BACKGROUND: AI-based tools are expected to play a key role in lung cancer screening (LCS). The evaluation of these tools often relied on private datasets or fragmented public datasets with inconsistent availability of clinical data and expert nodule annotations. This has hindered reproducibility, comparability, and independent assessment of AI tools. To address these gaps, we present LUCQUE, a novel, large, comprehensively annotated dataset derived from LDCT lung cancer screening in Qu\'ebec, which is accessible for reliable AI evaluation. METHODS: LUCQUE was curated and is hosted on PARADIM, a digital infrastructure supporting DICOM data de-identification, annotation, long-term storage and analysis. LDCT scans and clinical information were combined to a curated collection and complemented by voxel-level, expert-derived pulmonary nodule and cyst segmentations, and Lung-RADS-based lesion characteristics. Key dataset characteristics and statistics were reported, including participant demographics, imaging parameters, radiological findings, and segmented lesion characteristics. Dataset analyses were conducted according to PARADIM's model-to-data approach, in which user code is executed on the platform such that data remains on premise. RESULTS: LUCQUE currently comprises 1,678 LDCT baseline studies from 1,678 participants. Most studies were classified as Lung-RADS 2. A total of 1,776 pulmonary nodules and 60 cysts were annotated, with a median (interquartile range) volume of $89\,(56,\,159)\,\mathrm{mm}^3$ and $1,384\,(589,\,3793)\,\mathrm{mm}^3$ respectively. CONCLUSIONS: Compared to publicly available LCS datasets, LUCQUE currently represents the largest accessible annotated real-world LCS dataset. Access to LUCQUE is provided via a model-to-data approach, enabling privacy-preserving, reproducible, and independent real-world evaluation of AI tools in LCS.
Real-time data analytics has become a key demand for lakehouses. It requires propagating data changes from the data source to the lakehouse in real time, while ensuring ACID guarantees and minimizing resource consumption and impact on analytical query performance. This is highly challenging for a data system according to the RUM conjecture, especially given the read-optimized immutable file storage layer in lakehouses. Existing lakehouses offer only git-style catalog version control on a single table, and they trade data freshness, query performance, and/or resource efficiency to achieve a barely acceptable data-change throughput. In this paper, we propose a novel data synchronization framework, Retina, that enables real-time, cost-efficient, query-performant, and fully transactional data changes in lakehouses. We implement and open-source Retina. Evaluations show that Retina delivers 10-millisecond-level data freshness and over 3.2 million row/s linear-scalable data-change throughput with low resource consumption and query-performance overhead, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art lakehouse systems and lake-compatible HTAP databases.
Public scientific datasets rarely arrive analysis-ready. They arrive as messy folders of wide matrices, long tables, spreadsheets, and per-cohort files whose keys and encodings differ, and every reanalysis must reconnect them first. A coding agent can automate this, but its mistakes can look plausible, and without an audit trail, a mistake that corrupts data can go uncaught. We present an AI-assisted ingestion pipeline built on one rule: LLM agents propose, deterministic code verifies, and humans decide. Narrow agents see compact, citable evidence about the files, never the data, and return typed proposals. A verifier with 39 check types tests each proposal against that evidence in two loops, one for the schema's structure and one for its meaning, and a human reviewer approves the schema and the load. Code compiles PostgreSQL DDL, reshapes the data, quarantines rows it cannot place, records provenance, and reconciles every staged row against the database. On four public biomedical datasets, one held out from development, 9 of 20 first proposals failed a check and every failure was caught: the loops repaired eight, and a one-line reviewer edit fixed the ninth. All 45.1 million values loaded with zero reconciliation gap. Discovering a dataset's structure took 4-7 LLM calls and preparing its data at most one more, costing under $0.50 per dataset. In a separate test, each of nine planted data errors was quarantined with a reason or recorded in an audit log.
E-commerce catalogs increasingly live in lakehouse tables: Apache Iceberg metadata over Parquet files in object storage. Product search, however, still runs on copies of that catalog, in a lexical engine and a vector database, each with its own ingestion pipeline, schema, staleness window and bill. We show that search applications can be hosted directly on the data lake, with the lakehouse table as the single system of record. We extend Apache Pinot, a real-time OLAP engine that already serves Iceberg tables in place, with BM25 relevance scoring over its Lucene text index, corpus-wide term statistics so that scores are comparable across files, and reciprocal rank fusion in plain SQL; a real-time table fed by a stream can sit behind the same table, merged by the broker. On the Amazon ESCI benchmark (1.2M US products, 22,458 test queries), hybrid search served from the lake matches exact retrieval (nDCG@10 .361). The lake table is queryable 149 s after its files are registered, and a lake commit is searchable in 3.8 s, close to indexing directly into a search engine. On a brand-sorted lake of 277M products (0.8 TB), one 16-vCPU node answers brand-scoped vector, BM25 and client-fused hybrid searches in 6.5-9 ms (p50), sustains 1,100 vector and 635 BM25 searches per second at under 180 ms p99, and makes a commit searchable in 4.3 s. Search adds only its indexes: no copy of the catalog, no sync pipeline and no second schema, which cuts storage, rebuild time and the operational work of keeping copies consistent.
Big techs and researchers increasingly claim that their training datasets are too large to inspect for bias and ethical problems. However, in the race to build ever-large models, they have relied on automated web scraping and no human curation. Datasets built this way absorb the stereotypes, exclusionary norms, and historical prejudices of their sources, and the models trained on them can reproduce and amplify those patterns. Because manually auditing billions of samples is humanly impossible, we need practical, effective methods to identify biases in these datasets. This paper studies the feasibility of ethically auditing large datasets through small samples and proposes a practical method for identifying structural biases by applying AI Ethics Tools (AIETs) to random samples. We applied Datasheets for Datasets, Data Statements, Data Nutrition Labels, and Data Cards to a 1% sample of Framed Multi30K, and Datasheets for Datasets to two 0.00006% samples of relaion2B-en-research-safe. Our results show that evaluating small samples with AIETs can reveal ethical problems, structural biases, and technical inconsistencies. Although industry practice assumes that identifying problems requires analyzing the entire dataset, we show that a random subset supports a viable qualitative analysis without overwhelming computational or human resources. Demonstrating that a dataset is biased does not require examining every instance: if a bias appears in a random sample, it is a flaw of the creation process. The AIETs' questions acted as provocateurs, evoking different perspectives and analysis methods for the same dataset, but the analysis and its results depended fundamentally on the human factor. We hope these findings contribute to urgent public discussions about ethics, transparency, accountability, and AI regulation by offering a practical pathway for responsibly auditing massive datasets.
Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are a rich source of structured data, and graph neural networks (GNNs) are the dominant tool for learning over them. However, existing message-passing GNNs struggle to scale to large KGs because they rely on the iterative message passing process to learn graph structure. This process is inefficient, especially under mini-batch training, where a node sees only a partial view of its neighborhood. In this paper, we address this problem and present gHAWK, a novel and scalable GNN training framework for large KGs. The key idea is to precompute structural features for each node that capture its local and global structure before GNN training even begins. Specifically, gHAWK introduces a preprocessing step that computes: (a)~Bloom filters to compactly encode local neighborhood structure, and (b)~TransE embeddings to represent each node's global position in the graph. These features are then fused with any domain-specific features (e.g., text embeddings), producing a node feature vector that can be used with any GNN backbone. Equipped with these structural priors, the GNN no longer needs to rediscover graph structure, significantly improving convergence and model accuracy with little memory overhead. Extensive experiments on large datasets from the Open Graph Benchmark demonstrate that gHAWK improves accuracy on both node property prediction and link prediction tasks. Remarkably, gHAWK enables simple GNNs to match or exceed more complex relation-aware ones, suggesting that careful preprocessing can substitute for architectural complexity in KG learning.
Pervasive sensor deployments have generated significant interest in IoT data analysis across fields such as healthcare, transportation and urban planning. At the same time, the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a new tool for exploring IoT data through their expressive, natural language interface. Unfortunately, natural language querying of IoT sensor streams is impractical today: raw telemetry exhausts LLM context windows in fractions of a second at scale, incurs prohibitive per-token costs, and produces hallucinated responses. Existing systems work around these limits with lossy text summarization or unconstrained code synthesis, producing expensive, unverified computations. Multi-step queries compound this problem: logical errors in intermediate operations can derail the final answer. We present Flash-Fusion, an agentic framework for natural-language querying of tabular IoT data. Flash-Fusion identifies which available data fields and supported derivations can answer the user's query, constructs a plan using typed, domain-specific operators, and validates its structure and schema compatibility before executing. Because constructing plans still requires costly LLM reasoning, Flash-Fusion caches validated operator sequences for reuse across compatible queries. A smaller LLM adapts a cached plan's parameters to each query, cutting latency and cost. We evaluate Flash-Fusion across human activity recognition, ECG monitoring, and vehicular telematics, covering direct lookups, multi-step reasoning, predictive tasks, and out-of-scope requests. Flash-Fusion achieves 92.2% query accuracy versus 76.1% for ReAct, the strongest baseline, while completing queries 7x faster and consuming 5x fewer tokens. Flash-Fusion enables users across disciplines to explore IoT data without manually constructing queries.
Energy management officers and grid operators increasingly rely on smart meter data for anomaly detection, performance monitoring, and strategic decision-making. However, extracting actionable insights from large-scale, heterogeneous telemetry databases requires advanced SQL and data engineering expertise, creating a critical bottleneck for non-technical personnel. Furthermore, the strict data privacy regulations and security constraints inherent to critical energy infrastructure often prohibit the routing of sensitive consumer data through cloud-based Large Language Models (LLMs). To address these challenges, we present OpenMeter, a schema-agnostic Multi-Agent System (MAS) designed to translate natural language queries into executable code and human-readable insights. This architecture lowers the technical barrier for day-to-day utility operations by empowering non-expert personnel to interact with complex databases through intuitive natural language dialogue, transforming raw telemetry into a highly valuable tool for routine grid workflows and strategic decisions. Multi-scenario ablation studies over this environment demonstrate that full multi-agent orchestration shows its largest observed accuracy gains on resource-constrained local hardware (+6.1 pp EX-R over the strongest single-agent configuration); at frontier scale, individual components retain value but should be enabled selectively, indicating that the cost of full orchestration is justified specifically where privacy demands local execution.
E-commerce supply chains generate large volumes of customer feedback and operational data that remain underutilized in inventory management. Traditional inventory classification techniques such as ABC analysis rely primarily on annual dollar usage, while multi-criteria inventory classification (MCIC) methods extend this but still depend on structured quantitative data and do not utilize unstructured information available in modern supply chains. This paper proposes an LLM-based feature extraction approach that transforms unstructured sources such as customer reviews into quantitative features using vector embeddings and LLM-generated evaluation criteria. The enriched feature set is incorporated into an MCIC framework based on the Hadi-Vencheh model. Experimental results show measurable reclassification effects when customer sentiment signals are included, demonstrating that integrating unstructured data into MCIC can enhance inventory prioritization.
Temporal link prediction uses past interactions to predict whether two nodes will interact in the future. Temporal graph neural networks achieve strong results on this task, but they are trained separately for each graph. How a model should use interaction history also depends on the candidates it is compared with. A past interaction can distinguish a recurring link from a random pair that has never interacted, but when the negative candidates have also interacted before, other signals are needed. We propose StreamTab, a training-free framework built on a frozen tabular foundation model pretrained only on synthetic tables. StreamTab describes each candidate pair by statistics of its past interactions and shows the model recent observed interactions and sampled negative pairs as labeled examples, from which the model scores new candidates. Its central design, regime conditioning, samples the negative examples according to how the candidates are sampled, so the examples show the distinction the model must make. As new interactions arrive, StreamTab updates the statistics and refreshes the examples while the model parameters stay fixed. On thirteen datasets against 21 temporal graph baselines, StreamTab achieves the highest average precision on twelve datasets under historical sampling and eleven under inductive sampling, and ranks first or stays within one point of the best on seven datasets under random sampling. With the same features and model, regime conditioning raises average precision over examples with random negatives by a median of 12.6 points under historical sampling.
Traditional similarity-based schema matching methods fail to resolve semantic ambiguities and conflicts in complex, domain-specific mappings due to a lack of commonsense and domain-specific knowledge. In parallel, large language models (LLMs) without sufficient background knowledge tend to hallucinate, further complicating schema matching. To overcome these limitations, we introduce KG-RAG4SM, a Knowledge Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Schema Matching. This method integrates novel retrieval mechanisms, including LLM-based, vector-based, graph traversal-based, and hybrid techniques with advanced reranking schemes to extract the most relevant subgraphs from large external KGs. Our approach achieves superior results without requiring re-training, as evidenced by improvements of 39.79% in precision and 30.56% in F1 score over LLM-based state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods (e.g., Jellyfish-8B) on the MIMIC dataset, and enhancements of 69.20% in precision and 21.99% in F1 score over pre-trained language model (PLM)-based SOTA methods (e.g., SMAT) on the Synthea dataset. Additionally, KG-RAG4SM scales effectively across KGs from commonsense KGs to domain-specific ones, while its instruction-tuning knowledge exclusion component ensures truthful performance in end-to-end schema matching tasks despite the suboptimal relevance of KG context. Our empirical analysis and case studies from real-world scenarios show that the hallucination problem in LLMs for schema matching is well mitigated by our solution.
A national digital twin was conceived as an ecosystem of twins connected through mappings to a common foundation, but the roadmap that promises to confirm those mappings are valid never says what valid means. We give the test a precise form, coherence and conservativity of the merged ontology, borrowed from logic-based alignment repair, and apply it to the Information Exchange Standard (IES), first pair by pair and then to whole hubs. Crosswalks from IES into thirteen ontologies across seven sector groups, anchored on the building ontologies BOT, Brick, and SAREF4BLDG, pass through separate stages of matching, human review, certification of each SKOS correspondence against the two class hierarchies, and reasoning with HermiT. Pair by pair, the stages catch different failures: certification alone removed all 526 conservativity violations of the raw crosswalks, review alone left 73, and together they made eleven of twelve overlapping pairs coherent and conservative. Pairwise certification does not compose. Merging the three certified building crosswalks into one hub made five Brick classes unsatisfiable, through a homonym between the IES and Brick notions of a floor that only BOT's disjointness axioms expose; rejecting that one row gave a coherent and conservative hub that entails 290 cross-ontology links nobody wrote down. The core hub is inconsistent before any crosswalk is added, because two published standards, the Open Energy Ontology and BFO 2020, contradict each other; with either one left out it is coherent and conservative. A hub, not a pair, is the unit an ecosystem of twins has to certify.
Merging companies that each run Salesforce must consolidate their customer data into a single organization while both source systems remain in use. This requires reconciling different schemas and picklists, resolving duplicate customers across and within organizations, preserving relationships between records, and keeping the target current until cutover. This article proposes a reference framework for an autonomous extract-transform-load pipeline for this task. It combines partitioned bulk extraction, declarative mapping templates, rule-based and statistical quality gates, master data management with deterministic and blocked fuzzy matching, constrained loading with per-record error capture, and change data capture guarded by a data-health circuit breaker. Each stage is mapped to Jitterbit Integration Studio constructs. The framework was implemented as an open reference prototype and evaluated on synthetic two-organization scenarios with known ground truth at three scales, from 32,040 to 383,973 source records, over five random seeds. At a preset threshold, hybrid matching reached pairwise F1 scores of 0.918 for accounts and 0.885 for contacts; calibrating the threshold per object would raise these to 0.938 and 0.963. The quality gates prevented all load failures and all silent loss of unmapped picklist values without wrongly flagging any clean record, whereas removing them produced about 1,000 load failures per run. Over five simulated days of hourly incremental synchronization, replayed events were ignored, an injected upstream fault was contained in the batch in which it occurred, and the target agreed with a full rebuild on more than 99.3 percent of field values. Validation on a production deployment remains future work.
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have established human-agent collaboration as a promising paradigm for data science. Effective collaboration requires a shared computational abstraction that enables agents to reason about processing logic while allowing human analysts to understand, guide, and refine the analysis. Although scripts written in Python or SQL provide precise control, their syntax and execution details can be difficult for analysts to understand and modify. In this paper, we argue that dataflows are an effective abstraction for human-agent collaboration in data science. We introduce BobFlow, a system that combines the dataflow abstraction with the ReAct paradigm. It enables agents to iteratively construct and execute dataflows for data science tasks while allowing analysts to inspect the analysis and provide feedback. Our user study shows that BobFlow helps analysts understand, inspect, and verify agent-generated analyses. A thorough experimental evaluation across proprietary and open-weight LLMs shows accuracy score gains of up to 18.6 points at just over 1/3 of a script-based ReAct agent's inference cost.
We present the Whiel (a contraction of Whi(le-R)el) system for Lean-certified reasoning about imperative relational programs. The system can encode containment and equivalence problems for Datalog, its extensions with negation, and the core fragment of graph query languages. It can also represent optimized or incremental evaluation algorithms that are not expressible in the original query language, as well as first-order specifications of integrity constraints, schema mappings, and views arising in data integration, exchange, and sharing. Whiel's program states are database instances, and its imperative structure enables compositional Hoare-style reasoning with first-order relational specifications, using prophecy variables and leveled invariants to support inductive arguments. Whiel supports neurosymbolic discovery of loop invariants whose verification conditions can be checked using the Vampire first-order theorem prover. Counterexamples are fed back into the neurosymbolic pipeline, while proposed solutions are translated into Lean proof certificates. To validate the Whiel system, we evaluate its performance on a curated benchmark suite. In summary, we envision the Whiel system as a tool for tackling mathematically demanding, typically undecidable problems involving complex query and constraint languages, with a high degree of trust in its output.
As LLMs improve, data agents are emerging as a new interface for analytics, while semantic query processing engines use LLMs to operate over structured and unstructured data. Existing benchmarks largely evaluate agents and semantic query engines in isolation, leaving it unclear whether agents can decide when and how to use semantic operators in end-to-end analysis. We introduce AvalancheBench, a multimodal enterprise analytics benchmark that generates observed data from latent world specifications and evaluates data agents on their ability to recover that world. The benchmark's 3 validated tasks contain 58 questions spanning text, images, and documents. Questions are provided together as a multi-part analytical brief and may share intermediate results, exposing the avalanche effect: errors can propagate through legitimate dependencies, and inappropriate reuse can cause otherwise unrelated questions to fail. AvalancheBench measures analytical fidelity, monetary cost, and capability-adjusted token cost (CATC), a new metric that weights token use by model capability to separate technical efficiency from provider pricing. We evaluate 5 model-harness configurations across 3 agent harnesses using Snowflake Cortex AISQL as the engine, with the best configuration reaching macro analytical fidelity of 0.82. Agents fail primarily in constructing the analysis: failing to recover facts that require semantic computation costs 45.1% of lost points, yet incorrect operator outputs account for only 2.5%, versus 36.3% from agents misusing or avoiding semantic operators. Misinterpreting requirements costs the most, at 51.5%. Errors also spread between questions: 29% of lost points come from reusing another question's results. Finally, monetary cost and CATC produce different Pareto frontiers, distinguishing economically attractive configurations from those that are technically resource efficient.
Many spatial network applications, such as map-based services, rely heavily on efficient methods to search for relevant nearby points-of-interest (POIs). A $k$ Nearest Neighbor ($k$NN) query is one such example that finds the $k$ closest POIs from an agent's location. While most existing techniques for spatial networks focus on retrieving nearby POIs for a single agent, these search heuristics do not translate to many other applications. For example, Aggregate $k$ Nearest Neighbor (A$k$NN) queries require POIs that are close to multiple agents. $k$ Farthest Neighbors ($k$FN) queries require POIs that are the antithesis of nearest. Such problems naturally benefit from a hierarchical approach, but existing methods rely on Euclidean-based heuristics, which have diminished effectiveness in spatial networks such as road network graphs. We propose a novel data structure, COL-Tree (Compacted Object-Landmark Tree), to address this gap by enabling efficient hierarchical graph traversal using a more accurate landmark-based heuristic. We then present query algorithms that utilize COL-Trees to efficiently answer A$k$NN, $k$FN, and other queries. Our experiments evaluate performance on real-world and synthetic datasets including multiple types of spatial networks, such as road networks of varying sizes and edge weights, terrain networks, and 2D physics meshes. The results demonstrate that our techniques significantly outperform existing approaches, achieving up to three orders of magnitude improvement. Moreover, this comes at a small pre-processing overhead in both theory and practice.
Deep learning over relational databases has led to increasingly effective prediction models, motivating a growing need to explain their behavior. We study explanation methods that assign importance scores to individual database attributes, focusing on a fundamental question: to what extent does the choice of importance-attribution method matter? We develop a methodology to systematically compare importance-attribution methods and analyze their similarities and differences. In particular, we study two aspects of the explanations: which attributes they deem important, captured by differences in attribute rankings, and how importance scores vary across attributes, captured by differences in score distributions. We further investigate whether these differences are reflected in the conventional measure of explanation quality, fidelity. We apply our methodology in an extensive empirical study of four methods: Monte Carlo Shapley, Kernel SHAP, single-attribute impact, and mask learning. We experiment with multiple datasets and tasks using two RDL architectures: heterogeneous GraphSAGE and Relational Graph Transformers. Our experiments show that explanation methods behave differently depending on the prediction type: regression or classification. In regression, most methods exhibit high agreement in attribute rankings, whereas classification yields considerably less consensus. Notably, while mask learning frequently diverges in its importance distributions, Shapley-based methods and single-attribute impact often converge to similar explanations. This suggests that, in many settings, single-attribute impact can replace Shapley at substantially lower computational cost. Overall, our study provides methodological tools for comparing importance-attribution methods, and empirical evidence that their choice has important consequences for interpreting relational deep learning models.
A learned cost model that predicts query runtimes is trained on measurements from one machine. When the database moves to other hardware, its plans stay the same but their runtimes change, each by its own factor. We ask how to adapt such a model from k queries measured on the new machine: which queries to run, how to use their runtimes, and how many are enough. On PostgreSQL we timed the same plans of 1,162 TPC-H and TPC-DS queries in six environments: a laptop and a server, each with all its processors or pinned to one, the server also pinned to two, and the laptop also with a small buffer pool. No single factor describes the slowdown between two environments: most of its variance lies between query templates, so a speed factor stops improving after a few queries. A correction that fits separate lines for serial and parallel plans and adds an offset for every measured template brings the moved model, with one measured query per template, to an error (geometric mean over templates of the median Q-error) of 1.10 on TPC-H and 1.19 on TPC-DS, close to the same correction on a model trained on the new machine; fine-tuning a DACE-style neural cost model on the same queries gains at most 2%. On templates never measured, no correction we tried is on average more than 2% better than the speed factor. We then fixed hypotheses and timed new data. On TPC-H at ten times the scale the errors follow these results, but two of five repeated tests miss. On the Join Order Benchmark, whose queries differ widely within a template, the model errs by 2.36 even when retrained on the new machine, no correction gains much, and only the test on new templates holds; boosted trees and a neural model fit these queries better, and correcting the neural model works as well as fine-tuning it. We report every test as registered.
Given a query table, existing data lake discovery techniques seek to identify data sources related to the query table through schema similarity and joinability. The discovered sources, however, are not always useful for downstream analyses; while some improve task generalization, some have the potential to inadvertently introduce harmful noise or distribution shifts. We formalize source selection as the problem of finding a subset of the discovered sources that maximizes downstream task utility. We propose Splice, a target- and cost-aware source selection system that adopts the idea of gene splicing to identify sources which provide additional signals that the union of all sources misses. To speed up the process, we develop two surrogate variants, Splice-DP and Splice-Grad, that estimate the marginal contribution of subsets to task utility by leveraging data profiles in a meta-learning approach and gradient alignment, respectively. On classification tasks over two real-world benchmarks derived from SOTA table union search tools, Splice shows 3-5 percentage points improvement in binary F1 scores compared to the case when all discovered tables are considered. On five additional real-world ML tasks spanning classification and regression, Splice improves task utility over the all-sources baseline by 1.8-13.7 points, while Splice-DP and Splice-Grad match this quality with 3-7x fewer model evaluations (up to 77x at scale).