Related papers: Feasibility Preservation under Monotone Retrieval …
Dense retrieval has become the new paradigm in passage retrieval. Despite its effectiveness on typo-free queries, it is not robust when dealing with queries that contain typos. Current works on improving the typo-robustness of dense…
Popularized by the Differentiable Search Index, the emerging paradigm of generative retrieval re-frames the classic information retrieval problem into a sequence-to-sequence modeling task, forgoing external indices and encoding an entire…
Concurrent accesses to databases are typically encapsulated in transactions in order to enable isolation from other concurrent computations and resilience to failures. Modern databases provide transactions with various semantics…
Approximate Membership Query structures (AMQs) rely on randomisation for time- and space-efficiency, while introducing a possibility of false positive and false negative answers. Correctness proofs of such structures involve subtle…
Cross-modal image-text retrieval is challenging because of the diverse possible associations between content from different modalities. Traditional methods learn a single-vector embedding to represent semantics of each sample, but struggle…
When a relational database is queried, the result is normally a relation. Some queries, however, only require a yes/no answer; such queries are often called boolean queries. It is customary in database theory to express boolean queries by…
Reproducibility is a crucial aspect of scientific research that involves the ability to independently replicate experimental results by analysing the same data or repeating the same experiment. Over the years, many works have been proposed…
Can scientific discovery be made arbitrarily easy by choosing the right representation, collecting enough data, and deploying sufficiently powerful algorithms? This paper argues that the answer is fundamentally negative. We introduce the…
Conjunctive queries select and are expected to return certain tuples from a relational database. We study the potentially easier problem of counting all selected tuples, rather than enumerating them. In particular, we are interested in the…
The well-known trace reconstruction problem is the problem of inferring an unknown source string $x \in \{0,1\}^n$ from independent "traces", i.e. copies of $x$ that have been corrupted by a $\delta$-deletion channel which independently…
For a sample of Exponentially distributed durations we aim at point estimation and a confidence interval for its parameter. A duration is only observed if it has ended within a certain time interval, determined by a Uniform distribution.…
Counterfactual explanations shed light on the decisions of black-box models by explaining how an input can be altered to obtain a favourable decision from the model (e.g., when a loan application has been rejected). However, as noted…
Multimodal retrieval systems struggle to resolve image-text queries against text-only corpora: the best vision-language encoder achieves only 27.6 nDCG@10 on MM-BRIGHT, underperforming strong text-only retrievers. We argue the bottleneck is…
We map the space of soundness criteria for secure compilation based on the preservation of hyperproperties in arbitrary adversarial contexts, which we call robust hyperproperty preservation. For this, we study the preservation of several…
Dense retrieval, which encodes queries and documents into a single dense vector, has become the dominant neural retrieval approach due to its simplicity and compatibility with fast approximate nearest neighbor algorithms. As the tasks dense…
We present a unified framework for quantifying the similarity between representations through the lens of \textit{usable} information, offering a rigorous theoretical and empirical synthesis across three key dimensions. First, addressing…
Many data management applications must deal with data which is uncertain, incomplete, or noisy. However, on existing uncertain data representations, we cannot tractably perform the important query evaluation tasks of determining query…
Several real-world and abstract structures and systems are characterized by marked hierarchy to the point of being expressed as trees. Because the study of these entities often involves sampling (or discovering) the tree nodes in a specific…
A deep learning system typically suffers from a lack of reproducibility that is partially rooted in hardware or software implementation details. The irreproducibility leads to skepticism in deep learning technologies and it can hinder them…
Adversarial examples pose a security risk as they can alter decisions of a machine learning classifier through slight input perturbations. Certified robustness has been proposed as a mitigation where given an input $\mathbf{x}$, a…