Auto-Tables: Synthesizing Multi-Step Transformations to Relationalize Tables without Using Examples

Summary: Auto‑Tables auto-synthesizes multi-step pipelines (e.g., Python) to convert non‑relational “wild” tables into canonical row‑entity / column‑attribute relational form without requiring examples. On a 244-case benchmark it solves >70% at interactive latency, offering zero‑example end‑to‑end table preparation. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 13173
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2023
Pagerank: 5.5905507e-05
Overall Rank: 5,275 | 63.31%
DOI: 10.14778/3611479.3611534

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2,587	Table-GPT: Table Fine-tuned GPT for Diverse Table Tasks	2024	SIGMOD	8.4924618e-05
9,371	Auto-Formula: Recommend Formulas in Spreadsheets using Contrastive Learning for Table Representations	2024	SIGMOD	4.3480692e-05
10,598	Auto-Prep: Holistic Prediction of Data Preparation Steps for Self-Service Business Intelligence	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
10,682	AutoPrep: Natural Language Question-Aware Data Preparation with a Multi-Agent Framework	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
11,101	Utopia: Automatic Pivot Table Assistant	2024	VLDB	4.1945683e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 11 of 11 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
513	TURL: Table Understanding through Representation Learning	2021	VLDB	0.00021288342
1,267	Foofah: Transforming Data By Example	2017	SIGMOD	0.00012936483
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
3,690	Navigating the Data Lake with DATAMARAN: Automatically Extracting Structure from Log Datasets	2018	SIGMOD	6.8384476e-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
5,383	Auto-Pipeline: Synthesizing Complex Data Pipelines By-Target Using Reinforcement Learning and Search	2021	VLDB	5.5393038e-05
5,544	PATSQL: Efficient Synthesis of SQL Queries from Example Tables with Quick Inference of Projected Columns	2021	VLDB	5.4462933e-05
9,490	Auto-BI: Automatically Build BI-Models Leveraging Local Join Prediction and Global Schema Graph	2023	VLDB	4.3341665e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
7,463	Automated Migration of Hierarchical Data to Relational Tables using Programming-by-Example	2018	VLDB	4.7232241e-05
11,300	Towards Auto-Generated Data Systems	2023	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
3,823	Automatic Discovery of Attributes in Relational Databases	2011	SIGMOD	6.7261168e-05
4,173	Automatic Example Queries for Ad Hoc Databases	2011	SIGMOD	6.3874627e-05
11,888	Synthesizing Data Programs	2015	CIDR	4.1945683e-05
5,989	Tables As a Paradigm for Querying and Restructuring	1996	PODS	5.2429037e-05
5,096	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB	5.7011825e-05
10,598	Auto-Prep: Holistic Prediction of Data Preparation Steps for Self-Service Business Intelligence	2025	VLDB	4.1945683e-05
5,383	Auto-Pipeline: Synthesizing Complex Data Pipelines By-Target Using Reinforcement Learning and Search	2021	VLDB	5.5393038e-05
3,735	Auto-Join: Joining Tables by Leveraging Transformations	2017	VLDB	6.8061318e-05