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: 13174
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2023
Pagerank: 5.5851818e-05
Overall Rank: 5,279 | 63.32%
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
2,585	Table-GPT: Table Fine-tuned GPT for Diverse Table Tasks	2024	SIGMOD	8.4909917e-05
9,381	Auto-Formula: Recommend Formulas in Spreadsheets using Contrastive Learning for Table Representations	2024	SIGMOD	4.343902e-05
10,606	Auto-Prep: Holistic Prediction of Data Preparation Steps for Self-Service Business Intelligence	2025	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
10,690	AutoPrep: Natural Language Question-Aware Data Preparation with a Multi-Agent Framework	2025	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
11,104	Utopia: Automatic Pivot Table Assistant	2024	VLDB	4.1905499e-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
491	Query by Output	2009	SIGMOD	0.00021960753
514	TURL: Table Understanding through Representation Learning	2021	VLDB	0.00021280726
1,266	Foofah: Transforming Data By Example	2017	SIGMOD	0.00012921038
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
3,693	Navigating the Data Lake with DATAMARAN: Automatically Extracting Structure from Log Datasets	2018	SIGMOD	6.8326441e-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
5,389	Auto-Pipeline: Synthesizing Complex Data Pipelines By-Target Using Reinforcement Learning and Search	2021	VLDB	5.5339832e-05
5,554	PATSQL: Efficient Synthesis of SQL Queries from Example Tables with Quick Inference of Projected Columns	2021	VLDB	5.4410603e-05
9,491	Auto-BI: Automatically Build BI-Models Leveraging Local Join Prediction and Global Schema Graph	2023	VLDB	4.3300131e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
8,104	Automated Migration of Hierarchical Data to Relational Tables using Programming-by-Example	2018	VLDB	4.5815095e-05
11,302	Towards Auto-Generated Data Systems	2023	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
3,826	Automatic Discovery of Attributes in Relational Databases	2011	SIGMOD	6.7204879e-05
4,168	Automatic Example Queries for Ad Hoc Databases	2011	SIGMOD	6.3822979e-05
11,896	Synthesizing Data Programs	2015	CIDR	4.1905499e-05
5,993	Tables As a Paradigm for Querying and Restructuring	1996	PODS	5.2378977e-05
5,096	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB	5.6960764e-05
10,606	Auto-Prep: Holistic Prediction of Data Preparation Steps for Self-Service Business Intelligence	2025	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
5,389	Auto-Pipeline: Synthesizing Complex Data Pipelines By-Target Using Reinforcement Learning and Search	2021	VLDB	5.5339832e-05
3,738	Auto-Join: Joining Tables by Leveraging Transformations	2017	VLDB	6.8006812e-05