# LitE-SQL: A Lightweight and Efficient Text-to-SQL Framework with Vector-based Schema Linking and Execution-Guided Self-Correction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09014 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09014/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03771/) (2019)
- [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)
- [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)
- [DIN-SQL: Decomposed In-Context Learning of Text-to-SQL with Self-Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11015/) (2023)
- [Text-to-SQL Empowered by Large Language Models: A Benchmark Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15363/) (2023)
- [CodeS: Towards Building Open-source Language Models for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16347/) (2024)
- [CHESS: Contextual Harnessing for Efficient SQL Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16755/) (2024)
- [MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11242/) (2023)
- [CHASE-SQL: Multi-Path Reasoning and Preference Optimized Candidate Selection in Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01943/) (2024)
- [Next-Generation Database Interfaces: A Survey of LLM-based Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08426/) (2024)
- [MCS-SQL: Leveraging Multiple Prompts and Multiple-Choice Selection For Text-to-SQL Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07467/) (2024)
- [OmniSQL: Synthesizing High-quality Text-to-SQL Data at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02240/) (2025)
- [The Death of Schema Linking? Text-to-SQL in the Age of Well-Reasoned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07702/) (2024)
- [Reasoning-SQL: Reinforcement Learning with SQL Tailored Partial Rewards for Reasoning-Enhanced Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23157/) (2025)
- [Before Generation, Align it! A Novel and Effective Strategy for Mitigating Hallucinations in Text-to-SQL Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15307/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Large Language Model-Based Generative AI for Text-to-SQL: Benchmarks, Applications, Use Cases, and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05208/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [DeSQ: Decomposition-based SPARQL Query Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00203/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Text-to-SQL task translates natural language questions into SQL queries, enabling intuitive database interaction for non-experts. While recent methods leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance, their reliance on proprietary models raise concerns about deployment feasibility and data privacy. In this work, we introduce LitE-SQL, a Lightweight and Efficient framework with two components: (i) a Schema Retriever that performs efficient schema linking using a vector database of pre-computed schema embeddings, optimized with a hard-negative supervised contrastive objective to distinguish semantically similar but functionally irrelevant columns, and (ii) a SQL Generator fine-tuned in two stages-supervised fine-tuning followed by execution-guided reinforcement-enabling execution-guided self-correction without multi-candidate sampling, which is commonly required by prior LLM-based approaches. On BIRD, LitE-SQL achieves 72.10% execution accuracy, and on Spider 1.0 it reaches 88.45%, demonstrating comparable or superior performance to LLM-based methods despite using 2x to 30x fewer parameters. Our findings demonstrate that high-quality Text-to-SQL generation is feasible with lightweight models, offering a practical solution for privacy-sensitive and resource-constrained settings.