With the prevalence of Large Language Models (LLMs), recent studies have shifted paradigms and leveraged LLMs to tackle the challenging task of Text-to-SQL. Because of the complexity of real world databases, previous works adopt the retrieve-then-generate framework to retrieve relevant database schema and then to generate the SQL query. However, efficient embedding-based retriever suffers from lower retrieval accuracy, and more accurate LLM-based retriever is far more expensive to use, which hinders their applicability for broader applications. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes Gen-SQL, a novel generate-ground-regenerate framework, where we exploit prior knowledge from the LLM to enhance embedding-based retriever and reduce cost. Experiments on several datasets are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our proposed method. We release our code and data at https://github.com/jieshi10/gensql.

Specializing LLMs in various domain-specific tasks has emerged as a critical step towards achieving high performance. However, the construction and annotation of datasets in specific domains are always very costly. Apart from using superior and expensive closed-source LLM APIs to construct datasets, some open-source models have become strong enough to handle dataset construction in many scenarios. Thus, we present a family of data augmentation models designed to significantly improve the efficiency for model fine-tuning. These models, trained based on sufficiently small LLMs, support key functionalities with low inference costs: instruction expansion, instruction refinement, and instruction-response pair expansion. To fulfill this goal, we first construct an automatic data collection system with seed datasets generated from both public repositories and our in-house datasets. This system leverages powerful LLMs to expand, refine and re-write the instructions and responses, incorporating quality assessment techniques. Following this, we introduce the training process of our models, which effectively distills task-solving and text synthesis abilities from teacher LLMs. Finally, we demonstrate how we integrate these functionalities into a machine learning platform to support low-cost LLM fine-tuning from both dataset preparation and training perspectives for users. Experiments and an application study prove the effectiveness of our approach.

Text-to-SQL is the task of translating natural language questions into SQL queries based on relational databases. Different databases implement their own SQL dialects, leading to variations in syntax. As a result, SQL queries designed for one database may not execute properly in another, creating a dialect gap. Existing Text-to-SQL research primarily focuses on specific database systems, limiting adaptability to different dialects. This paper proposes a novel adaptive framework called Dialect-SQL, which employs Object Relational Mapping (ORM) code as an intermediate language to bridge this gap. Given a question, we guide Large Language Models (LLMs) to first generate ORM code, which is then parsed into SQL queries targeted for specific databases. However, there is a lack of high-quality Text-to-Code datasets that enable LLMs to effectively generate ORM code. To address this issue, we propose a bootstrapping approach to synthesize ORM code, where verified ORM code is iteratively integrated into a demonstration pool that serves as in-context examples for ORM code generation. Our experiments demonstrate that Dialect-SQL significantly enhances dialect adaptability, outperforming traditional methods that generate SQL queries directly. Our code and data are released at https://github.com/jieshi10/orm-sql.

Instruction tuning aims to align large language models (LLMs) with open-domain instructions and human-preferred responses. While several studies have explored autonomous approaches to distilling and annotating instructions from powerful proprietary LLMs, such as ChatGPT, they often neglect the impact of the distributions and characteristics of tasks, together with the varying difficulty of instructions in training sets. This oversight can lead to imbalanced knowledge capabilities and poor generalization powers of student LLMs. To address these challenges, we introduce Task-Aware Curriculum Planning for Instruction Refinement (TAPIR), a multi-round distillation framework that utilizes an oracle LLM to select instructions that are difficult for a student LLM to follow. To balance the student’s capabilities, task distributions in training sets are adjusted with responses automatically refined according to their corresponding tasks. In addition, by incorporating curriculum planning, our approach systematically escalates the difficulty levels of tasks, progressively enhancing the student LLM’s capabilities. We rigorously evaluate TAPIR using several widely recognized benchmarks (such as AlpacaEval 2.0, MT-Bench, etc.) and multiple student LLMs. Empirical results demonstrate that student LLMs, trained with our method and less training data, outperform larger instruction-tuned models and strong distillation baselines.