English

CSC-SQL: Corrective Self-Consistency in Text-to-SQL via Reinforcement Learning

Computation and Language 2025-07-01 v2

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in translating natural language questions about relational databases into SQL queries. In particular, test-time scaling techniques such as Self-Consistency and Self-Correction can enhance SQL generation accuracy by increasing computational effort during inference. However, these methods have notable limitations: Self-Consistency may select suboptimal outputs despite majority votes, while Self-Correction typically addresses only syntactic errors. To leverage the strengths of both approaches, we propose CSC-SQL, a novel method that integrates Self-Consistency and Self-Correction. CSC-SQL selects the two most frequently occurring outputs from parallel sampling and feeds them into a merge revision model for correction. Additionally, we employ the Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) algorithm to fine-tune both the SQL generation and revision models via reinforcement learning, significantly enhancing output quality. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness and generalizability of CSC-SQL. On the BIRD private test set, our 7B model achieves 71.72\% execution accuracy, while the 32B model achieves 73.67\%. The code has been open sourced at https://github.com/CycloneBoy/csc_sql.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.13271,
  title  = {CSC-SQL: Corrective Self-Consistency in Text-to-SQL via Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Lei Sheng and Shuai-Shuai Xu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.13271},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

25 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T02:22:15.772Z