Semantic Operators and Their Optimization: Enabling LLM-Based Data Processing with Accuracy Guarantees in LOTUS

Summary: Semantic operators: a formalism offering statistical accuracy guarantees for NL-parameterized LLM-based DB ops (filter/sort/join/agg) implemented via composed model calls. LOTUS' optimizer selects/composes AI algorithms to minimize cost with guarantees, yielding up to 1,000× operator speedups and 3.6× end-to-end gains while matching or exceeding SOTA accuracy. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 14035
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2025
Pagerank: 4.5041113e-05
Overall Rank: 8,469 | 41.09%
DOI: 10.14778/3749646.3749685

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5,171	Abacus: A Cost-Based Optimizer for Semantic Operator Systems	2026	VLDB	5.6464993e-05
10,215	Task Cascades for Efficient Unstructured Data Processing	2026	SIGMOD	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
140	The MADlib Analytics Library or MAD Skills, the SQL	2012	VLDB	0.00042270404
316	NoScope: Optimizing Neural Network Queries over Video at Scale	2017	VLDB	0.00027988668
329	Accelerating Machine Learning Inference with Probabilistic Predicates	2018	SIGMOD	0.00027249545
696	BlazeIt: Optimizing Declarative Aggregation and Limit Queries for Neural Network-Based Video Analytics	2020	VLDB	0.00018048935
1,116	Language Models Enable Simple Systems for Generating Structured Views of Heterogeneous Data Lakes	2024	VLDB	0.00013890154
1,963	DocETL: Agentic Query Rewriting and Evaluation for Complex Document Processing	2025	VLDB	9.929429e-05
2,523	ACORN: Performant and Predicate-Agnostic Search Over Vector Embeddings and Structured Data	2024	SIGMOD	8.604576e-05
3,359	Text2SQL is Not Enough: Unifying AI and Databases with TAG	2025	CIDR	7.1744146e-05
3,558	Approximate Selection with Guarantees using Proxies	2020	VLDB	6.9765724e-05
3,876	The Design of an LLM-powered Unstructured Analytics System	2025	CIDR	6.6741456e-05
4,712	Accelerating Approximate Aggregation Queries with Expensive Predicates	2021	VLDB	5.9787986e-05

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