ACTS-SQL: Agentic and Critic-Oriented Tree-Structured SQL Correctness with Large Language Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.15145v1
• Date: Sat, 15 Aug 2026 09:43:57 GMT
• Title: ACTS-SQL: Agentic and Critic-Oriented Tree-Structured SQL Correctness with Large Language Models
• Abstract summary: We present a training-free framework that formulatessql correction as a plan-guided, tree-structured debug process.<n>We observe consistent accuracy gains over strong LLM backbones and representative agent-based baselines, achieving a 9.42% improvement over the previous state-of-the-art method.<n>The framework is also deployed in the Torch Log Service (TLS) of Volcano Engine to support an online Text-to-TLS API.
• Score: 27.75092433893197
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly adopted in Text-to-SQL systems, yet SQL errors remain a major obstacle in real-world Text-to-SQL inference pipelines. Existing SQL correction approaches either rely on large-scale, high-quality training data with substantial overhead, or adopt single-path agentic workflows that are brittle to early mistakes and prone to error propagation. To develop a practical SQL correctness system for industrial scenarios, we present a training-free framework that formulates SQL correction as a plan-guided, tree-structured debugging process. By maintaining multiple correction strategies and enabling backtracking, the framework mitigates error accumulation during iterative refinement. We further integrate execution-based verification and clause-level diagnostic tools to support strategy pruning and precise error localization. We evaluate the system on the BIRD-Critic benchmark and observe consistent accuracy gains over strong LLM backbones and representative agent-based baselines, achieving a 9.42% improvement over the previous state-of-the-art method. The framework is also deployed in the Torch Log Service (TLS) of Volcano Engine to support an online Text-to-TLS API. In production, it improves execution accuracy from 36.77% to 53.61% on real user queries with a representative strong LLM backbone (GPT-5). These results demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of our approach in real-world deployments.

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