Auto-Pipeline: Synthesizing Complex Data Pipelines By-Target Using Reinforcement Learning and Search

Summary: Auto-Pipeline synthesizes data pipelines (string transforms + table ops) via DRL and search, guided by a by-target interface to a target output. Uses FDs and keys to prune the space; evaluated on 700 real pipelines, ~70% solved with up to 10 steps. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 12431
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 5.5393038e-05
Overall Rank: 5,383 | 62.56%
DOI: 10.14778/3476249.3476303

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5,275	Auto-Tables: Synthesizing Multi-Step Transformations to Relationalize Tables without Using Examples	2023	VLDB	5.5905507e-05
5,280	Explaining Dataset Changes for Semantic Data Versioning with Explain-Da-V	2023	VLDB	5.5896735e-05
8,828	HAIPipe: Combining Human-generated and Machine-generated Pipelines for Data Preparation	2023	SIGMOD	4.4407488e-05
9,371	Auto-Formula: Recommend Formulas in Spreadsheets using Contrastive Learning for Table Representations	2024	SIGMOD	4.3480692e-05
10,168	FlowPilot: A Suggestion System for Designing Scientific Workflows	2026	SIGMOD	4.1945683e-05
10,598	Auto-Prep: Holistic Prediction of Data Preparation Steps for Self-Service Business Intelligence	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
11,103	LucidScript: Bottom-up Standardization for Data Preparation	2024	VLDB	4.1945683e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 12 of 12 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
492	Query by Output	2009	SIGMOD	0.00021974699
894	A Hybrid Approach to Functional Dependency Discovery	2016	SIGMOD	0.00015556428
1,047	Functional Dependency Discovery: An Experimental Evaluation of Seven Algorithms	2015	VLDB	0.00014459715
1,267	Foofah: Transforming Data By Example	2017	SIGMOD	0.00012936483
1,277	The Data Civilizer System	2017	CIDR	0.00012879695
1,469	BlinkFill: Semi-supervised Programming By Example for Syntactic String Transformations	2016	VLDB	0.00011836053
2,097	Predictive Interaction for Data Transformation	2015	CIDR	9.5489822e-05
3,252	Auto-Suggest: Learning-to-Recommend Data Preparation Steps Using Data Science Notebooks	2020	SIGMOD	7.3178277e-05
3,478	Transform-Data-by-Example (TDE): An Extensible Search Engine for Data Transformations	2018	VLDB	7.054159e-05
3,735	Auto-Join: Joining Tables by Leveraging Transformations	2017	VLDB	6.8061318e-05
5,096	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB	5.7011825e-05
8,042	Transform-Data-by-Example (TDE): Extensible Data Transformation in Excel	2018	SIGMOD	4.5994569e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
3,735	Auto-Join: Joining Tables by Leveraging Transformations	2017	VLDB	6.8061318e-05
5,304	A Scalable AutoML Approach Based on Graph Neural Networks	2022	VLDB	5.5779335e-05
5,096	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB	5.7011825e-05
3,252	Auto-Suggest: Learning-to-Recommend Data Preparation Steps Using Data Science Notebooks	2020	SIGMOD	7.3178277e-05
9,490	Auto-BI: Automatically Build BI-Models Leveraging Local Join Prediction and Global Schema Graph	2023	VLDB	4.3341665e-05
5,963	Automatic Data Acquisition for Deep Learning	2021	VLDB	5.2526794e-05
8,743	CtxPipe: Context-aware Data Preparation Pipeline Construction for Machine Learning	2024	SIGMOD	4.456315e-05
8,828	HAIPipe: Combining Human-generated and Machine-generated Pipelines for Data Preparation	2023	SIGMOD	4.4407488e-05
10,598	Auto-Prep: Holistic Prediction of Data Preparation Steps for Self-Service Business Intelligence	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
5,275	Auto-Tables: Synthesizing Multi-Step Transformations to Relationalize Tables without Using Examples	2023	VLDB	5.5905507e-05