EMNLP 2025

November 06, 2025

Suzhou, China

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Natural language interfaces (NLIs) democratize data analytics by enabling non-technical users to query relational databases via Text-to-SQL systems. While large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy on benchmarks like Spider and BIRD, two critical challenges persist for real-time deployment: (1) inference latency due to sequential autoregressive decoding (e.g., 14.23–22.77 seconds per query for Qwen2.5-Coder-32B and Llama-70B on BIRD (Minidev)), and (2) schema hallucinations (e.g., invalid column references like customerids instead of cust_id). To address these, we propose Tree-Guided Token Decoding (TTD-SQL), a lightweight framework that integrates SQL grammar and database schema constraints into the decoding process without modifying the underlying LLM. TTD precomputes token-level decision trees over SQL keywords, table names, and column identifiers, enabling deterministic "auto-fill" transitions for uniquely determined tokens (e.g., "Singer" → "ID") while retaining flexibility for unconstrained reasoning. Across five LLMs (CodeLlama, Phi-4, Qwen2.5, Granite, Llama-70B), TTD achieves up to 19.96% token-rate speedups by eliminating redundant forward passes (e.g., CodeLlama: 8.97→10.76 tokens/s on Spider) and reduces schema hallucinations by +17.7% in executable-SQL rates (e.g., CodeLlama on BIRD). By bridging rigid parser-based methods and flexible LLM generation, TTD offers a practical path toward reliable, high-performance SQL generation in both public benchmarks and enterprise settings.

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