Language Models Enable Simple Systems for Generating Structured Views of Heterogeneous Data Lakes
Reviewed by Pith T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 kernel pith:K7NH3OJLrecord.jsonopen to challenge →
read the original abstract
A long standing goal of the data management community is to develop general, automated systems that ingest semi-structured documents and output queryable tables without human effort or domain specific customization. Given the sheer variety of potential documents, state-of-the art systems make simplifying assumptions and use domain specific training. In this work, we ask whether we can maintain generality by using large language models (LLMs). LLMs, which are pretrained on broad data, can perform diverse downstream tasks simply conditioned on natural language task descriptions. We propose and evaluate EVAPORATE, a simple, prototype system powered by LLMs. We identify two fundamentally different strategies for implementing this system: prompt the LLM to directly extract values from documents or prompt the LLM to synthesize code that performs the extraction. Our evaluations show a cost-quality tradeoff between these two approaches. Code synthesis is cheap, but far less accurate than directly processing each document with the LLM. To improve quality while maintaining low cost, we propose an extended code synthesis implementation, EVAPORATE-CODE+, which achieves better quality than direct extraction. Our key insight is to generate many candidate functions and ensemble their extractions using weak supervision. EVAPORATE-CODE+ not only outperforms the state-of-the art systems, but does so using a sublinear pass over the documents with the LLM. This equates to a 110x reduction in the number of tokens the LLM needs to process, averaged across 16 real-world evaluation settings of 10k documents each.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet.
Forward citations
Cited by 10 Pith papers
-
Morphing into Hybrid Attention Models
FlashMorph formulates hybrid layer selection as budget-constrained optimization, trains per-layer gates on synthetic retrieval data with linearization regularization, then discretizes and distills to produce efficient...
-
Attention Amnesia in Hybrid LLMs: When CoT Fine-Tuning Breaks Long-Range Recall, and How to Fix It
CoT SFT disrupts long-range routing in hybrid models via changes to W_Q and W_K; QK-Restore restores pre-SFT projections to recover NIAH performance.
-
Semantic Data Processing with Holistic Data Understanding
HoldUp uses LLM-guided clustering to provide holistic dataset context for semantic operators, yielding up to 33% higher classification accuracy and 30% higher scoring accuracy than row-by-row LLM processing across 15 ...
-
Gated Linear Attention Transformers with Hardware-Efficient Training
Gated linear attention Transformers achieve competitive language modeling results with linear-time inference, superior length generalization, and higher training throughput than Mamba.
-
MDN: Parallelizing Stepwise Momentum for Delta Linear Attention
MDN parallelizes stepwise momentum for delta linear attention using geometric reordering and dynamical systems analysis, yielding performance gains over Mamba2 and GDN on 400M and 1.3B models.
-
Train the Trainers -- An Agentic AI Framework for Peer-Based Mental Health Support in Battlefield Environments
The paper introduces an agentic AI platform to train and support recovered soldiers as peer facilitators providing mental health triage and interventions in austere battlefield environments.
-
Gated Delta Networks: Improving Mamba2 with Delta Rule
Gated DeltaNet integrates gating and delta rules into linear transformers, outperforming Mamba2 and DeltaNet on language modeling, reasoning, retrieval, and long-context tasks.
-
Towards an Agent-First Web: Redesigning the Web for AI Agents
Proposes ten design principles for an agent-first web with changes to access (agent identification and dual content), economics (intent-based tiers and tokens), and content (ATML and provenance chains) to address bloc...
-
Flowr -- Scaling Up Retail Supply Chain Operations Through Agentic AI in Large Scale Supermarket Chains
Flowr is an agentic AI framework that decomposes retail supply chain workflows into coordinated LLM-based agents with human-in-the-loop oversight to automate operations in large supermarket chains.
-
AI Trust OS -- A Continuous Governance Framework for Autonomous AI Observability and Zero-Trust Compliance in Enterprise Environments
AI Trust OS is a proposed always-on operating layer that discovers undocumented AI systems via telemetry and produces continuous zero-trust compliance artifacts for regulations including ISO 42001, EU AI Act, SOC 2, G...
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.