With advances in large language models (LLMs), researchers are creating new systems that can perform AI-driven analytics over large unstructured datasets. Recent work has explored executing such analytics queries using semantic operators -- a declarative set of AI-powered data transformations with natural language specifications. However, even when optimized, these operators can be expensive to execute on millions of records and their iterator execution semantics make them ill-suited for interactive data analytics tasks. In another line of work, Deep Research systems have demonstrated an ability to answer natural language question(s) over large datasets. These systems use one or more LLM agent(s) to plan their execution, process the dataset(s), and iteratively refine their answer. However, these systems do not explicitly optimize their query plans which can lead to poor plan execution. In order for AI-driven analytics to excel, we need a runtime which combines the optimized execution of semantic operators with the flexibility and more dynamic execution of Deep Research systems. As a first step towards this vision, we build a prototype which enables Deep Research agents to write and execute optimized semantic operator programs. We evaluate our prototype and demonstrate that it can outperform a handcrafted semantic operator program and open Deep Research systems on two basic queries. Compared to a standard open Deep Research agent, our prototype achieves up to 1.95x better F1-score. Furthermore, even if we give the agent access to semantic operators as tools, our prototype still achieves cost and runtime savings of up to 76.8% and 72.7% thanks to its optimized execution.

Efficient querying and analysis of large tabular datasets remain significant challenges, especially for users without expertise in programming languages like SQL. Text-to-SQL approaches have shown promising performance on benchmark data; however, they inherit SQL's drawbacks, including inefficiency with large datasets and limited support for complex data analyses beyond basic querying. We propose a novel framework that transforms natural language queries into query plans. Our solution is implemented outside traditional databases, allowing us to support classical SQL commands while avoiding SQL's inherent limitations. Additionally, we enable complex analytical functions, such as principal component analysis and anomaly detection, providing greater flexibility and extensibility than traditional SQL capabilities. We leverage LLMs to iteratively interpret queries and construct operation sequences, addressing computational complexity by incrementally building solutions. By executing operations directly on the data, we overcome context length limitations without requiring the entire dataset to be processed by the model. We validate our framework through experiments on both standard databases and large scientific tables, demonstrating its effectiveness in handling extensive datasets and performing sophisticated data analyses.

Recent deployments of learned query optimizers use expensive neural networks and ad-hoc search policies. To address these issues, we introduce \textsc{LimeQO}, a framework for offline query optimization leveraging low-rank learning to efficiently explore alternative query plans with minimal resource usage. By modeling the workload as a partially observed, low-rank matrix, we predict unobserved query plan latencies using purely linear methods, significantly reducing computational overhead compared to neural networks. We formalize offline exploration as an active learning problem, and present simple heuristics that reduces a 3-hour workload to 1.5 hours after just 1.5 hours of exploration. Additionally, we propose a transductive Tree Convolutional Neural Network (TCNN) that, despite higher computational costs, achieves the same workload reduction with only 0.5 hours of exploration. Unlike previous approaches that place expensive neural networks directly in the query processing ``hot'' path, our approach offers a low-overhead solution and a no-regressions guarantee, all without making assumptions about the underlying DBMS. The code is available in \href{https://github.com/zixy17/LimeQO}{https://github.com/zixy17/LimeQO}.

In multi-task Bayesian optimization, the goal is to leverage experience from optimizing existing tasks to improve the efficiency of optimizing new ones. While approaches using multi-task Gaussian processes or deep kernel transfer exist, the performance improvement is marginal when scaling to more than a moderate number of tasks. We introduce a novel approach leveraging large language models (LLMs) to learn from, and improve upon, previous optimization trajectories, scaling to approximately 2000 distinct tasks. Specifically, we propose an iterative framework in which an LLM is fine-tuned using the high quality solutions produced by BayesOpt to generate improved initializations that accelerate convergence for future optimization tasks based on previous search trajectories. We evaluate our method on two distinct domains: database query optimization and antimicrobial peptide design. Results demonstrate that our approach creates a positive feedback loop, where the LLM's generated initializations gradually improve, leading to better optimization performance. As this feedback loop continues, we find that the LLM is eventually able to generate solutions to new tasks in just a few shots that are better than the solutions produced by "from scratch" by Bayesian optimization while simultaneously requiring significantly fewer oracle calls.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in using machine learning (ML) in query optimization to select more efficient plans. Existing learning-based query optimizers use certain model architectures to convert tree-structured query plans into representations suitable for downstream ML tasks. As the design of these architectures significantly impacts cost estimation, we propose a tree model architecture based on Bidirectional Graph Neural Networks (Bi-GNN) aggregated by Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs) to achieve more accurate cost estimates. The inherent uncertainty of data and model parameters also leads to inaccurate cost estimates, resulting in suboptimal plans and less robust query performance. To address this, we implement a novel learning-to-rank cost model that effectively quantifies the uncertainty in cost estimates using approximate probabilistic ML. This model adaptively integrates quantified uncertainty with estimated costs and learns from comparing pairwise plans, achieving more robust performance. In addition, we propose the first explainability technique specifically designed for learning-based cost models. This technique explains the contribution of any subgraphs in the query plan to the final predicted cost, which can be integrated and trained with any learning-based cost model to significantly boost the model's explainability. By incorporating these innovations, we propose a cost model for a Robust and Explainable Query Optimizer, Reqo, that improves the accuracy, robustness, and explainability of cost estimation, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches in all three dimensions.

High-performance OLAP database technology has emerged with the growing demand for massive data analysis. To achieve much higher performance, many DBMSs adopt sophisticated designs including SIMD operators, parallel execution, and dynamic pipeline modification. However, such advanced OLAP query execution mechanisms still lack targeted Query Performance Prediction (QPP) methods because most existing methods target conventional tree-shaped query plans and static serial executors. To address this problem, in this paper, we proposed MERLIN a multi-stage query performance prediction method for high-performance OLAP DBMSs. MERLIN first establishes resource cost models for each physical operator. Then, it constructs a DAG that consists of a data-flow tree backbone and resource competition relationships among concurrent operators. After using a GAT with an extra attention mechanism to calibrate the cost, the cost vector tree is extracted and summarized by a TCN, ultimately enabling effective query performance prediction. Experimental results demonstrate that MERLIN yields higher performance prediction precision than existing methods.

This chapter delves into the emerging field of neuro-symbolic query optimization for knowledge graphs (KGs), presenting a comprehensive exploration of how neural and symbolic techniques can be integrated to enhance query processing. Traditional query optimizers in knowledge graphs rely heavily on symbolic methods, utilizing dataset summaries, statistics, and cost models to select efficient execution plans. However, these approaches often suffer from misestimations and inaccuracies, particularly when dealing with complex queries or large-scale datasets. Recent advancements have introduced neural models, which capture non-linear aspects of query optimization, offering promising alternatives to purely symbolic methods. In this chapter, we introduce neuro-symbolic query optimizers, a novel approach that combines the strengths of symbolic reasoning with the adaptability of neural computation. We discuss the architecture of these hybrid systems, highlighting the interplay between neural and symbolic components to improve the optimizer's ability to navigate the search space and produce efficient execution plans. Additionally, the chapter reviews existing neural components tailored for optimizing queries over knowledge graphs and examines the limitations and challenges in deploying neuro-symbolic query optimizers in real-world environments.

Query optimization has become a research area where classical algorithms are being challenged by machine learning algorithms. At the same time, recent trends in learned query optimizers have shown that it is prudent to take advantage of decades of database research and augment classical query optimizers by shrinking the plan search space through different types of hints (e.g. by specifying the join type, scan type or the order of joins) rather than completely replacing the classical query optimizer with machine learning models. It is especially relevant for cases when classical optimizers cannot fully enumerate all logical and physical plans and, as an alternative, need to rely on less robust approaches like genetic algorithms. However, even symbiotically learned query optimizers are hampered by the need for vast amounts of training data, slow plan generation during inference and unstable results across various workload conditions. In this paper, we present GenJoin - a novel learned query optimizer that considers the query optimization problem as a generative task and is capable of learning from a random set of subplan hints to produce query plans that outperform the classical optimizer. GenJoin is the first learned query optimizer that significantly and consistently outperforms PostgreSQL as well as state-of-the-art methods on two well-known real-world benchmarks across a variety of workloads using rigorous machine learning evaluations.

LLMs demonstrate an uncanny ability to process unstructured data, and as such, have the potential to go beyond search and run complex, semantic analyses at scale. We describe the design of an unstructured analytics system, Aryn, and the tenets and use cases that motivate its design. With Aryn, users can specify queries in natural language and the system automatically determines a semantic plan and executes it to compute an answer from a large collection of unstructured documents using LLMs. At the core of Aryn is Sycamore, a declarative document processing engine, built using Ray, that provides a reliable distributed abstraction called DocSets. Sycamore allows users to analyze, enrich, and transform complex documents at scale. Aryn also comprises Luna, a query planner that translates natural language queries to Sycamore scripts, and the Aryn Partitioner, which takes raw PDFs and document images, and converts them to DocSets for downstream processing. Using Aryn, we demonstrate a real world use case for analyzing accident reports from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), and discuss some of the major challenges we encountered in deploying Aryn in the wild.

Many real-world systems can be represented as sets of interacting components. Examples of such systems include computational systems such as query processors, natural systems such as cells, and social systems such as families. Many approaches have been proposed in traditional (associational) machine learning to model such structured systems, including statistical relational models and graph neural networks. Despite this prior work, existing approaches to estimating causal effects typically treat such systems as single units, represent them with a fixed set of variables and assume a homogeneous data-generating process. We study a compositional approach for estimating individual treatment effects (ITE) in structured systems, where each unit is represented by the composition of multiple heterogeneous components. This approach uses a modular architecture to model potential outcomes at each component and aggregates component-level potential outcomes to obtain the unit-level potential outcomes. We discover novel benefits of the compositional approach in causal inference - systematic generalization to estimate counterfactual outcomes of unseen combinations of components and improved overlap guarantees between treatment and control groups compared to the classical methods for causal effect estimation. We also introduce a set of novel environments for empirically evaluating the compositional approach and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using both simulated and real-world data.