SQL-ASTRA: Alleviating Sparse Feedback in Agentic SQL via Column-Set Matching and Trajectory Aggregation

Long Li, Zhijian Zhou, Jiangxuan Long, Peiyang Liu, Weidi Xu, Zhe Wang, Shirui Pan, Chao Qu

Agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) shows promise for complex tasks, but Text-to-SQL remains mostly restricted to single-turn paradigms. A primary bottleneck is the credit assignment problem. In traditional paradigms, rewards are determined solely by the final-turn feedback, which ignores the intermediate process and leads to ambiguous credit evaluation. To address this, we propose Agentic SQL, a framework featuring a universal two-tiered reward mechanism designed to provide effective trajectory-level evaluation and dense step-level signals. First, we introduce Aggregated Trajectory Reward (ATR) to resolve multi-turn credit assignment. Using an asymmetric transition matrix, ATR aggregates process-oriented scores to incentivize continuous improvement. Leveraging Lyapunov stability theory, we prove ATR acts as an energy dissipation operator, guaranteeing a cycle-free policy and monotonic convergence. Second, Column-Set Matching Reward (CSMR) provides immediate step-level rewards to mitigate sparsity. By executing queries at each turn, CSMR converts binary (0/1) feedback into dense [0, 1] signals based on partial correctness. Evaluations on BIRD show a 5% gain over binary-reward GRPO. Notably, our approach outperforms SOTA Arctic-Text2SQL-R1-7B on BIRD and Spider 2.0 using identical models, propelling Text-to-SQL toward a robust multi-turn agent paradigm.

• ByteDance
• Peking University
• New York University
• Peking University
• Fudan University
• Shanghai AI Laboratory
• Shanghai Jiao Tong University
• The Chinese University of Hong Kong
• University of Science and Technology of China
• Xiamen University
• AI for Science Institute
• Peking University
• Australian National University
• Fudan University
• Monash University
• University of Melbourne
• ByteDance
• NVIDIA
• Northeastern University
• Peking University
• The Chinese University of Hong Kong
• Westlake University