No Need to Train Your RDB Foundation Model
arXiv:2602. 13697v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Relational databases (RDBs) contain vast amounts of heterogeneous tabular information that can be exploited for predictive modeling purposes.
STEER is a sampling method for relational foundation models that reduces inference cost by focusing on the most relevant tables for a prediction task. It uses a large language model to rank foreign‑key edges in the database schema into relevance tiers, then assigns traversal probabilities based on these tiers. Evaluated on three state‑of‑the‑art RFMs, STEER cuts inference context size by roughly 40% on average while preserving or improving accuracy.
arXiv:2602. 13697v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Relational databases (RDBs) contain vast amounts of heterogeneous tabular information that can be exploited for predictive modeling purposes.
arXiv:2607. 29129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Relational Foundation Models (RFMs) require large-scale synthetic relational databases for pretraining, but existing approaches tightly couple data generation with the model training pipeline.
The paper proposes a fine‑tuning‑free listwise selector for Text‑to‑SQL systems that replaces traditional learning objectives with inference‑time strategies. It introduces reusable structured memories (MaP‑SQL) that encode mappings from natural language to schema elements, SQL operations, and expected outputs, and uses these memories to evaluate candidate queries. To reduce positional bias, the method aggregates rankings across multiple input permutations, optimizing inference cost through execution results and pointwise scoring. The approach achieves higher selection accuracy, fewer unnecessary comparisons, and outperforms the prior state‑of‑the‑art R^3‑SQL on the BIRD‑dev benchmark while using fewer tokens.
LLMAR is a tuning‑free recommendation framework designed for sparse, text‑rich industrial B2B domains. It transforms user behavioral history into structured semantic motives using LLM inference, employs a reflection loop to self‑correct hallucinations, and operates cost‑effectively with asynchronous batch processing. Experiments on MovieLens‑1M, Amazon Prime Pantry, and a construction risk dataset show LLMAR surpasses state‑of‑the‑art learning models, achieving up to a 54.6% nDCG@10 improvement while keeping inference costs around $1 per 1,000 users.
The paper investigates how Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs) can achieve strong transfer learning by self‑supervised pre‑training on a single real table. It finds that a table’s usefulness is largely determined by its number of features rather than instances, and that fine‑grained column‑level preprocessing improves downstream performance while dataset‑level filtering does not. The authors propose that tabular in‑context generalization is primarily retrieval‑based, with models learning to identify and aggregate relevant examples from the provided context.
arXiv:2607. 28680v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Entity linking in tables matches short and ambiguous cell mentions to their corresponding knowledge-base entities.
The paper examines the role of schema linking in Text-to-SQL systems and finds that recent large language models can effectively use relevant schema elements even when many irrelevant ones are present. Consequently, the authors eliminate schema linking when the entire schema fits within the model’s context window, instead employing augmentation, selection, and correction techniques to enhance accuracy. Their approach achieves first place on the BIRD benchmark with a 71.83% accuracy.
The paper introduces FlockMTL, an extension for database management systems that deeply integrates large language models and retrieval‑augmented generation into DuckDB. It provides model‑driven scalar and aggregate functions, cost‑based optimizations like batching and caching, and new SQL DDL abstractions (PROMPT and MODEL) to treat LLMs as first‑class schema objects. These features aim to simplify the development of knowledge‑intensive analytical applications by reducing the effort required to orchestrate heterogeneous data systems and manage LLM context.
arXiv:2606. 28601v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in Text-to-SQL has been driven by stronger language models and prompting strategies, yet performance on real enterprise benchmarks such as Spider 2.
arXiv:2608. 10447v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model-based recommender systems are increasingly adopting slow-thinking models that generate step-by-step reasoning before making predictions, often achieving higher accuracy than fast-thinking models that predict directly.
arXiv:2601.13111v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Realistic text-to-SQL workflows often require joining multiple tables. As a result, accurately retrieving the relevant set of tables becomes...
The paper investigates how Tabular Foundation Models (TFMs) can achieve strong transfer learning by self‑supervised pre‑training on a single real table, rather than large synthetic or real datasets. It finds that a table’s usefulness for downstream tasks is mainly determined by the number of features, not instances, and that fine‑grained column‑level preprocessing improves performance while dataset‑level filtering does not. The authors propose a task‑centric, retrieval‑based view of in‑context generalization, suggesting that effective TFMs identify and aggregate relevant examples from the provided context.