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: 12432
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 5.5339832e-05
Overall Rank: 5,389 | 62.55%
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
5,279	Auto-Tables: Synthesizing Multi-Step Transformations to Relationalize Tables without Using Examples	2023	VLDB	5.5851818e-05
5,283	Explaining Dataset Changes for Semantic Data Versioning with Explain-Da-V	2023	VLDB	5.5843052e-05
8,828	HAIPipe: Combining Human-generated and Machine-generated Pipelines for Data Preparation	2023	SIGMOD	4.4364918e-05
9,381	Auto-Formula: Recommend Formulas in Spreadsheets using Contrastive Learning for Table Representations	2024	SIGMOD	4.343902e-05
10,168	FlowPilot: A Suggestion System for Designing Scientific Workflows	2026	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05
10,606	Auto-Prep: Holistic Prediction of Data Preparation Steps for Self-Service Business Intelligence	2025	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
11,106	LucidScript: Bottom-up Standardization for Data Preparation	2024	VLDB	4.1905499e-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
491	Query by Output	2009	SIGMOD	0.00021960753
890	A Hybrid Approach to Functional Dependency Discovery	2016	SIGMOD	0.00015542177
1,047	Functional Dependency Discovery: An Experimental Evaluation of Seven Algorithms	2015	VLDB	0.00014442219
1,266	Foofah: Transforming Data By Example	2017	SIGMOD	0.00012921038
1,274	The Data Civilizer System	2017	CIDR	0.00012869297
1,469	BlinkFill: Semi-supervised Programming By Example for Syntactic String Transformations	2016	VLDB	0.00011831156
2,100	Predictive Interaction for Data Transformation	2015	CIDR	9.5410186e-05
3,254	Auto-Suggest: Learning-to-Recommend Data Preparation Steps Using Data Science Notebooks	2020	SIGMOD	7.3172324e-05
3,483	Transform-Data-by-Example (TDE): An Extensible Search Engine for Data Transformations	2018	VLDB	7.0493668e-05
3,738	Auto-Join: Joining Tables by Leveraging Transformations	2017	VLDB	6.8006812e-05
5,096	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB	5.6960764e-05
8,044	Transform-Data-by-Example (TDE): Extensible Data Transformation in Excel	2018	SIGMOD	4.5950532e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
3,738	Auto-Join: Joining Tables by Leveraging Transformations	2017	VLDB	6.8006812e-05
5,306	A Scalable AutoML Approach Based on Graph Neural Networks	2022	VLDB	5.5725759e-05
5,096	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB	5.6960764e-05
3,254	Auto-Suggest: Learning-to-Recommend Data Preparation Steps Using Data Science Notebooks	2020	SIGMOD	7.3172324e-05
9,491	Auto-BI: Automatically Build BI-Models Leveraging Local Join Prediction and Global Schema Graph	2023	VLDB	4.3300131e-05
8,739	CtxPipe: Context-aware Data Preparation Pipeline Construction for Machine Learning	2024	SIGMOD	4.4520434e-05
5,965	Automatic Data Acquisition for Deep Learning	2021	VLDB	5.2476363e-05
8,828	HAIPipe: Combining Human-generated and Machine-generated Pipelines for Data Preparation	2023	SIGMOD	4.4364918e-05
10,606	Auto-Prep: Holistic Prediction of Data Preparation Steps for Self-Service Business Intelligence	2025	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
5,279	Auto-Tables: Synthesizing Multi-Step Transformations to Relationalize Tables without Using Examples	2023	VLDB	5.5851818e-05