SQL-Zero: Self-Evolving Text-to-SQL

📅 2026-09-04
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
研究提出SQL-Zero,通过自进化提出者-解决者自我博弈方法,在无标注数据的情况下训练文本到SQL的转换模型,以克服人工标注对扩展性的限制。
📝 Abstract
Training a competitive Text-to-SQL agent usually depends on human-annotated natural-language/SQL pairs, which are expensive, domain-specific, and a bottleneck for scaling to new databases. We show it is possible to train a competitive solver with zero annotated pairs. We introduce SQL-Zero, a proposer-solver self-play in which a challenger and a solver start from the same base LLM and the only ground truth is execution against the database itself. The challenger generates SQL pairs calibrated to the solver's current difficulty (targeting "hard but solvable"), and both roles are updated with GRPO in alternating turns, with a template-level repetition penalty on the challenger to prevent diversity collapse. Training on BIRD databases with no labels, self-play improves over the zero-shot base on BIRD dev by 6.6 points at 3B and 7.3 points at 7B. It also scores higher than a matched control trained under the same recipe on human BIRD gold over the same databases, although an exact paired test does not resolve that margin. Transfer depends on scale: at 3B every iteration outperforms the base on unseen Spider databases and under lexical perturbation (Spider-Syn), where it also degrades less than the matched BIRD-gold control, whereas at 7B only the first iteration preserves transfer.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Text-to-SQL
zero annotated pairs
self-play
database
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

self-play
zero-annotated pairs
GRPO
template-level repetition penalty
transferability
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