@inproceedings{pan-etal-2026-evolsql,
title = "{E}vol{SQL}: Structure-Aware Evolution for Scalable Text-to-{SQL} Data Synthesis",
author = "Pan, Xuanguang and
Tao, Chongyang and
Bai, Jiayuan and
Gao, Jianling and
Hua, Kai and
Zhang, Ge and
Ma, Shuai",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {EMNLP} 2026",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1772/",
pages = "37915--37935",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-462-0",
abstract = "Training effective Text-to-SQL models remains challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality, diverse, and structurally complex datasets. Existing methods either rely on limited human-annotated corpora, or synthesize datasets directly by simply prompting LLMs without explicit control over SQL structures, often resulting in limited structural diversity and complexity. To address this, we introduce EvolSQL, a structure-aware data synthesis framework that evolves SQL queries from seed data into richer and more semantically diverse forms. EvolSQL starts with an exploratory Query-SQL expansion to broaden question diversity and improve schema coverage, and then applies an adaptive directional evolution strategy using six atomic transformation operators derived from the SQL Abstract Syntax Tree to progressively increase query complexity across relational, predicate, aggregation, and nesting dimensions. An execution-grounded SQL refinement module and schema-aware deduplication further ensure the creation of high-quality, structurally diverse mapping pairs. Experimental results show that a 7B model fine-tuned on our data outperforms one trained on the much larger SynSQL dataset using only 1/18 of the data. Our code is available at https://github.com/slaanurgle/EvolSQL."
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<abstract>Training effective Text-to-SQL models remains challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality, diverse, and structurally complex datasets. Existing methods either rely on limited human-annotated corpora, or synthesize datasets directly by simply prompting LLMs without explicit control over SQL structures, often resulting in limited structural diversity and complexity. To address this, we introduce EvolSQL, a structure-aware data synthesis framework that evolves SQL queries from seed data into richer and more semantically diverse forms. EvolSQL starts with an exploratory Query-SQL expansion to broaden question diversity and improve schema coverage, and then applies an adaptive directional evolution strategy using six atomic transformation operators derived from the SQL Abstract Syntax Tree to progressively increase query complexity across relational, predicate, aggregation, and nesting dimensions. An execution-grounded SQL refinement module and schema-aware deduplication further ensure the creation of high-quality, structurally diverse mapping pairs. Experimental results show that a 7B model fine-tuned on our data outperforms one trained on the much larger SynSQL dataset using only 1/18 of the data. Our code is available at https://github.com/slaanurgle/EvolSQL.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T EvolSQL: Structure-Aware Evolution for Scalable Text-to-SQL Data Synthesis
%A Pan, Xuanguang
%A Tao, Chongyang
%A Bai, Jiayuan
%A Gao, Jianling
%A Hua, Kai
%A Zhang, Ge
%A Ma, Shuai
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-462-0
%F pan-etal-2026-evolsql
%X Training effective Text-to-SQL models remains challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality, diverse, and structurally complex datasets. Existing methods either rely on limited human-annotated corpora, or synthesize datasets directly by simply prompting LLMs without explicit control over SQL structures, often resulting in limited structural diversity and complexity. To address this, we introduce EvolSQL, a structure-aware data synthesis framework that evolves SQL queries from seed data into richer and more semantically diverse forms. EvolSQL starts with an exploratory Query-SQL expansion to broaden question diversity and improve schema coverage, and then applies an adaptive directional evolution strategy using six atomic transformation operators derived from the SQL Abstract Syntax Tree to progressively increase query complexity across relational, predicate, aggregation, and nesting dimensions. An execution-grounded SQL refinement module and schema-aware deduplication further ensure the creation of high-quality, structurally diverse mapping pairs. Experimental results show that a 7B model fine-tuned on our data outperforms one trained on the much larger SynSQL dataset using only 1/18 of the data. Our code is available at https://github.com/slaanurgle/EvolSQL.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1772/
%P 37915-37935
Markdown (Informal)
[EvolSQL: Structure-Aware Evolution for Scalable Text-to-SQL Data Synthesis](https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1772/) (Pan et al., Findings 2026)
ACL