# OptiSQL: Executable SQL Generation from Optical Tokens

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13695 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.13695/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Pix2Struct: Screenshot Parsing as Pretraining for Visual Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03347/) (2022)
- [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)
- [TableBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Table Detection and Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01949/) (2019)
- [ReFoRCE: A Text-to-SQL Agent with Self-Refinement, Consensus Enforcement, and Column Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00675/) (2025)
- [Text2SQL-Flow: A Robust SQL-Aware Data Augmentation Framework for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10192/) (2025)
- [PreP-OCR: A Complete Pipeline for Document Image Restoration and Enhanced OCR Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20429/) (2025)
- [Beyond Query-Level Comparison: Fine-Grained Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQL with Automated Interpretable Critiques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22258/) (2025)
- [PdfTable: A Unified Toolkit for Deep Learning-Based Table Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05125/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Executable SQL generation is typically studied in text-to-SQL settings, where tables are provided as fully linearized textual schemas and contents. While effective, this formulation assumes access to structured text and incurs substantial token overhead, which is misaligned with many real-world scenarios where tables appear as visual artifacts in documents or webpages. We investigate whether compact optical representations can serve as an efficient interface for executable semantic parsing. We present OptiSQL, a vision-driven framework that generates executable SQL directly from table images and natural language questions using compact optical tokens. OptiSQL leverages an OCR-oriented visual encoder to compress table structure and content into a small set of optical tokens and fine-tunes a pretrained decoder for SQL generation while freezing the encoder to isolate representation sufficiency. Experiments on a visualized version of Spider 2.0-Snow show that OptiSQL retains strong execution accuracy while reducing table input tokens by an order of magnitude. Robustness analyses further demonstrate that optical tokens preserve essential structural information under visual perturbations.