Daily Papers

The capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly accelerating largely thanks to their integration with external tools. Querying databases is among the most effective of these integrations, enabling LLMs to access private or continually updating data. While Function Calling is the most common method for interfacing external tools to LLMs, its application to database querying as a tool has been underexplored. We propose a tool definition for database querying that unifies accessing data with search queries, filters, or a combination both, as well as transforming results with aggregation and groupby operators. To evaluate its effectiveness, we conduct a study with 8 LLMs spanning 5 model families. We present a novel pipeline adapting the Gorilla LLM framework to create synthetic database schemas and queries. We primarily evaluate the models with the Exact Match of predicted and ground truth query APIs. Among the models tested, Claude 3.5 Sonnet achieves the highest performance with an Exact Match score of 74.3%, followed by GPT-4o mini at 73.7%, and GPT-4o at 71.8%. We further breakdown these results per API component utilized and across synthetic use cases. We find that LLMs are highly effective at utilizing operators on boolean properties, but struggle with text property filters. Across use cases we find robust results with the higher performing models such as GPT-4o, but significant performance variance across use cases from lower performing models. We additionally conduct ablation studies exploring the impact of parallel tool calling, adding a rationale as an argument of the tool call, using a separate tool per database collection, and tool calling with structured outputs. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of enabling LLMs to query databases with Function Calling. We have open-sourced our experimental code and results at github.com/weaviate/gorilla.

Natural language interfaces to databases aim to translate user questions into executable SQL, yet remain brittle in real-world settings where questions are underspecified and schemas are large and ambiguous. Ambiguity across user questions, database schemas, and model interpretations are central failure modes in NL2SQL, leading to misaligned intent, incorrect schema grounding, and erroneous SQL generation. Existing approaches rely on human clarification or treat ambiguity as a schema representation problem, but these do not scale nor resolve ambiguity autonomously. We propose SOMA-SQL to automatically resolve ambiguity via targeted synthetic query log and ambiguity-driven probing. SOMA-SQL constructs synthetic query log to ground schema interpretation and guide candidate SQL generation; it then executes targeted probing queries, driven by a structured ambiguity taxonomy and candidate disagreements, to produce disambiguation evidence for final SQL selection and repair. This active approach to ambiguity discovery and resolution generalizes across unseen schemas and query distributions without human-in-the-loop. Experiments on six public benchmarks demonstrate that SOMA-SQL improves execution accuracy by 13.0% on average over state-of-the-art baselines, with gains of up to 16.7% on ambiguous questions.

Advances in large language models have accelerated progress in text-to-SQL, methods for converting natural language queries into valid SQL queries. A key bottleneck for developing generalizable text-to-SQL models is the lack of large-scale datasets with sufficient schema and query complexity, domain coverage, and task diversity. We introduce SQaLe: a large-scale semi-synthetic text-to-SQL dataset built on 135,875 relational database schemas expanded from a collection of real-world schemas, SchemaPile. We establish a principled generation pipeline which combines schema sampling, question synthesis, and SQL construction, and produce 517,676 high-quality (question, schema, query) triples. The SQaLe dataset captures realistic schema size variability, diverse query patterns, and natural language ambiguity while maintaining execution validity. We provide an analysis of its contents and characteristics, and find that SQaLe introduces the most realistic large-scale text-to-SQL dataset to date in comparison with existing benchmarks and datasets. We discuss how SQaLe enables our vision for data scaling and model generalization in text-to-SQL research. The dataset is accessible at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/trl-lab/SQaLe-text-to-SQL-dataset.

We present a framework for evaluating data-science agents on live, continuously updated data using executable ground truth and format-agnostic factoid scoring. Consider this example query: "what were last week's audience sizes"---the reference answer changes as the underlying data changes, so static references become outdated and standard LLM-as-a-judge pipelines cannot verify responses against a fixed ground truth. Our central contribution, ground-truth-as-code, encodes each expected answer as an executable reference function that recomputes the answer directly from live data at evaluation time, ensuring the reference remains consistent with the system it describes. We combine this with a factoid-level, format-agnostic judge that decomposes both the agent's response and the computed ground truth into atomic claims and scores precision, recall, and accuracy over them, irrespective of the response format (prose, list, table, HTML, etc.). The approach is applicable to agents whose expected outputs can be expressed as executable data computations. We validate the framework through a human--LLM agreement study on an internally developed machine learning skill deployed in production, using a synthetic database constructed to reproduce production schemas and entity relationships. Relative to a natural-language ground-truth baseline, our method achieves a 29% improvement in the Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC)---a class-balanced measure of agreement between expert annotators and LLM-as-a-judge predictions---and a 16% reduction in token consumption per test case, while a self-directed baseline lacking explicit ground truth is anti-correlated with human judgment. Agents that perform multi-source data integration and computation over non-stationary data are routinely deployed in industry; we propose ground-truth-as-code as a practical methodology for their evaluation.

We propose AutoQA, a methodology and toolkit to generate semantic parsers that answer questions on databases, with no manual effort. Given a database schema and its data, AutoQA automatically generates a large set of high-quality questions for training that covers different database operations. It uses automatic paraphrasing combined with template-based parsing to find alternative expressions of an attribute in different parts of speech. It also uses a novel filtered auto-paraphraser to generate correct paraphrases of entire sentences. We apply AutoQA to the Schema2QA dataset and obtain an average logical form accuracy of 62.9% when tested on natural questions, which is only 6.4% lower than a model trained with expert natural language annotations and paraphrase data collected from crowdworkers. To demonstrate the generality of AutoQA, we also apply it to the Overnight dataset. AutoQA achieves 69.8% answer accuracy, 16.4% higher than the state-of-the-art zero-shot models and only 5.2% lower than the same model trained with human data.

Recently, there has been increasing interest in synthesizing data to improve downstream text-to-SQL tasks. In this paper, we first examined the existing synthesized datasets and discovered that state-of-the-art text-to-SQL algorithms did not further improve on popular benchmarks when trained with augmented synthetic data. We observed two shortcomings: illogical synthetic SQL queries from independent column sampling and arbitrary table joins. To address these issues, we propose a novel synthesis framework that incorporates key relationships from schema, imposes strong typing, and conducts schema-distance-weighted column sampling. We also adopt an intermediate representation (IR) for the SQL-to-text task to further improve the quality of the generated natural language questions. When existing powerful semantic parsers are pre-finetuned on our high-quality synthesized data, our experiments show that these models have significant accuracy boosts on popular benchmarks, including new state-of-the-art performance on Spider.

Evaluating text-to-SQL systems remains largely fragile: correctness is typically judged by executing predicted and gold SQL queries on a single static database, even though the same queries may behave differently under alternative database instances. This raises a broader language modeling question: Can large language models synthesize semantically meaningful, schema-consistent relational data directly from a natural language question? If so, such generation can serve as a controlled mechanism for stress-testing text-to-SQL systems beyond fixed benchmark databases. We introduce SynSQL, a framework that synthesizes test databases conditioned on question-schema alignment rather than gold SQL queries. SynSQL decomposes the task into three stages: (1) schema selection, (2) question-guided data synthesis, and (3) constraint-aware critique with iterative refinement, framing database construction as structured generation under semantic and relational constraints. Across ten text-to-SQL models on Spider, BIRD, and Spider 2.0, SynSQL-generated databases reveal performance drops of 3-14% compared to static evaluation, exposing errors masked by benchmark artifacts. We further analyze generation quality, constraint adherence, and failure modes, highlighting both the promise and limitations of LLMs in structured data synthesis. Our findings position synthetic database generation as a new lens for studying LLM reasoning, controllability, and robustness in structured environments.

Existing Text-to-SQL generators require the entire schema to be encoded with the user text. This is expensive or impractical for large databases with tens of thousands of columns. Standard dense retrieval techniques are inadequate for schema subsetting of a large structured database, where the correct semantics of retrieval demands that we rank sets of schema elements rather than individual elements. In response, we propose a two-stage process for effective coverage during retrieval. First, we instruct an LLM to hallucinate a minimal DB schema deemed adequate to answer the query. We use the hallucinated schema to retrieve a subset of the actual schema, by composing the results from multiple dense retrievals. Remarkably, hallucination x2013 generally considered a nuisance x2013 turns out to be actually useful as a bridging mechanism. Since no existing benchmarks exist for schema subsetting on large databases, we introduce three benchmarks. Two semi-synthetic datasets are derived from the union of schemas in two well-known datasets, SPIDER and BIRD, resulting in 4502 and 798 schema elements respectively. A real-life benchmark called SocialDB is sourced from an actual large data warehouse comprising 17844 schema elements. We show that our method1 leads to significantly higher recall than SOTA retrieval-based augmentation methods.

Relational Foundation Models (RFMs) facilitate data-driven decision-making by learning from complex multi-table databases. However, the diverse relational databases needed to train such models are rarely public due to privacy constraints. While there are methods to generate synthetic tabular data of arbitrary size, incorporating schema structure and primary--foreign key connectivity for multi-table generation remains challenging. Here we introduce PluRel, a framework to synthesize multi-tabular relational databases from scratch. In a step-by-step fashion, PluRel models (1) schemas with directed graphs, (2) inter-table primary-foreign key connectivity with bipartite graphs, and, (3) feature distributions in tables via conditional causal mechanisms. The design space across these stages supports the synthesis of a wide range of diverse databases, while being computationally lightweight. Using PluRel, we observe for the first time that (1) RFM pretraining loss exhibits power-law scaling with the number of synthetic databases and total pretraining tokens, (2) scaling the number of synthetic databases improves generalization to real databases, and (3) synthetic pretraining yields strong base models for continued pretraining on real databases. Overall, our framework and results position synthetic data scaling as a promising paradigm for RFMs.

Schema linking is a critical bottleneck in applying existing Text-to-SQL models to real-world, large-scale, multi-database environments. Through error analysis, we identify two major challenges in schema linking: (1) Database Retrieval: accurately selecting the target database from a large schema pool, while effectively filtering out irrelevant ones; and (2) Schema Item Grounding: precisely identifying the relevant tables and columns within complex and often redundant schemas for SQL generation. Based on these, we introduce LinkAlign, a novel framework tailored for large-scale databases with thousands of fields. LinkAlign comprises three key steps: multi-round semantic enhanced retrieval and irrelevant information isolation for Challenge 1, and schema extraction enhancement for Challenge 2. Each stage supports both Agent and Pipeline execution modes, enabling balancing efficiency and performance via modular design. To enable more realistic evaluation, we construct AmbiDB, a synthetic dataset designed to reflect the ambiguity of real-world schema linking. Experiments on widely-used Text-to-SQL benchmarks demonstrate that LinkAlign consistently outperforms existing baselines on all schema linking metrics. Notably, it improves the overall Text-to-SQL pipeline and achieves a new state-of-the-art score of 33.09% on the Spider 2.0-Lite benchmark using only open-source LLMs, ranking first on the leaderboard at the time of submission. The codes are available at https://github.com/Satissss/LinkAlign

Relational databases are central to modern data management, yet most data exists in unstructured forms like text documents. To bridge this gap, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to automatically synthesize a relational database by generating its schema and populating its tables from raw text. We introduce SQUiD, a novel neurosymbolic framework that decomposes this task into four stages, each with specialized techniques. Our experiments show that SQUiD consistently outperforms baselines across diverse datasets. Our code and datasets are publicly available at: https://github.com/Mushtari-Sadia/SQUiD.

Tool-calling agents have become central to enterprise AI, yet training and evaluating them at scale remains severely constrained due to business and legal restrictions on enterprise systems, data, and database schemas. Tabular data synthesis offers a natural alternative, but its effectiveness is fundamentally limited by structural validity and schema availability, while procedure-based approaches yield the opposite weakness, typically lacking distributional fidelity without per-domain authoring. We introduce **Synthesis Through Simulation** (STS), a **schema--free** data synthesis paradigm in which an LLM agent generates data by executing operations against policy-enforcing APIs within simulated enterprise environments. Because data is generated through the same environment that defines what is valid, STS guarantees structural validity by construction while decoupling validity enforcement from distribution modeling, allowing each to be addressed independently. The **Generalist Populator** (GP), STS's domain-agnostic agent, addresses the remaining challenges of distributional fidelity and synthesis scalability: GP achieves **0.88** average marginal fidelity and **100\% constraint satisfaction** across all ten environments *without access to DB schemas*, while statistical synthesizers are inapplicable to seven due to necessary seed data requirements, and schema-privileged agents fail 82\% of trajectories on airline environment's tightly coupled workflows due to brittle task composition. We open-source the full framework, all ten environments, and generated datasets at https://github.com/SAP/synthesis-through-simulation.

The capability gap between open-source and closed-source large language models (LLMs) remains a challenge in text-to-SQL tasks. In this paper, we introduce a synthetic data approach that combines data produced by larger, more powerful models (strong models) with error information data generated by smaller, not well-aligned models (weak models). The method not only enhances the domain generalization of text-to-SQL models but also explores the potential of error data supervision through preference learning. Furthermore, we employ the synthetic data approach for instruction tuning on open-source LLMs, resulting SENSE, a specialized text-to-SQL model. The effectiveness of SENSE is demonstrated through state-of-the-art results on the SPIDER and BIRD benchmarks, bridging the performance gap between open-source models and methods prompted by closed-source models.

The success of AI models relies on the availability of large, diverse, and high-quality datasets, which can be challenging to obtain due to data scarcity, privacy concerns, and high costs. Synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution by generating artificial data that mimics real-world patterns. This paper provides an overview of synthetic data research, discussing its applications, challenges, and future directions. We present empirical evidence from prior art to demonstrate its effectiveness and highlight the importance of ensuring its factuality, fidelity, and unbiasedness. We emphasize the need for responsible use of synthetic data to build more powerful, inclusive, and trustworthy language models.

Research on parsing language to SQL has largely ignored the structure of the database (DB) schema, either because the DB was very simple, or because it was observed at both training and test time. In Spider, a recently-released text-to-SQL dataset, new and complex DBs are given at test time, and so the structure of the DB schema can inform the predicted SQL query. In this paper, we present an encoder-decoder semantic parser, where the structure of the DB schema is encoded with a graph neural network, and this representation is later used at both encoding and decoding time. Evaluation shows that encoding the schema structure improves our parser accuracy from 33.8% to 39.4%, dramatically above the current state of the art, which is at 19.7%.

Text-to-SQL aims to translate natural language questions into executable SQL queries over structured databases. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on closed-domain settings with predefined database schemas and well-specified questions, but they fall short in addressing the challenges of open-domain scenarios, such as ambiguous questions, unspecified databases, and cross-database querying. To bridge this gap, we introduce TACO, a benchmark for open-domain Text-to-SQL with Ambiguous and Cross-database queries. TACO consists of 1,500 real-world Text-to-SQL examples based on a smart city data service and 13,000 high-quality synthetic examples generated based on large-scale open data portals, covering diverse domains such as transportation, healthcare, and finance. To construct the synthetic examples, we develop an effective data synthesis pipeline that preserves the complexity of real-world queries. To demonstrate the utility of TACO, we introduce a baseline TACO-SQL composed of question rewriting, table linking, and query planning, to illustrate the challenges posed by TACO and to better understand the limitations of existing Text-to-SQL approaches. Extensive experiments on TACO using a variety of recent Text-to-SQL approaches show that, while TACO-SQL achieves the best results, a significant gap still remains between the existing approaches and human-written SQL. These findings highlight the difficulty of open-domain Text-to-SQL and position TACO as a valuable benchmark to drive future research.

Recent advancements in Text-to-SQL (Text2SQL) emphasize stimulating the large language models (LLM) on in-context learning, achieving significant results. Nevertheless, they face challenges when dealing with verbose database information and complex user intentions. This paper presents a two-stage framework to enhance the performance of current LLM-based natural language to SQL systems. We first introduce a novel prompt representation, called reference-enhanced representation, which includes schema information and randomly sampled cell values from tables to instruct LLMs in generating SQL queries. Then, in the first stage, question-SQL pairs are retrieved as few-shot demonstrations, prompting the LLM to generate a preliminary SQL (PreSQL). After that, the mentioned entities in PreSQL are parsed to conduct schema linking, which can significantly compact the useful information. In the second stage, with the linked schema, we simplify the prompt's schema information and instruct the LLM to produce the final SQL. Finally, as the post-refinement module, we propose using cross-consistency across different LLMs rather than self-consistency within a particular LLM. Our methods achieve new SOTA results on the Spider benchmark, with an execution accuracy of 87.6%.

For a full-stack web or app development, it requires a software firm or more specifically a team of experienced developers to contribute a large portion of their time and resources to design the website and then convert it to code. As a result, the efficiency of the development team is significantly reduced when it comes to converting UI wireframes and database schemas into an actual working system. It would save valuable resources and fasten the overall workflow if the clients or developers can automate this process of converting the pre-made full-stack website design to get a partially working if not fully working code. In this paper, we present a novel approach of generating the skeleton code from sketched images using Deep Learning and Computer Vision approaches. The dataset for training are first-hand sketched images of low fidelity wireframes, database schemas and class diagrams. The approach consists of three parts. First, the front-end or UI elements detection and extraction from custom-made UI wireframes. Second, individual database table creation from schema designs and lastly, creating a class file from class diagrams.

Data synthesis is gaining momentum as a privacy-enhancing technology. While single-table tabular data generation has seen considerable progress, current methods for multi-table data often lack the flexibility and expressiveness needed to capture complex relational structures. In particular, they struggle with long-range dependencies and complex foreign-key relationships, such as tables with multiple parent tables or multiple types of links between the same pair of tables. We propose a generative model for relational data that generates the content of a relational dataset given the graph formed by the foreign-key relationships. We do this by learning a deep generative model of the content of the whole relational database by flow matching, where the neural network trained to denoise records leverages a graph neural network to obtain information from connected records. Our method is flexible, as it can support relational datasets with complex structures, and expressive, as the generation of each record can be influenced by any other record within the same connected component. We evaluate our method on several benchmark datasets and show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of synthetic data fidelity.

Machine learning development critically depends on access to high-quality data. However, increasing restrictions due to privacy, proprietary interests, and ethical concerns have created significant barriers to data accessibility. Synthetic data offers a viable solution by enabling safe, broad data usage without compromising sensitive information. This paper presents the MOSTLY AI Synthetic Data Software Development Kit (SDK), an open-source toolkit designed specifically for synthesizing high-quality tabular data. The SDK integrates robust features such as differential privacy guarantees, fairness-aware data generation, and automated quality assurance into a flexible and accessible Python interface. Leveraging the TabularARGN autoregressive framework, the SDK supports diverse data types and complex multi-table and sequential datasets, delivering competitive performance with notable improvements in speed and usability. Currently deployed both as a cloud service and locally installable software, the SDK has seen rapid adoption, highlighting its practicality in addressing real-world data bottlenecks and promoting widespread data democratization.

Training effective Text-to-SQL models remains challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality, diverse, and structurally complex datasets. Existing methods either rely on limited human-annotated corpora, or synthesize datasets directly by simply prompting LLMs without explicit control over SQL structures, often resulting in limited structural diversity and complexity. To address this, we introduce EvolSQL, a structure-aware data synthesis framework that evolves SQL queries from seed data into richer and more semantically diverse forms. EvolSQL starts with an exploratory Query-SQL expansion to broaden question diversity and improve schema coverage, and then applies an adaptive directional evolution strategy using six atomic transformation operators derived from the SQL Abstract Syntax Tree to progressively increase query complexity across relational, predicate, aggregation, and nesting dimensions. An execution-grounded SQL refinement module and schema-aware deduplication further ensure the creation of high-quality, structurally diverse mapping pairs. Experimental results show that a 7B model fine-tuned on our data outperforms one trained on the much larger SynSQL dataset using only 1/18 of the data.

Document databases such as MongoDB are core infrastructure for modern applications, and natural-language interfaces to them---text-to-MQL---would let non-experts query complex, semi-structured data without mastering the query language. Progress on this task depends on high-quality benchmarks, which are most practically obtained by converting an existing text-to-SQL benchmark to the document setting. Unfortunately, existing efforts rely on heuristics for mechanical conversion: the document schema mirrors the relational foreign-key graph, and each query mirrors its source SQL. As a result in our experiments, these approaches fail to migrate 6 of 21 BIRD databases outright, silently drop up to 25.9\% of rows on others, and yield schemas whose ground-truth queries run over an order of magnitude slower as the data scales. We instead propose a conversion pipeline, driven by coding agents with human-in-the-loop verification, that designs each document schema from expected access patterns and rewrites queries to be MongoDB-native. Applying it to BIRD, we build an access-pattern-based text-to-MQL benchmark (AptMQL-Bench). It includes 21 document-oriented databases, 3,186 natural-language requests, and their associated MQL queries---whose databases are migrated from SQLite without data loss and scale efficiently. The strongest model, Claude Opus 4.5, achieves only 57.38\% accuracy without external knowledge evidence and 70.34\% with it. This indicates that realistic text-to-MQL generation remains challenging.

Text-to-SQL converts natural language questions into executable SQL queries, enabling non-technical users to access relational databases for analytics and intelligent data services. In real-world scenarios, performance is often constrained by low-resource settings, where high-quality annotated <question, SQL> pairs are scarce, particularly for domain-specific databases. Additional challenges include opaque schema definitions, abbreviations, and implicit business logic that are not explicitly encoded in the schema. Existing data synthesis and prompting techniques improve coverage but often fail to produce task-specific, semantically grounded examples aligned with database constraints. To address these challenges, we propose a knowledge-aware Text-to-SQL framework that constructs task-specific knowledge base including schema semantics, abbreviations, business logic, and query patterns, and injects them into both training and inference. This framework generates diverse, contextually grounded synthetic training data and enhances inference through targeted knowledge retrieval. Experiments on seven benchmarks, covering both general and domain-specific datasets, demonstrate that our approach substantially improves the performance of open-source and closed-source large language models in Text-to-SQL tasks, especially in low-resource domain-specific settings, enhancing generalization, robustness, and adaptability.

Tabular data is a common form of organizing data. Multiple models are available to generate synthetic tabular datasets where observations are independent, but few have the ability to produce relational datasets. Modeling relational data is challenging as it requires modeling both a "parent" table and its relationships across tables. We introduce REaLTabFormer (Realistic Relational and Tabular Transformer), a tabular and relational synthetic data generation model. It first creates a parent table using an autoregressive GPT-2 model, then generates the relational dataset conditioned on the parent table using a sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model. We implement target masking to prevent data copying and propose the Q_{delta} statistic and statistical bootstrapping to detect overfitting. Experiments using real-world datasets show that REaLTabFormer captures the relational structure better than a baseline model. REaLTabFormer also achieves state-of-the-art results on prediction tasks, "out-of-the-box", for large non-relational datasets without needing fine-tuning.

Schema linking is a crucial step in Text-to-SQL pipelines, which translate natural language queries into SQL. The goal of schema linking is to retrieve relevant tables and columns (signal) while disregarding irrelevant ones (noise). However, imperfect schema linking can often exclude essential columns needed for accurate query generation. In this work, we revisit the need for schema linking when using the latest generation of large language models (LLMs). We find empirically that newer models are adept at identifying relevant schema elements during generation, without the need for explicit schema linking. This allows Text-to-SQL pipelines to bypass schema linking entirely and instead pass the full database schema to the LLM, eliminating the risk of excluding necessary information. Furthermore, as alternatives to schema linking, we propose techniques that improve Text-to-SQL accuracy without compromising on essential schema information. Our approach achieves 71.83\% execution accuracy on the BIRD benchmark, ranking first at the time of submission.

For industrial-scale text-to-SQL, supplying the entire database schema to Large Language Models (LLMs) is impractical due to context window limits and irrelevant noise. Schema linking, which filters the schema to a relevant subset, is therefore critical. However, existing methods incur prohibitive costs, struggle to trade off recall and noise, and scale poorly to large databases. We present AutoLink, an autonomous agent framework that reformulates schema linking as an iterative, agent-driven process. Guided by an LLM, AutoLink dynamically explores and expands the linked schema subset, progressively identifying necessary schema components without inputting the full database schema. Our experiments demonstrate AutoLink's superior performance, achieving state-of-the-art strict schema linking recall of 97.4\% on Bird-Dev and 91.2\% on Spider-2.0-Lite, with competitive execution accuracy, i.e., 68.7\% EX on Bird-Dev (better than CHESS) and 34.9\% EX on Spider-2.0-Lite (ranking 2nd on the official leaderboard). Crucially, AutoLink exhibits exceptional scalability, maintaining high recall, efficient token consumption, and robust execution accuracy on large schemas (e.g., over 3,000 columns) where existing methods severely degrade-making it a highly scalable, high-recall schema-linking solution for industrial text-to-SQL systems.

JSON Schema is an important, evolving standard schema language for families of JSON documents. It is based on a complex combination of structural and Boolean assertions, and features negation and recursion. The static analysis of JSON Schema documents comprises practically relevant problems, including schema satisfiability, inclusion, and equivalence. These three problems can be reduced to witness generation: given a schema, generate an element of the schema, if it exists, and report failure otherwise. Schema satisfiability, inclusion, and equivalence have been shown to be decidable, by reduction to reachability in alternating tree automata. However, no witness generation algorithm has yet been formally described. We contribute a first, direct algorithm for JSON Schema witness generation. We study its effectiveness and efficiency, in experiments over several schema collections, including thousands of real-world schemas. Our focus is on the completeness of the language, where we only exclude the uniqueItems operator, and on the ability of the algorithm to run in a reasonable time on a large set of real-world examples, despite the exponential complexity of the underlying problem.

Real-world databases are predominantly relational, comprising multiple interlinked tables that contain complex structural and statistical dependencies. Learning generative models on relational data has shown great promise in generating synthetic data and imputing missing values. However, existing methods often struggle to capture this complexity, typically reducing relational data to conditionally generated flat tables and imposing limiting structural assumptions. To address these limitations, we introduce RelDiff, a novel diffusion generative model that synthesizes complete relational databases by explicitly modeling their foreign key graph structure. RelDiff combines a joint graph-conditioned diffusion process across all tables for attribute synthesis, and a 2K+SBM graph generator based on the Stochastic Block Model for structure generation. The decomposition of graph structure and relational attributes ensures both high fidelity and referential integrity, both of which are crucial aspects of synthetic relational database generation. Experiments on 11 benchmark datasets demonstrate that RelDiff consistently outperforms prior methods in producing realistic and coherent synthetic relational databases. Code is available at https://github.com/ValterH/RelDiff.

Most modern Text2SQL systems prompt large language models (LLMs) with entire schemas -- mostly column information -- alongside the user's question. While effective on small databases, this approach fails on real-world schemas that exceed LLM context limits, even for commercial models. The recent Spider 2.0 benchmark exemplifies this with hundreds of tables and tens of thousands of columns, where existing systems often break. Current mitigations either rely on costly multi-step prompting pipelines or filter columns by ranking them against user's question independently, ignoring inter-column structure. To scale existing systems, we introduce \toolname, an open-source, LLM-efficient schema filtering framework that compacts Text2SQL prompts by (i) ranking columns with a query-aware LLM encoder enriched with values and metadata, (ii) reranking inter-connected columns via a lightweight graph transformer over functional dependencies, and (iii) selecting a connectivity-preserving sub-schema with a Steiner-tree heuristic. Experiments on real datasets show that \toolname achieves near-perfect recall and higher precision than CodeS, SchemaExP, Qwen rerankers, and embedding retrievers, while maintaining sub-second median latency and scaling to schemas with 23,000+ columns. Our source code is available at https://github.com/thanhdath/grast-sql.

Utilizing large language models (LLMs) for transforming natural language questions into SQL queries (text-to-SQL) is a promising yet challenging approach, particularly when applied to real-world databases with complex and extensive schemas. In particular, effectively incorporating data catalogs and database values for SQL generation remains an obstacle, leading to suboptimal solutions. We address this problem by proposing a new pipeline that effectively retrieves relevant data and context, selects an efficient schema, and synthesizes correct and efficient SQL queries. To increase retrieval precision, our pipeline introduces a hierarchical retrieval method leveraging model-generated keywords, locality-sensitive hashing indexing, and vector databases. Additionally, we have developed an adaptive schema pruning technique that adjusts based on the complexity of the problem and the model's context size. Our approach generalizes to both frontier proprietary models like GPT-4 and open-source models such as Llama-3-70B. Through a series of ablation studies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of each component of our pipeline and its impact on the end-to-end performance. Our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the cross-domain challenging BIRD dataset.

Text-to-SQL systems powered by Large Language Models have excelled on academic benchmarks but struggle in complex enterprise environments. The primary limitation lies in their reliance on static schema representations, which fails to resolve semantic ambiguity and scale effectively to large, complex databases. To address this, we propose APEX-SQL, an Agentic Text-to-SQL Framework that shifts the paradigm from passive translation to agentic exploration. Our framework employs a hypothesis-verification loop to ground model reasoning in real data. In the schema linking phase, we use logical planning to verbalize hypotheses, dual-pathway pruning to reduce the search space, and parallel data profiling to validate column roles against real data, followed by global synthesis to ensure topological connectivity. For SQL generation, we introduce a deterministic mechanism to retrieve exploration directives, allowing the agent to effectively explore data distributions, refine hypotheses, and generate semantically accurate SQLs. Experiments on BIRD (70.65% execution accuracy) and Spider 2.0-Snow (51.01% execution accuracy) demonstrate that APEX-SQL outperforms competitive baselines with reduced token consumption. Further analysis reveals that agentic exploration acts as a performance multiplier, unlocking the latent reasoning potential of foundation models in enterprise settings. Ablation studies confirm the critical contributions of each component in ensuring robust and accurate data analysis.

Text-to-SQL maps natural language questions to executable SQL queries. Modern databases often contain large and complex schemas, making schema linking a critical step for accurate SQL generation. Existing methods either rely on full-schema generation, which leaves schema linking implicit within a large search space, or use a separate retriever trained with static gold-column supervision, whose targets may be suboptimal for the current generator policy. To address this issue, we propose Adaptive Co-optimization via Empirical Credit Assignment for Text-to-SQL (ACE-SQL), a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that jointly optimizes schema retrieval and SQL generation under execution feedback. ACE-SQL constructs an online column-set pool from generator rollouts and derives adaptive on-policy retrieval targets from the column set most frequently associated with execution-correct rollouts. This induces bidirectional adaptation, where the retriever adapts toward column sets that the generator can execute correctly, while the generator adapts to the retriever's evolving schema selections under execution feedback. With approximately 3k synthetic Text-to-SQL question-database pairs for RL training, ACE-SQL achieves 65.3% greedy execution accuracy on BIRD Dev while using 0.93k output tokens per query. The repository is available at https://github.com/xbchen1/ACE-SQL.

Text-to-SQL parsing has achieved remarkable progress under the Full Schema Assumption. However, this premise fails in real-world enterprise environments where databases contain hundreds of tables with massive noisy metadata. Rather than injecting the full schema upfront, an agent must actively identify and verify only the relevant subset, giving rise to the Unknown Schema scenario we study in this work. To address this, we propose TRUST-SQL (Truthful Reasoning with Unknown Schema via Tools). We formulate the task as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process where our autonomous agent employs a structured four-phase protocol to ground reasoning in verified metadata. Crucially, this protocol provides a structural boundary for our novel Dual-Track GRPO strategy. By applying token-level masked advantages, this strategy isolates exploration rewards from execution outcomes to resolve credit assignment, yielding a 9.9% relative improvement over standard GRPO. Extensive experiments across five benchmarks demonstrate that TRUST-SQL achieves an average absolute improvement of 30.6% and 16.6% for the 4B and 8B variants respectively over their base models. Remarkably, despite operating entirely without pre-loaded metadata, our framework consistently matches or surpasses strong baselines that rely on schema prefilling.

Schema matching -- the task of finding matches between attributes across disparate data sources with different tables and hierarchies -- is critical for creating interoperable machine learning (ML)-ready data. Addressing this fundamental data-centric problem has wide implications, especially in domains like healthcare, finance and e-commerce -- but also has the potential to benefit ML models more generally, by increasing the data available for ML model training. However, schema matching is a challenging ML task due to structural/hierarchical and semantic heterogeneity between different schemas. Previous ML approaches to automate schema matching have either required significant labeled data for model training, which is often unrealistic or suffer from poor zero-shot performance. To this end, we propose Matchmaker - a compositional language model program for schema matching, comprised of candidate generation, refinement and confidence scoring. Matchmaker also self-improves in a zero-shot manner without the need for labeled demonstrations via a novel optimization approach, which constructs synthetic in-context demonstrations to guide the language model's reasoning process. Empirically, we demonstrate on real-world medical schema matching benchmarks that Matchmaker outperforms previous ML-based approaches, highlighting its potential to accelerate data integration and interoperability of ML-ready data.

Many disciplines pose natural-language research questions over large document collections whose answers typically require structured evidence, traditionally obtained by manually designing an annotation schema and exhaustively labeling the corpus, a slow and error-prone process. We introduce ScheMatiQ, which leverages calls to a backbone LLM to take a question and a corpus to produce a schema and a grounded database, with a web interface that lets steer and revise the extraction. In collaboration with domain experts, we show that ScheMatiQ yields outputs that support real-world analysis in law and computational biology. We release ScheMatiQ as open source with a public web interface, and invite experts across disciplines to use it with their own data. All resources, including the website, source code, and demonstration video, are available at: www.ScheMatiQ-ai.com

Addressing the mismatch between natural language descriptions and the corresponding SQL queries is a key challenge for text-to-SQL translation. To bridge this gap, we propose an SQL intermediate representation (IR) called Natural SQL (NatSQL). Specifically, NatSQL preserves the core functionalities of SQL, while it simplifies the queries as follows: (1) dispensing with operators and keywords such as GROUP BY, HAVING, FROM, JOIN ON, which are usually hard to find counterparts for in the text descriptions; (2) removing the need for nested subqueries and set operators; and (3) making schema linking easier by reducing the required number of schema items. On Spider, a challenging text-to-SQL benchmark that contains complex and nested SQL queries, we demonstrate that NatSQL outperforms other IRs, and significantly improves the performance of several previous SOTA models. Furthermore, for existing models that do not support executable SQL generation, NatSQL easily enables them to generate executable SQL queries, and achieves the new state-of-the-art execution accuracy.

Database systems incorporate an ever-growing number of functions in their kernels (a.k.a., database native functions) for scenarios like new application support and business migration. This growth causes an urgent demand for automatic database native function synthesis. While recent advances in LLM-based code generation (e.g., Claude Code) show promise, they are too generic for database-specific development. They often hallucinate or overlook critical context because database function synthesis is inherently complex and error-prone, where synthesizing a single function may involve registering multiple function units, linking internal references, and implementing logic correctly. To this end, we propose DBCooker, an LLM-based system for automatically synthesizing database native functions. It consists of three components. First, the function characterization module aggregates multi-source declarations, identifies function units that require specialized coding, and traces cross-unit dependencies. Second, we design operations to address the main synthesis challenges: (1) a pseudo-code-based coding plan generator that constructs structured implementation skeletons by identifying key elements such as reusable referenced functions; (2) a hybrid fill-in-the-blank model guided by probabilistic priors and component awareness to integrate core logic with reusable routines; and (3) three-level progressive validation, including syntax checking, standards compliance, and LLM-guided semantic verification. Finally, an adaptive orchestration strategy unifies these operations with existing tools and dynamically sequences them via the orchestration history of similar functions. Results show that DBCooker outperforms other methods on SQLite, PostgreSQL, and DuckDB (34.55% higher accuracy on average), and can synthesize new functions absent in the latest SQLite (v3.50).

Text-to-SQL, the task of translating natural language questions into SQL queries, plays a crucial role in enabling non-experts to interact with databases. While recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced text-to-SQL performance, existing approaches face notable limitations in real-world text-to-SQL applications. Prompting-based methods often depend on closed-source LLMs, which are expensive, raise privacy concerns, and lack customization. Fine-tuning-based methods, on the other hand, suffer from poor generalizability due to the limited coverage of publicly available training data. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel and scalable text-to-SQL data synthesis framework for automatically synthesizing large-scale, high-quality, and diverse datasets without extensive human intervention. Using this framework, we introduce SynSQL-2.5M, the first million-scale text-to-SQL dataset, containing 2.5 million samples spanning over 16,000 synthetic databases. Each sample includes a database, SQL query, natural language question, and chain-of-thought (CoT) solution. Leveraging SynSQL-2.5M, we develop OmniSQL, a powerful open-source text-to-SQL model available in three sizes: 7B, 14B, and 32B. Extensive evaluations across nine datasets demonstrate that OmniSQL achieves state-of-the-art performance, matching or surpassing leading closed-source and open-source LLMs, including GPT-4o and DeepSeek-V3, despite its smaller size. We release all code, datasets, and models to support further research.

We present GraPPa, an effective pre-training approach for table semantic parsing that learns a compositional inductive bias in the joint representations of textual and tabular data. We construct synthetic question-SQL pairs over high-quality tables via a synchronous context-free grammar (SCFG) induced from existing text-to-SQL datasets. We pre-train our model on the synthetic data using a novel text-schema linking objective that predicts the syntactic role of a table field in the SQL for each question-SQL pair. To maintain the model's ability to represent real-world data, we also include masked language modeling (MLM) over several existing table-and-language datasets to regularize the pre-training process. On four popular fully supervised and weakly supervised table semantic parsing benchmarks, GraPPa significantly outperforms RoBERTa-large as the feature representation layers and establishes new state-of-the-art results on all of them.

Schema linking -- the process of aligning natural language questions with database schema elements -- is a critical yet underexplored component of Text-to-SQL systems. While recent methods have focused primarily on improving SQL generation, they often neglect the retrieval of relevant schema elements, which can lead to hallucinations and execution failures. In this work, we propose a context-aware bidirectional schema retrieval framework that treats schema linking as a standalone problem. Our approach combines two complementary strategies: table-first retrieval followed by column selection, and column-first retrieval followed by table selection. It is further augmented with techniques such as question decomposition, keyword extraction, and keyphrase extraction. Through comprehensive evaluations on challenging benchmarks such as BIRD and Spider, we demonstrate that our method significantly improves schema recall while reducing false positives. Moreover, SQL generation using our retrieved schema consistently outperforms full-schema baselines and closely approaches oracle performance, all without requiring query refinement. Notably, our method narrows the performance gap between full and perfect schema settings by 50\%. Our findings highlight schema linking as a powerful lever for enhancing Text-to-SQL accuracy and efficiency.

Large Language Model agents increasingly operate external systems through programmatic interfaces, yet practitioners lack empirical guidance on how to structure the context these agents consume. Using SQL generation as a proxy for programmatic agent operations, we present a systematic study of context engineering for structured data, comprising 9,649 experiments across 11 models, 4 formats (YAML, Markdown, JSON, Token-Oriented Object Notation [TOON]), and schemas ranging from 10 to 10,000 tables. Our findings challenge common assumptions. First, architecture choice is model-dependent: file-based context retrieval improves accuracy for frontier-tier models (Claude, GPT, Gemini; +2.7%, p=0.029) but shows mixed results for open source models (aggregate -7.7%, p<0.001), with deficits varying substantially by model. Second, format does not significantly affect aggregate accuracy (chi-squared=2.45, p=0.484), though individual models, particularly open source, exhibit format-specific sensitivities. Third, model capability is the dominant factor, with a 21 percentage point accuracy gap between frontier and open source tiers that dwarfs any format or architecture effect. Fourth, file-native agents scale to 10,000 tables through domain-partitioned schemas while maintaining high navigation accuracy. Fifth, file size does not predict runtime efficiency: compact or novel formats can incur a token overhead driven by grep output density and pattern unfamiliarity, with the magnitude depending on model capability. These findings provide practitioners with evidence-based guidance for deploying LLM agents on structured systems, demonstrating that architectural decisions should be tailored to model capability rather than assuming universal best practices.

Retrieval in the SQL setting has largely been studied as the task of finding, within a large collection of SQL statements, the statement that answers a natural-language question. At scale, however, a more fundamental retrieval problem precedes generation: schema retrieval, identifying the tables and columns a question requires in a database that may contain thousands of them, far more than fit in a model's context. We argue that this step warrants first-class evaluation. To this end, we recast five text-to-SQL datasets (Spider, BIRD, BEAVER, and two LiveSQLBench variants) as retrieval tasks at both table and column granularity, covering realistic and enterprise-scale schemas under two document representations, and we show that off-the-shelf text and code embedders transfer poorly to this setting. We then propose corpus-adaptive fine-tuning: natural-language queries are synthesized directly from the target schema corpus, granularity-aware hard negatives are mined, and a 305M-parameter embedder is fine-tuned contrastively. This procedure raises average recall@10 from 60.4 to 75.6 (nDCG@10 from 51.9 to 68.0), making the 305M model the strongest retriever under one billion parameters and competitive with state-of-the-art embedders of 4-8B parameters, more than an order of magnitude larger. The same recipe improves an 8B state-of-the-art embedder from 77.8 to 78.4 recall@10, matching the best result on the benchmark and indicating that the adaptation is backbone-agnostic. Leave-one-corpus-out experiments and a leakage audit show that these gains reflect a transferable schema-retrieval ability rather than memorization of the evaluation data. Our results establish schema linking as a standalone retrieval task and lightweight, label-free corpus adaptation as a practical route to deploying it at enterprise scale.

Synthetic data is emerging as one of the most promising solutions to share individual-level data while safeguarding privacy. While membership inference attacks (MIAs), based on shadow modeling, have become the standard to evaluate the privacy of synthetic data, they currently assume the attacker to have access to an auxiliary dataset sampled from a similar distribution as the training dataset. This is often seen as a very strong assumption in practice, especially as the proposed main use cases for synthetic tabular data (e.g. medical data, financial transactions) are very specific and don't have any reference datasets directly available. We here show how this assumption can be removed, allowing for MIAs to be performed using only the synthetic data. Specifically, we developed three different scenarios: (S1) Black-box access to the generator, (S2) only access to the released synthetic dataset and (S3) a theoretical setup as upper bound for the attack performance using only synthetic data. Our results show that MIAs are still successful, across two real-world datasets and two synthetic data generators. These results show how the strong hypothesis made when auditing synthetic data releases - access to an auxiliary dataset - can be relaxed, making the attacks more realistic in practice.

Relational Databases (RDBs) are the backbone of modern business, yet they lack foundation models comparable to those in text or vision. A key obstacle is that high-quality RDBs are private, scarce and structurally heterogeneous, making internet-scale pre-training infeasible. To overcome this data scarcity, We introduce RDB-PFN, the first relational foundation model trained purely via synthetic data. Inspired by Prior-Data Fitted Networks (PFNs) where synthetic data generated from Structural Causal Models (SCMs) enables reasoning on single tables, we design a Relational Prior Generator to create an infinite stream of diverse RDBs from scratch. Pre-training on over 2 million synthetic single-table and relational tasks, RDB-PFN learns to adapt to any new database instantly via genuine in-context learning. Experiments verify RDB-PFN achieves strong few-shot performance on 19 real-world relational prediction tasks, outperforming graph-based and single-table foundation-model baselines (given the same DFS-linearized inputs), while using a lightweight architecture and fast inference. The code is available at https://github.com/MuLabPKU/RDBPFN

To tackle the challenges of large language model performance in natural language to SQL tasks, we introduce XiYan-SQL, an innovative framework that employs a multi-generator ensemble strategy to improve candidate generation. We introduce M-Schema, a semi-structured schema representation method designed to enhance the understanding of database structures. To enhance the quality and diversity of generated candidate SQL queries, XiYan-SQL integrates the significant potential of in-context learning (ICL) with the precise control of supervised fine-tuning. On one hand, we propose a series of training strategies to fine-tune models to generate high-quality candidates with diverse preferences. On the other hand, we implement the ICL approach with an example selection method based on named entity recognition to prevent overemphasis on entities. The refiner optimizes each candidate by correcting logical or syntactical errors. To address the challenge of identifying the best candidate, we fine-tune a selection model to distinguish nuances of candidate SQL queries. The experimental results on multiple dialect datasets demonstrate the robustness of XiYan-SQL in addressing challenges across different scenarios. Overall, our proposed XiYan-SQL achieves the state-of-the-art execution accuracy of 89.65% on the Spider test set, 69.86% on SQL-Eval, 41.20% on NL2GQL, and a competitive score of 72.23% on the Bird development benchmark. The proposed framework not only enhances the quality and diversity of SQL queries but also outperforms previous methods.

Synthetic data is a standard component in training large language models, yet systematic comparisons across design dimensions, including rephrasing strategy, generator model, and source data, remain absent. We conduct extensive controlled experiments, generating over one trillion tokens, to identify critical factors in rephrasing web text into synthetic pretraining data. Our results reveal that structured output formats, such as tables, math problems, FAQs, and tutorials, consistently outperform both curated web baselines and prior synthetic methods. Notably, increasing the size of the generator model beyond 1B parameters provides no additional benefit. Our analysis also demonstrates that the selection of the original data used for mixing substantially influences performance. By applying our findings, we develop \textsc{FinePhrase}, a 486-billion-token open dataset of rephrased web text. We show that FinePhrase outperforms all existing synthetic data baselines while reducing generation costs by up to 30 times. We provide the dataset, all prompts, and the generation framework to the research community.

Recent text-to-SQL systems powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in translating natural language queries into SQL. However, these systems often struggle with complex database structures and domain-specific queries, as they primarily focus on enhancing logical reasoning and SQL syntax while overlooking the critical need for comprehensive database understanding. To address this limitation, we propose DB-Explore, a novel framework that systematically aligns LLMs with database knowledge through automated exploration and instruction synthesis. DB-Explore constructs database graphs to capture complex relational schemas, leverages GPT-4 to systematically mine structural patterns and semantic knowledge, and synthesizes instructions to distill this knowledge for efficient fine-tuning of LLMs. Our framework enables comprehensive database understanding through diverse sampling strategies and automated instruction generation, bridging the gap between database structures and language models. Experiments conducted on the SPIDER and BIRD benchmarks validate the effectiveness of DB-Explore, achieving an execution accuracy of 52.1% on BIRD and 84.0% on SPIDER. Notably, our open-source implementation, based on the Qwen2.5-coder-7B model, outperforms multiple GPT-4-driven text-to-SQL systems in comparative evaluations, and achieves near state-of-the-art performance with minimal computational cost.

Translating Natural Language Queries into Structured Query Language (Text-to-SQL or NLQ-to-SQL) is a critical task extensively studied by both the natural language processing and database communities, aimed at providing a natural language interface to databases (NLIDB) and lowering the barrier for non-experts. Despite recent advancements made through the use of Large Language Models (LLMs), significant challenges remain. These include handling complex database schemas, resolving ambiguity in user queries, and generating SQL queries with intricate structures that accurately reflect the user's intent. In this work, we introduce E-SQL, a novel pipeline specifically designed to address these challenges through direct schema linking and candidate predicate augmentation. E-SQL enhances the natural language query by incorporating relevant database items (i.e., tables, columns, and values) and conditions directly into the question and SQL construction plan, bridging the gap between the query and the database structure. The pipeline leverages candidate predicate augmentation to mitigate erroneous or incomplete predicates in generated SQLs. Comprehensive evaluations on the BIRD benchmark illustrate that E-SQL achieves competitive performance, particularly excelling in complex queries with a 66.29% execution accuracy on the test set. A further observation from our experiments reveals that incorporating schema filtering into the translation pipeline does not have a positive impact on performance when the most advanced proprietary LLMs are used. Additionally, our experiments with small LLMs highlight the importance and positive impact of enriched questions on their performance. Without fine-tuning, single-prompt SQL generation using enriched questions with DeepSeek Coder 7B Instruct 1.5v achieves 56.45% execution accuracy on the BIRD development set.

Data scientists today search large data lakes to discover and integrate datasets. In order to bring together disparate data sources, dataset discovery methods rely on some form of schema matching: the process of establishing correspondences between datasets. Traditionally, schema matching has been used to find matching pairs of columns between a source and a target schema. However, the use of schema matching in dataset discovery methods differs from its original use. Nowadays schema matching serves as a building block for indicating and ranking inter-dataset relationships. Surprisingly, although a discovery method's success relies highly on the quality of the underlying matching algorithms, the latest discovery methods employ existing schema matching algorithms in an ad-hoc fashion due to the lack of openly-available datasets with ground truth, reference method implementations, and evaluation metrics. In this paper, we aim to rectify the problem of evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of schema matching methods for the specific needs of dataset discovery. To this end, we propose Valentine, an extensible open-source experiment suite to execute and organize large-scale automated matching experiments on tabular data. Valentine includes implementations of seminal schema matching methods that we either implemented from scratch (due to absence of open source code) or imported from open repositories. The contributions of Valentine are: i) the definition of four schema matching scenarios as encountered in dataset discovery methods, ii) a principled dataset fabrication process tailored to the scope of dataset discovery methods and iii) the most comprehensive evaluation of schema matching techniques to date, offering insight on the strengths and weaknesses of existing techniques, that can serve as a guide for employing schema matching in future dataset discovery methods.

Recent advances in text-to-SQL have been driven by larger models, better datasets, and new training methods like RLVR. However, progress remains limited by scarce high-quality training data, a problem RLVR is especially sensitive to since noisy data can produce spurious rewards. Manual data creation is expensive, and existing synthetic methods trade off reliability for scalability: template-based approaches guarantee correct SQL but need schema-specific templates and lack diversity, while LLM-based generation scales easily but lacks quality guarantees. We introduce RingSQL, a hybrid framework for generating question-SQL pairs that combines schema-independent query templates with LLM-based paraphrasing of natural language questions. By grounding question generation in complete template questions, RingSQL preserves question-query correctness across all levels of query complexity, a property purely LLM-based methods fail to maintain. RingSQL also produces the only synthetic dataset that improves RLVR training performance across all tested model architectures and benchmarks, achieving 69.8% average accuracy and surpassing both the next-best synthetic dataset by 2.1% and human-annotated data from Spider and BIRD. Code and data are available at https://github.com/nu-c3lab/RingSQL.

Relational databases often suffer from uninformative descriptors of table contents, such as ambiguous columns and hard-to-interpret values, impacting both human users and Text-to-SQL models. This paper explores the use of large language models (LLMs) to generate informative column descriptions as a semantic layer for relational databases. Using the BIRD-Bench development set, we created ColSQL, a dataset with gold-standard column descriptions generated and refined by LLMs and human annotators. We evaluated several instruction-tuned models, finding that GPT-4o and Command R+ excelled in generating high-quality descriptions. Additionally, we applied an LLM-as-a-judge to evaluate model performance. Although this method does not align well with human evaluations, we included it to explore its potential and to identify areas for improvement. More work is needed to improve the reliability of automatic evaluations for this task. We also find that detailed column descriptions significantly improve Text-to-SQL execution accuracy, especially when columns are uninformative. This study establishes LLMs as effective tools for generating detailed metadata, enhancing the usability of relational databases.

Text-to-SQL is the task of translating natural language queries into executable SQL for a given database, enabling non-expert users to access structured data without writing SQL manually. Despite rapid advances driven by large language models (LLMs), existing approaches still struggle with complex queries in real-world settings, where database schemas are large and questions require multi-step reasoning over many interrelated tables. In such cases, providing the full schema often exceeds the context window, while one-shot generation frequently produces non-executable SQL due to syntax errors and incorrect schema linking. To address these challenges, we introduce AV-SQL, a framework that decomposes complex Text-to-SQL into a pipeline of specialized LLM agents. Central to AV-SQL is the concept of agentic views: agent-generated Common Table Expressions (CTEs) that encapsulate intermediate query logic and filter relevant schema elements from large schemas. AV-SQL operates in three stages: (1) a rewriter agent compresses and clarifies the input query; (2) a view generator agent processes schema chunks to produce agentic views; and (3) a planner, generator, and revisor agent collaboratively compose these views into the final SQL query. Extensive experiments show that AV-SQL achieves 70.38% execution accuracy on the challenging Spider 2.0 benchmark, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines, while remaining competitive on standard datasets with 85.59% on Spider, 72.16% on BIRD and 63.78% on KaggleDBQA. Our source code is available at https://github.com/pminhtam/AV-SQL.

Recent advances in large language models have revolutionized many sectors, including the database industry. One common challenge when dealing with large volumes of tabular data is the pervasive use of abbreviated column names, which can negatively impact performance on various data search, access, and understanding tasks. To address this issue, we introduce a new task, called NameGuess, to expand column names (used in database schema) as a natural language generation problem. We create a training dataset of 384K abbreviated-expanded column pairs using a new data fabrication method and a human-annotated evaluation benchmark that includes 9.2K examples from real-world tables. To tackle the complexities associated with polysemy and ambiguity in NameGuess, we enhance auto-regressive language models by conditioning on table content and column header names -- yielding a fine-tuned model (with 2.7B parameters) that matches human performance. Furthermore, we conduct a comprehensive analysis (on multiple LLMs) to validate the effectiveness of table content in NameGuess and identify promising future opportunities. Code has been made available at https://github.com/amazon-science/nameguess.

Differentially private (DP) synthetic data generation is a promising technique for utilizing private datasets that otherwise cannot be exposed for model training or other analytics. While much research literature has focused on generating private unstructured text and image data, in enterprise settings, structured data (e.g., tabular) is more common, often including natural language fields or components. Existing synthetic data evaluation techniques (e.g., FID) struggle to capture the structural properties and correlations of such datasets. In this work, we propose Struct-Bench, a framework and benchmark for evaluating synthetic datasets derived from structured datasets that contain natural language data. The Struct-Bench framework requires users to provide a representation of their dataset structure as a Context-Free Grammar (CFG). Our benchmark comprises 5 real-world and 2 synthetically generated datasets, each annotated with CFGs. We show that these datasets demonstrably present a great challenge even for state-of-the-art DP synthetic data generation methods. Struct-Bench also includes reference implementations of different metrics and a leaderboard, thereby providing researchers a standardized evaluation platform to benchmark and investigate privacy-preserving synthetic data generation methods. Further, we also present a case study showing how to use Struct-Bench to improve the synthetic data quality of Private Evolution (PE) on structured data. The benchmark and the leaderboard have been publicly made available at https://struct-bench.github.io.

In this paper, we explore the question of whether large language models can support cost-efficient information extraction from tables. We introduce schema-driven information extraction, a new task that transforms tabular data into structured records following a human-authored schema. To assess various LLM's capabilities on this task, we present a benchmark comprised of tables from four diverse domains: machine learning papers, chemistry literature, material science journals, and webpages. We use this collection of annotated tables to evaluate the ability of open-source and API-based language models to extract information from tables covering diverse domains and data formats. Our experiments demonstrate that surprisingly competitive performance can be achieved without requiring task-specific pipelines or labels, achieving F1 scores ranging from 74.2 to 96.1, while maintaining cost efficiency. Moreover, through detailed ablation studies and analyses, we investigate the factors contributing to model success and validate the practicality of distilling compact models to reduce API reliance.

In many use-cases, information is stored in text but not available in structured data. However, extracting data from natural language text to precisely fit a schema, and thus enable querying, is a challenging task. With the rise of pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs), there is now an effective solution to store and use information extracted from massive corpora of text documents. Thus, we envision the use of SQL queries to cover a broad range of data that is not captured by traditional databases by tapping the information in LLMs. To ground this vision, we present Galois, a prototype based on a traditional database architecture, but with new physical operators for querying the underlying LLM. The main idea is to execute some operators of the the query plan with prompts that retrieve data from the LLM. For a large class of SQL queries, querying LLMs returns well structured relations, with encouraging qualitative results. Preliminary experimental results make pre-trained LLMs a promising addition to the field of database systems, introducing a new direction for hybrid query processing. However, we pinpoint several research challenges that must be addressed to build a DBMS that exploits LLMs. While some of these challenges necessitate integrating concepts from the NLP literature, others offer novel research avenues for the DB community.

Schemas play a vital role in ensuring data quality and supporting usability in the Semantic Web and natural language processing. Traditionally, their creation demands substantial involvement from knowledge engineers and domain experts. Leveraging the impressive capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in tasks like ontology engineering, we explore schema generation using LLMs. To bridge the resource gap, we introduce two datasets: YAGO Schema and Wikidata EntitySchema, along with novel evaluation metrics. The LLM-based pipelines utilize local and global information from knowledge graphs (KGs) to generate schemas in Shape Expressions (ShEx). Experiments demonstrate LLMs' strong potential in producing high-quality ShEx schemas, paving the way for scalable, automated schema generation for large KGs. Furthermore, our benchmark introduces a new challenge for structured generation, pushing the limits of LLMs on syntactically rich formalisms.

Recent advances in Text-to-SQL have largely focused on the SQLite dialect, neglecting the diverse landscape of SQL dialects like BigQuery and PostgreSQL. This limitation is due to the diversity in SQL syntaxes and functions, along with the high cost of collecting and curating SQL-specific training data. To address this, we introduce SQL-GEN, a framework for generating high-quality synthetic training data for any SQL dialect, guided by readily available dialect-specific tutorials. SQL-GEN significantly improves cross-dialect Text-to-SQL performance, boosting execution accuracy by up to 20\% over existing methods. This performance gain narrows the gap with models trained on large-scale human-annotated data. Furthermore, combining synthetic data from SQL-GEN with human-annotated data yields additional improvements of up to 5.6\%. To unify multi-dialect capabilities within a single model, we propose a novel Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) initialization that leverages the shared knowledge across dialects. Our approach merges self-attention layers from dialect-specific models and initializes expert gates using dialect-specific keywords. This leads to a versatile model optimized for multiple SQL dialects, outperforming single-dialect models and significantly enhancing overall performance.

Language models have shown promising performance on the task of translating natural language questions into SQL queries (Text-to-SQL). However, most of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches rely on powerful yet closed-source large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, which may have the limitations of unclear model architectures, data privacy risks, and expensive inference overheads. To address the limitations, we introduce CodeS, a series of pre-trained language models with parameters ranging from 1B to 15B, specifically designed for the text-to-SQL task. CodeS is a fully open-source language model, which achieves superior accuracy with much smaller parameter sizes. This paper studies the research challenges in building CodeS. To enhance the SQL generation abilities of CodeS, we adopt an incremental pre-training approach using a specifically curated SQL-centric corpus. Based on this, we address the challenges of schema linking and rapid domain adaptation through strategic prompt construction and a bi-directional data augmentation technique. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on multiple datasets, including the widely used Spider benchmark, the newly released BIRD benchmark, robustness-diagnostic benchmarks such as Spider-DK, Spider-Syn, Spider-Realistic, and Dr.Spider, as well as two real-world datasets created for financial and academic applications. The experimental results show that our CodeS achieves new SOTA accuracy and robustness on nearly all challenging text-to-SQL benchmarks.

Existing private synthetic data generation algorithms are agnostic to downstream tasks. However, end users may have specific requirements that the synthetic data must satisfy. Failure to meet these requirements could significantly reduce the utility of the data for downstream use. We introduce a post-processing technique that improves the utility of the synthetic data with respect to measures selected by the end user, while preserving strong privacy guarantees and dataset quality. Our technique involves resampling from the synthetic data to filter out samples that do not meet the selected utility measures, using an efficient stochastic first-order algorithm to find optimal resampling weights. Through comprehensive numerical experiments, we demonstrate that our approach consistently improves the utility of synthetic data across multiple benchmark datasets and state-of-the-art synthetic data generation algorithms.

The task of converting natural language queries into SQL queries is intricate, necessitating a blend of precise techniques for an accurate translation. The DIN-SQL (Decomposed-In-Context SQL) methodology represents a significant development in this domain. This paper introduces DFIN (Decomposed Focused-In-Context), an innovative extension of DIN-SQL that enhances Text-to-SQL conversion by addressing schema linking errors, which are a major source of inaccuracies. DFIN uniquely alternates between prompting techniques and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), adapting to the size and complexity of the database schema. A preprocessing phase embeds database definitions and leverages annotated files, akin to those in the BIRD dataset, facilitating the runtime retrieval of pertinent schema information. This strategy significantly reduces the token count for schema linking prompts, enabling the use of a standard GPT-4 model over its larger context variant, thus handling large-scale databases more effectively and economically. Our evaluation on the BIRD dataset, a challenging real-world benchmark, demonstrates that DFIN not only scales efficiently but also improves accuracy, achieving a score of 51.69. This improvement surpasses DIN-SQL method (the current third-place), which is the highest-ranked model employing in-context learning rather than fine-tuning, previously scoring 50.72. The advancement of DFIN underscores the evolving capabilities of in-context learning methodologies combined with advanced language models, offering a promising avenue for future research in complex Text-to-SQL conversion tasks.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced Text-to-SQL performance, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on Western contexts and simplified schemas, leaving a gap in real-world, non-Western applications. We present IndicDB, a multilingual Text-to-SQL benchmark for evaluating cross-lingual semantic parsing across diverse Indic languages. The relational schemas are sourced from open-data platforms, including the National Data and Analytics Platform (NDAP) and the India Data Portal (IDP), ensuring realistic administrative data complexity. IndicDB comprises 20 databases across 237 tables. To convert denormalized government data into rich relational structures, we employ an iterative three-agent framework (Architect, Auditor, Refiner) to ensure structural rigor and high relational density (11.85 tables per database; join depths up to six). Our pipeline is value-aware, difficulty-calibrated, and join-enforced, generating 15,617 tasks across English, Hindi, and five Indic languages. We evaluate cross-lingual semantic parsing performance of state-of-the-art models (DeepSeek v3.2, MiniMax 2.7, LLaMA 3.3, Qwen3) across seven linguistic variants. Results show a 9.00% performance drop from English to Indic languages, revealing an "Indic Gap" driven by harder schema linking, increased structural ambiguity, and limited external knowledge. IndicDB serves as a rigorous benchmark for multilingual Text-to-SQL. Code and data: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/multilingualText2Sql-Indic--DDCC/

Synthetic data generation for tabular datasets must balance fidelity, efficiency, and versatility to meet the demands of real-world applications. We introduce the Tabular Auto-Regressive Generative Network (TabularARGN), a flexible framework designed to handle mixed-type, multivariate, and sequential datasets. By training on all possible conditional probabilities, TabularARGN supports advanced features such as fairness-aware generation, imputation, and conditional generation on any subset of columns. The framework achieves state-of-the-art synthetic data quality while significantly reducing training and inference times, making it ideal for large-scale datasets with diverse structures. Evaluated across established benchmarks, including realistic datasets with complex relationships, TabularARGN demonstrates its capability to synthesize high-quality data efficiently. By unifying flexibility and performance, this framework paves the way for practical synthetic data generation across industries.

One of the recent best attempts at Text-to-SQL is the pre-trained language model. Due to the structural property of the SQL queries, the seq2seq model takes the responsibility of parsing both the schema items (i.e., tables and columns) and the skeleton (i.e., SQL keywords). Such coupled targets increase the difficulty of parsing the correct SQL queries especially when they involve many schema items and logic operators. This paper proposes a ranking-enhanced encoding and skeleton-aware decoding framework to decouple the schema linking and the skeleton parsing. Specifically, for a seq2seq encoder-decode model, its encoder is injected by the most relevant schema items instead of the whole unordered ones, which could alleviate the schema linking effort during SQL parsing, and its decoder first generates the skeleton and then the actual SQL query, which could implicitly constrain the SQL parsing. We evaluate our proposed framework on Spider and its three robustness variants: Spider-DK, Spider-Syn, and Spider-Realistic. The experimental results show that our framework delivers promising performance and robustness. Our code is available at https://github.com/RUCKBReasoning/RESDSQL.

Large-scale and categorical-balanced text data is essential for training effective Scene Text Recognition (STR) models, which is hard to achieve when collecting real data. Synthetic data offers a cost-effective and perfectly labeled alternative. However, its performance often lags behind, revealing a significant domain gap between real and current synthetic data. In this work, we systematically analyze mainstream rendering-based synthetic datasets and identify their key limitations: insufficient diversity in corpus, font, and layout, which restricts their realism in complex scenarios. To address these issues, we introduce UnionST, a strong data engine synthesizes text covering a union of challenging samples and better aligns with the complexity observed in the wild. We then construct UnionST-S, a large-scale synthetic dataset with improved simulations in challenging scenarios. Furthermore, we develop a self-evolution learning (SEL) framework for effective real data annotation. Experiments show that models trained on UnionST-S achieve significant improvements over existing synthetic datasets. They even surpass real-data performance in certain scenarios. Moreover, when using SEL, the trained models achieve competitive performance by only seeing 9% of real data labels.

The Natural Language Interface to Databases (NLIDB) empowers non-technical users with database access through intuitive natural language (NL) interactions. Advanced approaches, utilizing neural sequence-to-sequence models or large-scale language models, typically employ auto-regressive decoding to generate unique SQL queries sequentially. While these translation models have greatly improved the overall translation accuracy, surpassing 70% on NLIDB benchmarks, the use of auto-regressive decoding to generate single SQL queries may result in sub-optimal outputs, potentially leading to erroneous translations. In this paper, we propose Metasql, a unified generate-then-rank framework that can be flexibly incorporated with existing NLIDBs to consistently improve their translation accuracy. Metasql introduces query metadata to control the generation of better SQL query candidates and uses learning-to-rank algorithms to retrieve globally optimized queries. Specifically, Metasql first breaks down the meaning of the given NL query into a set of possible query metadata, representing the basic concepts of the semantics. These metadata are then used as language constraints to steer the underlying translation model toward generating a set of candidate SQL queries. Finally, Metasql ranks the candidates to identify the best matching one for the given NL query. Extensive experiments are performed to study Metasql on two public NLIDB benchmarks. The results show that the performance of the translation models can be effectively improved using Metasql.

The widespread adoption of synthetic data raises new questions about how models generating the data can influence other large language models (LLMs) via distilled data. To start, our work exhaustively characterizes the impact of passive inheritance of model properties by systematically studying the consequences of synthetic data integration. We provide one of the most comprehensive studies to-date of how the source of synthetic data shapes models' internal biases, calibration and generations' textual attributes and preferences. We find that models are surprisingly sensitive towards certain attributes even when the synthetic data prompts appear "neutral". which invites the question whether this sensitivity can be exploited for good. Our findings invite the question can we explicitly steer the models towards the properties we want at test time by exploiting the data generation process? This would have historically been considered infeasible due to the cost of collecting data with a specific characteristic or objective in mind. However, improvement in the quality of synthetic data, as well as a shift towards general-purpose models designed to follow a diverse way of instructions, means this question is timely. We propose active inheritance as a term to describe intentionally constraining synthetic data according to a non-differentiable objective. We demonstrate how active inheritance can steer the generation profiles of models towards desirable non-differentiable attributes, e.g. high lexical diversity or low toxicity.

Generative models such as Large Language Models, Diffusion Models, and generative adversarial networks have recently revolutionized the creation of synthetic data, offering scalable solutions to data scarcity, privacy, and annotation challenges in data mining. This tutorial introduces the foundations and latest advances in synthetic data generation, covers key methodologies and practical frameworks, and discusses evaluation strategies and applications. Attendees will gain actionable insights into leveraging generative synthetic data to enhance data mining research and practice. More information can be found on our website: https://syndata4dm.github.io/.

Access to real-world medical data is often restricted due to privacy regulations, posing a significant barrier to the advancement of healthcare research. Synthetic data offers a promising alternative; however, generating realistic, clinically valid, and privacy-conscious records remains a major challenge. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer new opportunities for structured data generation; however, existing approaches frequently lack systematic prompting strategies and comprehensive, multi-dimensional evaluation frameworks. In this paper, we present SynLLM, a modular framework for generating high-quality synthetic medical tabular data using 20 state-of-the-art open-source LLMs, including LLaMA, Mistral, and GPT variants, guided by structured prompts. We propose four distinct prompt types, ranging from example-driven to rule-based constraints, that encode schema, metadata, and domain knowledge to control generation without model fine-tuning. Our framework features a comprehensive evaluation pipeline that rigorously assesses generated data across statistical fidelity, clinical consistency, and privacy preservation. We evaluate SynLLM across three public medical datasets, including Diabetes, Cirrhosis, and Stroke, using 20 open-source LLMs. Our results show that prompt engineering significantly impacts data quality and privacy risk, with rule-based prompts achieving the best privacy-quality balance. SynLLM establishes that, when guided by well-designed prompts and evaluated with robust, multi-metric criteria, LLMs can generate synthetic medical data that is both clinically plausible and privacy-aware, paving the way for safer and more effective data sharing in healthcare research.

Text-to-SQL simplifies database interactions by enabling non-experts to convert their natural language (NL) questions into Structured Query Language (SQL) queries. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have improved the zero-shot text-to-SQL paradigm, existing methods face scalability challenges when dealing with massive, dynamically changing databases. This paper introduces DBCopilot, a framework that addresses these challenges by employing a compact and flexible copilot model for routing across massive databases. Specifically, DBCopilot decouples the text-to-SQL process into schema routing and SQL generation, leveraging a lightweight sequence-to-sequence neural network-based router to formulate database connections and navigate natural language questions through databases and tables. The routed schemas and questions are then fed into LLMs for efficient SQL generation. Furthermore, DBCopilot also introduced a reverse schema-to-question generation paradigm, which can learn and adapt the router over massive databases automatically without requiring manual intervention. Experimental results demonstrate that DBCopilot is a scalable and effective solution for real-world text-to-SQL tasks, providing a significant advancement in handling large-scale schemas.

Training LLMs to invoke tools and leverage retrieved information necessitates high-quality, diverse data. However, existing pipelines for synthetic data generation often rely on tens of thousands of real API calls to enhance generalization, incurring prohibitive costs while lacking multi-hop reasoning and self-reflection. To address these limitations, we introduce ToolForge, an automated synthesis framework that achieves strong real-world tool-calling performance by constructing only a small number of virtual tools, eliminating the need for real API calls. ToolForge leverages a (question, golden context, answer) triple to synthesize large-scale tool-learning data specifically designed for multi-hop search scenarios, further enriching the generated data through multi-hop reasoning and self-reflection mechanisms. To ensure data fidelity, we employ a Multi-Layer Validation Framework that integrates both rule-based and model-based assessments. Empirical results show that a model with only 8B parameters, when trained on our synthesized data, outperforms GPT-4o on multiple benchmarks. Our code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/Buycar-arb/ToolForge .

Relational structures such as schema linking and schema encoding have been validated as a key component to qualitatively translating natural language into SQL queries. However, introducing these structural relations comes with prices: they often result in a specialized model structure, which largely prohibits using large pretrained models in text-to-SQL. To address this problem, we propose RASAT: a Transformer seq2seq architecture augmented with relation-aware self-attention that could leverage a variety of relational structures while inheriting the pretrained parameters from the T5 model effectively. Our model can incorporate almost all types of existing relations in the literature, and in addition, we propose introducing co-reference relations for the multi-turn scenario. Experimental results on three widely used text-to-SQL datasets, covering both single-turn and multi-turn scenarios, have shown that RASAT could achieve state-of-the-art results across all three benchmarks (75.5% EX on Spider, 52.6% IEX on SParC, and 37.4% IEX on CoSQL).

Context-dependent text-to-SQL task has drawn much attention in recent years. Previous models on context-dependent text-to-SQL task only concentrate on utilizing historical user inputs. In this work, in addition to using encoders to capture historical information of user inputs, we propose a database schema interaction graph encoder to utilize historicalal information of database schema items. In decoding phase, we introduce a gate mechanism to weigh the importance of different vocabularies and then make the prediction of SQL tokens. We evaluate our model on the benchmark SParC and CoSQL datasets, which are two large complex context-dependent cross-domain text-to-SQL datasets. Our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art model by a large margin and achieves new state-of-the-art results on the two datasets. The comparison and ablation results demonstrate the efficacy of our model and the usefulness of the database schema interaction graph encoder.

Text-to-SQL parsing, which aims at converting natural language instructions into executable SQLs, has gained increasing attention in recent years. In particular, Codex and ChatGPT have shown impressive results in this task. However, most of the prevalent benchmarks, i.e., Spider, and WikiSQL, focus on database schema with few rows of database contents leaving the gap between academic study and real-world applications. To mitigate this gap, we present Bird, a big benchmark for large-scale database grounded in text-to-SQL tasks, containing 12,751 pairs of text-to-SQL data and 95 databases with a total size of 33.4 GB, spanning 37 professional domains. Our emphasis on database values highlights the new challenges of dirty database contents, external knowledge between NL questions and database contents, and SQL efficiency, particularly in the context of massive databases. To solve these problems, text-to-SQL models must feature database value comprehension in addition to semantic parsing. The experimental results demonstrate the significance of database values in generating accurate text-to-SQLs for big databases. Furthermore, even the most effective text-to-SQL models, i.e. ChatGPT, only achieves 40.08% in execution accuracy, which is still far from the human result of 92.96%, proving that challenges still stand. Besides, we also provide an efficiency analysis to offer insights into generating text-to-efficient-SQLs that are beneficial to industries. We believe that BIRD will contribute to advancing real-world applications of text-to-SQL research. The leaderboard and source code are available: https://bird-bench.github.io/.

We present a neural approach called IRNet for complex and cross-domain Text-to-SQL. IRNet aims to address two challenges: 1) the mismatch between intents expressed in natural language (NL) and the implementation details in SQL; 2) the challenge in predicting columns caused by the large number of out-of-domain words. Instead of end-to-end synthesizing a SQL query, IRNet decomposes the synthesis process into three phases. In the first phase, IRNet performs a schema linking over a question and a database schema. Then, IRNet adopts a grammar-based neural model to synthesize a SemQL query which is an intermediate representation that we design to bridge NL and SQL. Finally, IRNet deterministically infers a SQL query from the synthesized SemQL query with domain knowledge. On the challenging Text-to-SQL benchmark Spider, IRNet achieves 46.7% accuracy, obtaining 19.5% absolute improvement over previous state-of-the-art approaches. At the time of writing, IRNet achieves the first position on the Spider leaderboard.

Cypher, the query language for Neo4j graph databases, plays a critical role in enabling graph-based analytics and data exploration. While substantial research has been dedicated to natural language to SQL query generation (Text2SQL), the analogous problem for graph databases referred to as Text2Cypher remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce SynthCypher, a fully synthetic and automated data generation pipeline designed to address this gap. SynthCypher employs a novel LLMSupervised Generation-Verification framework, ensuring syntactically and semantically correct Cypher queries across diverse domains and query complexities. Using this pipeline, we create SynthCypher Dataset, a large-scale benchmark containing 29.8k Text2Cypher instances. Fine-tuning open-source large language models (LLMs), including LLaMa-3.1- 8B, Mistral-7B, and QWEN-7B, on SynthCypher yields significant performance improvements of up to 40% on the Text2Cypher test set and 30% on the SPIDER benchmark adapted for graph databases. This work demonstrates that high-quality synthetic data can effectively advance the state-of-the-art in Text2Cypher tasks.

Synthetic data is widely adopted in embedding models to ensure diversity in training data distributions across dimensions such as difficulty, length, and language. However, existing prompt-based synthesis methods struggle to capture domain-specific data distributions, particularly in data-scarce domains, and often overlook fine-grained relevance diversity. In this paper, we present a Chinese short video dataset with 4-level relevance annotations, filling a critical resource void. Further, we propose a semi-supervised synthetic data pipeline where two collaboratively trained models generate domain-adaptive short video data with controllable relevance labels. Our method enhances relevance-level diversity by synthesizing samples for underrepresented intermediate relevance labels, resulting in a more balanced and semantically rich training data set. Extensive offline experiments show that the embedding model trained on our synthesized data outperforms those using data generated based on prompting or vanilla supervised fine-tuning(SFT). Moreover, we demonstrate that incorporating more diverse fine-grained relevance levels in training data enhances the model's sensitivity to subtle semantic distinctions, highlighting the value of fine-grained relevance supervision in embedding learning. In the search enhanced recommendation pipeline of Douyin's dual-column scenario, through online A/B testing, the proposed model increased click-through rate(CTR) by 1.45%, raised the proportion of Strong Relevance Ratio (SRR) by 4.9%, and improved the Image User Penetration Rate (IUPR) by 0.1054%.

Synthetic sequential tabular data are increasingly used for privacy-preserving data sharing and research, yet conventional tabular metrics often overlook temporal structure. Existing single-table and relational evaluation protocols largely collapse records into static distributions, leaving key temporal properties insufficiently evaluated. We introduce Seq2Synth, a unified benchmark for assessing these properties. Its taxonomy characterizes temporal and schema properties to determine applicable evaluations, covering timestamp, cross-sectional, longitudinal, and structural fidelity, alongside trajectory-aware utility and privacy. Across seven core datasets from a 13-dataset benchmark and eight generators, models with near-perfect static fidelity still violate basic temporal constraints, producing duplicate timestamps, irregular intervals, and incomplete observation grids. Moreover, static and temporal-aware rankings diverge substantially, showing that temporal fidelity must be evaluated directly rather than inferred from static or relational scores. Project page and online appendices are available at: https://seq2synth.github.io/.

We explore using T5 (Raffel et al. (2019)) to directly translate natural language questions into SQL statements. General purpose natural language that interfaces to information stored within databases requires flexibly translating natural language questions into database queries. The best performing text-to-SQL systems approach this task by first converting questions into an intermediate logical form (LF) (Lyu et al. (2020)). While LFs provide a convenient intermediate representation and simplify query generation, they introduce an additional layer of complexity and annotation requirements. However, weakly supervised modeling that directly converts questions to SQL statements has proven more difficult without the scaffolding provided by LFs (Min et al. (2019)). We approach direct conversion of questions to SQL statements using T5 (Raffel et al. (2019)), a pre-trained textto-text generation model, modified to support pointer-generator style decoding (See et al. (2017)). We explore using question augmentation with table schema information and the use of automatically generated silver training data. The resulting model achieves 90.5% execution accuracy on the WikiSQL (Zhong et al. (2017)) test data set, a new state-of-the-art on weakly supervised SQL generation. The performance improvement is 6.6% absolute over the prior state-of-the-art (Min et al. (2019)) and approaches the performance of state-ofthe-art systems making use of LFs.

Table extraction from document images is a challenging AI problem, and labelled data for many content domains is difficult to come by. Existing table extraction datasets often focus on scientific tables due to the vast amount of academic articles that are readily available, along with their source code. However, there are significant layout and typographical differences between tables found across scientific, financial, and other domains. Current datasets often lack the words, and their positions, contained within the tables, instead relying on unreliable OCR to extract these features for training modern machine learning models on natural language processing tasks. Therefore, there is a need for a more general method of obtaining labelled data. We present SynFinTabs, a large-scale, labelled dataset of synthetic financial tables. Our hope is that our method of generating these synthetic tables is transferable to other domains. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our dataset in training models to extract information from table images, we create FinTabQA, a layout large language model trained on an extractive question-answering task. We test our model using real-world financial tables and compare it to a state-of-the-art generative model and discuss the results. We make the dataset, model, and dataset generation code publicly available.

Text-to-SQL aims to map natural language questions to SQL queries. The sketch-based method combined with execution-guided (EG) decoding strategy has shown a strong performance on the WikiSQL benchmark. However, execution-guided decoding relies on database execution, which significantly slows down the inference process and is hence unsatisfactory for many real-world applications. In this paper, we present the Schema Dependency guided multi-task Text-to-SQL model (SDSQL) to guide the network to effectively capture the interactions between questions and schemas. The proposed model outperforms all existing methods in both the settings with or without EG. We show the schema dependency learning partially cover the benefit from EG and alleviates the need for it. SDSQL without EG significantly reduces time consumption during inference, sacrificing only a small amount of performance and provides more flexibility for downstream applications.

Recent In-Context Learning based methods have achieved remarkable success in Text-to-SQL task. However, there is still a large gap between the performance of these models and human performance on datasets with complex database schema and difficult questions, such as BIRD. Besides, existing work has neglected to supervise intermediate steps when solving questions iteratively with question decomposition methods, and the schema linking methods used in these works are very rudimentary. To address these issues, we propose MAG-SQL, a multi-agent generative approach with soft schema linking and iterative Sub-SQL refinement. In our framework, an entity-based method with tables' summary is used to select the columns in database, and a novel targets-conditions decomposition method is introduced to decompose those complex questions. Additionally, we build a iterative generating module which includes a Sub-SQL Generator and Sub-SQL Refiner, introducing external oversight for each step of generation. Through a series of ablation studies, the effectiveness of each agent in our framework has been demonstrated. When evaluated on the BIRD benchmark with GPT-4, MAG-SQL achieves an execution accuracy of 61.08\%, compared to the baseline accuracy of 46.35\% for vanilla GPT-4 and the baseline accuracy of 57.56\% for MAC-SQL. Besides, our approach makes similar progress on Spider.

Synthetic data has been proposed as a solution to address the issue of high-quality data scarcity in the training of large language models (LLMs). Studies have shown that synthetic data can effectively improve the performance of LLMs on downstream benchmarks. However, despite its potential benefits, our analysis suggests that there may be inherent flaws in synthetic data. The uniform format of synthetic data can lead to pattern overfitting and cause significant shifts in the output distribution, thereby reducing the model's instruction-following capabilities. Our work delves into these specific flaws associated with question-answer (Q-A) pairs, a prevalent type of synthetic data, and presents a method based on unlearning techniques to mitigate these flaws. The empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which can reverse the instruction-following issues caused by pattern overfitting without compromising performance on benchmarks at relatively low cost. Our work has yielded key insights into the effective use of synthetic data, aiming to promote more robust and efficient LLM training.

The ability to generate SQL queries from natural language has significant implications for making data accessible to non-specialists. This paper presents a novel approach to fine-tuning open-source large language models (LLMs) for the task of transforming natural language into SQL queries within the retail domain. We introduce models specialized in generating SQL queries, trained on synthetic datasets tailored to the Snowflake SQL and GoogleSQL dialects. Our methodology involves generating a context-specific dataset using GPT-4, then fine-tuning three open-source LLMs(Starcoder Plus, Code-Llama, and Mistral) employing the LoRa technique to optimize for resource constraints. The fine-tuned models demonstrate superior performance in zero-shot settings compared to the baseline GPT-4, with Code-Llama achieving the highest accuracy rates, at 81.58% for Snowflake SQL and 82.66% for GoogleSQL. These results underscore the effectiveness of fine-tuning LLMs on domain-specific tasks and suggest a promising direction for enhancing the accessibility of relational databases through natural language interfaces.

Several approaches are proposed to deal with the problem of the Automatic Schema Matching (ASM). The challenges and difficulties caused by the complexity and uncertainty characterizing both the process and the outcome of Schema Matching motivated us to investigate how bio-inspired emerging paradigm can help with understanding, managing, and ultimately overcoming those challenges. In this paper, we explain how we approached Automatic Schema Matching as a systemic and Complex Adaptive System (CAS) and how we modeled it using the approach of Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS). This effort gives birth to a tool (prototype) for schema matching called Reflex-SMAS. A set of experiments demonstrates the viability of our approach on two main aspects: (i) effectiveness (increasing the quality of the found matchings) and (ii) efficiency (reducing the effort required for this efficiency). Our approach represents a significant paradigm-shift, in the field of Automatic Schema Matching.

Text-to-SQL aims to translate natural language queries into SQL statements, which is practical as it enables anyone to easily retrieve the desired information from databases. Recently, many existing approaches tackle this problem with Large Language Models (LLMs), leveraging their strong capability in understanding user queries and generating corresponding SQL code. Yet, the parametric knowledge in LLMs might be limited to covering all the diverse and domain-specific queries that require grounding in various database schemas, which makes generated SQLs less accurate oftentimes. To tackle this, we propose constructing the knowledge base for text-to-SQL, a foundational source of knowledge, from which we retrieve and generate the necessary knowledge for given queries. In particular, unlike existing approaches that either manually annotate knowledge or generate only a few pieces of knowledge for each query, our knowledge base is comprehensive, which is constructed based on a combination of all the available questions and their associated database schemas along with their relevant knowledge, and can be reused for unseen databases from different datasets and domains. We validate our approach on multiple text-to-SQL datasets, considering both the overlapping and non-overlapping database scenarios, where it outperforms relevant baselines substantially.

In this paper we introduce the olog, or ontology log, a category-theoretic model for knowledge representation (KR). Grounded in formal mathematics, ologs can be rigorously formulated and cross-compared in ways that other KR models (such as semantic networks) cannot. An olog is similar to a relational database schema; in fact an olog can serve as a data repository if desired. Unlike database schemas, which are generally difficult to create or modify, ologs are designed to be user-friendly enough that authoring or reconfiguring an olog is a matter of course rather than a difficult chore. It is hoped that learning to author ologs is much simpler than learning a database definition language, despite their similarity. We describe ologs carefully and illustrate with many examples. As an application we show that any primitive recursive function can be described by an olog. We also show that ologs can be aligned or connected together into a larger network using functors. The various methods of information flow and institutions can then be used to integrate local and global world-views. We finish by providing several different avenues for future research.

Recent progress in language model pre-training has achieved a great success via leveraging large-scale unstructured textual data. However, it is still a challenge to apply pre-training on structured tabular data due to the absence of large-scale high-quality tabular data. In this paper, we propose TAPEX to show that table pre-training can be achieved by learning a neural SQL executor over a synthetic corpus, which is obtained by automatically synthesizing executable SQL queries and their execution outputs. TAPEX addresses the data scarcity challenge via guiding the language model to mimic a SQL executor on the diverse, large-scale and high-quality synthetic corpus. We evaluate TAPEX on four benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that TAPEX outperforms previous table pre-training approaches by a large margin and achieves new state-of-the-art results on all of them. This includes the improvements on the weakly-supervised WikiSQL denotation accuracy to 89.5% (+2.3%), the WikiTableQuestions denotation accuracy to 57.5% (+4.8%), the SQA denotation accuracy to 74.5% (+3.5%), and the TabFact accuracy to 84.2% (+3.2%). To our knowledge, this is the first work to exploit table pre-training via synthetic executable programs and to achieve new state-of-the-art results on various downstream tasks. Our code can be found at https://github.com/microsoft/Table-Pretraining.

Text-to-SQL conversion is a critical innovation, simplifying the transition from complex SQL to intuitive natural language queries, especially significant given SQL's prevalence in the job market across various roles. The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 has greatly advanced this field, offering improved natural language understanding and the ability to generate nuanced SQL statements. However, the potential of open-source LLMs in Text-to-SQL applications remains underexplored, with many frameworks failing to leverage their full capabilities, particularly in handling complex database queries and incorporating feedback for iterative refinement. Addressing these limitations, this paper introduces SQLfuse, a robust system integrating open-source LLMs with a suite of tools to enhance Text-to-SQL translation's accuracy and usability. SQLfuse features four modules: schema mining, schema linking, SQL generation, and a SQL critic module, to not only generate but also continuously enhance SQL query quality. Demonstrated by its leading performance on the Spider Leaderboard and deployment by Ant Group, SQLfuse showcases the practical merits of open-source LLMs in diverse business contexts.

The development of robust AI models relies heavily on the quality and variety of training data available. In fields where data scarcity is prevalent, synthetic data generation offers a vital solution. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to creating synthetic datasets, grounded in real-world diversity and enriched through strategic diversification. We synthesize data using a comprehensive collection of news articles spanning 12 languages and originating from 125 countries, to ensure a breadth of linguistic and cultural representations. Through enforced topic diversification, translation, and summarization, the resulting dataset accurately mirrors real-world complexities and addresses the issue of underrepresentation in traditional datasets. This methodology, applied initially to Named Entity Recognition (NER), serves as a model for numerous AI disciplines where data diversification is critical for generalizability. Preliminary results demonstrate substantial improvements in performance on traditional NER benchmarks, by up to 7.3%, highlighting the effectiveness of our synthetic data in mimicking the rich, varied nuances of global data sources. This paper outlines the strategies employed for synthesizing diverse datasets and provides such a curated dataset for NER.

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse tasks, largely driven by high-quality web data used in pre-training. However, recent studies indicate this data source is rapidly depleting. Synthetic data emerges as a promising alternative, but it remains unclear whether synthetic datasets exhibit predictable scalability comparable to raw pre-training data. In this work, we systematically investigate the scaling laws of synthetic data by introducing SynthLLM, a scalable framework that transforms pre-training corpora into diverse, high-quality synthetic datasets. Our approach achieves this by automatically extracting and recombining high-level concepts across multiple documents using a graph algorithm. Key findings from our extensive mathematical experiments on SynthLLM include: (1) SynthLLM generates synthetic data that reliably adheres to the rectified scaling law across various model sizes; (2) Performance improvements plateau near 300B tokens; and (3) Larger models approach optimal performance with fewer training tokens. For instance, an 8B model peaks at 1T tokens, while a 3B model requires 4T. Moreover, comparisons with existing synthetic data generation and augmentation methods demonstrate that SynthLLM achieves superior performance and scalability. Our findings highlight synthetic data as a scalable and reliable alternative to organic pre-training corpora, offering a viable path toward continued improvement in model performance.

The Text-to-SQL(Text2SQL) task aims to convert natural language queries into executable SQL queries. Thanks to the application of large language models (LLMs), significant progress has been made in this field. However, challenges such as model scalability, limited generation space, and coherence issues in SQL generation still persist. To address these issues, we propose SQL-o1, a Self-Reward-based heuristic search method designed to enhance the reasoning ability of LLMs in SQL query generation. SQL-o1 combines Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for heuristic process-level search and constructs a Schema-Aware dataset to help the model better understand database schemas. Extensive experiments on the Bird and Spider datasets demonstrate that SQL-o1 improves execution accuracy by 10.8\% on the complex Bird dataset compared to the latest baseline methods, even outperforming GPT-4-based approaches. Additionally, SQL-o1 excels in few-shot learning scenarios and shows strong cross-model transferability. Our code is publicly available at:https://github.com/ShuaiLyu0110/SQL-o1.

Text-to-SQL semantic parsing is an important NLP task, which greatly facilitates the interaction between users and the database and becomes the key component in many human-computer interaction systems. Much recent progress in text-to-SQL has been driven by large-scale datasets, but most of them are centered on English. In this work, we present MultiSpider, the largest multilingual text-to-SQL dataset which covers seven languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese). Upon MultiSpider, we further identify the lexical and structural challenges of text-to-SQL (caused by specific language properties and dialect sayings) and their intensity across different languages. Experimental results under three typical settings (zero-shot, monolingual and multilingual) reveal a 6.1% absolute drop in accuracy in non-English languages. Qualitative and quantitative analyses are conducted to understand the reason for the performance drop of each language. Besides the dataset, we also propose a simple schema augmentation framework SAVe (Schema-Augmentation-with-Verification), which significantly boosts the overall performance by about 1.8% and closes the 29.5% performance gap across languages.

Semantic database systems extend SQL with foundation-model inference over unstructured data, but current engines rely heavily on autoregressive LLMs for discrete relational decisions, creating high latency and monetary cost. We present JEVDB, a scalable semantic database system that uses fast, typed decision models for semantic filters, joins, classification, and ranking, while selectively escalating uncertain cases to generative LLMs. To reduce semantic-join work, JEVDB combines exact Yannakakis-style semijoin reduction over relational structure with Semantic Bloom Filters (SBFs), which use registered necessary conditions to screen candidates across latent semantic edges. We evaluate JEVDB on SemBench and Shelob, a TPC-DS-derived semantic-join workload. On SemBench, JEVDB-Flash achieves the lowest latency on all 21 evaluated queries and the lowest cost on 19, while maintaining competitive answer quality. On Shelob, where joins scale to 540K candidate pairs, JEVDB completes all queries with 95.7%-97.5% mean F1. SBF screening removes 87.4% of candidate pairs before semantic evaluation, and reusable condition-index scoring further reduces reasoning-model escalations by 55.2%. An interactive query simulator, source code, and benchmarks are available at https://jevdb.org.

Synthetic data generation has become an increasingly popular way of training models without the need for large, manually labeled datasets. For tasks like text embedding, synthetic data offers diverse and scalable training examples, significantly reducing the cost of human annotation. However, most current approaches rely heavily on proprietary models like GPT-4, which are expensive and inefficient for generating large-scale embedding data. In this paper, we introduce SPEED, a framework that aligns open-source small models (8B) to efficiently generate large-scale synthetic embedding data. Through supervised fine-tuning, preference optimization, and self-improvement, SPEED enables small open-source models to produce high-quality data. Remarkably, SPEED uses only less than 1/10 of the GPT API calls, outperforming the state-of-the-art embedding model E5_mistral when both are trained solely on their synthetic data. Using this efficient generator, we conduct a comprehensive study on how various factors within the alignment pipeline impact data quality and reveal the scaling law for synthetic embedding data.

Dataset search remains a bottleneck in data analysis workflows, as existing systems largely rely on keyword matching or shallow retrieval that fail to capture user intent. To facilitate intent-driven search, we present two retrieval components to equip multi-faceted dataset search interfaces through natural language. First, we propose Hypothetical Schema Embeddings (HySE) that uses a language model to generate task-aligned hypothetical table schemas which are used for embedding-based retrieval, bridging the gap between intent and table content. We introduce KaggleDS, a corpus comprising 6,503 tables and diverse task-queries derived from Kaggle, and show that HySE consistently improves recall over strong keyword and embedding-based baselines, as well as over a dense table retriever fine-tuned on KaggleDS. We also show that HySE generalizes to end-to-end question answering on, for example, the NQ-Tables dataset, a corpus of 169,898 Wikipedia tables with human-written queries, where HySE improves Recall@10 by +6.0 pp over dense retrieval baselines. Second, we introduce FlexPrune, which translates dataset constraints expressed in natural-language into SQL predicates over a customizable metadata index, enabling filtering across arbitrary metadata attributes. Combined with HySE, FlexPrune increases Recall@10 by +6.0 pp over dense retrieval followed by tag-based filtering. Our results show that natural-language-based retrieval supporting task and metadata queries offers a viable alternative to schema-level keyword search in dataset search.

Data collected from the real world tends to be biased, unbalanced, and at risk of exposing sensitive and private information. This reality has given rise to the idea of creating synthetic datasets to alleviate risk, bias, harm, and privacy concerns inherent in the real data. This concept relies on Generative AI models to produce unbiased, privacy-preserving synthetic data while being true to the real data. In this new paradigm, how can we tell if this approach delivers on its promises? We present an auditing framework that offers a holistic assessment of synthetic datasets and AI models trained on them, centered around bias and discrimination prevention, fidelity to the real data, utility, robustness, and privacy preservation. We showcase our framework by auditing multiple generative models on diverse use cases, including education, healthcare, banking, human resources, and across different modalities, from tabular, to time-series, to natural language. Our use cases demonstrate the importance of a holistic assessment in order to ensure compliance with socio-technical safeguards that regulators and policymakers are increasingly enforcing. For this purpose, we introduce the trust index that ranks multiple synthetic datasets based on their prescribed safeguards and their desired trade-offs. Moreover, we devise a trust-index-driven model selection and cross-validation procedure via auditing in the training loop that we showcase on a class of transformer models that we dub TrustFormers, across different modalities. This trust-driven model selection allows for controllable trust trade-offs in the resulting synthetic data. We instrument our auditing framework with workflows that connect different stakeholders from model development to audit and certification via a synthetic data auditing report.

Schema matching is a crucial task in data integration, involving the alignment of a source schema with a target schema to establish correspondence between their elements. This task is challenging due to textual and semantic heterogeneity, as well as differences in schema sizes. Although machine-learning-based solutions have been explored in numerous studies, they often suffer from low accuracy, require manual mapping of the schemas for model training, or need access to source schema data which might be unavailable due to privacy concerns. In this paper we present a novel method, named ReMatch, for matching schemas using retrieval-enhanced Large Language Models (LLMs). Our method avoids the need for predefined mapping, any model training, or access to data in the source database. Our experimental results on large real-world schemas demonstrate that ReMatch is an effective matcher. By eliminating the requirement for training data, ReMatch becomes a viable solution for real-world scenarios.

Mechanistic interpretability research faces a gap between analyzing simple circuits in toy tasks and discovering features in large models. To bridge this gap, we propose text-to-SQL generation as an ideal task to study, as it combines the formal structure of toy tasks with real-world complexity. We introduce TinySQL, a synthetic dataset, progressing from basic to advanced SQL operations, and train models ranging from 33M to 1B parameters to establish a comprehensive testbed for interpretability. We apply multiple complementary interpretability techniques, including Edge Attribution Patching and Sparse Autoencoders, to identify minimal circuits and components supporting SQL generation. We compare circuits for different SQL subskills, evaluating their minimality, reliability, and identifiability. Finally, we conduct a layerwise logit lens analysis to reveal how models compose SQL queries across layers: from intent recognition to schema resolution to structured generation. Our work provides a robust framework for probing and comparing interpretability methods in a structured, progressively complex setting.

Large-scale clinical databases offer opportunities for medical research, but their complexity creates barriers to effective use. The Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC-IV), one of the world's largest open-source electronic health record databases, traditionally requires both SQL proficiency and clinical domain expertise. We introduce M3, a system that enables natural language querying of MIMIC-IV data through the Model Context Protocol. With a single command, M3 retrieves MIMIC-IV from PhysioNet, launches a local SQLite instance or connects to hosted BigQuery, and allows researchers to pose clinical questions in plain English. We evaluated M3 using one hundred questions from the EHRSQL 2024 benchmark with two language models: the proprietary Claude Sonnet 4 achieved 94% accuracy, while the open-source gpt-oss-20B (deployable locally on consumer hardware) achieved 93% accuracy. Both models translate natural language into SQL, execute queries against MIMIC-IV, and return structured results alongside the underlying query for verification. Error analysis revealed that most failures stemmed from complex temporal reasoning or ambiguous question phrasing rather than fundamental architectural limitations. The comparable performance of a smaller open-source model demonstrates that privacy-preserving local deployment is viable for sensitive clinical data analysis. M3 lowers technical barriers to critical care data analysis while maintaining security through OAuth2 authentication, query validation, and comprehensive audit logging.

This research delves into the construction and utilization of synthetic datasets, specifically within the telematics sphere, leveraging OpenAI's powerful language model, ChatGPT. Synthetic datasets present an effective solution to challenges pertaining to data privacy, scarcity, and control over variables - characteristics that make them particularly valuable for research pursuits. The utility of these datasets, however, largely depends on their quality, measured through the lenses of diversity, relevance, and coherence. To illustrate this data creation process, a hands-on case study is conducted, focusing on the generation of a synthetic telematics dataset. The experiment involved an iterative guidance of ChatGPT, progressively refining prompts and culminating in the creation of a comprehensive dataset for a hypothetical urban planning scenario in Columbus, Ohio. Upon generation, the synthetic dataset was subjected to an evaluation, focusing on the previously identified quality parameters and employing descriptive statistics and visualization techniques for a thorough analysis. Despite synthetic datasets not serving as perfect replacements for actual world data, their potential in specific use-cases, when executed with precision, is significant. This research underscores the potential of AI models like ChatGPT in enhancing data availability for complex sectors like telematics, thus paving the way for a myriad of new research opportunities.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized Text-to-SQL generation, allowing users to query structured data using natural language with growing ease. Yet, real-world deployment remains challenging, especially in complex or unseen schemas, due to inconsistent accuracy and the risk of generating invalid SQL. We introduce Template Constrained Decoding (TeCoD), a system that addresses these limitations by harnessing the recurrence of query patterns in labeled workloads. TeCoD converts historical NL-SQL pairs into reusable templates and introduces a robust template selection module that uses a fine-tuned natural language inference model to match or reject queries efficiently. Once the template is selected, TeCoD enforces it during SQL generation through grammar-constrained decoding, implemented via a novel partitioned strategy that ensures both syntactic validity and efficiency. Together, these components yield up to 36% higher execution accuracy than in-context learning (ICL) and 2.2x lower latency on matched queries.

Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) enables intuitive interactions with databases by transforming natural language queries into structured SQL statements. Despite recent advancements in enhancing human-computer interaction within database applications, significant challenges persist, particularly regarding the inference performance in complex scenarios involving multi-table joins and nested queries. Current methodologies primarily utilize supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to train the NL2SQL model, which may limit adaptability and interpretability in new environments (e.g., finance and healthcare). In order to enhance the reasoning performance of the NL2SQL model in the above complex situations, we introduce SQL-R1, a novel NL2SQL reasoning model trained by the reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. We design a specialized RL-based reward function tailored for NL2SQL tasks and discussed the impact of cold start on the effectiveness of intensive training. In addition, we achieve competitive accuracy using only a tiny amount of synthetic NL2SQL data for augmented training and further explore data engineering for RL. In existing experiments, SQL-R1 achieves execution accuracy of 88.6% and 66.6% on the benchmark Spider and BIRD, respectively, only using the 7B base model.

Tabular data, as a crucial form of data representation, exists in diverse formats on the Web. When confronted with complex and irregular tables, manual modification becomes a laborious task. This paper investigates the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the context of table editing tasks. Existing research mainly focuses on regular-shaped tables, wherein instructions are used to generate code in SQL, Python, or Excel Office-script for manipulating the tables. Nevertheless, editing tables with irregular structures, particularly those containing merged cells spanning multiple rows, poses a challenge when using code. To address this, we introduce the WikiTableEdit dataset. Leveraging 26,531 tables from the WikiSQL dataset, we automatically generate natural language instructions for six distinct basic operations and the corresponding outcomes, resulting in over 200,000 instances. Subsequently, we evaluate several representative large language models on the WikiTableEdit dataset to demonstrate the challenge of this task. The dataset will be released to the community to promote related researches.

Many organizations rely on data from government and third-party sources, and those sources rarely follow the same data formatting. This introduces challenges in integrating data from multiple sources or aligning external sources with internal databases. Commercial database systems do not offer adequate support for integrating data from heterogeneous sources, and manual integration is both time-consuming and inefficient. State-of-the-art data integration approaches that rely on similarity functions and textual transformations often fail to handle challenging cases where multiple mappings are required, or the mappings go beyond simple textual transformations. In this paper, we study the potentials of deep neural models for transforming tables for joinability. In particular, we cast the problem as a prediction task and develop a framework that leverages large deep-learning language models to transform tabular data from a source formatting to a desired target representation. Our framework can efficiently learn the patterns for mapping a source formatting into an expected target using just a few examples, which can then be used for tasks such as table joining, filling in missing values, and error detection. Compared to state-of-the-art mapping and joining approaches, our framework delivers noticeably more accurate and scalable performance on both real-world and synthetic datasets. Our experimental evaluation also shows that the performance of the proposed framework using our fine-tuned model is at par or better than large language models such as GPT-3, despite the significant difference in size, and that using large language models within our framework improves their performance.

We present NeMo Data Designer (NDD), an open-source, general-purpose framework for multi-modal synthetic data generation (SDG). Designed to be intuitive to use, NDD provides a declarative configuration format in which human and/or agent users define each dataset column, with column types spanning text, code, structured outputs, images, embeddings, and statistical samplers that are explicitly configured to steer dataset diversity. Additional column types and functionality can be introduced using the framework's flexible plugin system. NDD's configuration is an inspectable artifact, supporting workflow sharing and reproducibility. SDG is an inherently iterative process. NDD therefore builds a preview-and-revision loop into its core workflow, allowing users to generate and inspect a small number of records, refine the specification, and rerun generation at full scale. At runtime, NDD resolves dependencies, schedules calls to user-provided model endpoints, and retries failed requests. We describe NDD's architecture and programming model and present case studies spanning structured, agentic, multimodal, and domain-specialized tasks, including datasets used in Nemotron model development and in production enterprise deployments.

Foundation models, particularly those that incorporate Transformer architectures, have demonstrated exceptional performance in domains such as natural language processing and image processing. Adapting these models to structured data, like tables, however, introduces significant challenges. These difficulties are even more pronounced when addressing multi-table data linked via foreign key, which is prevalent in the enterprise realm and crucial for empowering business use cases. Despite its substantial impact, research focusing on such linked business tables within enterprise settings remains a significantly important yet underexplored domain. To address this, we introduce a curated dataset sourced from an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, featuring extensive linked tables. This dataset is specifically designed to support research endeavors in table representation learning. By providing access to authentic enterprise data, our goal is to potentially enhance the effectiveness and applicability of models for real-world business contexts.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved unprecedented performances in various applications, yet evaluating them is still challenging. Existing benchmarks are either manually constructed or are automatic, but lack the ability to evaluate the thought process of LLMs with arbitrary complexity. We contend that utilizing existing relational databases based on the entity-relationship (ER) model is a promising approach for constructing benchmarks as they contain structured knowledge that can be used to question LLMs. Unlike knowledge graphs, which are also used to evaluate LLMs, relational databases have integrity constraints that can be used to better construct complex in-depth questions and verify answers: (1) functional dependencies can be used to pinpoint critical keywords that an LLM must know to properly answer a given question containing certain attribute values; and (2) foreign key constraints can be used to join relations and construct multi-hop questions, which can be arbitrarily long and used to debug intermediate answers. We thus propose ERBench, which uses these integrity constraints to convert any database into an LLM benchmark. ERBench supports continuous evaluation as databases change, multimodal questions, and various prompt engineering techniques. In our experiments, we construct LLM benchmarks using databases of multiple domains and make an extensive comparison of contemporary LLMs. We show how ERBench can properly evaluate any LLM by not only checking for answer correctness, but also effectively verifying the rationales by looking for the right keywords.

Synthetic data is increasingly used to enable the development and evaluation of AI systems in domains where access to real-world data is restricted. In healthcare, clinical documentation presents particular challenges due to its sensitivity. This work introduces a synthetic clinical notes pipeline and dataset designed to support the development of clinical AI tools while avoiding the privacy risks associated with real patient data. The dataset is generated using a modular pipeline that combines structured patient generation, semi-structured patient journey simulation, and unstructured clinical note generation using large language models. The pipeline is designed to prioritise internal consistency across longitudinal patient records, while also capturing variation in writing style, note structure, and clinical detail. Additional mechanisms, including LLM-based validation and augmentation steps, are used to improve faithfulness, realism, and diversity of the generated notes. We release a dataset of 70 synthetic patients, each associated with 20-50 clinical notes spanning a full hospital journey. The dataset is provided at multiple levels of validation, enabling users to balance realism and scalability depending on their use case. This dataset supports the development, testing, and evaluation of clinical AI systems, including summarisation tools, coding models, and decision support systems, without reliance on real patient data.

Semantic parsing, which converts natural language questions into logic forms, plays a crucial role in reasoning within structured environments. However, existing methods encounter two significant challenges: reliance on extensive manually annotated datasets and limited generalization capability to unseen examples. To tackle these issues, we propose Targeted Synthetic Data Generation (TARGA), a practical framework that dynamically generates high-relevance synthetic data without manual annotation. Starting from the pertinent entities and relations of a given question, we probe for the potential relevant queries through layer-wise expansion and cross-layer combination. Then we generate corresponding natural language questions for these constructed queries to jointly serve as the synthetic demonstrations for in-context learning. Experiments on multiple knowledge base question answering (KBQA) datasets demonstrate that TARGA, using only a 7B-parameter model, substantially outperforms existing non-fine-tuned methods that utilize close-sourced model, achieving notable improvements in F1 scores on GrailQA(+7.7) and KBQA-Agent(+12.2). Furthermore, TARGA also exhibits superior sample efficiency, robustness, and generalization capabilities under non-I.I.D. settings.

The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) is inherently linked to the availability of vast, diverse, and high-quality data for training and evaluation. However, the growth rate of high-quality data is significantly outpaced by the expansion of training datasets, leading to a looming data exhaustion crisis. This underscores the urgent need to enhance data efficiency and explore new data sources. In this context, synthetic data has emerged as a promising solution. Currently, data generation primarily consists of two major approaches: data augmentation and synthesis. This paper comprehensively reviews and summarizes data generation techniques throughout the lifecycle of LLMs, including data preparation, pre-training, fine-tuning, instruction-tuning, preference alignment, and applications. Furthermore, We discuss the current constraints faced by these methods and investigate potential pathways for future development and research. Our aspiration is to equip researchers with a clear understanding of these methodologies, enabling them to swiftly identify appropriate data generation strategies in the construction of LLMs, while providing valuable insights for future exploration.

Generating accurate SQL for user queries (text-to-SQL) is a long-standing problem since the generation of the SQL requires comprehending the query and database and retrieving the accurate data from the database accordingly. Existing models rely on the comprehensive ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate the SQL according to the database schema. However, there is some necessary knowledge that is not explicitly included in the database schema or has been learned by LLMs. Thus, the generated SQL of the knowledge-insufficient queries may be inaccurate, which negatively impacts the robustness of the text-to-SQL models. To deal with this situation, we propose the Knowledge-to-SQL framework, which employs tailored Data Expert LLM (DELLM) to provide helpful knowledge for all types of text-to-SQL models. Specifically, we provide the detailed design of DELLM, in terms of table reading, and the basic fine-tuning process. We further provide a Preference Learning via Database Feedback (PLDBF) training strategy to guide the DELLM to generate more helpful knowledge for LLMs. Extensive experiments verify DELLM can enhance the state-of-the-art LLMs on text-to-SQL tasks. The model structure and the parameter weight of DELLM are released for further research.

Exploiting the recent advancements in artificial intelligence, showcased by ChatGPT and DALL-E, in real-world applications necessitates vast, domain-specific, and publicly accessible datasets. Unfortunately, the scarcity of such datasets poses a significant challenge for researchers aiming to apply these breakthroughs in engineering design. Synthetic datasets emerge as a viable alternative. However, practitioners are often uncertain about generating high-quality datasets that accurately represent real-world data and are suitable for the intended downstream applications. This study aims to fill this knowledge gap by proposing comprehensive guidelines for generating, annotating, and validating synthetic datasets. The trade-offs and methods associated with each of these aspects are elaborated upon. Further, the practical implications of these guidelines are illustrated through the creation of a turbo-compressors dataset. The study underscores the importance of thoughtful sampling methods to ensure the appropriate size, diversity, utility, and realism of a dataset. It also highlights that design diversity does not equate to performance diversity or realism. By employing test sets that represent uniform, real, or task-specific samples, the influence of sample size and sampling strategy is scrutinized. Overall, this paper offers valuable insights for researchers intending to create and publish synthetic datasets for engineering design, thereby paving the way for more effective applications of AI advancements in the field. The code and data for the dataset and methods are made publicly accessible at https://github.com/cyrilpic/radcomp .

We introduce a framework for generating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rationales to enhance text-to-SQL model fine-tuning. These rationales consist of intermediate SQL statements and explanations, serving as incremental steps toward constructing the final SQL query. The process begins with manually annotating a small set of examples, which are then used to prompt a large language model in an iterative, dynamic few-shot knowledge distillation procedure from a teacher model. A rationalization model is subsequently trained on the validated decomposed queries, enabling extensive synthetic CoT annotations for text-to-SQL datasets. To evaluate the approach, we fine-tune small language models with and without these rationales on the BIRD dataset. Results indicate that step-by-step query generation improves execution accuracy, especially for moderately and highly complex queries, while also enhancing explainability.

Relational data augmentation is a powerful technique for enhancing data analytics and improving machine learning models by incorporating columns from external datasets. However, it is challenging to efficiently discover relevant external tables to join with a given input table. Existing approaches rely on data discovery systems to identify joinable tables from external sources, typically based on overlap or containment. However, the sheer number of tables obtained from these systems results in irrelevant joins that need to be performed; this can be computationally expensive or even infeasible in practice. We address this limitation by proposing the use of efficient mutual information (MI) estimation for finding relevant joinable tables. We introduce a new sketching method that enables efficient evaluation of relationship discovery queries by estimating MI without materializing the joins and returning a smaller set of tables that are more likely to be relevant. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach at approximating MI in extensive experiments using synthetic and real-world datasets.

Relational tables, where each row corresponds to an entity and each column corresponds to an attribute, have been the standard for tables in relational databases. However, such a standard cannot be taken for granted when dealing with tables "in the wild". Our survey of real spreadsheet-tables and web-tables shows that over 30% of such tables do not conform to the relational standard, for which complex table-restructuring transformations are needed before these tables can be queried easily using SQL-based analytics tools. Unfortunately, the required transformations are non-trivial to program, which has become a substantial pain point for technical and non-technical users alike, as evidenced by large numbers of forum questions in places like StackOverflow and Excel/Power-BI/Tableau forums. We develop an Auto-Tables system that can automatically synthesize pipelines with multi-step transformations (in Python or other languages), to transform non-relational tables into standard relational forms for downstream analytics, obviating the need for users to manually program transformations. We compile an extensive benchmark for this new task, by collecting 244 real test cases from user spreadsheets and online forums. Our evaluation suggests that Auto-Tables can successfully synthesize transformations for over 70% of test cases at interactive speeds, without requiring any input from users, making this an effective tool for both technical and non-technical users to prepare data for analytics.

Text-to-SQL models are commonly trained to map questions directly to static queries, whereas real-world database agents operate through stateful, multi-turn interaction with live databases -- inspecting schemas, executing probe queries, diagnosing errors, and revising hypotheses. This creates a critical train-deploy mismatch, as the execution harness that mediates this interaction is introduced only at inference time. To bridge this gap, we propose HarnessSQL, a harness-native post-training framework that preserves the full interaction structure throughout both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. HarnessSQL builds isolated, executable database environments paired with hidden execution oracles, rolls out teachers directly inside the target SQL harness, and retains only verified trajectories for full-sequence SFT, followed by execution-reward RL. Across Spider 2.0-SQLite, HarnessSQL dramatically boosts the execution accuracy of compact models, raising Qwen3-8B from 15.5% to 45.2% and Qwen3-14B from 22.2% to 54.8%, while transferring effectively to out-of-distribution interactive benchmarks such as BIRD-Interact and LiveSQLBench. Our findings demonstrate that training database agents directly within their execution harness is essential for mastering complex, long-horizon database workflows.

Tables are fundamental in domains such as finance, healthcare, and public administration, yet real-world table tasks often involve noise, structural heterogeneity, and semantic complexity--issues underexplored in existing research that primarily targets clean academic datasets. This survey focuses on LLM-based Table Agents, which aim to automate table-centric workflows by integrating preprocessing, reasoning, and domain adaptation. We define five core competencies--C1: Table Structure Understanding, C2: Table and Query Semantic Understanding, C3: Table Retrieval and Compression, C4: Executable Reasoning with Traceability, and C5: Cross-Domain Generalization--to analyze and compare current approaches. In addition, a detailed examination of the Text-to-SQL Agent reveals a performance gap between academic benchmarks and real-world scenarios, especially for open-source models. Finally, we provide actionable insights to improve the robustness, generalization, and efficiency of LLM-based Table Agents in practical settings.

Given a database S and a natural language question Q, text-to-SQL systems aim to generate an SQL query that correctly answers Q when executed against S. Currently, popular text-to-SQL benchmarks mostly assume unrestricted access to S; in practice, however, user access is often restricted, e.g., through role-based access control (RBAC) policies. This leads to a potential disconnect between benchmarking results and real-world performance: an LLM with high benchmark scores might perform poorly in an access-controlled environment, by frequently violating RBAC, or rejecting a query q that could be answered with only permitted data in S. Motivated by this, we present a comprehensive text-to-SQL benchmarking framework with realistic RBAC constraints, which features an LLM-assisted workflow that augments existing text-to-SQL benchmarks with plausible user roles and access policies. To do so, we formulate the problem of role synthesis as a structured reasoning process over the database schema, in which the LLM first infers the application context from the schema, and then derives role responsibilities and access scopes consistent with this context. This process is audited by human-in-the-loop quality control, in which domain experts perform metric-guided screening on the generated roles. Besides the augmented dataset, the proposed framework also contains evaluation metrics that identify RBAC-specific failure modes, and disentangle SQL utility from access-control compliance. We apply the proposed framework to several widely-used benchmarks, and conduct a systematic empirical study of state-of-the-art text-to-SQL systems. The results show that many solutions (especially open-weight LLMs) with high benchmarking scores under an unrestricted setting suffer sharp performance degradation once access constraints are in place, due to frequent RBAC violations.

Relational Deep Learning (RDL) models multi-tabular databases as temporal heterogeneous graphs for end-to-end representation learning. While RDL is evolving rapidly, existing approaches face significant generalization obstacles. They are either schema-specific, requiring training from scratch for every new database, or they rely on monolithic architectures that entangle feature encoding with graph message-passing. Analyzing these limitations, we establish four core pillars for building foundational relational models: semantic granularity, structural topology, temporal causality, and unified optimization. Addressing these pillars, we propose a modular approach that decouples row encoding from graph message-passing. We introduce the Universal Row Encoder, a transformer-based module that integrates raw cell data with schema metadata-including column semantics, table names, and global distribution statistics-to produce table-width invariant row embeddings. By explicitly feeding global statistics to an intra-row self-attention mechanism, the encoder natively contextualizes unseen features and handles sparse data. Serving as a flexible "backend" for any downstream graph architecture, our pretrained encoder enhances cross-database knowledge transfer on the established RelBench benchmarks while improving learning convergence and memory footprint.