Current Text-to-SQL reasoning models often lack integrated execution feedback during generation, and most existing approaches utilize feedback only for post-hoc correction. This separation not only limits real-time error correction, but may also introduce mistakes by altering otherwise correct SQL queries. To address these challenges, we present **ReEx-SQL** (Reasoning with Execution-Aware Reinforcement Learning), a Text-to-SQL framework that interacts with the SQL execution engine during decoding and dynamically adjusts reasoning based on execution feedback, thereby enabling context-sensitive query refinement and improved accuracy. ReEx-SQL achieves this through structured prompts with markup tags and a stepwise rollout strategy that incorporates execution feedback at each generation stage. For policy supervision, we design a composite reward function—featuring an exploration reward—to explicitly encourage effective interaction with the database. Furthermore, ReEx-SQL adopts a tree-based decoding strategy to facilitate exploratory reasoning and primarily aims to enhance parallel decoding efficiency. Notably, ReEx-SQL achieves 89.1% accuracy on Spider and 65.3% on BIRD at the 7B scale, surpassing baseline models by 2.7% and 2.6%, respectively. In addition, its tree-based decoding accelerates inference by 51.9% compared to linear decoding during sampling.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to substantial progress on the Text-to-SQL task. However, existing approaches typically depend on static, pre-processed database information supplied at inference time, which restricts the model’s capacity to deeply comprehend the underlying database content. In the absence of dynamic interaction, LLMs are limited to fixed, human-curated context and lack the ability to autonomously query or explore the data. To overcome this limitation, we introduce SDE-SQL, a novel framework that empowers LLMs to perform Self-Driven Exploration of databases during inference. This is achieved through the generation and execution of SQL probes, enabling the model to actively retrieve information and iteratively refine its understanding of the database. Unlike prior methods, SDE-SQL operates in a zero-shot setting, requiring no in-context demonstrations or question-SQL pairs. Evaluated on the BIRD benchmark with Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct, SDE-SQL achieves an 8.02 % relative improvement in execution accuracy over the vanilla Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct baseline, establishing a new state-of-the-art among open-source methods without supervised fine-tuning (SFT) or model ensembling. Furthermore, when combined with SFT, SDE-SQL delivers an additional 0.52 % performance gain.