# Scaling Text2SQL via LLM-efficient Schema Filtering with Functional Dependency Graph Rerankers

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.16083 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.16083/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12950/) (2023)
- [M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03216/) (2024)
- [StarCoder: may the source be with you!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06161/) (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)
- [Graph Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.06455/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Spider 2.0: Evaluating Language Models on Real-World Enterprise Text-to-SQL Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07763/) (2024)
- [Towards Complex Text-to-SQL in Cross-Domain Database with Intermediate Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.08205/) (2019)
- [RESDSQL: Decoupling Schema Linking and Skeleton Parsing for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05965/) (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)
- [C3: Zero-shot Text-to-SQL with ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07306/) (2023)
- [MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.11242/) (2023)
- [SQLNet: Generating Structured Queries From Natural Language Without Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04436/) (2017)
- [Bridging Textual and Tabular Data for Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12627/) (2020)
- [TypeSQL: Knowledge-based Type-Aware Neural Text-to-SQL Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.09769/) (2018)
- [SyntaxSQLNet: Syntax Tree Networks for Complex and Cross-DomainText-to-SQL Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05237/) (2018)
- [Representing Schema Structure with Graph Neural Networks for Text-to-SQL Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06241/) (2019)
- [Global Reasoning over Database Structures for Text-to-SQL Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11214/) (2019)
- [SQL-PaLM: Improved Large Language Model Adaptation for Text-to-SQL (extended)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00739/) (2023)
- [ShadowGNN: Graph Projection Neural Network for Text-to-SQL Parser](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04689/) (2021)
- [PURPLE: Making a Large Language Model a Better SQL Writer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20014/) (2024)

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

- [FINER-SQL: Boosting Small Language Models for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.03465/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Most modern Text2SQL systems prompt large language models (LLMs) with entire schemas -- mostly column information -- alongside the user's question. While effective on small databases, this approach fails on real-world schemas that exceed LLM context limits, even for commercial models. The recent Spider 2.0 benchmark exemplifies this with hundreds of tables and tens of thousands of columns, where existing systems often break. Current mitigations either rely on costly multi-step prompting pipelines or filter columns by ranking them against user's question independently, ignoring inter-column structure. To scale existing systems, we introduce toolname, an open-source, LLM-efficient schema filtering framework that compacts Text2SQL prompts by (i) ranking columns with a query-aware LLM encoder enriched with values and metadata, (ii) reranking inter-connected columns via a lightweight graph transformer over functional dependencies, and (iii) selecting a connectivity-preserving sub-schema with a Steiner-tree heuristic. Experiments on real datasets show that toolname achieves near-perfect recall and higher precision than CodeS, SchemaExP, Qwen rerankers, and embedding retrievers, while maintaining sub-second median latency and scaling to schemas with 23,000+ columns. Our source code is available at https://github.com/thanhdath/grast-sql.