Local railway committees need timely situational awareness after highway–rail grade crossing incidents, yet official Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) investigations can take days to weeks. We present a demo system that populates Highway–Rail Grade Crossing Incident Data (Form 57) from news in real time. Our approach addresses two core challenges: the form is visually irregular and semantically dense, and news is noisy. To solve these problems, we design a pipeline that first converts Form 57 into a JSON schema using a vision language model with sample aggregation, and then performs grouped question answering following the intent of the form layout to reduce ambiguity. In addition, we build an evaluation dataset by aligning scraped news articles with official FRA records and annotating retrievable information. We then assess our system against various alternatives in terms of information retrieval accuracy and coverage.

Hyperparameter optimization is an essential component in many data science pipelines and typically entails exhaustive time and resource-consuming computations in order to explore the combinatorial search space. Similar to this problem, other key operations in data science pipelines exhibit the exact same properties. Important examples are: neural architecture search, where the goal is to identify the best design choices for a neural network, and query cardinality estimation, where given different predicate values for a SQL query the goal is to estimate the size of the output. In this paper, we abstract away those essential components of data science pipelines and we model them as instances of tensor completion, where each variable of the search space corresponds to one mode of the tensor. Now the goal is to identify all missing entries of the tensor, corresponding to all combinations of variable values, starting from a very small sample of observed entries. In order to do so, we first conduct a thorough experimental evaluation of existing state-of-the-art tensor completion techniques. We also introduce domaininspired adaptations (such as smoothness across the discretized variable space) and an ensemble technique which is able to achieve state-of-the-art performance. We extensively evaluate existing and proposed methods in a number of generated datasets corresponding to (a) hyperparameter optimization for non-neural network models, (b) neural architecture search, and (c) variants of query cardinality estimation. By doing this, we demonstrate the effectiveness of tensor completion as a tool for automating data science pipelines. Furthermore, we release our generated datasets and code in order to provide benchmarks for future work on this topic.

Multimodal datasets represented as tensors oftentimes share some of their modes. However, even though there may exist a one-to-one (or perhaps partial) correspondence between the coupled modes, such correspondence/alignment may not be given, especially when integrating datasets from disparate sources. This is a very important problem, broadly termed as entity alignment or matching, and subsets of the problem such as graph matching have been extremely popular in the recent years. In order to solve this problem, current work computes the alignment based on existing embeddings of the data. This can be problematic if our end goal is the joint analysis of the two datasets into the same latent factor space: the embeddings computed separately per dataset may yield a suboptimal alignment, and if such an alignment is used to subsequently compute the joint latent factors, the computation will similarly be plagued by compounding errors incurred by the imperfect alignment. In this work, we are the first to define and solve the problem of joint tensor alignment and factorization into a shared latent space. By posing this as a unified problem and solving for both tasks simultaneously, we observe that the both alignment and factorization tasks benefit each other resulting in superior performance compared to two-stage approaches. We extensively evaluate our proposed method TENALIGN and conduct a thorough sensitivity and ablation analysis. We demonstrate that TENALIGN significantly outperforms baseline approaches where embedding and matching happen separately.