-context learning with only correct examples . current test-time scaling methods often decompose questions arbitrarily, resulting in poor performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a structured decomposition and experience-aware self-correction framework for NL2SQL . they build a dynamic memory of successful queries and historical error–fix pairs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 68.5% execution accuracy on BIRD, setting new state of the art among open, zero-fine-tuning methods. |
DPC: Training-Free Text-to-SQL Candidate Selection via Dual-Paradigm Consistency (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating SQL queries lack the ability to self-evaluate correctness without an execution oracle. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates SQL selection from a probabilistic guessing task on hidden data into a deterministic verification task on visible data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on BIRD and Spider show that the proposed method outperforms baselines. |
Bidirectional Semantic Enhancement for Schema Routing Across Large-Scale Databases (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods relying on unidirectional query expansion fail to bridge lexical mismatches and graph-based approaches struggle to navigate schemas when explicit structural links are missing. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval framework that bridges the semantic gap between user queries and vague schema definitions by performing online generative query expansion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed retrieval framework bridges the semantic gap between user queries and vague schema definitions by enriching table schemas offline and performing online generative query expansion. |
QBridge: Bridging Natural Language and SQL via Gold Query Rewriting with Agentic Refinement (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Natural language to SQL (NL2SQL) is an intuitive interface for querying structured data . but real user questions are noisy, ambiguous, and weakly grounded to database semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose an agentic feedback-driven NL2SQL framework that bridges natural language and SQL via Gold Query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong prompting and agentic baselines on spider, BIRD, and three robustness variants on NL2SQL. |
UCS-SQL: Uniting Content and Structure for Enhanced Semantic Bridging In Text-to-SQL (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhenhe Wu, Zhongqiu Li, JieZhangChinaTele JieZhangChinaTele, Zhongjiang He, Jian Yang, Yu Zhao, Ruiyu Fang, Bing Wang, Hongyan Xie, Shuangyong Song, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods overlook the challenge of effectively transforming structure information from NL to SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-SQL framework that unites content and structure pipes to bridge the gap between NL and SQL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the gap between natural language questions and SQL by combining content and structure pipes. |
Retrieve Only Relevant Tables Whether Few or Many: Adaptive Table Retrieval Method (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieving relevant tables from databases are limited by the number of tables required. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive table retrieval method that adjusts the number of tables retrieved according to the requirements of each query. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Spider, BIRD, and Spider 2.0 show that the proposed method improves performance and retrieval and downstream tasks. |
Graph-Reward-SQL: Execution-Free Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQL via Graph Matching and Stepwise Reward (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Han Weng, Puzhen Wu, Cui Longjie, Yi Zhan, Boyi Liu, Yuanfeng Song, Dun Zeng, Yingxiang Yang, Qianru Zhang, Dong Huang, Xiaoming Yin, Yang Sun, Xing Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance performance of large language models (LLMs) on Text-to-SQL tasks rely on execution-based or LLM-based reward models. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward model framework for RL-based Text-to-SQL that employs the GMNScore outcome reward model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reward model outperforms existing reward models on standard benchmarks including Spider and BIRD. |
Beyond Quantity: Trajectory Diversity Scaling for Code Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Guhong Chen, Chenghao Sun, Cheng Fu, Qiyao Wang, Zhihong Huang, ChaoPeng Wei, Guangxu Chen, Feiteng Fang, Ahmadreza Argha, Bing Zhao, Xander Xu, Qi Han, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Qiang Qu, Binhua Li, Shiwen Ni, Min Yang, HU Wei, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Code large language models (LLMs) are becoming tool-interactive agents . quantity-centric scaling exhibits an early bottleneck that underutilizes trajectory data . et al.: a new approach to scale trajectory diversity improves tool-use generalization . |
| Approach: | They propose a Trajectory Diversity Scaling-based data synthesis framework for code agents that scales performance through diversity rather than raw volume. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on general tool-use benchmarks and code agent tasks show that TDScaling improves tool-user generalization and inherent coding proficiency. |
SQL-ASTRA: Alleviating Sparse Feedback in Agentic SQL via Column-Set Matching and Trajectory Aggregation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Agentic SQL is a framework for multiturn agent learning, but it is limited to single-turn paradigms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that provides a universal two-tiered reward mechanism for credit assignment . they propose 'Aggregated Trajectory Reward' to resolve multi-turn credit assignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA Arctic-Text2SQL-R1-7B on BIRD and Spider 2.0 using identical models. |
Optimizing Reasoning for Text-to-SQL with Execution Feedback (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models excel in many reasoning tasks, but their ability to leverage Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that iteratively optimizes open-source LLMs by combining CoT reasoning with off-policy and on-poly DPO, relying solely on execution accuracy as feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves execution accuracy on BIRD and Spider datasets. |
DB-Explore: Automated Database Exploration and Instruction Synthesis for Text-to-SQL (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent text-to-SQL systems that use large language models struggle with complex database structures and domain-specific queries. |
| Approach: | a framework that aligns large language models with database knowledge is proposed . DB-Explore constructs database graphs to capture complex relational schemas . |
| Outcome: | a new framework outperforms existing text-to-SQL systems by outperforming existing systems. |
BIRD: Bronze Inscription Restoration and Dating (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing applications of artificial intelligence to bronze inscriptions focus almost exclusively on computer vision . |
| Approach: | They propose a fully encoded dataset that integrates domain- and task-adaptive pretraining with a Glyph Net to model bronze inscriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves restoration, while glyph-biased sampling yields gains in dating. |
DeKeyNLU: Enhancing Natural Language to SQL Generation through Task Decomposition and Keyword Extraction (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jian Chen, Zhenyan Chen, Xuming Hu, Peilin Zhou, Yining Hua, Han Fang, Cissy Hing Yee Choy, Xinmei Ke, Jingfeng Luo, Zixuan Yuan
| Challenge: | NL2SQL provides a model-centric paradigm that simplifies database access for non-technical users . challenges such as inaccurate task decomposition and keyword extraction remain major bottlenecks . |
| Approach: | They propose a RAG-based NL2SQL pipeline that employs three modules for query understanding, entity retrieval, and generation to improve SQL generation accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves the accuracy of query generation on BIRD and Spider datasets. |
GenLink: Generation-Driven Schema-Linking via Multi-Model Learning for Text-to-SQL (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results on BIRD and Spider benchmarks validate the effectiveness of GenLink. |
| Approach: | They propose a generation-driven schema-linking framework based on multi-model learning . experimental results validate the effectiveness of GenLink . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that GenLink improves schema-linking recall rate and cross-domain adaptability. |
VET: Verifiable Execution Tracing for Reliable Text-to-SQL Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text-to-SQL generation are prone to hallucinations and grounding . authors present a novel reasoning paradigm that transforms text- to-Sql from unverifiable textual rationales into step-wise executable semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning paradigm that transforms text-to-SQL from unverifiable textual rationales into step-wise executable semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reasoning paradigm transforms text-to-SQL from unverifiable textual rationales into step-wise executable semantics. |
REaR : Retrieve, Expand and Refine for Effective Multitable Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | REaR is retriever-agnostic and improves dense/ sparse retrievers on complex table QA datasets. |
| Approach: | a new framework separates semantic relevance from structural joinability for efficient multi-table retrieval. adam scott and eric liu introduce REaR, a three-stage, LLM-free framework. |
| Outcome: | a new framework improves retrieval quality and performance on complex table QA datasets . it separates semantic relevance from structural joinability and prunes weakly related candidates . the framework is retriever-agnostic and delivers performance competitive with state-of-the-art LLM-augmented retrieval systems . |