@inproceedings{wang-etal-2026-vet,
    title = "{VET}: Verifiable Execution Tracing for Reliable Text-to-{SQL} Generation",
    author = "Wang, Dongyu  and
      Li, Jingyu  and
      Zhang, Lan  and
      Ganggang.yu  and
      Huang, Liang",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1544/",
    pages = "30867--30883",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in text-to-SQL generation, yet existing approaches remain prone to hallucinations and lack verification mechanisms. Current methods such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Program-of-Thought (PoT) typically rely on intermediate reasoning that is either purely textual or executed only as a final step, leaving the reasoning process opaque and prone to grounding and logical hallucinations. In this paper, we introduce Verifiable Execution Tracing (VET), a novel reasoning paradigm that transforms text-to-SQL from unverifiable textual rationales into step-wise executable semantics. VET addresses these limitations by constraining the reasoning process within a candidate schema space and formulating it as a sequence of executable Python steps. Crucially, each step is executed against the real database to produce observable intermediate results, which serve as immediate verification feedback and transform the traditionally opaque generation process into a transparent, debuggable interaction with database reality.Experiments show consistent gains under matched, training-free settings, achieving 70.93{\%} execution accuracy on BIRD and 37.04{\%} on Spider 2.0-lite, with particularly strong improvements on complex queries."
}