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arXiv2026

Evaluating LLMs on Conversational Text-to-SQL under Chain Ambiguity and Intent Drift

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have established conversational text-to-SQL as a practical interface between users and databases, often involving multiple turns of clarification and revision. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate execution accuracy, leaving the unfolding and shifting of user intent across turns largely uncovered. To address this, we introduce TIDE-Bench, a benchmark for conversational text-to-SQL under chain ambiguity and intent drift evaluation, targeting two recurring patterns: chain ambiguity, where an underspecified question triggers layered clarification with conditional dependencies, and intent drift, where the user retracts and replaces a previously committed request element. Built on 514 anchor SQLs from BIRD, TIDE-Bench comprises 1,542 samples and introduces dedicated metrics for chain identification and drift recognition-resolution beyond execution accuracy. Evaluating 12 advanced LLMs reveals a persistent chain identification bottleneck unaffected by clarification frequency, a wide drift recognition-resolution gap, and overlap between failure modes when jointly activated. The corresponding code of TIDE-Bench is released for further research.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Demystifying and Improving Lazy Promotion in Cache Eviction

Cache eviction algorithms play a critical role in the performance of modern data systems, yet their scalability is often limited by the high computational overhead associated with object promotions. Lazy Promotion techniques have emerged as relaxations of traditional Least-Recently-Used (LRU) methods, designed to alleviate lock contention and increase throughput. This work uses production traces from real-world systems to benchmark five Lazy Promotion strategies: Probabilistic-LRU, Batch-LRU, Delay-LRU, FIFO-reinsertion, and Random-LRU. We evaluate these techniques across miss ratio, scalability, promotion count, and a novel metric called promotion efficiency, which measures the number of hits per promotion. Our results reveal that Delay-LRU and FIFO-reinsertion significantly improve promotion efficiency, whereas Batch-LRU and Probabilistic-LRU struggle to reduce promotions without significantly increasing miss ratio. We further explore the impact of lazy promotion in advanced algorithms such as ARC and 2Q and make a similar observation. Moreover, we uncover substantial optimization potential, showing that most cache promotions are unnecessary when equipped with oracle knowledge. To further reduce promotions in LRU, we propose two novel enhancements-Delayed FIFO-reinsertion (D-FR) and Age-Guided Eviction (AGE)-that reduce promotions by 20-60% while achieving a similar or lower miss ratio.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2026

SINDI: An Efficient Index for Sparse Vector Approximate Maximum Inner Product Search

Sparse vector Maximum Inner Product Search (MIPS) is crucial in multi-path retrieval for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). Recent inverted index-based and graph-based algorithms have achieved high search accuracy with practical efficiency. However, their performance in production environments is often limited by redundant distance computations and frequent random memory accesses. Furthermore, the compressed storage format of sparse vectors hinders the use of SIMD acceleration. In this paper, we propose the sparse inverted non-redundant distance index (SINDI), which incorporates three key optimizations: (i) Efficient Inner Product Computation: SINDI leverages SIMD acceleration and eliminates redundant identifier lookups, enabling batched inner product computation; (ii) Memory-Friendly Design: SINDI replaces random memory accesses to original vectors with sequential accesses to inverted lists, substantially reducing memory-bound latency. (iii) Vector Pruning: SINDI retains only the high-magnitude non-zero entries of vectors, improving query throughput while maintaining accuracy. We evaluate SINDI on multiple real-world datasets. Experimental results show that SINDI achieves state-of-the-art performance across datasets of varying scales, languages, and models. On the MsMarco dataset, when Recall@50 exceeds 99%, SINDI delivers single-thread query-per-second (QPS) improvements ranging from 4.2 to 26.4 times compared with SEISMIC and PyANNs. Notably, SINDI has been integrated into Ant Group's open-source vector search library, VSAG.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2026

The Table Says Otherwise: Testing LLMs with Counterfactual Relational Data

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to answer natural-language questions over structured data. However, when a table contains familiar real-world facts, it is unclear whether the model answers by reading the provided data or by recalling knowledge learned during pretraining. This distinction is important for database applications, where the provided tables should be the source of truth. In this paper, we introduce ContraTable, a paired original-counterfactual benchmark for evaluating whether LLMs ground their answers in relational tables. We build the benchmark with two aligned versions: an original database with real-world facts and a counterfactual database that preserves the same schemas, identifiers, and relationships while changing selected country, club, and player attributes. We design 214 matched questions across three levels: single-table lookup, multi-table lookup, and multi-table temporal reasoning. Experiments on commercial closed-source and open-source models show that strong instruction-tuned models can often handle direct lookup, but their reliability drops as questions require joins, comparison, and temporal reasoning. The gap between original and counterfactual accuracy reveals that models may fall back on prior knowledge when table evidence conflicts with familiar facts. These results suggest that table-QA evaluation should measure not only accuracy, but also faithfulness to the provided database.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2026

EvoSQL: Memory-Augmented Critic-Generator Co-Evolution for Text-to-SQL

Text-to-SQL has advanced rapidly with large language models, but complex database queries still require reasoning beyond one-shot generation, including multi-step decomposition, execution-based diagnosis, and targeted correction. We present EvoSQL, a co-evolution framework that formulates SQL synthesis as an iterative interaction between a generator and a critic. EvoSQL maintains a contextualized candidate memory, verifies SQL candidates with both execution signals and LLM-based critique, and updates its memory through utility-guided aggregation. To strengthen the underlying generator-critic pair, we further introduce a Self-Distillation Policy Optimization (SDPO) fine-tuning stage that injects execution-aware supervision into modern coding LLM backbones. Experiments on Spider and BIRD show that EvoSQL consistently improves open-source models over Maj@16 baselines, with particularly large gains on BIRD-Dev, ranging from +1.37% for Qwen3-4B to +9.19% for Qwen2.5-Coder-3B. SDPO initialization further improves selected backbones on Spider-Test and BIRD-Dev. These results suggest that memory-grounded co-evolution is an effective path toward more reliable and generalizable Text-to-SQL systems. Code is available at https://github.com/valleysprings/EvoSQL.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

RENSA: Rich Environment Metadata to Navigate Shared and Distributed Endpoints for Automated Federated SPARQL Query Generation

The number of knowledge graph databases has increased significantly with the proliferation of knowledge graph technologies. Knowledge graphs enable the dynamic integration of distributed data through federated SPARQL queries. However, constructing efficient queries in a federated environment is challenging due to the lack of detailed structural knowledge across decentralized datasets. While standards like VoID provide basic metadata, they often fail to capture the complex interlinks and authority distributions necessary for optimization. Consequently, current engines frequently rely on runtime ASK queries for source selection, increasing communication overhead. We propose RENSA, a federated SPARQL query generation framework that leverages an extension of SPARQL Builder Metadata (SBM). By integrating class and authority information, mapping subject and object usage to specific predicates, RENSA enables precise source selection and semantic constraint inference for query variables without runtime communication. The generated profiles represent less than 1\% of the original dataset triples in most cases, ensuring storage efficiency. Evaluation on the LargeRDFBench benchmark (13 datasets with >1B triples, 32 queries) shows that RENSA achieves source selection results comparable to state-of-the-art methods while eliminating ASK query overhead. Furthermore, we demonstrate that RENSA infers class and authority constraints for query variables, enabling the identification of data sources even across heterogeneous endpoints. These profiles additionally offer human-readable structural insights for semi-automated query generation.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2026

FENCE: A Financial and Multimodal Jailbreak Detection Dataset

Jailbreaking poses a significant risk to the deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs). VLMs are particularly vulnerable because they process both text and images, creating broader attack surfaces. However, available resources for jailbreak detection are scarce, particularly in finance. To address this gap, we present FENCE, a bilingual (Korean-English) multimodal dataset for training and evaluating jailbreak detectors in financial applications. FENCE emphasizes domain realism through finance-relevant queries paired with image-grounded threats. Experiments with commercial and open-source VLMs reveal consistent vulnerabilities, with GPT-4o showing measurable attack success rates and open-source models displaying greater exposure. A baseline detector trained on FENCE achieves 99 percent in-distribution accuracy and maintains strong performance on external benchmarks, underscoring the dataset's robustness for training reliable detection models. FENCE provides a focused resource for advancing multimodal jailbreak detection in finance and for supporting safer, more reliable AI systems in sensitive domains. Warning: This paper includes example data that may be offensive.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

GPU-Native Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search with IVF-RaBitQ: Fast Index Build and Search

Approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) on GPUs is gaining increasing popularity for modern retrieval and recommendation workloads that operate over massive high-dimensional vectors. Graph-based indexes deliver high recall and throughput but incur heavy build-time and storage costs. In contrast, cluster-based methods build and scale efficiently yet often need many probes for high recall, straining memory bandwidth and compute. Aiming to simultaneously achieve fast index build, high-throughput search, high recall, and low storage requirement for GPUs, we present IVF-RaBitQ (GPU), a GPU-native ANNS solution that integrates the cluster-based method IVF with RaBitQ quantization into an efficient GPU index build/search pipeline. Specifically, for index build, we develop a scalable GPU-native RaBitQ quantization method that enables fast and accurate low-bit encoding at scale. For search, we develop GPU-native distance computation schemes for RaBitQ codes and a fused search kernel to achieve high throughput with high recall. With IVF-RaBitQ implemented and integrated into the NVIDIA cuVS Library, experiments on cuVS Bench across multiple datasets show that IVF-RaBitQ offers a strong performance frontier in recall, throughput, index build time, and storage footprint. For Recall approximately equal 0.95, IVF-RaBitQ achieves 3.0x higher QPS than the state-of-the-art graph-based method CAGRA, while also constructing indices 14.7x faster on average. Compared to the cluster-based method IVF-PQ, IVF-RaBitQ delivers on average over 4.5x higher throughput while avoiding accessing the raw vectors for reranking.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2026

Bolt-on, Verifiable Provenance for LLM-Powered Data Processing

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful tools for processing data. However, LLMs are also complex black-boxes, returning answers to queries on data, without any indication for where the answer came from or whether it is trustworthy. We introduce the notion of provenance for data processing with LLMs. While existing heuristics (such as embedding similarity or directly asking an LLM) could provide some hints for where the answer was derived, they provide no guarantees that the answer can be derived using the identified provenance, and indeed, are often incorrect. Instead, we propose the notion of verifiable provenance wherein we identify a subset of the input text that reproduces the same (or equivalent) answer as that on the complete text, and introduce the notion of minimality, where the verifiable provenance is as small as possible. To identify such a provenance, a naive solution would require checking all possible subsets of the source data with the LLM, which is prohibitively expensive. We present BLIP, a bolt-on framework for efficiently inferring a small-sized verifiable provenance for any LLM-powered data processing task, with any LLM. As part of BLIP, we introduce eight strategies, each guaranteed to find a minimal verifiable provenance, as well as an adaptive strategy that combines their strengths to reduce cost further. We further extend BLIP to produce multiple minimal verifiable provenances. Experiments on seven datasets show that the provenance generated by BLIP is always guaranteed to reproduce the answer, achieving over 30% higher accuracy than the best-performing baseline with a comparable provenance size. Moreover, BLIP incurs a low cost, comparable to the original query on the original data.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2026

Credo: Reusable Declarative Primitives for Agentic Workflows

An LLM application depends on both a model and a harness: the program that determines what each call sees, how many calls to make, and which answers to trust. Coding agents can now discover strong harnesses by searching over candidate programs, but the resulting artifact is an opaque block of imperative code whose logical steps, runtime signals, physical execution decisions, and prompt strategies remain implicit and task-specific, forcing subsequent tasks to start the harness search process from scratch. The potential for reuse, however, is substantial. A searched harness encodes significant knowledge, such as the logical steps that work, the signals that matter, the physical operator decisions that adapt execution, and the prompt strategies that are effective, yet this knowledge is buried in imperative code with no inspectable or reusable structure, nor does it carry any provenance or metadata. Credo addresses this problem by recovering a structured declarative description of a searched harness, tagging each extracted primitive with relevant metadata, and cataloguing all of it with provenance. A compiler can then bind stored primitives to generate harnesses for new tasks without having to start the search over from scratch. This paper provides preliminary results demonstrating the potential of our approach and lays out a related research agenda that the database community is well-positioned to tackle, including cost-based compilation over declarative catalogs and catalog maintenance under model and workload drift.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

DBRepro: Automated Database Synthesis via a Hybrid Constraint-Solving Approach for Reproducing Slow Queries

Slow queries frequently cause severe performance bottlenecks in database management systems. Diagnosing their root causes online risks exacerbating resource contention, while data privacy regulations often prohibit copying production data to test environments. Synthesizing a proxy database from non-intrusive metadata that induces the query optimizer to generate the same physical execution plans is therefore critical for offline diagnosis. High-fidelity reproduction requires preserving global statistical distributions while enforcing exact local cardinalities. Existing data-driven and workload-aware approaches cannot satisfy both requirements simultaneously. We present DBRepro, an automated end-to-end framework that formulates database generation as a constrained distribution synthesis problem. DBRepro initializes a global distribution from lightweight column statistics, extracts execution constraints from target queries, and progressively adjusts the distribution to satisfy these constraints while preserving the global distribution. Experiments on TPC-H and SSB show that DBRepro reduces cardinality error by up to 20.3% over a data-driven baseline while maintaining identical plan consistency. Compared with a workload-aware baseline, it reproduces 15% more consistent execution plans and reduces latency proportion error by 21.5%. We further validate DBRepro on a nearly 1 TB real-world dataset managed by KingbaseES, where it reproduces the execution performance of complex slow queries with high fidelity.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2026

NumBench: Diagnosing Counting Failures in Text-to-Image Models

Text-to-image (T2I) models often generate the wrong number of objects, yet existing benchmarks are too small or weakly controlled to explain why. We introduce \textbf{NumBench}, a benchmark of 640{,}000 prompts spanning 1{,}600 categories and counts from 1 to 100. Its factorial design varies object composition, spatial guidance, and appearance conditions while balancing counts and category exposure. We also develop a process model in which requested instances compete for a finite set of resolvable image regions. The model predicts a near-quadratic collision deficit at low occupancy and shows how coordinated placement reduces it. For scalable evaluation, we propose the Confidence-Weighted Numeric Precision Score (\cwnps), which aggregates three calibrated detectors and discounts uncertain proposals. Across five commercial systems, two open models, and two specialized counting methods, performance declines sharply with requested count; all evaluated methods are weak above 50 objects. Count range has the largest measured effect, followed by layout and composition. Grid guidance is strongest among guided layouts, consistent with the coordination prediction, although the analysis does not establish collision as the sole cause. A 14{,}400-image human study supports automated evaluation through count 50, while results on 243 natural-language prompts show transfer beyond NumBench templates.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Are These Modules Worth Their Cost? A Paradigm-Level Accuracy-Cost Analysis of In-context Learning Text-to-SQL

Recent advances in in-context learning (ICL) text-to-SQL have substantially improved execution accuracy on public benchmarks by assembling increasingly elaborate pipelines around the base generator, yet existing studies typically report aggregate end-to-end accuracy, without quantifying the marginal accuracy-cost contribution of individual design choices. Consequently, providing a unified, paradigm-level cost-accuracy quantification remains a critical challenge for understanding and configuring modern text-to-SQL. To address this, we instantiate 17 paradigm-level configurations across five recurring modules of the ICL text-to-SQL pipeline under a single controlled implementation, and attribute each paradigm's marginal contribution and incurred cost across all four backbones spanning diverse capability levels and reasoning styles. Our analysis reveals that execution-feedback refinement is the only paradigm whose benefit holds universally at consistently low cost, while most other modules help only under backbone-dependent conditions. Token accounting shows that input demand is more closely tied to pipeline structure, whereas output demand is more sensitive to backbone generation behavior. Cross-module analysis further shows that stacking improves accuracy on most backbones, although how the gains compose varies with backbone capability. We also find that a fixed budget is often better spent engineering a more elaborate pipeline over a mid-tier backbone than upgrading to a frontier model with a lean pipeline. These findings distill into an actionable, cost-aware tiered guideline that transfers to five additional backbones without per-paradigm search.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Engaging the scientific community in high-quality biocuration: a report on the International Society for Biocuration workshop, 'Maximizing community curation for the benefit of all'

Biological knowledgebases traditionally rely on expert, professional curation of the research literature to maintain up-to-date collections of data organized in machine-readable form. However, despite the increasing amount of curatable biomedical knowledge, support for knowledgebases is declining, leaving these resources no alternative but to explore additional ways of updating and maintaining content. One way in which knowledgebases have addressed this problem is by engaging researchers to help curate their published papers, a process generally known as 'community curation'. As helpful as community curation can be, though, it is not universally adopted and, for groups that do have it, there is a wide range of approaches. To learn about existing community curation pipelines and explore possibilities for working towards a common approach, we organized a workshop, Maximizing Community Curation for the Benefit of All, at the 18th International Biocuration Conference, hosted by the Stowers Institute for Medical Research. Our aim was to examine the different strategies that groups use, share successes, failures, and ongoing challenges, and produce suggested deliverables for broader adoption of common best practices and tools for effective community curation. Representatives from 18 different resources, ranging from model organism and specialty knowledgebases to journals and literature resources, presented their work. The result was a comprehensive assessment of the state-of-the-art for community curation and an in-depth discussion on how community curation can become standard practice for maintaining timely, highquality biological resources that will continue to provide scientists with the essential information they need for their research.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2026

ANCHOR: A Vision for Secure Persistent Key-Value Stores in Disaggregated Data Centers

Persistent key-value stores (PKVS) are increasingly deployed in disaggregated settings that split compute, memory, and storage across separate server pools. This shift redraws the trust boundary: data that would remain within a single machine is now transported, cached, and rewritten across multiple hosts, expanding exposure to both network attackers and intra-infrastructure adversaries. This paper presents ANCHOR, a vision for end-to-end integrity and freshness in disaggregated PKVS. ANCHOR proposes a two-part semantics-aware architecture: 1) Persistence path: ANCHOR outlines encrypting and authenticating PKVS persistent files and preventing rollback with manifest versioning. 2) Volatile path: ANCHOR treats caches, indexes, and filters as untrusted hints unless accompanied by verifiable provenance, enforced by a TEE-resident policy. Finally, we outline key invariants and discuss enclave-friendly batching and asynchronous I/O to amortize verification without undermining disaggregation's performance and elasticity benefits.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2026

No Silver Bullet: Boosting GaussDB Performance on the 30TB TPC-H Workload

GaussDB is Huawei's premier database system, designed for large-scale deployments and the most demanding workloads. It is a distributed shared-nothing system, capable of handling all types of workloads. This paper outlines a series of modifications to GaussDB aimed at improving its performance on large-scale and complex analytical workloads. After these changes, its performance on the TPC-H workload exceeded the best published result by 40% at 30 TB. The key enhancements to achieve this elite performance include adopting a pipeline execution model, a faster and more scalable inter-node data shuffle, exploiting a unified bus and unified remote memory access. We also expanded the support of cost-based Bloom filter placement and implemented several Bloom filter streaming strategies, enabling their use across nodes.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2026

Real-time SQL Plan Management in Oracle

Consistent query performance is essential for mission critical database applications, yet SQL execution plans can change due to factors such as database upgrades, DML changes, new indexes, etc. While plan stability mechanisms such as stored outlines prevent regressions by freezing execution plans, they also inhibit performance improvements by disallowing plan evolution. We introduced SQL Plan Management (SPM) in Oracle 11g to address this trade-off by maintaining a set of accepted execution plans and allowing plan evolution only when new plans demonstrably outperform existing baselines. However, prior implementations of SPM primarily rely on background performance verification processes, delaying regression detection and recovery. This issue is amplified in autonomous cloud database systems, where several automatic actions that could cause plan change driven regressions are performed with limited customer control. Timely detection and remediation is paramount, but the constrained background resources on cloud may not keep pace. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Real-Time SPM in Oracle 26ai, a novel extension of SPM that performs foreground verification of new execution plans during user query execution. Real-Time SPM leverages runtime session context to immediately validate plan changes, enabling rapid adoption of superior plans while promptly detecting and preventing regressions. This paper presents the architecture and design of Real-Time SPM - including technical challenges like reliably comparing performance of previous plans - and contrasts it with traditional background plan evolution.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2026

Select, Don't Train: The Benefits of Modular Entity Disambiguation with LLM-Based Selection

Entity Disambiguation (ED) is a key task for constructing and using knowledge graphs. State-of-the-art neural approaches commonly model ED as a single task, although it consists of two distinct subproblems: retrieving candidate entities and selecting the correct one given context. Dual-encoder models optimize for both within a shared embedding space, forcing representations to balance high-recall retrieval with fine-grained selection, and they require trained retrievers, which are costly to maintain as knowledge graphs change. While recent work has begun to combine retrievers with LLM-based selectors, the interplay between the two stages has not been studied systematically. In this paper, we present a systematic comparison of retrieval strategies for candidate generation under a shared LLM-based selection stage, combining sparse retrieval (BM25), Web KB search, and a state-of-the-art trained dense retriever with several open- and closed-source LLMs. We show that, once selection is delegated to a capable LLM, training the retriever provides only modest additional value: a fully training-free BM25 retriever paired with an LLM selector reaches a new state of the art on the ZELDA benchmark, raising inKB micro-F1 from 82.3 to 86.3 (+4); pairing the same LLM with a trained dense retriever reaches 88.5. Decoupling retrieval from selection also exposes a limitation of current ED systems: when the correct entity is missing from retrieved candidates, they are forced to predict an incorrect entity. In contrast, our framework allows for abstention when retrieval failure is detected. In an evaluation setting that rewards correct abstentions, the training-free BM25 + LLM pipeline reaches 90.7 F1.

cs.CL↗