SING-SQL: A Synthetic Data Generation Framework for In-Domain Text-to-SQL Translation
On the map: Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs → Synthetic reasoning data and bootstrapping
Abstract (arXiv)
Translating natural language questions into SQL has become a core challenge in enabling non-technical users to query databases. While recent work has explored large-scale synthetic data generation to improve model performance through post-training, most efforts emphasize cross-domain generalization. This leaves a gap for real-world enterprise scenarios, where models need to specialize to a single database schema and organizations require to be able to evaluate their Text-to-SQL systems on their own databases. To address this, we introduce SING-SQL, a fully automated two-stage framework for generating high-quality, high-coverage synthetic Text-to-SQL data for any target database, without relying on SQL logs or manual annotations. Our approach hierarchically partitions a database schema into sub-schemas, synthesizes SQL queries across multiple complexity levels, and applies a quality-aware pipeline that includes LLM-as-a-judge validation, executability checks, automatic repair, and column balancing. We further release SingSQL-LM, a family of compact language models fine-tuned on the synthetic data, achieving strong in-domain generalization. On the subset of the BIRD benchmark, SingSQL-LM-3B-R64 reaches 82.87% Soft F1 and 73.03% EX upper bound with 32 candidates, outperforming the best 3B-scale baseline by +16.21 in Soft F1 and +12.36 in EX. At the 1.5B scale, SingSQL-LM-1.5B-R64 improves over prior systems by +9.30 in Soft F1 and +4.49 in EX. On synthetic evaluation sets, SingSQL-LMs exceed prior systems by wide margins, establishing state-of-the-art performance among open models at comparable scales. Our study of context management strategies reveals that schema-free fine-tuning combined with schema-only inference provides the most robust results. These findings establish SING-SQL as a scalable, database-agnostic paradigm for producing and evaluating enterprise-grade Text-to-SQL systems.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Synthetic reasoning data and bootstrapping, one of 13 directions in Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs. Builds on 25 of its 42 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2025.
Builds on
25 of 42 references.
References · 25
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- 2022Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasonerscited by 4,374
- 2023Can LLM Already Serve as A Database Interface? A BIg Bench for Large-Scale Database Grounded Text-to-SQLscited by 688
- 2023DIN-SQL: Decomposed In-Context Learning of Text-to-SQL with Self-Correctioncited by 477
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- 2024MCS-SQL: Leveraging Multiple Prompts and Multiple-Choice Selection For Text-to-SQL Generationcited by 105
- 2025OmniSQL: Synthesizing High-quality Text-to-SQL Data at Scalecited by 91
- 2024The Death of Schema Linking? Text-to-SQL in the Age of Well-Reasoned Language Modelscited by 67
13 more
- 2025Reasoning-SQL: Reinforcement Learning with SQL Tailored Partial Rewards for Reasoning-Enhanced Text-to-SQLcited by 59
- 2025OpenSearch-SQL: Enhancing Text-to-SQL with Dynamic Few-shot and Consistency Alignmentcited by 53
- 2024RSL-SQL: Robust Schema Linking in Text-to-SQL Generationcited by 52
- 2024Before Generation, Align it! A Novel and Effective Strategy for Mitigating Hallucinations in Text-to-SQL Generationcited by 50
- 2025Arctic-Text2SQL-R1: Simple Rewards, Strong Reasoning in Text-to-SQLcited by 38
- 2024E-SQL: Direct Schema Linking via Question Enrichment in Text-to-SQLcited by 35
- 2025Automatic Metadata Extraction for Text-to-SQLcited by 27
- 2025Think2SQL: Reinforce LLM Reasoning Capabilities for Text2SQLcited by 14
- 2024SiriusBI: A Comprehensive LLM-Powered Solution for Data Analytics in Business Intelligencecited by 12
- 2024Solid-SQL: Enhanced Schema-linking based In-context Learning for Robust Text-to-SQLcited by 11
- 2025SLM-SQL: An Exploration of Small Language Models for Text-to-SQLcited by 10
- 2025BASE-SQL: A powerful open source Text-To-SQL baseline approachcited by 9
- 2025TailorSQL: An NL2SQL System Tailored to Your Query Workloadcited by 3
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 4.
5 papers.
- 2025AGRO-SQL: Agentic Group-Relative Optimization with High-Fidelity Data Synthesiscited by 2
- 2026CLARITY: A Framework and Benchmark for Conversational Language Ambiguity and Unanswerability in Interactive NL2SQL Systemscited by 2
- 2026SemanticAgent: A Semantics-Aware Framework for Text-to-SQL Data Synthesiscited by 0
- 2026STAGE: Source-grounded Text-to-JSON Artifact GEnerationcited by 0
- 2026A Cost-Aware Agentic Architecture for NL-to-SQL over Nested Enterprise Schemas, with a New Benchmarkcited by 0
- 2026A Cost-Aware Agentic Architecture for NL-to-SQL over Nested Enterprise Schemas, with a New Benchmark4 Sep 2026
- 2026STAGE: Source-grounded Text-to-JSON Artifact GEneration18 Jun 2026
- 2026CLARITY: A Framework and Benchmark for Conversational Language Ambiguity and Unanswerability in Interactive NL2SQL Systems24 Apr 2026
- 2026SemanticAgent: A Semantics-Aware Framework for Text-to-SQL Data Synthesis23 Apr 2026
- 2025AGRO-SQL: Agentic Group-Relative Optimization with High-Fidelity Data Synthesis29 Dec 2025
Similar, not cited
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- 2026SQuaD-SQL: Efficient Text-to-SQL with Small Language Models via LLM-Guided Knowledge Distillation
- 2025ORANGE: An Online Reflection ANd GEneration framework with Domain Knowledge for Text-to-SQL
- 2025Thinkquel: A Model Dedicated to Text-to-dbt Using Synthetic Data and a Span-Aware Objective
- 2024SQL-GEN: Bridging the Dialect Gap for Text-to-SQL Via Synthetic Data And Model Merging
- 2025Text2SQL-Flow: A Robust SQL-Aware Data Augmentation Framework for Text-to-SQL
- 2026EvolSQL: Structure-Aware Evolution for Scalable Text-to-SQL Data Synthesis
- 2026Knowledge Distillation for Low-Resource Open-source Text-to-SQL Model
- 2025Distill-C: Enhanced NL2SQL via Distilled Customization with LLMs