ROSE: An Intent-Centered Evaluation Metric for NL2SQL
Abstract
ROSE is an intent-centered metric for NL2SQL evaluation that uses a Prover-Refuter cascade to assess semantic correctness independently of ground-truth SQL, showing superior agreement with human experts.
Execution Accuracy (EX), the widely used metric for evaluating the effectiveness of Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) solutions, is becoming increasingly unreliable. It is sensitive to syntactic variation, ignores that questions may admit multiple interpretations, and is easily misled by erroneous ground-truth SQL. To address this, we introduce ROSE, an intent-centered metric that focuses on whether the predicted SQL answers the question, rather than consistency with the ground-truth SQL under the reference-dependent paradigm. ROSE employs an adversarial Prover-Refuter cascade: SQL Prover assesses the semantic correctness of a predicted SQL against the user's intent independently, while Adversarial Refuter uses the ground-truth SQL as evidence to challenge and refine this judgment. On our expert-aligned validation set ROSE-VEC, ROSE achieves the best agreement with human experts, outperforming the next-best metric by nearly 24% in Cohen's Kappa. We also conduct a largescale re-evaluation of 19 NL2SQL methods, revealing four valuable insights. We release ROSE and ROSE-VEC to facilitate more reliable NL2SQL research.
Community
Execution Accuracy (EX), the widely used metric for evaluating the effectiveness of Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) solutions, is becoming increasingly unreliable. It is sensitive to syntactic variation, ignores that questions may admit multiple interpretations, and is easily misled by erroneous ground-truth SQL. To address this, we introduce ROSE, an intent-centered metric that focuses on whether the predicted SQL answers the question, rather than consistency with the ground-truth SQL under the reference-dependent paradigm. ROSE employs an adversarial Prover-Refuter cascade: SQL Prover assesses the semantic correctness of a predicted SQL against the user's intent independently, while Adversarial Refuter uses the ground-truth SQL as evidence to challenge and refine this judgment. On our expert-aligned validation set ROSE-VEC, ROSE achieves the best agreement with human experts, outperforming the next-best metric by nearly 24% in Cohen's Kappa. We also conduct a largescale re-evaluation of 19 NL2SQL methods, revealing four valuable insights. We release ROSE and ROSE-VEC to facilitate more reliable NL2SQL research.
This is an automated message from the Librarian Bot. I found the following papers similar to this paper.
The following papers were recommended by the Semantic Scholar API
- ErrorLLM: Modeling SQL Errors for Text-to-SQL Refinement (2026)
- TRUST-SQL: Tool-Integrated Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQL over Unknown Schemas (2026)
- Beyond Output Correctness: Benchmarking and Evaluating Large Language Model Reasoning in Coding Tasks (2026)
- Who Judges the Judge? Evaluating LLM-as-a-Judge for French Medical open-ended QA (2026)
- Optimizing Small Language Models for NL2SQL via Chain-of-Thought Fine-Tuning (2026)
- ReViSQL: Achieving Human-Level Text-to-SQL (2026)
- SQLStructEval: Structural Evaluation of LLM Text-to-SQL Generation (2026)
Please give a thumbs up to this comment if you found it helpful!
If you want recommendations for any Paper on Hugging Face checkout this Space
You can directly ask Librarian Bot for paper recommendations by tagging it in a comment: @librarian-bot recommend
Get this paper in your agent:
hf papers read 2604.12988 Don't have the latest CLI?
curl -LsSf https://hf.co/cli/install.sh | bash Models citing this paper 0
No model linking this paper
Datasets citing this paper 0
No dataset linking this paper
Spaces citing this paper 0
No Space linking this paper
Collections including this paper 0
No Collection including this paper