Cut Costs, Not Accuracy: LLM-Powered Data Processing with Guarantees

Summary: Targets LLM cascade cost-quality tradeoffs by provable selection of when to use cheaper LLMs for record processing, addressing weak quality estimation in prior confidence-based cascades. BARGAIN uses adaptive sampling and statistical estimation tuned to data/task to give tight theoretical guarantees (accuracy/precision/recall) and empirically reduces cost up to 86% vs. state-of-the-art. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 11 2026)

Paper ID: h0b08d826353bd4cb
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2026
Pagerank: 5.3039559e-05
Overall Rank: 8,543 | 42.74%
DOI: 10.1145/3769776
PDF: Download (CC BY 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Sepanta Zeighami (University of California Berkeley)
2. Shreya Shankar (University of California Berkeley)
3. Aditya Parameswaran (University of California Berkeley)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{zeighami_sigmod26,
        title = {{Cut Costs, Not Accuracy: LLM-Powered Data Processing with Guarantees}},
        author = {Zeighami, Sepanta and Shankar, Shreya and Parameswaran, Aditya},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '26},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3769776},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3769776},
        year = {2026}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
6,615	Multi-Objective Agentic Rewrites for Unstructured Data Processing	2026	VLDB	5.7164252e-05
10,232	Featurized-Decomposition Join: Low-Cost Semantic Joins with Guarantees	2026	VLDB	5.0432098e-05
10,418	Evergreen: Efficient Claim Verification for Semantic Aggregates	2027	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
10,493	Automated Discovery of Test Oracles for Database Management Systems Using LLMs	2026	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
10,575	ScaleDoc: Scaling LLM-based Predicates over Large Document Collections	2026	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 22 of 22 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
273	NoScope: Optimizing Neural Network Queries over Video at Scale	2017	VLDB	0.00022518449
278	Accelerating Machine Learning Inference with Probabilistic Predicates	2018	SIGMOD	0.00022277737
323	Can Foundation Models Wrangle Your Data?	2023	VLDB	0.00021022156
494	Language Models Enable Simple Systems for Generating Structured Views of Heterogeneous Data Lakes	2024	VLDB	0.00017350554
541	BlazeIt: Optimizing Declarative Aggregation and Limit Queries for Neural Network-Based Video Analytics	2020	VLDB	0.00016627384
605	CAESURA: Language Models as Multi-Modal Query Planners	2024	CIDR	0.00015630219
630	DocETL: Agentic Query Rewriting and Evaluation for Complex Document Processing	2025	VLDB	0.00015402076
2,256	The Design of an LLM-powered Unstructured Analytics System	2025	CIDR	8.7418985e-05
2,777	Approximate Selection with Guarantees using Proxies	2020	VLDB	8.0101016e-05
3,223	How Large Language Models Will Disrupt Data Management	2023	VLDB	7.5043163e-05
3,629	TASTI: Semantic Indexes for Machine Learning-based Queries over Unstructured Data	2022	SIGMOD	7.1286458e-05
3,747	Accelerating Approximate Aggregation Queries with Expensive Predicates	2021	VLDB	7.0351475e-05
3,889	FiGO: Fine-Grained Query Optimization in Video Analytics	2022	SIGMOD	6.9269184e-05
3,914	AOP: Automated and Interactive LLM Pipeline Orchestration for Answering Complex Queries	2025	CIDR	6.9084826e-05
3,957	OTIF: Efficient Tracker Pre-processing over Large Video Datasets	2022	SIGMOD	6.8827279e-05
3,978	RetClean: Retrieval-Based Data Cleaning Using LLMs and Data Lakes	2024	VLDB	6.8704139e-05
5,234	ELEET: Efficient Learned Query Execution over Text and Tables	2024	VLDB	6.204849e-05
5,918	On Efficient Approximate Queries over Machine Learning Models	2023	VLDB	5.9307869e-05
6,614	Solo: Data Discovery Using Natural Language Questions Via A Self-Supervised Approach	2023	SIGMOD	5.7164731e-05
7,416	Accelerating Aggregation Queries on Unstructured Streams of Data	2023	VLDB	5.5159866e-05
7,882	Semantic Integrity Constraints: Declarative Guardrails for AI-Augmented Data Processing Systems	2025	VLDB	5.4181983e-05
8,320	ThriftLLM: On Cost-Effective Selection of Large Language Models for Classification Queries	2025	VLDB	5.3404439e-05

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