Papers › Robust Text-to-SQL Generation with Execution-Guided Decoding

Robust Text-to-SQL Generation with Execution-Guided Decoding

9 Jul 2018arXiv:1807.03100archive 2025-07-28

Chenglong Wang, Kedar Tatwawadi, Marc Brockschmidt, Po-Sen Huang, Yi Mao, Oleksandr Polozov, Rishabh Singh

We consider the problem of neural semantic parsing, which translates natural language questions into executable SQL queries. We introduce a new mechanism, execution guidance, to leverage the semantics of SQL. It detects and excludes faulty programs during the decoding procedure by conditioning on the execution of partially generated program. The mechanism can be used with any autoregressive generative model, which we demonstrate on four state-of-the-art recurrent or template-based semantic parsing models. We demonstrate that execution guidance universally improves model performance on various text-to-SQL datasets with different scales and query complexity: WikiSQL, ATIS, and GeoQuery. As a result, we achieve new state-of-the-art execution accuracy of 83.8% on WikiSQL.

PaperPDFCodeCode Syntology ran

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="1807.03100")

Code

Syntology Ran 0 of 20 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 20 have no recorded run.

By repository: community (archive-listed): 20 samples from 1 repository, 0 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

Microsoft/PointerSQL mentioned on GitHubtfMIT report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

20 samples harvested; 0 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 20 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

20unverified

Licence: 0 of the 20 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from Microsoft/PointerSQL. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

assemble_by_type Microsoft/PointerSQL/model/pointer_net_helper.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 0b81ea6dfac2fd9c · report
bidirectional_dynamic_rnn Microsoft/PointerSQL/model/rnn.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · b1599f4b6b51e8a2 · report
build_graph Microsoft/PointerSQL/model/pointer_net_graph.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · cfad29b0a7e82227 · report
build_graph Microsoft/PointerSQL/model/pointer_net_graph_meta.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 6a7354677696eb19 · report
construct_weights Microsoft/PointerSQL/model/pointer_net_graph_meta.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 78fdc65284881fbb · report
dynamic_rnn Microsoft/PointerSQL/model/rnn.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 73be07d069c18e4e · report
forward Microsoft/PointerSQL/model/pointer_net_graph_meta.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 5dee7f2a76ba2fc8 · report
load_annotated_tables Microsoft/PointerSQL/execute.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 206674fc5ea33e29 · report
load_model Microsoft/PointerSQL/model/learn.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 270c014771199c5e · report
load_queries Microsoft/PointerSQL/execute.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 039141b13cd8e378 · report
ngrams Microsoft/PointerSQL/model/util.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · d3bb03195eaecef4 · report
pointer_network_decoder Microsoft/PointerSQL/model/pointer_net.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · e620af6f2188f7cd · report
pointer_to_label Microsoft/PointerSQL/model/pointer_net_helper.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · f933c2946f112686 · report
simple_parser Microsoft/PointerSQL/execute.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 74009b6529893c93 · report
split_by_type Microsoft/PointerSQL/model/pointer_net_helper.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 8b10d12f88841ce4 · report
static_rnn Microsoft/PointerSQL/model/rnn.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 07f567d9ce2eef9e · report
test_model Microsoft/PointerSQL/model/learn.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 6ce7b508f74964a9 · report
test_model Microsoft/PointerSQL/model/learn_meta.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 2d2a3a813048a37f · report
train_model Microsoft/PointerSQL/model/learn.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 8b02f98bb290fa3d · report
train_model Microsoft/PointerSQL/model/learn_meta.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 2117f25305d44365 · report

Tasks

Semantic ParsingText to SQLText-To-SQL

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections