Recently, at Xiaohongshu, the rapid expansion of e-commerce and advertising demands real-time business analytics with high accuracy and low latency. To meet this demand, systems typically rely on converting natural language (NL) queries into Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) to ensure semantic consistency, validation, and portability. However, existing multi-stage LLM pipelines for this NL-to-DSL task suffer from prohibitive latency, high cost, and error propagation, rendering them unsuitable for enterprise-scale deployment. In this paper, we propose RedParrot, a novel NL-to-DSL framework that accelerates inference via a semantic cache. Observing the high repetition and stable structural patterns in user queries, RedParrot bypasses the costly pipeline by matching new requests against cached "query skeletons" (normalized structural patterns) and adapting their corresponding DSLs. Our core technical contributions include (1) an offline skeleton construction strategy, (2) an online, entity-agnostic embedding model trained via contrastive learning for robust matching, and (3) a heterogeneous Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) method that integrates diverse knowledge sources to handle unseen entities. Experiments on six real enterprise datasets from Xiaohongshu show RedParrot achieves an average 3.6x speedup and an 8.26% accuracy improvement. Furthermore, on new public benchmarks adapted from Spider and BIRD, it boosts accuracy by 34.8%, substantially outperforming standard in-context learning baselines.

Approximate Vector Retrieval (AVR), which aims to efficiently retrieve the most similar items from a large dataset, is a fundamental task in a variety of applications such as information retrieval, recommender systems, and large language models. Advances in representation learning and multimodal neural models have enabled diverse data types (e.g., text, images, audio) to be embedded into a shared vector space, facilitating similarity-based retrieval in AVR. While single-modal AVR assumes query and database embeddings follow the same distribution (In-Distribution, ID), cross-modal AVR introduces a distribution shift, where query vectors (e.g., text) are Out-of-Distribution (OOD) relative to the database (e.g., images). This mismatch complicates retrieval and degrades accuracy, making it a key challenge in AVR. Existing methods typically focus on either ID or OOD queries but struggle to handle both within a unified framework.

Abstract Approximate query processing (AQP) plays a critical role in modern data analytics. Although machine learning models are used for AQP, existing methods fail to uncover implicit relationships among the underlying data, the aggregate functions in queries, and the query predicates. In this work, we propose a Graph REpresentation Learning-based AQP model (GRELA for short) for answering queries with multiple aggregate functions. GRELA models the aggregate functions and the query predicates as task and clause nodes respectively in a graph and then learns appropriate node representations via its two modules. In particular, the $$\texttt {Encoder}$$ Encoder module coalesces query predicates and underlying data into the representations of clause nodes. The $$\mathbf {\texttt {Graph}}$$ Graph module bridges task nodes and clause nodes such that each task node can aggregate the information from its neighborhood into its representation. Through the inner products of clause and task representations, GRELA is able to make accurate estimates for queries with multiple aggregate functions. Extensive experimental results verify that GRELA outperforms the state-of-the-art AQP methods on different kinds of datasets.

Cardinality estimation (CardEst) is essential for optimizing query execution plans. Recent ML-based CardEst methods achieve high accuracy but face deployment challenges due to high preparation costs and lack of transferability across databases. In this paper, we propose PRICE, a PRetrained multI-table CardEst model, which addresses these limitations. PRICE takes low-level but transferable features w.r.t. data distributions and query information and elegantly applies self-attention models to learn meta-knowledge to compute cardinality in any database. It is generally and adaptively applicable to any unseen new database to attain high estimation accuracy, while its preparation cost is as little as the basic one-dimensional histogram-based CardEst methods. Moreover, PRICE can be finetuned to further enhance its performance on any specific database. We pretrained PRICE using 30 diverse datasets, completing the process in about 5 hours with a resulting model size of only about 40MB. Evaluations show that PRICE consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving the highest estimation accuracy on several unseen databases and generating faster execution plans with lower overhead. After finetuning with a small volume of database-specific queries, PRICE could even find plans that were very close to the optimal ones. Meanwhile, PRICE is generally applicable to different settings such as data updates, data scaling, and query workload shifts.

Learned databases, or AI4DB techniques, have rapidly developed in the last decade. Deploying machine learning (ML) and AI4DB algorithms into actual databases is the gold standard to examine their performance in practice. However, due to the complexity of database systems, the difference between ML and DB programming paradigms, and the diversity of ML models, the tasks of developing and deploying AI4DB algorithms into databases are prohibitively difficult. Most previous works focus on specific AI4DB algorithms and ML models whose deployment requires close cooperation between ML and DB developers and heavy engineering cost. In this paper, we design and implement PilotScope, an AI4DB middleware with a programming model that largely reduces such difficulties. With a novel abstraction of AI4DB algorithms for, e.g. , knob tuning and query optimization, PilotScope consists of two classes of components, AI4DB drivers and DB interactors , with different programming paradigms and roles in AI4DB tasks. ML developers focus on designing and implementing AI4DB drivers, which are algorithmic workflows that collect statistics from databases, train ML models, make decisions and optimize databases using learned models. AI4DB drivers interact with databases via DB interactors ( e.g. , for collecting data and enforcing actions in databases). DB developers focus on implementing these interactors on one or more database engines, with the interaction details hindered from ML developers. PilotScope supports a variety of AI4DB tasks, and the implementation of an AI4DB algorithm on PilotScope can be deployed in different databases with only minimum modifications. PilotScope is effective in benchmarking these AI4DB algorithms in real-world scenarios. We hope that PilotScope could significantly accelerate iterating AI4DB research and make AI4DB techniques truly applicable in production.

The early-stage Alzheimer’s disease (AD) detection has been considered an important field of medical studies. Like traditional machine learning methods, speech-based automatic detection also suffers from data privacy risks because the data of specific patients are exclusive to each medical institution. A common practice is to use federated learning to protect the patients’ data privacy. However, its distributed learning process also causes performance reduction. To alleviate this problem while protecting user privacy, we propose a federated contrastive pre-training (FedCPC) performed before federated training for AD speech detection, which can learn a better representation from raw data and enables different clients to share data in the pre-training and training stages. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods can achieve satisfactory performance while preserving data privacy.

For efficient query processing, DBMS query optimizers have for decades relied on delicate cardinality estimation methods. In this work, we propose an Attention-based LEarned Cardinality Estimator ( ALECE for short) for SPJ queries. The core idea is to discover the implicit relationships between queries and underlying dynamic data using attention mechanisms in ALECE's two modules that are built on top of carefully designed featurizations for data and queries. In particular, from all attributes in the database, the data-encoder module obtains organic and learnable aggregations which implicitly represent correlations among the attributes, whereas the query-analyzer module builds a bridge between the query featurizations and the data aggregations to predict the query's cardinality. We experimentally evaluate ALECE on multiple dynamic workloads. The results show that ALECE enables PostgreSQL's optimizer to achieve nearly optimal performance, clearly outperforming its built-in cardinality estimator and other alternatives.

Multimodal dialogue systems (MDS) have recently attracted increasing attention. The automatic evaluation of user impression with spoken dialog at the dialog level plays a central role in managing dialog systems. A user usually forms an overall impression through the experience of each exchange of turns in the conversation. Thus, the user’s exchange-level sentiment should be considered when recognizing the user’s overall impression of the dialog. Previous research has focused on modeling user impressions during individual exchanges or during the overall conversation. Thus, the relationship between user sentiment at the exchange level and user impression at the dialog level is still unclear, and appropriately utilizing this relationship in impression analysis remains unexplored. In this paper, we first investigate the relation between sentiment at the exchange level and 18 labels that indicate different aspects of the user impression at the dialog level. Then, we present a multitask learning model (MTL) that uses exchange-level annotations to recognize dialog-level labels. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves better performance at the dialog level, outperforming the single-task model by a maximum of 15.7%.

Optimal methods could effectively improve the accuracy of predicting and identifying candidate driver genes. Various computational methods based on mutational frequency, network and function approaches have been developed to identify mutation driver genes in cancer genomes. However, a comprehensive evaluation of the performance levels of network-, function- and frequency-based methods is lacking. In the present study, we assessed and compared eight performance criteria for eight network-based, one function-based and three frequency-based algorithms using eight benchmark datasets. Under different conditions, the performance of approaches varied in terms of network, measurement and sample size. The frequency-based driverMAPS and network-based HotNet2 methods showed the best overall performance. Network-based algorithms using protein-protein interaction networks outperformed the function- and the frequency-based approaches. Precision, F1 score and Matthews correlation coefficient were low for most approaches. Thus, most of these algorithms require stringent cutoffs to correctly distinguish driver and non-driver genes. We constructed a website named Cancer Driver Catalog (http://159.226.67.237/sun/cancer_driver/), wherein we integrated the gene scores predicted by the foregoing software programs. This resource provides valuable guidance for cancer researchers and clinical oncologists prioritizing cancer driver gene candidates by using an optimal tool.

Multimodal dialogue systems (MDSs) are needed to allow users to converse with virtual agents that use natural language by sensing the multimodal behavior of users. One crucial step in the development of an MDS is measuring how well the dialogue system performs. Though previous research focused on the user satisfaction modeling from linguistic modality in text-to-text dialogue systems, the user satisfaction is observed by not only spoken dialogue contents but also the acoustic and visual nonverbal behaviors of users. Multimodal social signal sensing provides a solution that automatically measures dialogue systems based on subjective evaluation. With this background, we proposed a multimodal recognition model of the user using sequence modeling algorithms (RNN, LSTM, and GRU). It is a novel challenge to recognize the user satisfaction label at the dialogue level. Each label was annotated by the user based on the overall dialogue. We extracted both verbal features and nonverbal features at the exchange level (the unit is a pair of system and user utterances) and analyzed the contributions of multimodal features and unimodal features to recognize user satisfaction labels at the dialogue level. We used a multimodal user-system dialogue data corpus with user satisfaction labels at the dialogue level. To validate the recognition accuracy of the proposed multimodal modeling approach, we compared the proposed method with two models based on human perception by external human coders and the system operator (called “Wizard”) with whom the user talks. The experimental results showed that the multimodal model achieved a better performance in both classification and regression tasks. The results indicated that the performance of the multimodal model was higher than that of the human models.