Every Step Counts: Step-Level Credit Assignment for Tool-Integrated Text-to-SQL

Tool-integrated Text-to-SQL parsing has emerged as a promising paradigm, framing SQL generation as a sequential decision-making process interleaved with tool execution. However, existing reinforcement learning approaches mainly rely on coarse-grained outcome supervision, resulting in a fundamental credit assignment problem: models receive the same reward for any trajectory that yields the correct answer, even when intermediate steps are redundant, inefficient, or erroneous. Consequently, models are encouraged to explore suboptimal reasoning spaces, limiting both efficiency and generalization. To address this problem, we propose FineStep, a novel framework for step-level credit assignment in tool-augmented Text-to-SQL. First, we introduce a reward design with independent process rewards to alleviate the signal sparsity of outcome supervision. Next, we present a step-level credit assignment mechanism to precisely quantify the value of each reasoning step. Finally, we develop a policy optimization method based on step-level advantages for efficient updates. Extensive experiments on BIRD benchmarks show that FineStep achieves state-of-the-art performance and reduces redundant tool interactions, with a 3.25% average EX gain over GRPO at the 4B scale.

Diffusion Probe: Generated Image Result Prediction Using CNN Probes

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models lack an efficient mechanism for early quality assessment, leading to costly trial-and-error in multi-generation scenarios such as prompt iteration, agent-based generation, and flow-grpo. We reveal a strong correlation between early diffusion cross-attention distributions and final image quality. Based on this finding, we introduce Diffusion Probe, a framework that leverages internal cross-attention maps as predictive signals. We design a lightweight predictor that maps statistical properties of early-stage cross-attention extracted from initial denoising steps to the final image's overall quality. This enables accurate forecasting of image quality across diverse evaluation metrics long before full synthesis is complete. We validate Diffusion Probe across a wide range of settings. On multiple T2I models, across early denoising windows, resolutions, and quality metrics, it achieves strong correlation (PCC > 0.7) and high classification performance (AUC-ROC > 0.9). Its reliability translates into practical gains. By enabling early quality-aware decisions in workflows such as prompt optimization, seed selection, and accelerated RL training, the probe supports more targeted sampling and avoids computation on low-potential generations. This reduces computational overhead while improving final output quality.Diffusion Probe is model-agnostic, efficient, and broadly applicable, offering a practical solution for improving T2I generation efficiency through early quality prediction.

FIT-RAG: Black-Box RAG with Factual Information and Token Reduction

Due to the extraordinarily large number of parameters, fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) to update long-tail or out-of-date knowledge is impractical in lots of applications. To avoid fine-tuning, we can alternatively treat a LLM as a black-box (i.e., freeze the parameters of the LLM) and augment it with a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, namely black-box RAG. Recently, black-box RAG has achieved success in knowledge-intensive tasks and has gained much attention. Existing black-box RAG methods typically fine-tune the retriever to cater to LLMs' preferences and concatenate all the retrieved documents as the input, which suffers from two issues: (1) Ignorance of Factual Information. The LLM preferred documents may not contain the factual information for the given question, which can mislead the retriever and hurt the effectiveness of black-box RAG; (2) Waste of Tokens. Simply concatenating all the retrieved documents brings large amounts of unnecessary tokens for LLMs, which degenerates the efficiency of black-box RAG. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel black-box RAG framework which utilizes the factual information in the retrieval and reduces the number of tokens for augmentation, dubbed FIT-RAG. FIT-RAG utilizes the factual information by constructing a bi-label document scorer. Besides, it reduces the tokens by introducing a self-knowledge recognizer and a sub-document-level token reducer. FIT-RAG achieves both superior effectiveness and efficiency, which is validated by extensive experiments across three open-domain question-answering datasets: TriviaQA, NQ and PopQA. FIT-RAG can improve the answering accuracy of Llama2-13B-Chat by 14.3\% on TriviaQA, 19.9\% on NQ and 27.5\% on PopQA, respectively. Furthermore, it can save approximately half of the tokens on average across the three datasets.

C3: Zero-shot Text-to-SQL with ChatGPT

This paper proposes a ChatGPT-based zero-shot Text-to-SQL method, dubbed C3, which achieves 82.3\% in terms of execution accuracy on the holdout test set of Spider and becomes the state-of-the-art zero-shot Text-to-SQL method on the Spider Challenge. C3 consists of three key components: Clear Prompting (CP), Calibration with Hints (CH), and Consistent Output (CO), which are corresponding to the model input, model bias and model output respectively. It provides a systematic treatment for zero-shot Text-to-SQL. Extensive experiments have been conducted to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.