ICML2026
MARS-SQL: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Framework For Text-To-SQL
Haolin Yang, Jipeng Zhang, Zhitao He, Alexander Zhou, Yi Fung
12 citations
Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with the precise logic and schema alignment required for complex Text-to-SQL tasks. While current methods rely heavily on static prompting, they lack the ability to dynamically adapt and self-correct through environmental interaction. To bridge this gap, we propose MARS-SQL , a trainable multi-agent framework for Text-to-SQL. Rather than introducing a new standalone SQL primitive, MARS-SQL makes an agentic workflow trainable by decomposing the problem into three specialized roles: schema grounding, query generation, and solution validation. Central to our approach is a generation agent trained via a multi-turn RL policy within a ReAct-style loop. The agent learns to iteratively reason, execute intermediate SQL actions on a live database, and refine its strategy based on execution feedback. To improve robustness, we further introduce a validation mechanism that treats solution selection as a generative modeling task, identifying the optimal interaction trajectory through next-token prediction probabilities. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of coupling interactive learning with trajectory ranking. MARS-SQL achieves state-of-the-art performance, recording an execution accuracy of 77.84% on the BIRD development dataset and 89.75% on the Spider test dataset, while also transferring strongly to out-of-domain benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/YangHaolin0526/MARS-SQL.