ROSE: An Intent-Centered Evaluation Metric for NL2SQL
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.
69e1080d4bed1847510d92a8
Wenqi Pei
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2026-04-17T06:57:09.315Z
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Pei Wenqi
CedPei
user
CedPei
69e1080d4bed1847510d92a9
Shizheng Hou
69e1080d4bed1847510d92aa
Boyan Li
69e1080d4bed1847510d92ab
Han Chen
69e1080d4bed1847510d92ac
Zhichao Shi
69e1080d4bed1847510d92ad
Yuyu Luo
ROSE: An Intent-Centered Evaluation Metric for NL2SQL
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.
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.
NL2SQL intent-centered metric Prover-Refuter cascade semantic correctness ground-truth SQL Cohen's Kappa