Sparks of Tabular Reasoning via Text2SQL Reinforcement Learning

This work reframes the Text-to-SQL task as a pathway for teaching large language models (LLMs) to reason over and manipulate tabular data-moving beyond the traditional focus on query generation.We propose a twostage framework that leverages SQL supervision to develop transferable table reasoning capabilities.First, we synthesize detailed chainof-thought (CoT) traces from real-world SQL queries, providing step-by-step, clause-level supervision that teaches the model how to traverse, filter, and aggregate table fields.Second, we introduce a Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) reinforcement learning objective that connects SQL execution accuracy to generalizable reasoning by encouraging steps that extend beyond task-specific syntax and transfer across datasets.Empirically, our approach improves performance on standard Text-to-SQL benchmarks and achieves substantial gains on reasoningintensive datasets such as BIRD, CRT-QA and Tablebench, demonstrating enhanced generalization and interpretability.Specifically, the distilled-quantized LLaMA-8B model achieved a 34% relative increase in exact match scores on CRT-QA when trained on Text-to-SQL tasks, while Qwen-2.5-7Bachieved a 10% and Qwen-2.5-14B a 6% relative increase.These results suggest that SQL can serve not only as a target formalism but also as an effective scaffold for learning robust, transferable reasoning over structured data.