Uncovering the Impact of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Direct Preference Optimization: Lessons from Text-to-SQL

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11656v1
• Date: Mon, 17 Feb 2025 10:47:17 GMT
• Title: Uncovering the Impact of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Direct Preference Optimization: Lessons from Text-to-SQL
• Abstract summary: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has proven effective in complex reasoning tasks like math word problems and code generation.<n>But when applied to Text-to-native datasets, DPO often fails to improve performance and can even degrade it.<n>By augmenting Text-to-native datasets with synthetic Chain-of-Thought (CoT) solutions, we achieve, for the first time, consistent and significant performance improvements.
• Score: 23.741969743203413
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has proven effective in complex reasoning tasks like math word problems and code generation. However, when applied to Text-to-SQL datasets, it often fails to improve performance and can even degrade it. Our investigation reveals the root cause: unlike math and code tasks, which naturally integrate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with DPO, Text-to-SQL datasets typically include only final answers (gold SQL queries) without detailed CoT solutions. By augmenting Text-to-SQL datasets with synthetic CoT solutions, we achieve, for the first time, consistent and significant performance improvements using DPO. Our analysis shows that CoT reasoning is crucial for unlocking DPO's potential, as it mitigates reward hacking, strengthens discriminative capabilities, and improves scalability. These findings offer valuable insights for building more robust Text-to-SQL models. To support further research, we publicly release the code and CoT-enhanced datasets.

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