Naili Xing

Zhanhao Zhao, Shaofeng Cai, Haotian Gao et al.

Databases are increasingly embracing AI to provide autonomous system optimization and intelligent in-database analytics, aiming to relieve end-user burdens across various industry sectors. Nonetheless, most existing approaches fail to account for the dynamic nature of databases, which renders them ineffective for real-world applications characterized by evolving data and workloads. This paper introduces NeurDB, an AI-powered autonomous database that deepens the fusion of AI and databases with adaptability to data and workload drift. NeurDB establishes a new in-database AI ecosystem that seamlessly integrates AI workflows within the database. This integration enables efficient and effective in-database AI analytics and fast-adaptive learned system components. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that NeurDB substantially outperforms existing solutions in managing AI analytics tasks, with the proposed learned components more effectively handling environmental dynamism than state-of-the-art approaches.

Naili Xing, Haotian Gao, Zhanhao Zhao et al.

AI-driven analytics are increasingly crucial to data-centric decision-making. The practice of exporting data to machine learning runtimes incurs high overhead, limits robustness to data drift, and expands the attack surface, especially in multi-tenant, heterogeneous data systems. Integrating AI directly into database engines, while offering clear benefits, introduces challenges in managing joint query processing and model execution, optimizing end-to-end performance, coordinating execution under resource contention, and enforcing strong security and access-control guarantees. This paper discusses the challenges of joint DB-AI, or AIxDB, data management and query processing within AI-powered data systems. It presents various challenges that need to be addressed carefully, such as query optimization, execution scheduling, and distributed execution over heterogeneous hardware. Database components such as transaction management and access control need to be re-examined to support AI lifecycle management, mitigate data drift, and protect sensitive data from unauthorized AI operations. We present a design and preliminary results to demonstrate what may be key to the performance for serving AIxDB queries.

Zhanhao Zhao, Haotian Gao, Naili Xing et al.

Learned database components, which deeply integrate machine learning into their design, have been extensively studied in recent years. Given the dynamism of databases, where data and workloads continuously drift, it is crucial for learned database components to remain effective and efficient in the face of data and workload drift. Robustness, therefore, is a key factor in assessing their practical applicability. Although recent works examine learned database components under specific drift, they fail to enable systematic performance evaluations across a broad range of drift or under customized drift as needed. This paper presents NeurBench, a new benchmark suite that supports evaluating learned database components under measurable and controllable data and workload drift. We quantify diverse types of drift by introducing a key concept called the drift factor. Building on this formulation, we propose a drift-aware data and workload generation framework that effectively simulates real-world drift while preserving inherent correlations. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of NeurBench in generating realistic data and workload drift, while providing insights into the performance of representative learned database components under different drift scenarios.

Beng Chin Ooi, Shaofeng Cai, Gang Chen et al.

In the wake of rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), we stand on the brink of a transformative leap in data systems. The imminent fusion of AI and DB (AIxDB) promises a new generation of data systems, which will relieve the burden on end-users across all industry sectors by featuring AI-enhanced functionalities, such as personalized and automated in-database AI-powered analytics, self-driving capabilities for improved system performance, etc. In this paper, we explore the evolution of data systems with a focus on deepening the fusion of AI and DB. We present NeurDB, an AI-powered autonomous data system designed to fully embrace AI design in each major system component and provide in-database AI-powered analytics. We outline the conceptual and architectural overview of NeurDB, discuss its design choices and key components, and report its current development and future plan.

Lingze Zeng, Naili Xing, Shaofeng Cai et al.

Relational database management systems (RDBMS) are widely used for the storage of structured data. To derive insights beyond statistical aggregation, we typically have to extract specific subdatasets from the database using conventional database operations, and then apply deep neural networks (DNN) training and inference on these subdatasets in a separate analytics system. The process can be prohibitively expensive, especially when there are various subdatasets extracted for different analytical purposes. This calls for efficient in-database support of advanced analytical methods. In this paper, we introduce LEADS, a novel SQL-aware dynamic model slicing technique to customize models for specified SQL queries. LEADS improves the predictive modeling of structured data via the mixture of experts (MoE) and maintains efficiency by a SQL-aware gating network. At the core of LEADS is the construction of a general model with multiple expert sub-models trained over the database. The MoE scales up the modeling capacity, enhances effectiveness, and preserves efficiency by activating necessary experts via the SQL-aware gating network during inference. To support in-database analytics, we build an inference extension that integrates LEADS onto PostgreSQL. Our extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that LEADS consistently outperforms the baseline models, and the in-database inference extension delivers a considerable reduction in inference latency compared to traditional solutions.

Naili Xing, Shaofeng Cai, Zhaojing Luo et al.

The increasing demand for tabular data analysis calls for transitioning from manual architecture design to Neural Architecture Search (NAS). This transition demands an efficient and responsive anytime NAS approach that is capable of returning current optimal architectures within any given time budget while progressively enhancing architecture quality with increased budget allocation. However, the area of research on Anytime NAS for tabular data remains unexplored. To this end, we introduce ATLAS, the first anytime NAS approach tailored for tabular data. ATLAS introduces a novel two-phase filtering-and-refinement optimization scheme with joint optimization, combining the strengths of both paradigms of training-free and training-based architecture evaluation. Specifically, in the filtering phase, ATLAS employs a new zero-cost proxy specifically designed for tabular data to efficiently estimate the performance of candidate architectures, thereby obtaining a set of promising architectures. Subsequently, in the refinement phase, ATLAS leverages a fixed-budget search algorithm to schedule the training of the promising candidates, so as to accurately identify the optimal architecture. To jointly optimize the two phases for anytime NAS, we also devise a budget-aware coordinator that delivers high NAS performance within constraints. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our ATLAS can obtain a good-performing architecture within any predefined time budget and return better architectures as and when a new time budget is made available. Overall, it reduces the search time on tabular data by up to 82.75x compared to existing NAS approaches.

Naili Xing, Sai Ho Yeung, Chenghao Cai et al.

Deep learning has achieved great success in a wide spectrum of multimedia applications such as image classification, natural language processing and multimodal data analysis. Recent years have seen the development of many deep learning frameworks that provide a high-level programming interface for users to design models, conduct training and deploy inference. However, it remains challenging to build an efficient end-to-end multimedia application with most existing frameworks. Specifically, in terms of usability, it is demanding for non-experts to implement deep learning models, obtain the right settings for the entire machine learning pipeline, manage models and datasets, and exploit external data sources all together. Further, in terms of adaptability, elastic computation solutions are much needed as the actual serving workload fluctuates constantly, and scaling the hardware resources to handle the fluctuating workload is typically infeasible. To address these challenges, we introduce SINGA-Easy, a new deep learning framework that provides distributed hyper-parameter tuning at the training stage, dynamic computational cost control at the inference stage, and intuitive user interactions with multimedia contents facilitated by model explanation. Our experiments on the training and deployment of multi-modality data analysis applications show that the framework is both usable and adaptable to dynamic inference loads. We implement SINGA-Easy on top of Apache SINGA and demonstrate our system with the entire machine learning life cycle.