M. Tamer Özsu

Xiangru Jian, Zhengyuan Dong, M. Tamer Özsu

In recent years, querying semantic web data using SPARQL has remained challenging, especially for non-expert users, due to the language's complex syntax and the prerequisite of understanding intricate data structures. To address these challenges, we propose InteracSPARQL, an interactive SPARQL query generation and refinement system that leverages natural language explanations (NLEs) to enhance user comprehension and facilitate iterative query refinement. InteracSPARQL integrates LLMs with a rule-based approach to first produce structured explanations directly from SPARQL abstract syntax trees (ASTs), followed by LLM-based linguistic refinements. Users can interactively refine queries through direct feedback or LLM-driven self-refinement, enabling the correction of ambiguous or incorrect query components in real time. We evaluate InteracSPARQL on standard benchmarks, demonstrating significant improvements in query accuracy, explanation clarity, and overall user satisfaction compared to baseline approaches. Our experiments further highlight the effectiveness of combining rule-based methods with LLM-driven refinements to create more accessible and robust SPARQL interfaces.

Sepideh Abedini, M. Tamer Özsu

Text-to-SQL models have significantly improved with the adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), leading to their increasing use in real-world applications. Although many benchmarks exist for evaluating the performance of text-to-SQL models, they often rely on a single aggregate score, lack evaluation under realistic settings, and provide limited insight into model behaviour across different query types. In this work, we present SQLyzr, a comprehensive benchmark and evaluation platform for text-to-SQL models. SQLyzr incorporates a diverse set of evaluation metrics that capture multiple aspects of generated queries, while enabling more realistic evaluation through workload alignment with real-world SQL usage patterns and database scaling. It further supports fine-grained query classification, error analysis, and workload augmentation, allowing users to better diagnose and improve text-to-SQL models. This demonstration showcases these capabilities through an interactive experience. Through SQLyzr's graphical interface, users can customize evaluation settings, analyze fine-grained reports, and explore additional features of the platform. We envision that SQLyzr facilitates the evaluation and iterative improvement of text-to-SQL models by addressing key limitations of existing benchmarks. The source code of SQLyzr is available at https://github.com/sepideh-abedini/SQLyzr.

Shravan Nayak, Xiangru Jian, Kevin Qinghong Lin et al. · mila

Autonomous agents that navigate Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) to automate tasks like document editing and file management can greatly enhance computer workflows. While existing research focuses on online settings, desktop environments, critical for many professional and everyday tasks, remain underexplored due to data collection challenges and licensing issues. We introduce UI-Vision, the first comprehensive, license-permissive benchmark for offline, fine-grained evaluation of computer use agents in real-world desktop environments. Unlike online benchmarks, UI-Vision provides: (i) dense, high-quality annotations of human demonstrations, including bounding boxes, UI labels, and action trajectories (clicks, drags, and keyboard inputs) across 83 software applications, and (ii) three fine-to-coarse grained tasks-Element Grounding, Layout Grounding, and Action Prediction-with well-defined metrics to rigorously evaluate agents' performance in desktop environments. Our evaluation reveals critical limitations in state-of-the-art models like UI-TARS-72B, including issues with understanding professional software, spatial reasoning, and complex actions like drag-and-drop. These findings highlight the challenges in developing fully autonomous computer use agents. By releasing UI-Vision as open-source, we aim to advance the development of more capable agents for real-world desktop tasks.

Kerem Akillioglu, Anurag Chakraborty, Sairaj Voruganti et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have become essential for applications such as text summarization, sentiment analysis, and automated question-answering. Recently, LLMs have also been integrated into relational database management systems to enhance querying and support advanced data processing. Companies such as Amazon, Databricks, Google, and Snowflake offer LLM invocation directly within SQL, denoted as LLM queries, to boost data insights. However, open-source solutions currently have limited functionality and poor performance. In this work, we present an early exploration of two open-source systems and one enterprise platform, using five representative queries to expose functional, performance, and scalability limits in today's SQL-invoked LLM integrations. We identify three main issues: enforcing structured outputs, optimizing resource utilization, and improving query planning. We implemented initial solutions and observed improvements in accommodating LLM powered SQL queries. These early gains demonstrate that tighter integration of LLM+DBMS is the key to scalable and efficient processing of LLM queries.

Xiangru Jian, Wei Pang, Zhengyuan Dong et al.

Current video analytics approaches face a fundamental trade-off between flexibility and efficiency. End-to-end Vision Language Models (VLMs) often struggle with long-context processing and incur high computational costs, while neural-symbolic methods depend heavily on manual labeling and rigid rule design. In this paper, we introduce LazyVLM, a neuro-symbolic video analytics system that provides a user-friendly query interface similar to VLMs, while addressing their scalability limitation. LazyVLM enables users to effortlessly drop in video data and specify complex multi-frame video queries using a semi-structured text interface for video analytics. To address the scalability limitations of VLMs, LazyVLM decomposes multi-frame video queries into fine-grained operations and offloads the bulk of the processing to efficient relational query execution and vector similarity search. We demonstrate that LazyVLM provides a robust, efficient, and user-friendly solution for querying open-domain video data at scale.