Audrey Cheng
Publications
AI-Driven Research for Databases
As the complexity of modern workloads and hardware increasingly outpaces human research and engineering capacity, existing methods for database performance optimization struggle to keep pace. To address this gap, a new class of techniques, termed AI-Driven Research for Systems (ADRS), uses large language models to automate solution discovery. This approach shifts optimization from manual system design to automated code generation. The key obstacle, however, in applying ADRS is the evaluation pipeline. Since these frameworks rapidly generate hundreds of candidates without human supervision, they depend on fast and accurate feedback from evaluators to converge on effective solutions. Building such evaluators is especially difficult for complex database systems. To enable the practical application of ADRS in this domain, we propose automating the design of evaluators by co-evolving them with the solutions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through three case studies optimizing buffer management, query rewriting, and index selection. Our automated evaluators enable the discovery of novel algorithms that outperform state-of-the-art baselines (e.g., a deterministic query rewrite policy that achieves up to 6.8x lower latency), demonstrating that addressing the evaluation bottleneck unlocks the potential of ADRS to generate highly optimized, deployable code for next-generation data systems.
AdaEvolve: Adaptive LLM Driven Zeroth-Order Optimization
The paradigm of automated program generation is shifting from one-shot generation to inference-time search, where Large Language Models (LLMs) function as semantic mutation operators within evolutionary loops. While effective, these systems are currently governed by static schedules that fail to account for the non-stationary dynamics of the search process. This rigidity results in substantial computational waste, as resources are indiscriminately allocated to stagnating populations while promising frontiers remain under-exploited. We introduce AdaEvolve, a framework that reformulates LLM-driven evolution as a hierarchical adaptive optimization problem. AdaEvolve uses an "accumulated improvement signal" to unify decisions across three levels: Local Adaptation, which dynamically modulates the exploration intensity within a population of solution candidates; Global Adaptation, which routes the global resource budget via bandit-based scheduling across different solution candidate populations; and Meta-Guidance which generates novel solution tactics based on the previously generated solutions and their corresponding improvements when the progress stalls. We demonstrate that AdaEvolve consistently outperforms the open-sourced baselines across 185 different open-ended optimization problems including combinatorial, systems optimization and algorithm design problems.