data integration teams

Abstract: RDF 1.2 introduces statement-level constructs, such as triple terms, reifiers, and descriptions, that pose new challenges for transforming RDF data into labeled property graphs (LPGs). This work presents and compares three algorithms for translating RDF 1.2 data into LPGs, each interpreting a different amount of the RDF 1.2 reification vocabulary. Algorithm Structural interprets no vocabulary and losslessly supports arbitrary RDF 1.2 graphs by representing triple terms explicitly as nodes; Direct interprets rdf:reifies to recover annotated edges while preserving reifiers as graph objects; and Fold additionally folds reifier descriptions into edge properties, resulting in a more concise, albeit lossy, LPG representation. We define the three translations, analyze which class of RDF 1.2 graphs each preserves, and experimentally evaluate their implementations. The experiments confirm the predicted trade-offs: all variants scale linearly on the tested workloads, the generality of Structural has no runtime penalty, and folding descriptions into edge records can significantly reduce the number of edges on description-heavy data.

Abstract: While the Platonic Representation Hypothesis posits that vision and language models converge toward compatible latent geometries, recovering class-level correspondences between unpaired modalities without cross-modal supervision remains challenging. Existing relational matching methods compare within-modality similarity kernels directly, although the same semantic structure may be represented through different numerical parameterizations across modalities. We propose RankAlign, a rank-based normalization strategy for class-level unpaired vision-language matching. RankAlign transforms each within-modality similarity kernel into an ordinal relational representation before permutation matching, while leaving the correspondence space and matching solver unchanged. The resulting representation is invariant to strictly increasing reparameterizations of similarity values while preserving the ordinal structure used for matching. We provide exact-recovery and stability guarantees that characterize correspondence recovery under both exact and partial ordinal agreement. Experiments across diverse frozen vision and language encoders and multiple datasets demonstrate improved and more stable class-level correspondence recovery, including under label corruption and domain shift.

Abstract: Multimodal question answering (MMQA) is based on integrating heterogeneous data sources, selectively leveraging relevant modalities, and ignoring distractors. Existing approaches based on Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) improve performance by splitting the task into intermediate steps, but do not quantify how each modality contributes to reaching the final answer. We argue that quantifying the effect that each modality has on the answering process improves process traceability and final performance. Thus, we propose Entropy-Driven Multimodal Answering (EDMA), which uses logical entropy to formalise multimodal QA as an iterative process of entropy reduction and to quantify the contribution of each modality in distinguishing correct from incorrect candidate answers. This enables the construction of quantifiable answering trajectories, where each step is associated with a measurable entropy reduction. EDMA introduces (i) modality-conditioned partitioning to estimate unimodal entropy reduction, (ii) entropy-driven multimodal fusion to capture complementary information across modalities, and (iii) entropy-based selection of the answering trajectory that minimises the most logical entropy. Evaluated across standard MMQA benchmarks, EDMA outperforms competitive prompting baselines, with average gains of 12.8 F1 and 4.6 LLM-J points over Planning Prompting and 18.6 F1 and 8.3 LLM-J points over Chain-of-Thought. Moreover, EDMA outperforms self-consistency baselines and is competitive with the multi-agent system baseline. Moreover, we show that higher entropy correlates with more false positives and, through controlled trajectory selection, demonstrate that logical entropy serves as an effective, monotonic selector for correct reasoning paths, validating entropy level as a reliable proxy for performance.

Abstract: Constraint pruning saves queries to a large language model (LLM) or another noisy oracle by skipping each yes/no question implied by answers accepted earlier, for example through transitivity. Entity-resolution systems and LLM-based rankers use this idea. However, their analyses typically assume a correct oracle. We argue that pruning should be judged by its risk when the oracle errs, since an accepted wrong answer spreads to every question it implies. When each answer is wrong independently with small probability $\varepsilon$, the first-order risk is set by how many facts one wrong answer corrupts on average. We consider two kinds of constraints. For implication rules, as in taxonomies, pruning in a random order adds no first-order risk: a wrong answer that would change $k$ facts is accepted with probability $1/k$, so it costs one fact on average. Rules with $s$ premises break this balance: a wrong answer at a premise shared by $r$ rules can cost order $r^{1-1/s}$ facts. For entity resolution with $m$ records of one entity, the first-order risk equals $\varepsilon$ times the Wiener index (the total pairwise distance) of the spanning tree built by the query order. Pivot orders, which first compare one record with all others, amplify errors by less than 2 and are optimal; random orders by order $m^{1/3}$; the common most-similar-first order is the worst in one dimension and, for large $m$, worse than random in two. With several entities, the cost of wrongly merging two does not depend on how many others exist. Simulations agree with every predicted constant within sampling error.

Abstract: Source labels tell us where a sample came from, but not how that source oriented its coordinates. In a sparse Gaussian multi-source model with source-specific sign gauges, that distinction changes the learning problem. Without calibration, pooling across sources erases the mean signal, and the source-labelled experiment reduces to sparse PCA. With task-independent relative-gauge metadata, synchronization aligns sources and the same observations become a sparse mean problem. We formalize the value of metadata through AlignedMass, which quantifies how much first-order signal a metadata-induced alignment restores. Source labels create only limited AlignedMass, whereas valid calibration can create AlignedMass proportional to the full sample size. This yields a statistical separation in micro-source regimes and, under standard sparse-PCA hardness assumptions, a computational separation as well. Synthetic experiments check the predicted scaling; controlled real-feature and physical sensor studies examine sign cancellation, separately acquired calibration, and reuse across tasks.

Abstract: When two tables from different sources are joined, the values that should join often differ in spelling, format, or meaning, and fuzzy-, transformation-, and semantic-joins each handle one type of these differences. Large language models (LLMs) can match values that differ in several ways at once, but every LLM call is billed, and having an LLM compare the rows of two large tables can cost far more than a typical budget allows. This paper studies how to combine these join types with LLMs to join two tables under a dollar budget, maximizing recall while keeping the precision of the result at or above a target, a problem that is NP-hard. Our key idea is to use LLMs selectively to create join programs and verify their outputs through sampling, while adaptively deciding which joins to pursue under budget and precision constraints. This combines the scalability of program-based joins with selective LLM verification, while maintaining a statistical precision guarantee on the accumulated result. We develop Uber-Join, which treats creating a join and checking the output of a created join as two levels of arms in a budgeted multi-armed bandit. It commits an output only if the precision of the whole result, estimated from an LLM's judgments of sampled pairs, stays at or above the target with high confidence. Under the same budget, Uber-Join achieves the highest recall at the precision target in nearly all settings on three join benchmarks and Join-Hard, a new benchmark of large tables.

Abstract: Graph diffusion models are competitive approaches for generating complex graph-structured data. However, when such distributions have strict structural constraints, diffusion models may fail to capture them exactly, resulting in the generation of invalid graphs. In this paper, we propose a method for grounding graph diffusion models in domain-specific knowledge via First Order Logic (FOL), leveraging its expressive and interpretable formalism to impose structural constraints on the generative process. We incorporate domain knowledge using classifier guidance, a technique that conditions the diffusion model's distribution on external variables to exert control over the sampled data. During the generative process, classifier guidance steers the denoising trajectory to optimize an objective function, which we define as a fuzzy and differentiable relaxation of the logical rules. Our methodology requires only the specification of constraints in FOL, whose satisfaction is encouraged at inference time to guide a pre-trained generative model. We evaluate our approach by comparing the unconditional generation of knowledge graphs with our logic-guided framework, which incorporates domain ontologies as structural constraints during inference. This approach significantly increases the proportion of generated graphs that satisfy the ontological constraints.

Abstract: We study the recovery of the hidden vertex correspondence between two correlated dense random geometric graphs. Each graph is generated from $n$ latent unit vectors in $\mathbb R^d$; the vectors $u_i^A$ and $u_i^B$ of corresponding vertices satisfy $\langle u_i^A,u_i^B\rangle=ρ$, and the vertex labels of the second graph are permuted by an unknown permutation $π$. For every fixed correlation $ρ\in(0,1]$ and every edge density bounded away from zero and one, we give a randomized polynomial time algorithm that recovers $π$ exactly with probability tending to one whenever $d\ge(\log n)^L$, where $L$ depends only on the correlation and the density bounds. The algorithm assigns to each vertex a signature formed by counting decorated paths with a constant number of seeds. The number of such seeded templates grows exponentially with the path length, with an arbitrarily large constant base, so the resulting statistics amplify an arbitrarily small constant correlation. We control the dependencies created by the latent geometry in two ways: when $d$ is larger than $n/(\log n)^{L_0}$ for a suitable constant $L_0$, by comparing local moments with those of correlated Erdős--Rényi graphs; for smaller $d$, by spectral estimation of the latent geometry combined with a harmonic correction. We also provide low-degree evidence for a tradeoff between the correlation and the computational cost.

Abstract: Multimodal entity alignment (MMEA) is fundamental to integrating heterogeneous knowledge graphs (KGs), yet existing paradigms remain critically vulnerable to incomplete modalities and cross-graph structural asymmetries. This paper exposes a fundamental oversight in current MMEA research: treating feature missingness and topological discrepancies as isolated preprocessing or denoising challenges, which overlooks their destructive coupling during multimodal fusion. We systematically formulate and evaluate two newly identified failure modes: 1) Detail Missing (DM)-induced overvaluation, where the absence of local modality details causes models to overemphasize uninformative, blurred representations; and 2) Context Imbalance (CI)-induced suppression, where topological discrepancies across KGs allow dense structural contexts to overwhelm weaker but highly discriminative modal signals, triggering high-level semantic drift. To break this cycle of degradation, we introduce ALMEA, a generative and calibration framework that establishes a bidirectional feedback loop between low-level feature reconstruction and high-level latent space alignment. Specifically, Cross-Modality Imputation (CMI) synthesizes missing modality details to mitigate overvaluation, while Latent Semantic Calibration (LSC) aligns cross-graph joint embeddings to suppress topology-driven semantic drift. Under sparse supervision, we develop Controlled Iterative Selection (CIS) to adaptively acquire representative and diverse pseudo-labeled pairs, optimizing latent calibration under constrained budgets. Extensive evaluations on standard benchmarks demonstrate that ALMEA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. At a 20% supervision rate, ALMEA yields substantial absolute improvements of up to 5.20% in MRR and 6.40% in Hits@1, maintaining robust gains across higher supervision thresholds.

Abstract: Inspired by the great success of foundation models in the development of artificial general intelligence, Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) have recently attracted significant attention and have the potential to advance graph intelligence. Exhibiting such intelligence requires effectively learning knowledge from large-scale, multi-domain graph data during pre-training. Increasing domain diversity during pre-training is expected to yield richer and more generalizable knowledge. Most existing methods pursue this goal by designing domain alignment strategies that help a single graph model learn from multiple domains. However, we observe that existing methods struggle to benefit from increasing domain diversity. Through empirical and theoretical analysis, we reveal two key limitations. Firstly, pre-training in most GFMs is confined to a single message-passing paradigm. Since propagation flattens relations among neighboring nodes, the graph model can hardly perceive the knowledge beyond propagation, namely the attribute-predictable component of these relations. Secondly, domain alignment strategies often rely on randomly initialized parameters that are jointly updated with the graph model using immediate loss feedback, leaving early knowledge acquisition vulnerable to cross-domain interference. To address these issues, we propose FLO, a Fast--sLow reciprOcal approach for multi-domain graph pre-training. Specifically, a propagation-free attribute branch predicts the graph model's relations without message passing and returns these predictions to refine the model. We further stabilize knowledge acquisition by pairing a fast process that adapts to the current domain with a slow process that integrates knowledge across domains. On 12 datasets, FLO benefits from increasing domain diversity and achieves the best average performance in cross-domain and cross-task transfer.

Abstract: Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models encode the entities and relations of a knowledge graph into a low-dimensional latent space, enabling tasks such as classification or link prediction. Most KGE models follow an autoencoder architecture, in which an encoder projects the knowledge graph into the latent space and a decoder reconstruct it. Combining both encoder and decoder components is increasingly needed, yet existing libraries rarely support complete autoencoders, are often unmaintained, rely on undocumented default hyperparameters, and produce results that cannot be compared across libraries. Here we present KGATE (Knowledge Graph Autoencoder Training Environment), a modular Python library built on PyTorch Geometric and TorchKGE. KGATE lets users assemble initializers, encoders, decoders, losses, negative samplers, and evaluation metrics as building blocks, or plug in their own block. KGATE includes a preprocessing procedure that controls data leakage, a builtin training pipeline, and reproducibility by design. Benchmarks against six existing KGE libraries show that KGATE training time is comparable with the fastest libraries while offering a broader set of features.

Abstract: Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) is a fundamental method for multiview shared space learning. However, its strict reliance on paired data poses a significant limitation, as such data is often difficult to obtain or entirely unavailable. In this paper, we present Unpaired CCA (UCCA), a novel method that learns linear projections to maximize the correlation of the true underlying pairing without access to any paired samples during training. We first establish theoretical results connecting the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) to CCA. Leveraging these theoretical insights, we derive a practical method to maximize correlation exclusively from unpaired data. To the best of our knowledge, UCCA is the first approach to learn maximally correlated projections in a strictly unpaired setting. We validate UCCA on real-world multi-modal datasets, demonstrating that it significantly outperforms recent unpaired alignment baselines in recovering the underlying true correlation. This work fills a critical gap between traditional statistical multiview learning and the growing field of unpaired data learning.

Abstract: We introduce a calibration-first framework that produces supervision scores without access to ground-truth labels or a shared annotation space. Our framework aligns subset-specific scorers using a synthetic ordinal reference space before fusion. This reference space is constructed from ordered calibration features that represent the latent concept, providing a common scale on which otherwise incomparable scorer outputs can be aligned. Because our calibration procedure uses the reference space rather than training samples, it is independent of the training set's empirical distribution. Across three benchmark datasets, our framework consistently outperforms uncalibrated averaging and achieves higher primary-metric point estimates on the evaluation metrics than the best individual scorer. Performance relative to sample-dependent baselines varies by domain, with absolute differences below 0.02 on Ames Housing and below 0.01 on Breast Cancer Wisconsin and Wine Quality. After Bonferroni correction, differences remain significant for all three comparisons on Ames Housing and one on Breast Cancer Wisconsin. Additionally, we show that using fewer calibration levels per feature can closely approximate higher-resolution results at substantially lower computational cost. Together, these results support our framework as a viable approach to construct supervision scores when neither ground-truth labels nor a shared annotation space is available.

Abstract: In semantic query engines, predicates are evaluated by machine-learned models, and the choice of a query plan affects not only the cost of a query but also its result. Existing systems either apply a fixed threshold to each semantic operator or tune accuracy per operator, without accounting for how errors propagate through joins. We give a formal problem definition for cost-accuracy optimization of such queries. Our starting point is the calibrated confidence that decision models such as Jev attach to each decision. It yields an expected error for every decision; weighting these errors by each decision's contribution to the output (in the simplest case, its fan-out) gives the expected output quality of a plan without any labeled data, and the same computation in reverse turns an output-level accuracy target into a price on each base or intermediate tuple. Building on this, we define an oracle semantics for relational algebra with semantic operators, physical plans as pairs of a logical plan and a decision policy, declarative output-level targets, and a hierarchy of plan equivalence. We show that accuracy is plan-invariant under pointwise-deterministic policies, and that selection pushdown is not quality-sound when escalation bands are calibrated on the plan's own candidates. Expected quality can be computed in polynomial time under bag semantics; under set semantics it follows the dichotomy of tuple-independent probabilistic databases when every relation carries a semantic predicate. Choosing which tuples to drop is NP-hard, while the optimization problem decomposes into per-tuple decisions through two Lagrange multipliers. Simulations on a synthetic workload illustrate these effects; an evaluation on real engines is left for future work.

Abstract: Improved name retrieval may have little effect on company clusters when the pair classifier remains unchanged. We examine this dependency by adapting multilingual E5 encoders under fixed candidate budgets and downstream decision rules. Random-negative and hard-negative training use identical positive schedules. Checkpoints are selected before collecting a new GLEIF sample of 3,633 names, 2,880 source identities and 882 silver-positive pairs. At 72,660 candidate edges, adaptation with a multi-view selector increases direct pair recall from 53.74% to 76.98%. The primary matcher adds only seven correct and two incorrect co-cluster pairs: cluster recall rises from 32.54% to 33.33%, while precision falls from 95.99% to 95.45%. Of 208 newly retrieved silver-positive pairs, 202 fall below its decision threshold. Random-negative and hard-negative training produce identical final partitions. An AI-assisted, single-reviewer audit of 137 pairs supports the observed pattern, although its predominantly LEI-derived evidence does not establish independent gold labels. The results locate the immediate loss of retrieval gains at the existing confirmation stage and show why encoder evaluation must also measure final cluster quality.

Abstract: We present Guanaco, an algorithm for performing conjunctive query evaluation where, for each Boolean conjunctive query, and positive epsilon, the algorithm achieves polynomial time with exponent equal to the submodular width plus epsilon. The algorithm and its running time generalize smoothly to general conjunctive queries. We believe the algorithm and its analysis to be notably simple, indeed, together we believe they form a highly simple argument that conjunctive query evaluation can be performed in essentially submodular width time. In the case of Boolean conjunctive queries, the algorithm is based on interleaving three simple primitives: a subroutine for establishing a form of consistency; a subroutine for establishing global uniformity, which, briefly speaking, partitions relations as needed to control discrepancies between average degree and maximum degree; and, a simple step that joins pairs of existing relations to form new relations.

Abstract: We study constant-delay enumeration for conjunctive queries with negation ($\texttt{CQ}^{\neg}$). Prior work defined \emph{signed-acyclicity}, which characterizes the class of queries where linear preprocessing time is achievable, but little has been known beyond this. We introduce a new hypergraph width measure for $\texttt{CQ}^{\neg}$, the \emph{signed fractional hypertree width} ($\textsf{sfhw}$), defined by requiring that a single variable order simultaneously handle every subset of the negative atoms. We show that $\textsf{sfhw}$ strictly generalizes signed-acyclicity (recovered when $\textsf{sfhw} = 1$) and fractional hypertree width (recovered on queries without negation). Our main algorithmic result is a variable-elimination algorithm that achieves constant-delay enumeration on input $I$ for any full $\texttt{CQ}^{\neg}$ query with preprocessing time $O(|I|^{\textsf{sfhw}})$. We further show that using multiple variable orders can improve this bound, exhibiting an $O(|I|^{3/2})$ algorithm for $k$-cycle queries with at least one negative edge.

Abstract: Numerical measurements capture how a system behaves, but often leave the meanings of its variables unspecified. Some variables are measured but never labeled, and others are never measured at all. Existing methods assign semantics to such variables by consulting general human knowledge, but this inherits its biases where that knowledge exists and offers nothing where it does not. We bridge this gap between measurements and their meanings with causal structure instead, reading a variable's semantics from how it acts on other variables. We formalize this as structure-constrained semantic alignment, in which the embedding of each unnamed variable is solved under the dependence relations implied by the causal graph, with the embeddings of a few known names as anchors. Accordingly, we build CausalBridge, a framework that discovers the causal graph from the measurements, latent variables included, solves for the embeddings under those relations, and expresses them as names through a language model. The causal structure reflects the mechanism that generated the measurements and is recovered from the measurements alone, which may make it the one source of information free of bias from human knowledge. We evaluate CausalBridge on five questionnaires and three robotics scenarios, with 20 to 90% of the variable names masked. It recovers the semantics of observed and latent variables more accurately than existing methods that rely on association, and its lead widens as less of the system is documented. The graph it discovers names variables as accurately as the documented one, and a new system is named in minutes and at a fraction of the cost of sampling methods. Once the semantic gap is bridged faithfully, machines can understand the world and take actions causally.

Abstract: Gromov-Wasserstein multidimensional scaling (GW-MDS) learns low-dimensional representations from relational data but remains transductive, providing no explicit mapping for unseen samples. We introduce an inductive framework based on barycentric distillation. A GW-MDS teacher learns a latent support and an optimal transport plan from the training data, and barycentric projection converts the resulting coupling into sample-aligned targets. A neural student then learns an explicit out-of-sample mapping, avoiding additional relational-matrix construction and GW optimization at inference. We formulate the approach for single-view data and extend it to Mean-GWMDS and Multi-GWMDS teachers through consensus and selected-projection targets learned by a multi-view student with view-specific encoders. We also investigate a direct neural baseline trained solely with a GW objective. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data using Euclidean, geodesic, and cosine relations show that the distilled models preserve the teacher geometry on unseen samples and consistently outperform direct neural GW training in sample-indexed relational preservation. These results establish barycentric projection as an effective bridge between transductive GW embeddings and inductive neural mappings.

Abstract: We describe KNDB, a PostgreSQL 18 table access method (TAM) that types every row with an engine-assigned epistemic kind (MEASURED, INFERRED, or DERIVED) and resolves per-slot conflicts inside every write-time heapam callback. Rows land as ordinary heap tuples; seven of the 44 TAM callbacks are overridden (tuple_insert, multi_insert, tuple_update, tuple_delete, tuple_insert_speculative, tuple_complete_speculative, relation_toast_am), the other 37 delegate to heap; we provide a completeness argument over the interface as a paper artefact. This paper reports the engineering behind that decision and the adversarial evaluation that motivated it. On a confidence-forgery workload where an attacker asserts INFERRED writes with confidence in [0.95,1.0] against honest MEASURED writes with confidence in [0.5,0.9], KNDB beats a confidence-only baseline by 63 percentage points on the Book-Author fusion dataset and 92.7 points on the Zheng crowdsourcing dataset. Both wins are proven load-bearing on the kind axis by a source-rebuild disable-and-test in which the lattice is neutralised and the win vanishes. Against four truth-discovery baselines (TruthFinder, CRH, CATD, ACCU) reimplemented from the original equations and validated to within 0.3 percentage points of the published numbers, KNDB is competitive below a per-dataset density-saturation cell and dominant at or above it. We formalise the cell as k* ~ rho_alg * h_top, where h_top is per-slot top honest surface-form support, and validate the prediction within +/-20% on Book-Author and +/-30% on Zheng. Because the kind axis is assigned by the engine from independent metadata and cannot be forged at write time, KNDB's k* is unbounded. The paper is honest about where KNDB loses: CRH and ACCU outperform KNDB below saturation on Zheng, and KNDB scores zero on three temporal knowledge-editing benchmarks whose ground truth is last-writer-wins.

Abstract: Semantic knowledge is increasingly used to bridge heterogeneous schemas in tabular learning, but how much does that knowledge actually improve prediction? Studies in tabular learning commonly answer this question through semantic ablations that modify or suppress the supplied semantic knowledge. We show that these ablations can lead to misleading conclusions about predictive benefit: poor performance under altered semantics may be taken as evidence that the intended knowledge is beneficial. Across real and controlled experiments, altering semantic content can produce large performance differences even when the model gains little predictive benefit from having that semantic knowledge in the first place. To separate these effects, we distinguish two quantities: content sensitivity and predictive utility. Content sensitivity measures the change in performance when semantic content is altered, whereas predictive utility measures the benefit of the intended semantic knowledge relative to a suitable reference without that knowledge. This distinction motivates an evaluation framework in which the control is chosen according to the question being asked: altered controls assess sensitivity to semantic content, whereas claims that semantic knowledge improves prediction require a suitable reference. Even then, predictive utility is not fixed; it varies across suitable references and decreases when the reference can more easily recover the tested knowledge from other inputs or labeled examples. In a bounded audit of 25 semantic-ablation comparisons across nine studies, only one of 18 explicit predictive-utility claims is paired with a control that clearly isolates the tested semantic contribution. Together, these findings motivate a simple evaluation principle: semantic-ablation controls should be chosen and interpreted according to the question they are intended to answer.

Abstract: Multimodal contrastive learning is a dominant paradigm for learning transferable representations from unlabeled data, but standard objectives primarily capture information that is redundant between modalities. Partial Information Decomposition (PID) shows that task-relevant information in multimodal data decomposes into three components: redundancy shared between modalities, uniqueness specific to each modality, and synergy available only from their joint observation. Recent frameworks extend contrastive learning to capture all three components, yet synergy remains undertrained in practice. We propose SynCo (Synergy Contrastive Learning), a method that directly addresses synergy undertraining through dedicated supervision on an interaction residual. SynCo fits a linear projector to predict the fused representation from independently computed unimodal features, and the resulting interaction residual, which removes the linearly unimodal-predictable component, receives dedicated contrastive supervision at negligible computational cost. On the controlled Trifeature benchmark, SynCo achieves state-of-the-art synergy capture with a $+5.98\%$ gain over the baseline, and on real-world benchmarks from MultiBench, DARai, and MM-IMDb, SynCo consistently outperforms or matches prior methods across diverse modality combinations and task types. The method operates as a plug-in to existing contrastive multimodal frameworks without modifying the underlying fusion architecture and can further improve synergy capture when combined with other methods.

Abstract: Query containment is a fundamental decision problem in database theory: given two queries, determine whether, over all database instances, every answer produced by the first is also produced by the second. For conjunctive queries under set semantics, the problem is understood through the classical homomorphism-based characterisation. Under bag semantics, the interpretation underlying real relational databases, containment becomes a quantitative comparison of answer multiplicities. Despite decades of work, the decidability of bag containment for conjunctive queries remains open. This frontier is fragile: for slightly more expressive classes, bag containment is undecidable, with negative results relying on reductions from variants of Hilbert's 10th problem. This work develops a unified framework for bag containment of conjunctive queries that subsumes two previously studied decidable cases: projection-free and join-on-free containee queries. The framework yields decidability for a broader class, called join-uniform queries, while leaving the containing query arbitrary. This contrasts with techniques that impose restrictions on the containing query. The approach identifies tractable classes based on the internal unification structure of the query whose multiplicities must be bounded. Specifically, it reduces containment to a controlled Diophantine problem. Starting from the containee query, one builds a canonical model generated by all its possible unifications, over which multiplicities admit a finite arithmetic characterisation. Containment is proved equivalent to the non-existence of solutions of a corresponding Diophantine inequality system. Although these problems are undecidable in general, we show that the systems arising from join-uniform containment form a decidable subclass. Thus, the standard source of undecidability for bag containment becomes the core of the decision procedure.

Abstract: Physical Internet (PI) is an emerging concept that applies the digital internet as a design metaphor for the development of sustainable, interoperable, and collaborative freight transportation. It is considered a way to bring logistics into the next generation of transformation. Effective tools for organizing and integrating knowledge are essential for navigating the emerging research in this area. In this study, we explore the application of Graph Retrieval Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) in the context of PI, using GPT-4o mini and Neo4j to construct a knowledge graph and systematically analyze existing PI-related literature. Our approach synthesizes scattered research findings, highlights emerging trends, and identifies knowledge gaps. Furthermore, we demonstrate that GraphRAG improves accessibility by structuring complex information into interconnected graphs and provides a deeper understanding of underlying research dynamics. This research will contribute to future research and innovation by providing a new method of information analysis in the PI domain.

Abstract: We address the problems of giving a semantics to a relational database (RDB) that has missing values (MVs). The causes for the latter are governed by a Missingness Mechanism that is modelled as a Bayesian Network (BN) that involves the DB attributes as variables. The BN is called a Missingness Graph (MG). Our approach considerable departs from the treatment of RDBs with NULL (values). The combination of the MG and the observed DB allows us to build a block-independent probabilistic DB. We identify two optimal classes of its possible worlds on which QA can be performed. Those classes jointly capture probabilistic uncertainty and statistical plausibility of the implicit imputation of MVs. We obtain tractability results for the computation of some optimal classes; and we also obtain complexity results that characterize the computational feasibility of our approach.

Abstract: The visual modality, i.e., images, plays a key role in multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA). Existing approaches often directly fuse the image with other modalities to align different entities. Although simple, such strategies overlook the potential noise in the images and their semantic misalignment with corresponding entities, resulting in suboptimal fusion and degraded performance. Addressing this, we propose a novel Reliability-Aware framework for MMEA (RA-MMEA), which assesses visual reliability and adaptively improves unreliable visual representations for robust entity alignment. The core lies in two modules, including dependency-aware visual reliability prediction (DA-VRP) and stability-regularized visual embedding generation (SR-VEG). The former aims to estimate the reliability of an image by leveraging multi-modal dependency within the entity, while the latter focuses on producing alternative visual representation conditioned on semantics encoded in textual modalities for multi-modal fusion. Compared to current methods, RA-MMEA enables more reliable visual representations for modality fusion, thereby improving performance. In extensive experiments, RA-MMEA achieves state-of-the-art results, verifying the importance of reliable visual modality for entity alignment and the effectiveness of RA-MMEA. The code and results will be released.

Abstract: Because of its collaborative nature, Wikidata suffers from errors, in- consistencies, and excessive complexity, such as redundant classes, ambiguity between instances and classes, wrong taxonomic paths, and type constraint violations. The manual curation of these issues is infeasible at scale. To address these challenges, we introduce WiCleanData, a refined version of Wikidata with a consistent tax- onomy and free from type constraint violations. Specifically, we have designed an automated pipeline that first cleans the taxonomy with language model assistance, then simplifies type constraints by hierarchical aggregation, and finally filters facts accordingly. The resulting knowledge graph, free from any type violation, is made publicly available via a Web interface, enabling easy exploration and downstream applications.

Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) applications often transfer domain concepts into the model's context informally, through prompt prose, schema dumps, and examples. We show that for database queries, data model concepts pass to LLMs more effectively through representations whose vocabulary terms carry declared, machine-readable semantics (controlled semantics). NLKGQ is a working system and reusable framework that does this for data modeled in a knowledge graph. A formal OWL ontology serves as the transfer mechanism, concentrating the meaning of the data into semantically precise tokens the model can use directly. In a single LLM call, NLKGQ places in the context a system prompt instructing on SPARQL, the complete domain OWL ontology, and a domain-specific prompt addition, together with the user's natural language query. The model then generates the SPARQL query directly, zero-shot. Where the native vocabulary of an existing database or federation of databases is opaque, a wrapper ontology substitutes clean terms and a runtime rewriter restores the native forms. Evaluating on DBLP-QuAD 2.0 showed that its scores depend on the graph snapshot, the endpoint used, and the wording of its machine-generated questions, so we propose DBLP-QuAD 3.1, which maintains the intent of 2.0 while making reference results deterministic, revising reference SPARQL where needed, and rewriting the natural language questions, with a frontier model, to state each reference query's intent clearly and completely. We evaluate on the DBLP-QuAD 2.0 benchmark (57.6% Match under deterministic re-scoring), DBLP-QuAD 3.1 (89.9% Match on 1,000 questions), SemOpenAlex (98% Match against a published baseline's 86% on the identical test set), and neuroimaging metadata (100%).

Abstract: SNAP-KG is a framework for assigning newly arriving entities to semantic communities in a growing knowledge graph (KG) using only their raw features, with no graph access and no retraining at inference time. It was evaluated on five multi-view benchmarks and a 2.4M-node OGB-WikiKG2 KG. In each of these datasets, at least one graph view is homophilous, meaning that connected nodes usually belong to the same class, and SNAP-KG performs well on all of them. This paper asks what happens outside that setting. We extend the evaluation to three heterophilous graphs (Texas, Wisconsin, Chameleon) and measure the edge homophily of every view. When no homophilous view is available, clustering quality drops sharply for both SNAP-KG and the transductive baselines used in its original evaluation. What decides this is the homophily of the relation, not the number of relations. Multi-view fusion still helps, but only when at least one homophilous relation provides a reliable foundation. The homophily assumption is therefore shared by the whole method family, not specific to SNAP-KG. We argue that heterophilous multi-view clustering is a separate research problem, outside the scope of this work. As future work, we outline how a heterophily-aware teacher could be distilled into SNAP-KG's projector to serve both homophilous and heterophilous KGs.

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate structured outputs, but their reliability remains unclear when those outputs must satisfy database-level constraints. We study this issue through database normalization, involving reasoning about functional dependencies, lossless join decompositions, and inter-table constraints. We introduce a Database Normalization Benchmark (DNBENCH), comprising 3,275 samples for evaluating LLM-driven database normalization from 1NF to BCNF. DNBENCH uses a three-axis protocol to measure semantic equivalence, structural accuracy, and logical validity. Across Single, Complex, and Real World levels, DNBENCH uncovers recurring failures in dependency inference, schema decomposition, and inter-table constraint reconstruction. We further propose Multi-Agent Reasoning for Schemas (MARS), which separates evidence extraction, violation diagnosis, and decomposition planning from schema generation and verification. MARS improves the DNB-SCORE by 82.0% over the single-prompt baseline. All artifacts will be released upon acceptance.

Abstract: This paper introduces an evolutionary computation approach for consensus in structural Bayesian Network (BN) fusion under the constraint of limited treewidth. The consensus BN aims to reconcile multiple input BNs into a single one that retains key structural features present in the original networks. Treewidth, a graph-based parameter associated with computationally tractable inference, is utilized to restrict the complexity of the resulting network. A genetic algorithm is proposed to look for a BN that codifies as much information about the unrestricted fusion as possible while ensuring the treewidth restriction. Experimental evaluation demonstrates the genetic algorithm's ability to obtain consensus BNs with limited treewidth, providing a valuable tool for aggregating information from diverse sources while returning a computationally actionable model.