# BADGER: Bridging Agentic and Deterministic Evaluation for Generative Enterprise Reasoning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02109 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02109/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 26 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning for agents, planning and code](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-for-agents-planning-and-code/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [General LLM agent frameworks and benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/agents/general-llm-agent-frameworks-and-benchmarks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15334/) (2023)
- [AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03688/) (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)
- [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)
- [SummEval: Re-evaluating Summarization Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12626/) (2020)
- [Plan-and-Solve Prompting: Improving Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04091/) (2023)
- [DIN-SQL: Decomposed In-Context Learning of Text-to-SQL with Self-Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11015/) (2023)
- [Ragas: Automated Evaluation of Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15217/) (2023)
- [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)
- [FLASK: Fine-grained Language Model Evaluation based on Alignment Skill Sets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.10928/) (2023)
- [CoSQL: A Conversational Text-to-SQL Challenge Towards Cross-Domain Natural Language Interfaces to Databases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05378/) (2019)
- [SParC: Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02285/) (2019)
- [Semantic Evaluation for Text-to-SQL with Distilled Test Suites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02840/) (2020)
- [KaggleDBQA: Realistic Evaluation of Text-to-SQL Parsers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11455/) (2021)
- [The Dawn of Natural Language to SQL: Are We Fully Ready?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01265/) (2024)
- [Dr.Spider: A Diagnostic Evaluation Benchmark towards Text-to-SQL Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08881/) (2023)
- [BEAVER: An Enterprise Benchmark for Text-to-SQL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02038/) (2024)
- [UNITE: A Unified Benchmark for Text-to-SQL Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16265/) (2023)
- [FLEX: Expert-level False-Less EXecution Metric for Reliable Text-to-SQL Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19014/) (2024)
- [MT-Teql: Evaluating and Augmenting Consistency of Text-to-SQL Models with Metamorphic Testing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11163/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Enterprise AI systems that translate natural language into SQL queries and orchestrate multi-step agentic reasoning pipelines require evaluation approaches fundamentally different from academic benchmarks. Spider and BIRD established execution-accuracy protocols; G-Eval and RAGAS advanced LLM-based assessment; and recent work such as Spider 2.0, BEAVER, and BIRD-Interact has begun to address enterprise and agentic dimensions. No single framework unifies text-to-SQL assessment with agentic behavior evaluation into a production-grade pipeline calibrated against human expert judgment. We present BADGER, developed at Merkle, a unified evaluation framework integrating text-to-SQL assessment with agentic behavior evaluation. BADGER offers three contributions. First, LLM-assisted SQL component extraction extending Spider methodology to handle CTE-heavy, dialect-specific SQL. Second, a hybrid execution accuracy metric (Hybrid-EX) resolving column-aliasing and numeric-tolerance brittleness by using an LLM to infer structural alignments before deterministic cell-level scoring. Validated on 150 human-annotated industry queries, Hybrid-EX achieves Cohen's kappa=0.717 [95% CI: 0.600-0.822] (Substantial agreement) and 87.3% balanced accuracy, outperforming all six competing frameworks (Delta-kappa: 0.322-0.502, all p<=0.001). Third, an enterprise agentic evaluation suite assembling RAGAS, G-Eval, and agent benchmark metrics into a unified pipeline; Excess Tool Usage is the sole novel element. BADGER runs entirely within the client's governed data environment, supports configurable LLM judge backends, and enables rapid prototyping of client-specific judges and metrics, serving as a continuous evaluation backbone rather than a one-time quality gate.