LLamaRecipes/end-to-end-use-cases/coding/text2sql

Improving Llama Text2SQL performance with CoT Fine-tuning

This recipe is step by step guide to improve Llama performance on Text2SQL measured with the popular BIRD benchmark. We generate a synthetic Chain of Thought(CoT) dataset and fine-tune Llama models on it.

Results:

Fine-tuning Combination	Accuracy
baseline	39.47%
CoT, PEFT	43.35%
CoT, FFT	42.44% (3 epochs)
CoT, FFT	43.87% (10 epochs)

The complete steps are:

1. Pre-processing the BIRD TRAIN datset by converting text, schema, external knowledge, and SQL statements into the conversation format.

2. Using Llama-3.3-70B to add CoT to the conversation format dataset.

3. Fine-tuning Llama-3.1-8B on the CoT dataset from step 2.

4. Running the BIRD DEV eval benchmark on the fine-tuned models and compare it with out of the model.

Folder Structure

• quickstart folder: contains a notebook to ask Llama 3.3 to convert natural language queries into SQL queries.
• data folder: contains scripts to download the BIRD TRAIN and DEV datasets;
• fine-tune folder: contains scripts to generate CoT dataset based on the BIRD TRAIN set and to supervised fine-tune Llama models using the dataset, with different SFT options (quantization or not, full fine-tuning or parameter-efficient fine-tuning);
• eval folder: contains scripts to evaluate Llama models (original and fine-tuned) on the BIRD dataset.

We also experimented with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) without CoT which resulted in slightly lower accuracy.

Next Steps

1. Hyper-parameter tuning of the current SFT scripts.
2. Try GRPO reinforcement learning to further improve the accuracy.
3. Fine-tune Llama 3.3 70B and Llama 4 models.
4. Try agentic workflow.
5. Expand the eval to support other enterprise databases.