arXiv subjects

Gabriele Sanmartino

Publications and source records attributed to Gabriele Sanmartino.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The Stretto Execution Engine for Semantic Data Systems

Semantic data systems enable querying over both structured and unstructured data using LLMs, but a central challenge is navigating the performance-accuracy trade-off when selecting among alternative strategies for executing semantic operators. In this paper, we present Stretto, a new execution engine for semantic query processing that combines a novel optimizer with a rich set of physical execution strategies for semantic operators. Unlike prior work, Stretto provides global - rather than per-operator - accuracy guarantees while optimizing query performance. To this end, Stretto formulates query planning as a constrained optimization problem and employs a gradient-based optimizer to jointly select operator implementations and allocate error budgets across the full query plan. Furthermore, to enable diverse execution choices, Stretto introduces a new technique that builds on KV-cache compression to realize a spectrum of physical execution strategies for semantic operators with controllable runtime-accuracy trade-offs. Experimental results demonstrate that Stretto outperforms state-of-the-art systems while consistently satisfying quality guarantees.

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arXiv2026

Selectivity Estimation for Semantic Filters on Image Data

Semantic data systems integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) directly into database query execution, enabling expressive queries on multi-modal data. However, optimizing these queries requires accurate selectivity estimates to determine the most efficient operator execution order. Contemporary systems rely on online sample-based profiling, a process that incurs severe latency overheads and struggles with low-selectivity queries. In this paper, we introduce Semantic Histograms, a novel selectivity estimator for semantic filters on image data that leverages shared embedding spaces to bypass traditional profiling. We realize that all semantic filters are implicit range queries, as they match a range of different images. Some filter predicates are more general, yielding a wide range, while others are more specific, yielding a smaller range. To address the challenge of implicit ranges, we propose two approaches to estimate the queries' specificity, with an ensemble of the two performing best. The evaluation shows that Semantic Histograms can reduce the end-to-end runtime overhead of query optimization and execution by up to 86%.

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