# SIRIUS-SQL: Anchoring Multi-Candidate Text-to-SQL in Execution Feedback

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01246 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01246/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14476/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17926/) (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)
- [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)
- [Spider 2.0: Evaluating Language Models on Real-World Enterprise Text-to-SQL Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07763/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Bridging Textual and Tabular Data for Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12627/) (2020)
- [Semantic Evaluation for Text-to-SQL with Distilled Test Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02840/) (2020)
- [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)
- [RASAT: Integrating Relational Structures into Pretrained Seq2Seq Model for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06983/) (2022)
- [Representing Schema Structure with Graph Neural Networks for Text-to-SQL Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06241/) (2019)
- [Natural SQL: Making SQL Easier to Infer from Natural Language Specifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05153/) (2021)
- [SQL-R1: Training Natural Language to SQL Reasoning Model By Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08600/) (2025)
- [Reasoning-SQL: Reinforcement Learning with SQL Tailored Partial Rewards for Reasoning-Enhanced Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23157/) (2025)
- [Synthesizing Text-to-SQL Data from Weak and Strong LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03256/) (2024)
- [Before Generation, Align it! A Novel and Effective Strategy for Mitigating Hallucinations in Text-to-SQL Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15307/) (2024)
- [XiYan-SQL: A Novel Multi-Generator Framework For Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04701/) (2025)
- [Arctic-Text2SQL-R1: Simple Rewards, Strong Reasoning in Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20315/) (2025)
- [Alpha-SQL: Zero-Shot Text-to-SQL using Monte Carlo Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17248/) (2025)
- [Decomposition for Enhancing Attention: Improving LLM-based Text-to-SQL through Workflow Paradigm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10671/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-to-SQL on complex schemas is unreliable on a single pass, so recent systems generate multiple SQL candidates and let voting filter out errors. Yet voting alone is not enough, because the multi-candidate recipe has three coupled weaknesses: 1) sampling more from a single generator produces increasingly redundant candidates, 2) existing pipelines apply one generic correction to every non-clean execution result, while runtime errors, timeouts, and empty results each indicate a different distance from correctness, and 3) existing selectors rely on a single angle such as result-majority voting or pairwise SQL comparison, missing what other angles would have caught. We present SIRIUS-SQL, which addresses all three weaknesses. A difficulty-smoothing RL recipe trains SIRIUS-32B to generate diverse executable SQL candidates, paired with a generalist LLM that fills in gaps left by the specialist. An execution-grounded lifecycle classifies each outcome and applies targeted repair before candidates re-enter the pool. A confidence-gated hybrid selector combines execution-result agreement with pairwise SQL-form judgment, escalating only near-tied cases to a deterministic structural check. SIRIUS-SQL reaches 75.88% on BIRD dev and 91.20% on SPIDER test. Two of three generalist pairings surpass Agentar-Scale-SQL, the strongest published multi-candidate system on BIRD dev.