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Before Generation, Align it! A Novel and Effective Strategy for Mitigating Hallucinations in Text-to-SQL Generation

24 May 2024arXiv:2405.15307archive 2025-07-28

Ge Qu, Jinyang Li, Bowen Li, Bowen Qin, Nan Huo, Chenhao Ma, Reynold Cheng

Large Language Models (LLMs) driven by In-Context Learning (ICL) have significantly improved the performance of text-to-SQL. Previous methods generally employ a two-stage reasoning framework, namely 1) schema linking and 2) logical synthesis, making the framework not only effective but also interpretable. Despite these advancements, the inherent bad nature of the generalization of LLMs often results in hallucinations, which limits the full potential of LLMs. In this work, we first identify and categorize the common types of hallucinations at each stage in text-to-SQL. We then introduce a novel strategy, Task Alignment (TA), designed to mitigate hallucinations at each stage. TA encourages LLMs to take advantage of experiences from similar tasks rather than starting the tasks from scratch. This can help LLMs reduce the burden of generalization, thereby mitigating hallucinations effectively. We further propose TA-SQL, a text-to-SQL framework based on this strategy. The experimental results and comprehensive analysis demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our framework. Specifically, it enhances the performance of the GPT-4 baseline by 21.23% relatively on BIRD dev and it yields significant improvements across six models and four mainstream, complex text-to-SQL benchmarks.

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connect_gpt4 quge2023/TA-SQL/src/llm.py official repository ran no licence file found · pointer only · cf622335fdf48d31 · report
execute_model quge2023/TA-SQL/evaluation/evaluation.py official repository ran no licence file found · pointer only · 81256d41646b9e77 · report
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iterated_execute_sql quge2023/TA-SQL/evaluation/evaluation_ves.py official repository ran no licence file found · pointer only · ef3b3e97bc625f25 · report
load_json quge2023/TA-SQL/evaluation/evaluation.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · 72eccdcbaaff9c8d · report
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collect_response quge2023/TA-SQL/src/llm.py official repository unverified no licence file found · pointer only · 47b1f6f8f721aa31 · report

Tasks

In-Context LearningText to SQLText-To-SQL

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Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutGPT-4Label SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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