# LLMSQL: Upgrading WikiSQL for the LLM Era of Text-to-SQL

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02350 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02350/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (2025)
- [gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10925/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Seq2SQL: Generating Structured Queries from Natural Language using Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.00103/) (2017)
- [SQLNet: Generating Structured Queries From Natural Language Without Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04436/) (2017)
- [Improving Text-to-SQL Evaluation Methodology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09029/) (2018)
- [A Comprehensive Exploration on WikiSQL with Table-Aware Word Contextualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01069/) (2019)
- [TypeSQL: Knowledge-based Type-Aware Neural Text-to-SQL Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09769/) (2018)
- [Robust Text-to-SQL Generation with Execution-Guided Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03100/) (2018)
- [Understanding the Effects of Noise in Text-to-SQL: An Examination of the BIRD-Bench Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12243/) (2024)
- [SQLBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation for Text-to-SQL Capabilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02951/) (2024)
- [SeaD: End-to-end Text-to-SQL Generation with Schema-aware Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07911/) (2021)
- [UNITE: A Unified Benchmark for Text-to-SQL Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16265/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Converting natural language questions into SQL queries enables non-expert users to interact with relational databases and has long been a central task for natural language interfaces to data. While the WikiSQL dataset played a key role in early text-to-SQL research, its usage has declined due to structural and annotation issues, including case sensitivity inconsistencies, data type mismatches, syntax errors, and unanswered questions. We present LLMSQL, a systematic revision and transformation of WikiSQL designed for the large language model era. We classify these errors and implement automated methods for cleaning and re-annotation. To assess the impact of these improvements, we evaluated multiple large language models, including Gemma 3, LLaMA 3.2, Mistral 7B, gpt-oss 20B, Phi-3.5 Mini, Qwen 2.5, OpenAI o4-mini, DeepSeek-R1, and others. Notably, DeepSeek-R1 achieves 88.40% accuracy in a zero-shot setting, and models under 10B parameters surpass 90% accuracy after fine-tuning. Rather than serving as an update, LLMSQL is introduced as an LLM-ready benchmark. Unlike the original WikiSQL, which was tailored for pointer-network models selecting tokens from input, LLMSQL provides clean natural language questions and full SQL queries as plain text, enabling straightforward generation and evaluation for modern natural-language-to-SQL models.