HAMMER: An Automatic RAG Tuning System via Hierarchical Memory-Guided Monte Carlo Tree Search

Summary: HAMMER combines hierarchical graph memory with Monte Carlo Tree Search to tune interdependent RAG modules, retaining and reusing experimental experience. A theoretically grounded query-selection strategy cuts tuning time and token use by up to 9× while improving EM/F1 substantially. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 26 2026)

Paper ID: h24728f20da4e31c5
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2026
Pagerank: 4.9605343e-05
Overall Rank: 10,543 | 29.33%
DOI: 10.1145/3802071
PDF: Download (CC BY 4.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

No non-self incoming citations found for this paper in this database.

Authors

1. Yingli Zhou (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
2. Zixuan Wang (Harbin Engineering University)
3. Yixiang Fang (Chinese University of Hong Kong)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{zhou_sigmod26,
        title = {{HAMMER: An Automatic RAG Tuning System via Hierarchical Memory-Guided Monte Carlo Tree Search}},
        author = {Zhou, Yingli and Wang, Zixuan and Fang, Yixiang},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '26},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/3802071},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3802071},
        year = {2026}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 1 of 1 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
11,099	Graph-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Applications, Challenges, Solutions, and Opportunities	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 24 of 24 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
74	Automatic Database Management System Tuning Through Large-scale Machine Learning	2017	SIGMOD	0.00037164008
313	Tuning Database Configuration Parameters with iTuned	2009	VLDB	0.00021288111
1,656	D-Bot: Database Diagnosis System using Large Language Models	2024	VLDB	9.948529e-05
1,700	Black or White? How to Develop an AutoTuner for Memory-based Analytics	2020	SIGMOD	9.8224761e-05
1,956	LLM-R^2: A Large Language Model Enhanced Rule-based Rewrite System for Boosting Query Efficiency	2025	VLDB	9.2927535e-05
2,117	The Dawn of Natural Language to SQL: Are We Fully Ready?	2024	VLDB	9.0012524e-05
2,227	GPTuner: A Manual-Reading Database Tuning System via GPT-Guided Bayesian Optimization	2024	VLDB	8.7924681e-05
2,389	A Learned Query Rewrite System using Monte Carlo Tree Search	2022	VLDB	8.5228689e-05
2,572	ResTune: Resource Oriented Tuning Boosted by Meta-Learning for Cloud Databases	2021	SIGMOD	8.2581875e-05
2,779	Facilitating Database Tuning with Hyper-Parameter Optimization: A Comprehensive Experimental Evaluation	2022	VLDB	8.0085666e-05
2,995	Panda: Performance Debugging for Databases using LLM Agents	2024	CIDR	7.7556154e-05
3,172	CGPTuner: a Contextual Gaussian Process Bandit Approach for the Automatic Tuning of IT Configurations Under Varying Workload Conditions	2021	VLDB	7.5556865e-05
3,286	In-depth Analysis of Graph-based RAG in a Unified Framework	2025	VLDB	7.441688e-05
3,358	Combining Small Language Models and Large Language Models for Zero-Shot NL2SQL	2024	VLDB	7.3650961e-05
3,839	Automatic Database Configuration Debugging using Retrieval-Augmented Language Models	2025	SIGMOD	6.9704205e-05
3,978	RetClean: Retrieval-Based Data Cleaning Using LLMs and Data Lakes	2024	VLDB	6.8704139e-05
4,004	Cracking SQL Barriers: An LLM-based Dialect Translation System	2025	SIGMOD	6.846192e-05
4,383	R-Bot: An LLM-based Query Rewrite System	2025	VLDB	6.6140223e-05
5,466	HAIPipe: Combining Human-generated and Machine-generated Pipelines for Data Preparation	2023	SIGMOD	6.1038307e-05
6,938	PalimpChat: Declarative and Interactive AI analytics	2025	SIGMOD	5.6242429e-05
7,092	E2ETune: End-to-End Knob Tuning via Fine-tuned Generative Language Model	2025	VLDB	5.5868637e-05
7,297	SubStrat: A Subset-Based Optimization Strategy for Faster AutoML	2023	VLDB	5.5469403e-05
7,802	Auto-Formula: Recommend Formulas in Spreadsheets using Contrastive Learning for Table Representations	2024	SIGMOD	5.4336348e-05
8,320	ThriftLLM: On Cost-Effective Selection of Large Language Models for Classification Queries	2025	VLDB	5.3404439e-05

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