# You Only Read Once (YORO): Learning to Internalize Database Knowledge for Text-to-SQL

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.12172 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12172/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12950/) (2023)
- [Spider: A Large-Scale Human-Labeled Dataset for Complex and Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08887/) (2018)
- [LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11206/) (2023)
- [Teaching Large Language Models to Self-Debug](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05128/) (2023)
- [Can LLM Already Serve as A Database Interface? A BIg Bench for Large-Scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQLs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03111/) (2023)
- [Seq2SQL: Generating Structured Queries from Natural Language using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00103/) (2017)
- [DIN-SQL: Decomposed In-Context Learning of Text-to-SQL with Self-Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11015/) (2023)
- [PICARD: Parsing Incrementally for Constrained Auto-Regressive Decoding from Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05093/) (2021)
- [Learning to Compress Prompts with Gist Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08467/) (2023)
- [Text-to-SQL Empowered by Large Language Models: A Benchmark Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15363/) (2023)
- [Adapting Language Models to Compress Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14788/) (2023)
- [CodeS: Towards Building Open-source Language Models for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16347/) (2024)
- [Bridging Textual and Tabular Data for Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12627/) (2020)
- [KaggleDBQA: Realistic Evaluation of Text-to-SQL Parsers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11455/) (2021)
- [Grounded Adaptation for Zero-shot Executable Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07396/) (2020)
- [Dr.Spider: A Diagnostic Evaluation Benchmark towards Text-to-SQL Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08881/) (2023)
- [Extending Context Window of Large Language Models via Semantic Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09571/) (2023)
- [SQLBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation for Text-to-SQL Capabilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02951/) (2024)
- [Importance of Synthesizing High-quality Data for Text-to-SQL Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08785/) (2022)
- [Selective Demonstrations for Cross-domain Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06302/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [OmniSQL: Synthesizing High-quality Text-to-SQL Data at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02240/) (2025)
- [EllieSQL: Cost-Efficient Text-to-SQL with Complexity-Aware Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22402/) (2025)
- [SQLForge: Synthesizing Reliable and Diverse Data to Enhance Text-to-SQL Reasoning in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13725/) (2025)
- [On Synthetic Data Strategies for Domain-Specific Generative Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17957/) (2025)
- [Exploring the Landscape of Text-to-SQL with Large Language Models: Progresses, Challenges and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23838/) (2025)
- [TableZoomer: A Collaborative Agent Framework for Large-scale Table Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01312/) (2025)
- [HES-SQL: Hybrid Reasoning for Efficient Text-to-SQL with Structural Skeleton Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08896/) (2025)
- [GradeSQL: Test-Time Inference with Outcome Reward Models for Text-to-SQL Generation from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01308/) (2025)
- [Boundary-Aware NL2SQL: Integrating Reliability through Hybrid Reward and Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10318/) (2026)
- [Schema on the Inside: A Two-Phase Fine-Tuning Method for High-Efficiency Text-to-SQL at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24023/) (2026)
- [Bootstrapping Semantic Layer from Execution for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05634/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While significant progress has been made on the text-to-SQL task, recent solutions repeatedly encode the same database schema for every question, resulting in unnecessary high inference cost and often overlooking crucial database knowledge. To address these issues, we propose You Only Read Once (YORO), a novel paradigm that directly internalizes database knowledge into the parametric knowledge of a text-to-SQL model during training and eliminates the need for schema encoding during inference. YORO significantly reduces the input token length by 66%-98%. Despite its shorter inputs, our empirical results demonstrate YORO's competitive performances with traditional systems on three benchmarks as well as its significant outperformance on large databases. Furthermore, YORO excels in handling questions with challenging value retrievals such as abbreviation.