No Arabic abstract
Unstructured data is now commonly queried by using target deep neural networks (DNNs) to produce structured information, e.g., object types and positions in video. As these target DNNs can be computationally expensive, recent work uses proxy models to produce query-specific proxy scores. These proxy scores are then used in downstream query processing algorithms for improved query execution speeds. Unfortunately, proxy models are often trained per-query, require large amounts of training data from the target DNN, and new training methods per query type. In this work, we develop an index construction method (task-agnostic semantic trainable index, TASTI) that produces reusable embeddings that can be used to generate proxy scores for a wide range of queries, removing the need for query-specific proxies. We observe that many queries over the same dataset only require access to the schema induced by the target DNN. For example, an aggregation query counting the number of cars and a selection query selecting frames of cars require only the object types per frame of video. To leverage this opportunity, TASTI produces embeddings per record that have the key property that close embeddings have similar extracted attributes under the induced schema. Given this property, we show that clustering by embeddings can be used to answer downstream queries efficiently. We theoretically analyze TASTI and show that low training error guarantees downstream query accuracy for a natural class of queries. We evaluate TASTI on four video and text datasets, and three query types. We show that TASTI can be 10x less expensive to construct than proxy models and can outperform them by up to 24x at query time.
Cardinality estimation is a fundamental problem in database systems. To capture the rich joint data distributions of a relational table, most of the existing work either uses data as unsupervised information or uses query workload as supervised information. Very little work has been done to use both types of information, and cannot fully make use of both types of information to learn the joint data distribution. In this work, we aim to close the gap between data-driven and query-driven methods by proposing a new unified deep autoregressive model, UAE, that learns the joint data distribution from both the data and query workload. First, to enable using the supervised query information in the deep autoregressive model, we develop differentiable progressive sampling using the Gumbel-Softmax trick. Second, UAE is able to utilize both types of information to learn the joint data distribution in a single model. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that UAE achieves single-digit multiplicative error at tail, better accuracies over state-of-the-art methods, and is both space and time efficient.
Scanning and filtering over multi-dimensional tables are key operations in modern analytical database engines. To optimize the performance of these operations, databases often create clustered indexes over a single dimension or multi-dimensional indexes such as R-trees, or use complex sort orders (e.g., Z-ordering). However, these schemes are often hard to tune and their performance is inconsistent across different datasets and queries. In this paper, we introduce Flood, a multi-dimensional in-memory index that automatically adapts itself to a particular dataset and workload by jointly optimizing the index structure and data storage. Flood achieves up to three orders of magnitude faster performance for range scans with predicates than state-of-the-art multi-dimensional indexes or sort orders on real-world datasets and workloads. Our work serves as a building block towards an end-to-end learned database system.
In visual exploration and analysis of data, determining how to select and transform the data for visualization is a challenge for data-unfamiliar or inexperienced users. Our main hypothesis is that for many data sets and common analysis tasks, there are relatively few data slices that result in effective visualizations. By focusing human users on appropriate and suitably transformed parts of the underlying data sets, these data slices can help the users carry their task to correct completion. To verify this hypothesis, we develop a framework that permits us to capture exemplary data slices for a user task, and to explore and parse visual-exploration sequences into a format that makes them distinct and easy to compare. We develop a recommendation system, DataSlicer, that matches a currently viewed data slice with the most promising next effective data slices for the given exploration task. We report the results of controlled experiments with an implementation of the DataSlicer system, using four common analytical task types. The experiments demonstrate statistically significant improvements in accuracy and exploration speed versus users without access to our system.
Natural language is perhaps the most flexible and intuitive way for humans to communicate tasks to a robot. Prior work in imitation learning typically requires each task be specified with a task id or goal image -- something that is often impractical in open-world environments. On the other hand, previous approaches in instruction following allow agent behavior to be guided by language, but typically assume structure in the observations, actuators, or language that limit their applicability to complex settings like robotics. In this work, we present a method for incorporating free-form natural language conditioning into imitation learning. Our approach learns perception from pixels, natural language understanding, and multitask continuous control end-to-end as a single neural network. Unlike prior work in imitation learning, our method is able to incorporate unlabeled and unstructured demonstration data (i.e. no task or language labels). We show this dramatically improves language conditioned performance, while reducing the cost of language annotation to less than 1% of total data. At test time, a single language conditioned visuomotor policy trained with our method can perform a wide variety of robotic manipulation skills in a 3D environment, specified only with natural language descriptions of each task (e.g. open the drawer...now pick up the block...now press the green button...). To scale up the number of instructions an agent can follow, we propose combining text conditioned policies with large pretrained neural language models. We find this allows a policy to be robust to many out-of-distribution synonym instructions, without requiring new demonstrations. See videos of a human typing live text commands to our agent at language-play.github.io
There is great excitement about learned index structures, but understandable skepticism about the practicality of a new method uprooting decades of research on B-Trees. In this paper, we work to remove some of that uncertainty by demonstrating how a learned index can be integrated in a distributed, disk-based database system: Googles Bigtable. We detail several design decisions we made to integrate learned indexes in Bigtable. Our results show that integrating learned index significantly improves the end-to-end read latency and throughput for Bigtable.