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Beam Search, Self-Consistency, and the Limits of Inference-Time Scaling for Grammar-Constrained Text-to-SQL in Small Language Models

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 26, 2026 · UTC

One common trade-off in the use of large language models involves reducing the size of the model while increasing the amount of computation at inference time, for example by using a wider beam search. In this paper, we examine the constrained case of this "model size vs. inference compute" trade-off, in which the model outputs are constrained by a strict grammar at inference time. Our results demonstrate that the constrained trade-off behaves differently from the unconstrained trade-off. We investigate the task of converting a prose query into an equivalent SQL query (text-to-SQL). Performance

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