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From Test-Time Scaling to Reusable Memory: Measuring Crystallization in Text-to-SQL

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TL;DR - An arXiv paper defining the "crystallization problem": how to measure whether test-time-scaling compute, when saved as reusable memory, actually helps on future unseen text-to-SQL questions rather than just replaying past ones. It matters because current end-to-end scores conflate replay with genuine transfer and hide which memory design choice is doing the work.

  • Proposes a controlled evaluation that fixes the single-shot solver and varies one memory choice at a time, separately reporting replay, cross-question retention, and held-out same-database transfer.
  • On BIRD, storing verified corrected queries raises held-out first-attempt accuracy by 4.34 percentage points, capturing 44.4% of the headroom that on-demand repair provides on the same questions.
  • Interventions point to database-specific content as the main active ingredient; reliable verification and broader retrieval coverage help, while richer memory formats and more elaborate retrievers do not.
  • Code, evaluation artifacts, and reproduction instructions are released openly (github.com/ai-jiaqian/text-to-sql-memory-crystallization).

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From Test-Time Scaling to Reusable Memory: Measuring Crystallization in Text-to-SQL

arXiv cs.CL Jiaqian Wang, Yutao Qi, Wenjin Hou, Yuanxi Che, Muning Wen 2026-08-07 arXiv:2608.07213
Public signals Semantic Scholar citations 0 · Semantic Scholar influential citations 0
Providers: Hugging Face · N/A OpenAlex · N/A Publisher · N/A Semantic Scholar · Citations 0 · Influential citations 0 X · N/A Fetched 2026-08-31 14:24:16.133642 UTC

TL;DR - An arXiv paper defining the "crystallization problem": how to measure whether test-time-scaling compute, when saved as reusable memory, actually helps on future unseen text-to-SQL questions rather than just replaying past ones. It matters because current end-to-end scores conflate replay with genuine transfer and hide which memory design choice is doing the work.

  • Proposes a controlled evaluation that fixes the single-shot solver and varies one memory choice at a time, separately reporting replay, cross-question retention, and held-out same-database transfer.
  • On BIRD, storing verified corrected queries raises held-out first-attempt accuracy by 4.34 percentage points, capturing 44.4% of the headroom that on-demand repair provides on the same questions.
  • Interventions point to database-specific content as the main active ingredient; reliable verification and broader retrieval coverage help, while richer memory formats and more elaborate retrievers do not.
  • Code, evaluation artifacts, and reproduction instructions are released openly (github.com/ai-jiaqian/text-to-sql-memory-crystallization).
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