Bridging the Semantic Gap: Contrastive Rewards for Multilingual Text-to-SQL with GRPO

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Hauptverfasser: Kattamuri, Ashish, Prasad, Ishita, Malhotra, Meetu, Vats, Arpita, Raja, Rahul, Lie, Albert
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Kattamuri, Ashish
Prasad, Ishita
Malhotra, Meetu
Vats, Arpita
Raja, Rahul
Lie, Albert
author_facet Kattamuri, Ashish
Prasad, Ishita
Malhotra, Meetu
Vats, Arpita
Raja, Rahul
Lie, Albert
contents Current Text-to-SQL methods are evaluated and only focused on executable queries, overlooking the semantic alignment challenge -- both in terms of the semantic meaning of the query and the correctness of the execution results. Even execution accuracy itself shows significant drops when moving from English to other languages, with an average decline of 6 percentage points across non-English languages. We address these challenges by presenting a new framework that combines Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) within a multilingual contrastive reward signal to enhance both task efficiency and semantic accuracy in Text-to-SQL systems in cross-lingual scenarios. Our method teaches models to obtain better correspondence between SQL generation and user intent by combining a reward signal based on semantic similarity. On the seven-language MultiSpider dataset, fine-tuning the LLaMA-3-3B model with GRPO improved the execution accuracy up to 87.4 percent (+26 pp over zero-shot) and semantic accuracy up to 52.29 percent (+32.86 pp). Adding our contrastive reward signal in the GRPO framework further improved the average semantic accuracy to 59.14 percent (+6.85 pp, up to +10 pp for Vietnamese). Our experiments showcase that a smaller, parameter-efficient 3B LLaMA model fine-tuned with our contrastive reward signal outperforms a much larger zero-shot 8B LLaMA model, with an uplift of 7.43 pp in execution accuracy (from 81.43 percent on the 8B model to 88.86 percent on the 3B model), and nearly matches its semantic accuracy (59.14 percent vs. 68.57 percent) -- all using just 3,000 reinforcement learning training examples. These results demonstrate how we can improve the performance of Text-to-SQL systems with contrastive rewards for directed semantic alignment, without requiring large-scale training datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_13827
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bridging the Semantic Gap: Contrastive Rewards for Multilingual Text-to-SQL with GRPO
Kattamuri, Ashish
Prasad, Ishita
Malhotra, Meetu
Vats, Arpita
Raja, Rahul
Lie, Albert
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Current Text-to-SQL methods are evaluated and only focused on executable queries, overlooking the semantic alignment challenge -- both in terms of the semantic meaning of the query and the correctness of the execution results. Even execution accuracy itself shows significant drops when moving from English to other languages, with an average decline of 6 percentage points across non-English languages. We address these challenges by presenting a new framework that combines Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) within a multilingual contrastive reward signal to enhance both task efficiency and semantic accuracy in Text-to-SQL systems in cross-lingual scenarios. Our method teaches models to obtain better correspondence between SQL generation and user intent by combining a reward signal based on semantic similarity. On the seven-language MultiSpider dataset, fine-tuning the LLaMA-3-3B model with GRPO improved the execution accuracy up to 87.4 percent (+26 pp over zero-shot) and semantic accuracy up to 52.29 percent (+32.86 pp). Adding our contrastive reward signal in the GRPO framework further improved the average semantic accuracy to 59.14 percent (+6.85 pp, up to +10 pp for Vietnamese). Our experiments showcase that a smaller, parameter-efficient 3B LLaMA model fine-tuned with our contrastive reward signal outperforms a much larger zero-shot 8B LLaMA model, with an uplift of 7.43 pp in execution accuracy (from 81.43 percent on the 8B model to 88.86 percent on the 3B model), and nearly matches its semantic accuracy (59.14 percent vs. 68.57 percent) -- all using just 3,000 reinforcement learning training examples. These results demonstrate how we can improve the performance of Text-to-SQL systems with contrastive rewards for directed semantic alignment, without requiring large-scale training datasets.
title Bridging the Semantic Gap: Contrastive Rewards for Multilingual Text-to-SQL with GRPO
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13827