# AGENTIQL: An Agent-Inspired Multi-Expert Framework for Text-to-SQL Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10661 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10661/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Web, search, and research agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 19 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

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

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [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)
- [RAT-SQL: Relation-Aware Schema Encoding and Linking for Text-to-SQL Parsers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04942/) (2019)
- [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)
- [C3: Zero-shot Text-to-SQL with ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07306/) (2023)
- [CHASE-SQL: Multi-Path Reasoning and Preference Optimized Candidate Selection in Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01943/) (2024)
- [Exploring Chain-of-Thought Style Prompting for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14215/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Text-to-SQL in the Era of LLMs: Where are we, and where are we going?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05109/) (2024)
- [A Preview of XiYan-SQL: A Multi-Generator Ensemble Framework for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08599/) (2024)
- [DTS-SQL: Decomposed Text-to-SQL with Small Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01117/) (2024)
- [SQL-PaLM: Improved Large Language Model Adaptation for Text-to-SQL (extended)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00739/) (2023)
- [Improving Generalization in Language Model-Based Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing: Two Simple Semantic Boundary-Based Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17378/) (2023)
- [Semantic Enhanced Text-to-SQL Parsing via Iteratively Learning Schema Linking Graph](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03903/) (2022)
- [Text-to-SQL Error Correction with Language Models of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13073/) (2023)
- [SQL-GEN: Bridging the Dialect Gap for Text-to-SQL Via Synthetic Data And Model Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12733/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Natural Language Interfaces for Spatial and Temporal Databases: A Comprehensive Overview of Methods, Taxonomy, and Future Directions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23375/) (2026)
- [The Nuts and Bolts of Natural Language to SQL Translation: A Systematic Analysis of Model Pipeline Optimisation Approaches and their Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10911/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

LLMs have advanced text-to-SQL generation, yet monolithic architectures struggle with complex reasoning and schema diversity. We propose AGENTIQL, an agent-inspired multi-expert framework that combines a reasoning agent for question decomposition, a coding agent for sub-query generation, and a refinement step for column selection. An adaptive router further balances efficiency and accuracy by selecting between our modular pipeline and a baseline parser. Several steps in the pipeline can be executed in parallel, making the framework scalable to larger workloads. Evaluated on the Spider benchmark, AGENTIQL improves execution accuracy and interpretability and achieves up to 86.07% EX with 14B models using the Planner&Executor merging strategy. The attained performance is contingent upon the efficacy of the routing mechanism, thereby narrowing the gap to GPT-4-based SOTA (89.65% EX) while using much smaller open-source LLMs. Beyond accuracy, AGENTIQL enhances transparency by exposing intermediate reasoning steps, offering a robust, scalable, and interpretable approach to semantic parsing.