Auto-Formula: Recommend Formulas in Spreadsheets using Contrastive Learning for Table Representations

Summary: Auto-Formula recommends spreadsheet cell formulas by retrieving/adapting formulas from similar enterprise spreadsheets, exploiting the recurring structure and computation patterns across org-specific tables. Key idea: contrastive learning for table/spreadsheet representations to predict target formulas more accurately than prior approaches. (summarized by gpt-5.4-mini on May 24 2026)

Paper ID: 6949
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2024
Pagerank: 5.3702298e-05
Overall Rank: 8,797 | 39.65%
DOI: 10.1145/3654925

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Sibei Chen (Renmin University of China)
2. Yeye He (Microsoft)
3. Weiwei Cui (Microsoft)
4. Ju Fan (Renmin University of China)
5. Song Ge (Microsoft)
6. Haidong Zhang (Microsoft)
7. Dongmei Zhang (Microsoft)
8. Surajit Chaudhuri (Microsoft)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{chen_sigmod24,
        title = {{Auto-Formula: Recommend Formulas in Spreadsheets using Contrastive Learning for Table Representations}},
        author = {Chen, Sibei and He, Yeye and Cui, Weiwei and Fan, Ju and Ge, Song and Zhang, Haidong and Zhang, Dongmei and Chaudhuri, Surajit},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '24},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3654925},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3654925},
        year = {2024}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5,856	Automatic Database Configuration Debugging using Retrieval-Augmented Language Models	2025	SIGMOD	6.0644656e-05
6,254	In-depth Analysis of Graph-based RAG in a Unified Framework	2025	VLDB	5.9405174e-05
10,253	HAMMER: An Automatic RAG Tuning System via Hierarchical Memory-Guided Monte Carlo Tree Search	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 14 of 14 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
846	SnipSuggest: Context-Aware Autocompletion for SQL	2011	VLDB	0.00013658824
878	Table Union Search on Open Data	2018	VLDB	0.00013463374
1,165	Foofah: Transforming Data By Example	2017	SIGMOD	0.00011860616
2,099	Table-GPT: Table Fine-tuned GPT for Diverse Table Tasks	2024	SIGMOD	9.1682353e-05
2,744	Auto-Suggest: Learning-to-Recommend Data Preparation Steps Using Data Science Notebooks	2020	SIGMOD	8.1781662e-05
2,905	SQL QueRIE Recommendations	2010	VLDB	7.9756156e-05
2,978	Transform-Data-by-Example (TDE): An Extensible Search Engine for Data Transformations	2018	VLDB	7.9030989e-05
2,980	Auto-Join: Joining Tables by Leveraging Transformations	2017	VLDB	7.8975073e-05
4,412	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB	6.7168614e-05
4,875	Auto-Pipeline: Synthesizing Complex Data Pipelines By-Target Using Reinforcement Learning and Search	2021	VLDB	6.4689177e-05
5,403	Auto-Tables: Synthesizing Multi-Step Transformations to Relationalize Tables without Using Examples	2023	VLDB	6.2306083e-05
7,078	Transform-Data-by-Example (TDE): Extensible Data Transformation in Excel	2018	SIGMOD	5.7095504e-05
7,167	Mondrian: Spreadsheet Layout Detection	2022	SIGMOD	5.6841406e-05
8,177	HAIPipe: Combining Human-generated and Machine-generated Pipelines for Data Preparation	2023	SIGMOD	5.4730821e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	3,547	Learning Semantic String Transformations from Examples	2012	VLDB
2	2,980	Auto-Join: Joining Tables by Leveraging Transformations	2017	VLDB
3	7,482	Table Extraction and Understanding for Scientific and Enterprise Applications	2020	VLDB
4	2,099	Table-GPT: Table Fine-tuned GPT for Diverse Table Tasks	2024	SIGMOD
5	3,147	Auto-Detect: Data-Driven Error Detection in Tables	2018	SIGMOD
6	4,412	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB
7	13,398	Cornet: Learning Spreadsheet Formatting Rules By Example	2023	VLDB
8	5,403	Auto-Tables: Synthesizing Multi-Step Transformations to Relationalize Tables without Using Examples	2023	VLDB
9	8,692	FormaT5: Abstention and Examples for Conditional Table Formatting with Natural Language	2024	VLDB
10	11,445	Cornet: Learning Table Formatting Rules By Example	2023	VLDB