arXiv subjects

Chengliang Chai

Publications and source records attributed to Chengliang Chai.

15 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

EcoTable: Cost-effective Table Integration in Data Lakes for Natural Language Queries

The diverse formats of CSV and Parquet files in data lakes pose a significant challenge to traditional ETL, which relies on data engineers to pre-define a target database schema and build a complex pipeline for data integration. Moreover, with this approach, the integrated data often cannot support various analytical needs, as the predefined schema does not necessarily satisfy the table format or join relationships required to answer unforeseen queries. To address this, we propose EcoTable, the first natural language-based data integration framework. Given a set of user-specified natural language queries, EcoTable automatically integrates the tables into a form that adequately supports the corresponding SQL queries. EcoTable achieves this by leveraging the semantic understanding and complex reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Moreover, EcoTable addresses the scalability and cost issues introduced by expensive LLM inferences with a set of novel ideas. First, EcoTable introduces a graph to represent the overall search space, where nodes represent tables and edges carry weights indicating join likelihood produced by a lightweight deep learning model. On top of this graph data structure, EcoTable designs three components to achieve our goal: (1) the table identification layer aims to identify relevant tables via a two-stage schema linking based on user queries; (2) the graph-based validation layer aims to discover significant join paths, including necessary data transformations and bridging tables, by modeling the problem as Steiner tree searches; and (3) the table transformation layer generates transformation code to implement the joins using LLMs. We construct 4 real-world benchmark datasets with more than 200 queries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EcoTable outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines, increasing accuracy by more than 30% and cutting LLM invocation costs by 5 times.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2026

DiagramRAG: A Lightweight Framework to Retrieve Scientific Diagram for Figure Generation

Scientific diagrams are essential for communicating complex methodologies in academic papers. A natural way for researchers to specify such diagrams is through rough sketches, where text labels, connectors, and spatial arrangements express early semantic and topological intentions. However, sketches are usually incomplete, making them insufficient for directly producing publication-quality diagrams. Existing sketch-based generation methods mainly reconstruct the sketch itself, while recent text-driven diagram generation frameworks rely on textual semantics and do not fully exploit the topological structure contained in sketches. In this paper, we introduce DiagramRAG, a lightweight retrieval-augmented framework for sketch-based scientific diagram completion. Given a user sketch, DiagramRAG retrieves reference diagrams that are both semantically relevant to the sketch content and topologically compatible with its structure, and uses them to guide downstream diagram generation. To enable efficient structure-aware retrieval, we represent diagrams as knowledge graphs, synthesize sketch variants at different simplification levels, and train an embedding model to align sketches with compatible diagrams in a shared space. The retrieved references further provide content, topology, and visual priors for completing and rendering the final diagram. Experiments show that DiagramRAG achieves F1-scores of 0.848 and 0.802 on DiagramBank and FigureBench, respectively, and improves generation quality with the best VLM-as-a-Judge score of 7.170, while reducing inference latency to 35.48 seconds per sample. Our code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DiagramRAG-A262 and https://huggingface.co/datasets/anonymous-review-a262/DiagramSketch.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Unstructured Data Analysis using LLMs: A Comprehensive Benchmark

Nowadays, the explosion of unstructured data presents immense analytical value. Leveraging the remarkable capability of large language models (LLMs) in extracting attributes of structured tables from unstructured data, researchers are developing LLM-powered data systems for users to analyze unstructured documents as working with a database. These unstructured data analysis (UDA) systems differ significantly in all aspects, including query interfaces, query optimization strategies, and operator implementations, making it unclear which performs best in which scenario. Unfortunately, there does not exist a comprehensive benchmark that offers high-quality, large-volume, and diverse datasets as well as rich query workload to thoroughly evaluate such systems. To fill this gap, we present UDA-Bench, the first benchmark for unstructured data analysis that meets all the above requirements. Specifically, we organize a team with 30 graduate students that spends over in total 10,000 hours on curating 5 datasets from various domains and constructing a relational database view from these datasets by manual annotation. These relational databases can be used as ground truth to evaluate any of these UDA systems despite their differences in programming interfaces. Moreover, we design diverse queries to analyze the attributes defined in the database schema, covering different types of analytical operators with varying selectivities and complexities. We conduct in-depth analysis of the key building blocks of existing UDA systems: query interface, query optimization, operator design, and data processing. We run exhaustive experiments over the benchmark to fully evaluate these systems and different techniques w.r.t. the above building blocks.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2025

Not All Instances Are Equally Valuable: Towards Influence-Weighted Dataset Distillation

Dataset distillation condenses large datasets into synthetic subsets, achieving performance comparable to training on the full dataset while substantially reducing storage and computation costs. Most existing dataset distillation methods assume that all real instances contribute equally to the process. In practice, real-world datasets contain both informative and redundant or even harmful instances, and directly distilling the full dataset without considering data quality can degrade model performance. In this work, we present Influence-Weighted Distillation IWD, a principled framework that leverages influence functions to explicitly account for data quality in the distillation process. IWD assigns adaptive weights to each instance based on its estimated impact on the distillation objective, prioritizing beneficial data while downweighting less useful or harmful ones. Owing to its modular design, IWD can be seamlessly integrated into diverse dataset distillation frameworks. Our empirical results suggest that integrating IWD tends to improve the quality of distilled datasets and enhance model performance, with accuracy gains of up to 7.8%.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

A Survey of Data Agents: Emerging Paradigm or Overstated Hype?

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has spurred the emergence of data agents, autonomous systems designed to orchestrate Data + AI ecosystems for tackling complex data-related tasks. However, the term "data agent" currently suffers from terminological ambiguity and inconsistent adoption, conflating simple query responders with sophisticated autonomous architectures. This terminological ambiguity fosters mismatched user expectations, accountability challenges, and barriers to industry growth. Inspired by the SAE J3016 standard for driving automation, this survey introduces the first systematic hierarchical taxonomy for data agents, comprising six levels that delineate and trace progressive shifts in autonomy, from manual operations (L0) to a vision of generative, fully autonomous data agents (L5), thereby clarifying capability boundaries and responsibility allocation. Through this lens, we offer a structured review of existing research arranged by increasing autonomy, encompassing specialized data agents for data management, preparation, and analysis, alongside emerging efforts toward versatile, comprehensive systems with enhanced autonomy. We further analyze critical evolutionary leaps and technical gaps for advancing data agents, especially the ongoing L2-to-L3 transition, where data agents evolve from procedural execution to autonomous orchestration. Finally, we conclude with a forward-looking roadmap, envisioning proactive, generative data agents.

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arXiv2025

QUEST: Query Optimization in Unstructured Document Analysis

Most recently, researchers have started building large language models (LLMs) powered data systems that allow users to analyze unstructured text documents like working with a database because LLMs are very effective in extracting attributes from documents. In such systems, LLM-based extraction operations constitute the performance bottleneck of query execution due to the high monetary cost and slow LLM inference. Existing systems typically borrow the query optimization principles popular in relational databases to produce query execution plans, which unfortunately are ineffective in minimizing LLM cost. To fill this gap, we propose QUEST, which features a bunch of novel optimization strategies for unstructured document analysis. First, we introduce an index-based strategy to minimize the cost of each extraction operation. With this index, QUEST quickly retrieves the text segments relevant to the target attributes and only feeds them to LLMs. Furthermore, we design an evidence-augmented retrieval strategy to reduce the possibility of missing relevant segments. Moreover, we develop an instance-optimized query execution strategy: because the attribute extraction cost could vary significantly document by document, QUEST produces different plans for different documents. For each document, QUEST produces a plan to minimize the frequency of attribute extraction. The innovations include LLM cost-aware operator ordering strategies and an optimized join execution approach that transforms joins into filters. Extensive experiments on 3 real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of QUEST, achieving 30%-6x cost savings while improving the F1 score by 10% -27% compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

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arXiv2025

Not All Documents Are What You Need for Extracting Instruction Tuning Data

Instruction tuning improves the performance of large language models (LLMs), but it heavily relies on high-quality training data. Recently, LLMs have been used to synthesize instruction data using seed question-answer (QA) pairs. However, these synthesized instructions often lack diversity and tend to be similar to the input seeds, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. To address this, we propose extracting instruction tuning data from web corpora that contain rich and diverse knowledge. A naive solution is to retrieve domain-specific documents and extract all QA pairs from them, but this faces two key challenges: (1) extracting all QA pairs using LLMs is prohibitively expensive, and (2) many extracted QA pairs may be irrelevant to the downstream tasks, potentially degrading model performance. To tackle these issues, we introduce EQUAL, an effective and scalable data extraction framework that iteratively alternates between document selection and high-quality QA pair extraction to enhance instruction tuning. EQUAL first clusters the document corpus based on embeddings derived from contrastive learning, then uses a multi-armed bandit strategy to efficiently identify clusters that are likely to contain valuable QA pairs. This iterative approach significantly reduces computational cost while boosting model performance. Experiments on AutoMathText and StackOverflow across four downstream tasks show that EQUAL reduces computational costs by 5-10x and improves accuracy by 2.5 percent on LLaMA-3.1-8B and Mistral-7B

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

LEAD: Iterative Data Selection for Efficient LLM Instruction Tuning

Instruction tuning has emerged as a critical paradigm for improving the capabilities and alignment of large language models (LLMs). However, existing iterative model-aware data selection methods incur significant computational overhead, as they rely on repeatedly performing full-dataset model inference to estimate sample utility for subsequent training iterations, creating a fundamental efficiency bottleneck. In this paper, we propose LEAD, an efficient iterative data selection framework that accurately estimates sample utility entirely within the standard training loop, eliminating the need for costly additional model inference. At its core, LEAD introduces Instance-Level Dynamic Uncertainty (IDU), a theoretically grounded utility function combining instantaneous training loss, gradient-based approximation of loss changes, and exponential smoothing of historical loss signals. To further scale efficiently to large datasets, LEAD employs a two-stage, coarse-to-fine selection strategy, adaptively prioritizing informative clusters through a multi-armed bandit mechanism, followed by precise fine-grained selection of high-utility samples using IDU. Extensive experiments across four diverse benchmarks show that LEAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, improving average model performance by 6.1%-10.8% while using only 2.5% of the training data and reducing overall training time by 5-10x.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Handling Label Noise via Instance-Level Difficulty Modeling and Dynamic Optimization

Recent studies indicate that deep neural networks degrade in generalization performance under noisy supervision. Existing methods focus on isolating clean subsets or correcting noisy labels, facing limitations such as high computational costs, heavy hyperparameter tuning process, and coarse-grained optimization. To address these challenges, we propose a novel two-stage noisy learning framework that enables instance-level optimization through a dynamically weighted loss function, avoiding hyperparameter tuning. To obtain stable and accurate information about noise modeling, we introduce a simple yet effective metric, termed wrong event, which dynamically models the cleanliness and difficulty of individual samples while maintaining computational costs. Our framework first collects wrong event information and builds a strong base model. Then we perform noise-robust training on the base model, using a probabilistic model to handle the wrong event information of samples. Experiments on five synthetic and real-world LNL benchmarks demonstrate our method surpasses state-of-the-art methods in performance, achieves a nearly 75% reduction in computational time and improves model scalability.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Harnessing Diversity for Important Data Selection in Pretraining Large Language Models

Data selection is of great significance in pre-training large language models, given the variation in quality within the large-scale available training corpora. To achieve this, researchers are currently investigating the use of data influence to measure the importance of data instances, $i.e.,$ a high influence score indicates that incorporating this instance to the training set is likely to enhance the model performance. Consequently, they select the top-$k$ instances with the highest scores. However, this approach has several limitations. (1) Computing the influence of all available data is time-consuming. (2) The selected data instances are not diverse enough, which may hinder the pre-trained model's ability to generalize effectively to various downstream tasks. In this paper, we introduce \texttt{Quad}, a data selection approach that considers both quality and diversity by using data influence to achieve state-of-the-art pre-training results. In particular, noting that attention layers capture extensive semantic details, we have adapted the accelerated $iHVP$ computation methods for attention layers, enhancing our ability to evaluate the influence of data, $i.e.,$ its quality. For the diversity, \texttt{Quad} clusters the dataset into similar data instances within each cluster and diverse instances across different clusters. For each cluster, if we opt to select data from it, we take some samples to evaluate the influence to prevent processing all instances. To determine which clusters to select, we utilize the classic Multi-Armed Bandit method, treating each cluster as an arm. This approach favors clusters with highly influential instances (ensuring high quality) or clusters that have been selected less frequently (ensuring diversity), thereby well balancing between quality and diversity.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

PACE: Poisoning Attacks on Learned Cardinality Estimation

Cardinality estimation (CE) plays a crucial role in database optimizer. We have witnessed the emergence of numerous learned CE models recently which can outperform traditional methods such as histograms and samplings. However, learned models also bring many security risks. For example, a query-driven learned CE model learns a query-to-cardinality mapping based on the historical workload. Such a learned model could be attacked by poisoning queries, which are crafted by malicious attackers and woven into the historical workload, leading to performance degradation of CE. In this paper, we explore the potential security risks in learned CE and study a new problem of poisoning attacks on learned CE in a black-box setting. Experiments show that PACE reduces the accuracy of the learned CE models by 178 times, leading to a 10 times decrease in the end-to-end performance of the target database.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2024

AutoCE: An Accurate and Efficient Model Advisor for Learned Cardinality Estimation

Cardinality estimation (CE) plays a crucial role in many database-related tasks such as query generation, cost estimation, and join ordering. Lately, we have witnessed the emergence of numerous learned CE models. However, no single CE model is invincible when it comes to the datasets with various data distributions. To facilitate data-intensive applications with accurate and efficient cardinality estimation, it is important to have an approach that can judiciously and efficiently select the most suitable CE model for an arbitrary dataset. In this paper, we study a new problem of selecting the best CE models for a variety of datasets. This problem is rather challenging as it is hard to capture the relationship from various datasets to the performance of disparate models. To address this problem, we propose a model advisor, named AutoCE, which can adaptively select the best model for a dataset. The main contribution of AutoCE is the learning-based model selection, where deep metric learning is used to learn a recommendation model and incremental learning is proposed to reduce the labeling overhead and improve the model robustness. We have integrated AutoCE into PostgreSQL and evaluated its impact on query optimization. The results showed that AutoCE achieved the best performance (27% better) and outperformed the baselines concerning accuracy (2.1 times better) and efficacy (4.2 times better).

cs.DB↗

arXiv2024

The Dawn of Natural Language to SQL: Are We Fully Ready?

Translating users' natural language questions into SQL queries (i.e., NL2SQL) significantly lowers the barriers to accessing relational databases. The emergence of Large Language Models has introduced a novel paradigm in NL2SQL tasks, enhancing capabilities dramatically. However, this raises a critical question: Are we fully prepared to deploy NL2SQL models in production? To address the posed questions, we present a multi-angle NL2SQL evaluation framework, NL2SQL360, to facilitate the design and test of new NL2SQL methods for researchers. Through NL2SQL360, we conduct a detailed comparison of leading NL2SQL methods across a range of application scenarios, such as different data domains and SQL characteristics, offering valuable insights for selecting the most appropriate NL2SQL methods for specific needs. Moreover, we explore the NL2SQL design space, leveraging NL2SQL360 to automate the identification of an optimal NL2SQL solution tailored to user-specific needs. Specifically, NL2SQL360 identifies an effective NL2SQL method, SuperSQL, distinguished under the Spdier dataset using the execution accuracy metric. Remarkably, SuperSQL achieves competitive performance with execution accuracy of 87% and 62.66% on the Spider and BIRD test sets, respectively.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2023

Cost-Effective In-Context Learning for Entity Resolution: A Design Space Exploration

Entity resolution (ER) is an important data integration task with a wide spectrum of applications. The state-of-the-art solutions on ER rely on pre-trained language models (PLMs), which require fine-tuning on a lot of labeled matching/non-matching entity pairs. Recently, large languages models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, have shown the ability to perform many tasks without tuning model parameters, which is known as in-context learning (ICL) that facilitates effective learning from a few labeled input context demonstrations. However, existing ICL approaches to ER typically necessitate providing a task description and a set of demonstrations for each entity pair and thus have limitations on the monetary cost of interfacing LLMs. To address the problem, in this paper, we provide a comprehensive study to investigate how to develop a cost-effective batch prompting approach to ER. We introduce a framework BATCHER consisting of demonstration selection and question batching and explore different design choices that support batch prompting for ER. We also devise a covering-based demonstration selection strategy that achieves an effective balance between matching accuracy and monetary cost. We conduct a thorough evaluation to explore the design space and evaluate our proposed strategies. Through extensive experiments, we find that batch prompting is very cost-effective for ER, compared with not only PLM-based methods fine-tuned with extensive labeled data but also LLM-based methods with manually designed prompting. We also provide guidance for selecting appropriate design choices for batch prompting.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Crowd-Powered Data Mining

Many data mining tasks cannot be completely addressed by auto- mated processes, such as sentiment analysis and image classification. Crowdsourcing is an effective way to harness the human cognitive ability to process these machine-hard tasks. Thanks to public crowdsourcing platforms, e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk and Crowd- Flower, we can easily involve hundreds of thousands of ordinary workers (i.e., the crowd) to address these machine-hard tasks. In this tutorial, we will survey and synthesize a wide spectrum of existing studies on crowd-powered data mining. We first give an overview of crowdsourcing, and then summarize the fundamental techniques, including quality control, cost control, and latency control, which must be considered in crowdsourced data mining. Next we review crowd-powered data mining operations, including classification, clustering, pattern mining, machine learning using the crowd (including deep learning, transfer learning and semi-supervised learning) and knowledge discovery. Finally, we provide the emerging challenges in crowdsourced data mining.

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