RingSQL: Schema-Independent Synthetic Data Generation for Text-to-SQL Reinforcement Learning
On the map: Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs → Synthetic reasoning data and bootstrapping
Abstract (arXiv)
Recent advances in text-to-SQL have been driven by larger models, better datasets, and new training methods like RLVR. However, progress remains limited by scarce high-quality training data, a problem RLVR is especially sensitive to since noisy data can produce spurious rewards. Manual data creation is expensive, and existing synthetic methods trade off reliability for scalability: template-based approaches guarantee correct SQL but need schema-specific templates and lack diversity, while LLM-based generation scales easily but lacks quality guarantees. We introduce RingSQL, a hybrid framework for generating question-SQL pairs that combines schema-independent query templates with LLM-based paraphrasing of natural language questions. By grounding question generation in complete template questions, RingSQL preserves question-query correctness across all levels of query complexity, a property purely LLM-based methods fail to maintain. RingSQL also produces the only synthetic dataset that improves RLVR training performance across all tested model architectures and benchmarks, achieving 69.8% average accuracy and surpassing both the next-best synthetic dataset by 2.1% and human-annotated data from Spider and BIRD. Code and data are available at https://github.com/nu-c3lab/RingSQL.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Synthetic reasoning data and bootstrapping, one of 13 directions in Synthetic data and self-improvement for LLMs. Builds on 40 of its 51 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Jan 2026.
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References · 40
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28 more
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