Translating natural language questions to SQL queries (Text-to-SQL) is a long-standing problem in database research. Recent efforts have focused on improving accuracy by building increasingly complex multi-stage large LLM pipelines, layering task decomposition, schema linking, and model-based query selection on top of an LLM. Despite this growing complexity, a substantial gap (>10%) between such systems and human experts persists on benchmarks, suggesting that pipeline engineering alone has hit a ceiling.
We show that human-level Text-to-SQL performance is achievable by fine-tuning an LLM using RLVR on clean data, without pipeline components. In this paper, we identified the dominant bottleneck for RLVR on Text-to-SQL: existing training data contains pervasive annotation errors that mislead optimization. To address this, we developed a multi-round, expert-driven verification pipeline and used it to curate BIRD-Platinum, a dataset of 2.5k verified instances sampled from BIRD Train, with errors corrected in 61% of instances. We show that fine-tuning Qwen3-235B on BIRD-Platinum yields consistent improvements (11-16%) over BIRD Train on Arcwise-Plat (an expert-verified version of BIRD) and Spider2, outperforming SOTA open-source systems by 0.6-16%. Furthermore, we diagnosed two failure modes of standard RLVR on Text-to-SQL. We find that (1) result-based rewards have non-trivial false positive rates, and (2) models systematically ignore the external knowledge in BIRD-style problems. To address them, we propose ReViSQL-BIRD, a specialized reward shaping method that combines result-based rewards with SQL equivalence verification and leverages process rewards for incentivizing external-knowledge use. We fine-tuned Kimi-K2.6 with ReViSQL-BIRD. On Arcwise-Plat, ReViSQL-BIRD-K2.6 is the first method to achieve human-level accuracy (92.96%), outperforming top five open-source systems by 10-22%.
Next-Generation Database Interfaces: A Survey of LLM-based Text-to-SQL
Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学计算机系）；Faculty of Data Science, City University of Macau（澳门城市大学数据科学学院）；College of Cyber Security, Jinan University（暨南大学网络安全学院）
Are These Modules Worth Their Cost? A Paradigm-Level Accuracy-Cost Analysis of In-context Learning Text-to-SQL
Jinan University（暨南大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；City University of Macau（澳门城市大学）；Jilin University（吉林大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
A Multi-agent Text2SQL Framework using Small Language Models and Execution Feedback
Griffith University (Australia)（格里菲斯大学）；VinUniversity (Vietnam)（文大学）；Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin (Germany)（柏林洪堡大学）；The University of Queensland, Australia (2025)（昆士兰大学）
