Querying and extracting value from unstructured document collection remains a considerable challenge. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in document understanding, they fail to give high accuracy results for analytical queries on documents, and additionally incur high costs. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) can reduce costs, accuracy degrades further. Our key insight is that documents in a collection often follow similar templates that impart a common semantic structure. We therefore introduce Zendb, a document analytics system that leverages this semantic structure, coupled with LLMs, to answer ad-hoc SQL queries on document collections. Zendb efficiently extracts semantic hierarchical structures from such templatized documents and introduces a novel query engine that leverages these structures for accurate and cost-effective query execution. Extensive experiments on three real-world document collections demonstrate ZENDB's benefits, achieving up to 31× cost savings compared to LLM-based baselines, while maintaining or improving accuracy, and surpassing RAG-based baselines by up to 61% in precision and 81% in recall, at a marginally higher cost.

Many templatized documents are programmatically generated from structured data following a visual template. Such documents include invoices, tax documents, financial reports, and purchase orders. Effective data extraction from these documents is crucial to support downstream analytical tasks. Current data extraction tools often struggle with complex document layouts, incur high latency and/or cost on large datasets, and require significant human effort. The key insight of our tool, TWIX, is to infer the underlying template used to create such documents, and then extract the data, rather than extracting directly from documents. To do so, TWIX first infers the underlying fields, such as columns of tabular portions or keys in co-located key-value pairs, by leveraging their consistent location patterns (e.g., two fields in the same template repeatedly co-occur within a fixed distance apart across multiple records). TWIX then assembles these fields into a template by enforcing visual constraints, such as vertically aligning table rows with their column headers for tabular regions, and horizontally aligning keys with their values for key-value pairs. TWIX then uses this inferred template to accurately and efficiently extract data from templatized documents at a low cost. On one benchmark with 34 diverse real-world datasets, TWIX outperforms state-of-the-art structured data extraction tools (Evaporate, Textract, and Azure Document Intelligence), and vision-based LLMs like GPT-4-Vision, by over 25% in precision and recall. Another benchmark with 30 large datasets demonstrates TWIX's scalability: it is 520X faster and 3,786X cheaper than the most competitive compared tool, for extracting data from large document collections with over 2000 pages.

Efficient water use, particularly in the realm of irrigation, has emerged as a critical concern in regions suffering from persistent drought, such as California and Florida. With the advent of smart irrigation controllers encouraged by environmental policies, a new paradigm of water management is gaining traction. Among these, the Rachio smart controller has garnered significant attention. However, without direct feedback or actual water usage data, optimizing these irrigation systems for enhanced efficiency remains challenging. This paper introduces Water-COLOR, a novel recommendation system integrated within the Rachio smart controller's framework to address this challenge. The system leverages similar landscape profiles to suggest irrigation schedules that are both water-efficient and user-preferable. By analyzing manual user interactions with the controller, Water-COLOR infers user satisfaction, which, along with estimated water usage, informs the adaptation of irrigation plans. The system eschews the need for additional sensors, thereby reducing infrastructure requirements. Our evaluation demonstrates consistent performance across diverse climatic regions and indicates that the system's recommendations could significantly contribute to water conservation efforts. The results not only showcase the potential of Water-COLOR to enhance the efficiency of existing smart irrigation systems but also open avenues for deploying real-time, data-driven environmental solutions.

Predicate pushing down is a key optimization used to speed up query processing. Much of the existing practice is restricted to pushing predicates explicitly listed in the query. In this paper, we consider the challenge of learning predicates during query execution which are then exploited to accelerate execution. Prior related approaches with a similar goal are restricted (e.g., learn only from only join columns or from specific data statistics). We significantly expand the realm of predicates that can be learned from different query operators (aggregations, joins, grouping, etc.) and develop a system, entitled PLAQUE, that learns such predicates during query execution. Comprehensive evaluations on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that the learned predicate approach adopted by PLAQUE can significantly accelerate query execution by up to 33x, and this improvement increases to up to 100x when User-Defined Functions (UDFs) are utilized in queries.

Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly deployed as part of pipelines that repeatedly process or generate data of some sort. However, a common barrier to deployment are the frequent and often unpredictable errors that plague LLMs. Acknowledging the inevitability of these errors, we propose data quality assertions to identify when LLMs may be making mistakes. We present spade, a method for automatically synthesizing data quality assertions that identify bad LLM outputs. We make the observation that developers often identify data quality issues during prototyping prior to deployment, and attempt to address them by adding instructions to the LLM prompt over time. spade therefore analyzes histories of prompt versions over time to create candidate assertion functions and then selects a minimal set that fulfills both coverage and accuracy requirements. In testing across nine different real-world LLM pipelines, spade efficiently reduces the number of assertions by 14% and decreases false failures by 21% when compared to simpler baselines. spade has been deployed as an offering within LangSmith, LangChain's LLM pipeline hub, and has been used to generate data quality assertions for over 2000 pipelines across a spectrum of industries.

Business Intelligence (BI) is crucial in modern enterprises and billion-dollar business. Traditionally, technical experts like database administrators would manually prepare BI-models (e.g., in star or snowflake schemas) that join tables in data warehouses, before less-technical business users can run analytics using end-user dashboarding tools. However, the popularity of self-service BI (e.g., Tableau and Power-BI) in recent years creates a strong demand for less technical end-users to build BI-models themselves. We develop an Auto-BI system that can accurately predict BI models given a set of input tables, using a principled graph-based optimization problem we propose called k-Min-Cost-Arborescence (k-MCA), which holistically considers both local join prediction and global schema-graph structures, leveraging a graph-theoretical structure called arborescence. While we prove k-MCA is intractable and inapproximate in general, we develop novel algorithms that can solve k-MCA optimally, which is shown to be efficient in practice with sub-second latency and can scale to the largest BI-models we encounter (with close to 100 tables). Auto-BI is rigorously evaluated on a unique dataset with over 100K real BI models we harvested, as well as on 4 popular TPC benchmarks. It is shown to be both efficient and accurate, achieving over 0.9 F1-score on both real and synthetic benchmarks.

This paper develops a query-time missing value imputation framework, entitled ZIP, that modifies relational operators to be imputation aware in order to minimize the joint cost of imputing and query processing. The modified operators use a cost-based decision function to determine whether to invoke imputation or to defer to downstream operators to resolve missing values. The modified query processing logic ensures results with deferred imputations are identical to those produced if all missing values were imputed first. ZIP includes a novel outer-join based approach to preserve missing values during execution, and a bloom filter based index to optimize the space and running overhead. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic data sets demonstrate 10 to 25 times improvement when augmenting the state-of-the-art technology, ImputeDB, with ZIP-based deferred imputation. ZIP also outperforms the offline approach by up to 19607 times in a real data set.

WiFi connectivity events, generated when a mobile device connects to WiFi access points can serve as a robust, passive, (almost) zero-cost indoor localization technology. The challenge is the coarse level localization it offers that limits its usefulness. We recently developed a novel data cleaning based approach, LOCATER , that exploits patterns in the network data to achieve accuracy as high as 90% at room level granularity making it possible to use network data to support a much larger class of applications. In this paper, we demonstrate one such application to help organizations track levels of occupancy, and potential exposure of the inhabitants of the buildings to others possibly infected on their premises. The system, entitled T-Cove, is in operational use at over 20 buildings at UCI and has now become part of the reopening procedure of the schools. The demonstration will highlight T-Cove functionalities over both live data and data captured in the past.

Entity resolution (ER) is the problem of identifying and merging records that refer to the same real-world entity. In many scenarios, raw records are stored under heterogeneous environment. To leverage such records better, most existing work assume that schema matching and data exchange have been done to convert records under different schemas to those under a predefined schema. However, we observe that schema matching would lose information in some cases, which could be useful or even crucial to ER. To leverage sufficient information from heterogeneous sources, in this paper, we address several challenges of ER on heterogeneous records and show that none of existing similarity metrics or their transformations could be applied to find similar records under heterogeneous settings. Motivated by this, we propose a novel framework to iteratively find records which refer to the same entity as well as an index to generate candidates and accelerate similarity computation. Evaluations on real-world datasets show the effectiveness and efficiency of our methods.

This paper explores the data cleaning challenges that arise in using WiFi connectivity data to locate users to semantic indoor locations such as buildings, regions, rooms. WiFi connectivity data consists of sporadic connections between devices and nearby WiFi access points (APs), each of which may cover a relatively large area within a building. Our system, entitled semantic LOCATion cleanER (LOCATER), postulates semantic localization as a series of data cleaning tasks - first, it treats the problem of determining the AP to which a device is connected between any two of its connection events as a missing value detection and repair problem. It then associates the device with the semantic subregion (e.g., a conference room in the region) by postulating it as a location disambiguation problem. LOCATER uses a bootstrapping semi-supervised learning method for coarse localization and a probabilistic method to achieve finer localization. The paper shows that LOCATER can achieve significantly high accuracy at both the coarse and fine levels.

Entity resolution (ER) is the problem of identifying and merging records that refer to the same real-world entity. In many scenarios, raw records are stored under heterogeneous environment. Specifically, the schemas of records may differ from each other. To leverage such records better, most existing work assume that schema matching and data exchange have been done to convert records under different schemas to those under a predefined schema. However, we observe that schema matching would lose information in some cases, which could be useful or even crucial to ER. To leverage sufficient information from heterogeneous sources, in this paper, we address several challenges of ER on heterogeneous records and show that none of existing similarity metrics or their transformations could be applied to find similar records under heterogeneous settings. Motivated by this, we design the similarity function and propose a novel framework to iteratively find records which refer to the same entity. Regarding efficiency, we build an index to generate candidates and accelerate similarity computation. Evaluations on real-world datasets show the effectiveness and efficiency of our methods.