EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Jia Zou 0001
dblp:08/4537
· DBLP profile ↗
24ranked-venue papers in the field
6as first author
17since 2021 · last 2026
—ORCID · conflict
Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several
Database Systems & Data Management · 21 (5 first)Big Data, Cloud & Distributed Data Systems · 2Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 1 (1 first)
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | ProGQL: A Provenance Graph Query System for Cyber Attack Investigation
Fei Shao, Jia Zou 0001, Zhichao Cao 0002, Xusheng Xiao |
ICDE | 2 |
| 2026 | CactusDB: Unlock Co-Optimization Opportunities for SQL Queries and AI/ML Model Inferences
Lixi Zhou, Kanchan Chowdhury, Lulu Xie, Jaykumar Tandel, Xinwei Fu, Jia Zou 0001 |
ICDE | 8 |
| 2026 | DeepMapping++: Balancing Efficiency and Storage for Lossless Lookup and Approximate Range AggregationabstractEfficient storage and query processing over tabular data, while balancing storage cost, query latency, and memory footprint, remains a fundamental challenge in the database community. In this work, we propose DeepMapping++, a neural-based data representation that leverages the memorization capability of deep neural networks to support efficient query processing in resource-constrained environments. DeepMapping++ has two flavors: DeepMapping-L for lossless look-up queries on categorical data and DeepMapping-R for approximate range aggregation queries on numerical data. To efficiently handle data modifications, DeepMapping-L integrates a lightweight auxiliary structure to correct prediction errors and support data modification operations, including insertions, deletions, and updates. DeepMapping-R further incorporates a buffer structure for caching partially aggregated values to reduce the need for model retraining. Experiments on real-world, synthetic, and benchmark datasets, demonstrated the effectiveness of DeepMapping-L and DeepMapping-R. Lixi Zhou, K. Selçuk Candan, Jia Zou 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. | 4 |
| 2025 | ExBoost: Out-of-Box Co-optimization of Machine Learning and Join Queries
Kanchan Chowdhury, Lulu Xie, Lixi Zhou, Jia Zou 0001 |
DASFAA (1) | 4 |
| 2025 | Declarative Privacy-Preserving Inference Queries
Ansh Tiwari, Summer Gautier, Rajan Hari Ambrish, Lixi Zhou, Yancheng Wang 0001, Deepti Gupta, Yingzhen Yang, Chaowei Xiao, Kanchan Chowdhury, Jia Zou 0001 |
DASFAA (6) | 11 |
| 2025 | DataMorpher: Automatic Data Transformation Using LLM-Based Zero-Shot Code GenerationabstractData transformation is a critical challenge in modern data management systems, particularly when handling complex operations over multiple data sources. However, existing approaches rely on supervised learning, which requires tremendous data labeling and training overhead. To alleviate such overhead while improving accuracy, we demonstrate a novel system DataMorpher that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate code that transforms source datasets into a user-specified target format. To generate a high-quality and token-efficient prompt, we leverage data profiling to extract features from the source datasets and historical examples of the target data. We also select a subset of features to reduce noise and costs using a ranking algorithm. These selected features are finally translated into a declarative language, which is inspired by SQL's data definition language (DDL), before being added to the prompt. We will demonstrate the workflow and effectiveness of DATAMORPHER using real-world data transformation workflows from Microsoft's GitHub benchmark, smart building, and medical data integration. (A5-min video of our demo is available at https://youtu.be/CuDm46K-_eA.) Jaykumar Tandel, Xuanmao Li, Lanjun Wang, Anna Fariha, Liang Zhang 0048, Syed Arsalan Ahmed Naqvi, Irbaz Bin Riaz, Lei Cao 0004, Jia Zou 0001 |
ICDE | 10 |
| 2025 | Privacy and Accuracy-Aware AI/ML Model DeduplicationabstractWith the growing adoption of privacy-preserving machine learning algorithms, such as Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD), training or fine-tuning models on private datasets has become increasingly prevalent. This shift has led to the need for models offering varying privacy guarantees and utility levels to satisfy diverse user requirements. Managing numerous versions of large models introduces significant operational challenges, including increased inference latency, higher resource consumption, and elevated costs. Model deduplication is a technique widely used by many model serving and database systems to support high-performance and low-cost inference queries and model diagnosis queries. However, none of the existing model deduplication works has considered privacy, leading to unbounded aggregation of privacy costs for certain deduplicated models and inefficiencies when applied to deduplicate DP-trained models. We formalize the problem of deduplicating DP-trained models for the first time and propose a novel privacy- and accuracy-aware deduplication mechanism to address the problem. We developed a greedy strategy to select and assign base models to target models to minimize storage and privacy costs. When deduplicating a target model, we dynamically schedule accuracy validations and apply the Sparse Vector Technique to reduce the privacy costs associated with private validation data. Compared to baselines, our approach improved the compression ratio by up to 35× for individual models (including large language models and vision transformers). We also observed up to 43× inference speedup due to the reduction of I/O operations. Lei Yu 0002, Lixi Zhou, Li Xiong 0001, Kanchan Chowdhury, Lulu Xie, Xusheng Xiao, Jia Zou 0001 |
Proc. ACM Manag. Data | 8 |
| 2024 | IDNet: A Novel Identity Document Dataset via Few-Shot and Quality-Driven Synthetic Data GenerationabstractEffective fraud detection and analysis of government-issued identity documents, such as passports, driver’s licenses, and identity cards, are essential in thwarting identity theft and bolstering security on online platforms. The accuracy of training fraud detection and analysis tools depends on the availability of extensive and diverse identity document datasets. However, current publicly available benchmark datasets for identity document analysis, including MIDV-500, MIDV-2020, and FMIDV, fall short in several aspects: they offer a limited number of samples of ten European country document types, cover insufficient varieties of fraud patterns, and seldom include alterations in critical personal identifying fields such as portrait images, limiting their utility in training models capable of detecting realistic frauds while preserving privacy. In response to these shortcomings, our research introduces a new benchmark dataset, IDNet, designed to advance privacy-preserving fraud detection efforts, synthesized by integrating the generative models and a Bayesian optimization approach. The IDNet dataset comprises 837, 060 images of synthetically generated identity documents, totaling approximately 490 gigabytes, categorized into 20 types from 10 U.S. states and 10 European countries, which is the largest identity document dataset publicly available today. We evaluated the fidelity and utility of IDNet to demonstrate the effectiveness of our unique synthetic data generation method. We also presented two use cases of the dataset, illustrating how it can aid in training privacy-preserving fraud detection methods, and facilitating the generation of camera and video capturing of identity documents. Lulu Xie, Yancheng Wang 0001, Soham Nag, Rajeev Goel, Niranjan Erappa Narayana Swamy, Yingzhen Yang, Chaowei Xiao, Jonathan Prisby, Ross Maciejewski, Jia Zou 0001 |
IEEE Big Data | 11 |
| 2024 | Serving Deep Learning Models from Relational Databases
Lixi Zhou, Kanchan Chowdhury, Saif Masood, Alexandre E. Eichenberger, Hong Min, Alex Sim, Kesheng Wu, Binhang Yuan, Jia Zou 0001 |
EDBT | 12 |
| 2024 | DeepMapping: Learned Data Mapping for Lossless Compression and Efficient LookupabstractStoring tabular data to balance storage and query efficiency is a long-standing research question in the database community. In this work, we argue and show that a novel DeepMapping abstraction, which relies on the impressive memorization capabilities of deep neural networks, can provide better storage cost, better latency, and better run-time memory footprint, all at the same time. Such unique properties may benefit a broad class of use cases in capacity-limited devices. Our proposed DeepMapping abstraction transforms a dataset into multiple key-value mappings and constructs a multi-tasking neural network model that outputs the corresponding values for a given input key. To deal with memorization errors, DeepMapping couples the learned neural network with a lightweight auxiliary data structure capable of correcting mistakes. The auxiliary structure design further enables DeepMapping to efficiently deal with insertions, deletions, and updates even without retraining the mapping. We propose a multi-task search strategy for selecting the hybrid DeepMapping structures (including model architecture and auxiliary structure) with a desirable trade-off among memorization capacity, size, and efficiency. Extensive experiments with a real-world dataset, synthetic and benchmark datasets, including TPC-H and TPC-DS, demonstrated that the DeepMapping approach can better balance the retrieving speed and compression ratio against several cutting-edge competitors. Lixi Zhou, K. Selçuk Candan, Jia Zou 0001 |
ICDE | 3 |
| 2023 | Automatic Data Transformation Using Large Language Model - An Experimental Study on Building Energy DataabstractExisting approaches to automatic data transformation are insufficient to meet the requirements in many real-world scenarios, such as the building sector. First, there is no convenient interface for domain experts to provide domain knowledge easily. Second, they require significant training data collection overheads. Third, the accuracy suffers from complicated schema changes. To address these shortcomings, we present a novel approach that leverages the unique capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in coding, complex reasoning, and zero-shot learning to generate SQL code that transforms the source datasets into the target datasets. We demonstrate the viability of this approach by designing an LLM-based framework, termed SQLMorpher, which comprises a prompt generator that integrates the initial prompt with optional domain knowledge and historical patterns in external databases. It also implements an iterative prompt optimization mechanism that automatically improves the prompt based on flaw detection. The key contributions of this work include (1) pioneering an end-to-end LLM-based solution for data transformation, (2) developing a benchmark dataset of 105 real-world building energy data transformation problems, and (3) conducting an extensive empirical evaluation where our approach achieved 96% accuracy in all 105 problems. SQLMorpher demonstrates the effectiveness of utilizing LLMs in complex, domain-specific challenges, highlighting the potential of their potential to drive sustainable solutions. Xuanmao Li, Guoxin Sun, Liang Zhang 0048, Lanjun Wang, Kesheng Wu, Lei Cao 0004, Erkang Zhu, Alex Sim, Teresa Wu, Jia Zou 0001 |
IEEE Big Data | 12 |
| 2023 | Privacy-Preserving Redaction of Diagnosis Data through Source Code AnalysisabstractProtecting sensitive information in diagnostic data such as logs, is a critical concern in the industrial software diagnosis and debugging process. While there are many tools developed to automatically redact the logs for identifying and removing sensitive information, they have severe limitations which can cause either over redaction and loss of critical diagnostic information (false positives), or disclosure of sensitive information (false negatives), or both. To address the problem, in this paper, we argue for a source code analysis approach for log redaction. To identify a log message containing sensitive information, our method locates the corresponding log statement in the source code with logger code augmentation, and checks if the log statement outputs data from sensitive sources by using the data flow graph built from the source code. Appropriate redaction rules are further applied depending on the sensitiveness of the data sources to preserve the privacy information in the logs. We conducted experimental evaluation and comparison with other popular baselines. The results demonstrate that our approach can significantly improve the detection precision of the sensitive information and reduce both false positives and negatives. Lixi Zhou, Lei Yu 0002, Jia Zou 0001, Hong Min |
SSDBM | 3 |
| 2022 | Benchmark of DNN Model Search at Deployment TimeabstractDeep learning has become the most popular direction in machine learning and artificial intelligence. However, the preparation of training data, as well as model training, are often time-consuming and become the bottleneck of the end-to-end machine learning lifecycle. Reusing models for inferring a dataset can avoid the costs of retraining. However, when there are multiple candidate models, it is challenging to discover the right model for reuse. Although there exist a number of model sharing platforms such as ModelDB, TensorFlow Hub, PyTorch Hub, and DLHub, most of these systems require model uploaders to manually specify the details of each model and model downloaders to screen keyword search results for selecting a model. We are lacking a highly productive model search tool that selects models for deployment without the need for any manual inspection and/or labeled data from the target domain. This paper proposes multiple model search strategies including various similarity-based approaches and non-similarity-based approaches. We design, implement and evaluate these approaches on multiple model inference scenarios, including activity recognition, image recognition, text classification, natural language processing, and entity matching. The experimental evaluation showed that our proposed asymmetric similarity-based measurement, adaptivity, outperformed symmetric similarity-based measurements and non-similarity-based measurements in most of the workloads. Lixi Zhou, Arindam Jain, Amitabh Das, Yingzhen Yang, Jia Zou 0001 |
SSDBM | 6 |
| 2022 | Serving Deep Learning Models with Deduplication from Relational DatabasesabstractServing deep learning models from relational databases brings significant benefits. First, features extracted from databases do not need to be transferred to any decoupled deep learning systems for inferences, and thus the system management overhead can be significantly reduced. Second, in a relational database, data management along the storage hierarchy is fully integrated with query processing, and thus it can continue model serving even if the working set size exceeds the available memory. Applying model deduplication can greatly reduce the storage space, memory footprint, cache misses, and inference latency. However, existing data deduplication techniques are not applicable to the deep learning model serving applications in relational databases. They do not consider the impacts on model inference accuracy as well as the inconsistency between tensor blocks and database pages. This work proposed synergistic storage optimization techniques for duplication detection, page packing, and caching, to enhance database systems for model serving. Evaluation results show that our proposed techniques significantly improved the storage efficiency and the model inference latency, and outperformed existing deep learning frameworks in targeting scenarios. Lixi Zhou, Amitabh Das, Hong Min, Lei Yu 0002, Jia Zou 0001 |
Proc. VLDB Endow. | 7 |
| 2021 | Using Deep Learning Models to Replace Large Materialized Views in Relational Database
Jia Zou 0001 |
CIDR | 1 |
| 2021 | Tensor Relational Algebra for Distributed Machine Learning System DesignabstractWe consider the question: what is the abstraction that should be implemented by the computational engine of a machine learning system? Current machine learning systems typically push whole tensors through a series of compute kernels such as matrix multiplications or activation functions, where each kernel runs on an AI accelerator (ASIC) such as a GPU. This implementation abstraction provides little built-in support for ML systems to scale past a single machine, or for handling large models with matrices or tensors that do not easily fit into the RAM of an ASIC. In this paper, we present an alternative implementation abstraction called the tensor relational algebra (TRA). The TRA is a set-based algebra based on the relational algebra. Expressions in the TRA operate over binary tensor relations, where keys are multi-dimensional arrays and values are tensors. The TRA is easily executed with high efficiency in a parallel or distributed environment, and amenable to automatic optimization. Our empirical study shows that the optimized TRA-based back-end can significantly outperform alternatives for running ML workflows in distributed clusters. Binhang Yuan, Dimitrije Jankov, Jia Zou 0001, Daniel Bourgeois, Chris Jermaine |
Proc. VLDB Endow. | 3 |
| 2021 | Lachesis: Automated Partitioning for UDF-Centric AnalyticsabstractPartitioning is effective in avoiding expensive shuffling operations. However, it remains a significant challenge to automate this process for Big Data analytics workloads that extensively use user defined functions (UDFs), where sub-computations are hard to be reused for partitionings compared to relational applications. In addition, functional dependency that is widely utilized for partitioning selection is often unavailable in the unstructured data that is ubiquitous in UDF-centric analytics. We propose the Lachesis system, which represents UDF-centric workloads as workflows of analyzable and reusable sub-computations. Lachesis further adopts a deep reinforcement learning model to infer which sub-computations should be used to partition the underlying data. This analysis is then applied to automatically optimize the storage of the data across applications to improve the performance and users' productivity. Jia Zou 0001, Amitabh Das, Pratik Barhate, Arun Iyengar, Binhang Yuan, Dimitrije Jankov, Chris Jermaine |
Proc. VLDB Endow. | 1 |
| 2020 | Architecture of a distributed storage that combines file system, memory and computation in a single layer
Jia Zou 0001, Arun Iyengar, Chris Jermaine |
VLDB J. | 1 |
| 2019 | Declarative Recursive Computation on an RDBMSabstractA number of popular systems, most notably Google's TensorFlow, have been implemented from the ground up to support machine learning tasks. We consider how to make a very small set of changes to a modern relational database management system (RDBMS) to make it suitable for distributed learning computations. Changes include adding better support for recursion, and optimization and execution of very large compute plans. We also show that there are key advantages to using an RDBMS as a machine learning platform. In particular, learning based on a database management system allows for trivial scaling to large data sets and especially large models, where different computational units operate on different parts of a model that may be too large to fit into RAM. Dimitrije Jankov, Shangyu Luo, Binhang Yuan, Zhuhua Cai, Jia Zou 0001, Chris Jermaine, Zekai J. Gao |
Proc. VLDB Endow. | 5 |
| 2019 | Pangea: Monolithic Distributed Storage for Data AnalyticsabstractStorage and memory systems for modern data analytics are heavily layered, managing shared persistent data, cached data, and nonshared execution data in separate systems such as a distributed file system like HDFS, an in-memory file system like Alluxio, and a computation framework like Spark. Such layering introduces significant performance and management costs. In this paper we propose a single system called Pangea that can manage all data---both intermediate and long-lived data, and their buffer/caching, data placement optimization, and failure recovery---all in one monolithic distributed storage system, without any layering. We present a detailed performance evaluation of Pangea and show that its performance compares favorably with several widely used layered systems such as Spark. Jia Zou 0001, Arun Iyengar, Chris Jermaine |
Proc. VLDB Endow. | 1 |
| 2018 | PlinyCompute: A Platform for High-Performance, Distributed, Data-Intensive Tool DevelopmentabstractThis paper describes PlinyCompute, a system for development of high-performance, data-intensive, distributed computing tools and libraries. \emphIn the large, PlinyCompute presents the programmer with a very high-level, declarative interface, relying on automatic, relational-database style optimization to figure out how to stage distributed computations. However, in the small, PlinyCompute presents the capable systems programmer with a persistent object data model and API (the "PC object model'') and associated memory management system that has been designed from the ground-up for high performance, distributed, data-intensive computing. This contrasts with most other Big Data systems, which are constructed on top of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), and hence must at least partially cede performance-critical concerns such as memory management (including layout and de/allocation) and virtual method/function dispatch to the JVM. This hybrid approach---declarative in the large, trusting the programmer's ability to utilize PC object model efficiently in the small---results in a system that is ideal for the development of reusable, data-intensive tools and libraries. Jia Zou 0001, R. Matthew Barnett, Tania Lorido-Botran, Shangyu Luo, Carlos Monroy, Sourav Sikdar, Kia Teymourian, Binhang Yuan, Chris Jermaine |
SIGMOD Conference | 1 |
| 2015 | Schema Management for Document StoresabstractDocument stores that provide the efficiency of a schema-less interface are widely used by developers in mobile and cloud applications. However, the simplicity developers achieved controversially leads to complexity for data management due to lack of a schema. In this paper, we present a schema management framework for document stores. This framework discovers and persists schemas of JSON records in a repository, and also supports queries and schema summarization. The major technical challenge comes from varied structures of records caused by the schema-less data model and schema evolution. In the discovery phase, we apply a canonical form based method and propose an algorithm based on equivalent sub-trees to group equivalent schemas efficiently. Together with the algorithm, we propose a new data structure, eSiBu-Tree, to store schemas and support queries. In order to present a single summarized representation for heterogenous schemas in records, we introduce the concept of "skeleton", and propose to use it as a relaxed form of the schema, which captures a small set of core attributes. Finally, extensive experiments based on real data sets demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed schema discovery algorithms, and practical use cases in real-world data exploration and integration scenarios are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of using skeletons in these applications. Lanjun Wang, Oktie Hassanzadeh, Juwei Shi, Limei Jiao, Jia Zou 0001, Chen Wang 0018 |
Proc. VLDB Endow. | 6 |
| 2014 | MRTuner: A Toolkit to Enable Holistic Optimization for MapReduce JobsabstractMapReduce based data-intensive computing solutions are increasingly deployed as production systems. Unlike Internet companies who invent and adopt the technology from the very beginning, traditional enterprises demand easy-to-use software due to the limited capabilities of administrators. Automatic job optimization software for MapReduce is a promising technique to satisfy such requirements. In this paper, we introduce a toolkit from IBM, called MRTuner , to enable holistic optimization for MapReduce jobs. In particular, we propose a novel Producer-Transporter-Consumer (PTC) model, which characterizes the tradeoffs in the parallel execution among tasks. We also carefully investigate the complicated relations among about twenty parameters, which have significant impact on the job performance. We design an efficient search algorithm to find the optimal execution plan. Finally, we conduct a thorough experimental evaluation on two different types of clusters using the HiBench suite which covers various Hadoop workloads from GB to TB size levels. The results show that the search latency of MRTuner is a few orders of magnitude faster than that of the state-of-the-art cost-based optimizer, and the effectiveness of the optimized execution plan is also significantly improved. Juwei Shi, Jia Zou 0001, Jiaheng Lu, Zhao Cao, Shiqiang Li, Chen Wang 0018 |
Proc. VLDB Endow. | 2 |
| 2010 | Frequent Instruction Sequential Pattern Mining in Hardware Sample DataabstractWhen parallelism and heterogeneity has become the trend for computer system design, both the size and the complexity of the hardware sample data generated by Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) increase fast, thus automatic analysis methods, i.e. data mining methods, are urgently needed to accelerate hardware sample data analysis. We are the first to study instruction sequential pattern mining for hardware sample data. It is a challenging task due to the implicit sequential relationship contained in the data and due to the importance of low frequency patterns. As a solution, we i) provide a novel algorithm ProfSpan, ii) adapt two existing algorithms, which are based on candidate generation and projected database generation, to hardware sample data. Our evaluation results show ProfSpan can reduce up to 75% and 80% of execution time compared with other two algorithms. Particularly, up to 50% of frequent patterns mined by ProfSpan in hardware sample data are crossing basic block boundaries and can not be found by existing methods for source code or disassembly code. We also analyze three example patterns identified by ProfSpan: consecutive loads, JIT entry sequence, and conditional code dependency sequence, to illustrate how ProfSpan can benefit performance analysis. Finally, we apply patterns to module classification and obtain promising results. Jia Zou 0001 |
ICDM | 1 |