Naili Xing

About

I am a Ph.D. candidate at the NUS Database Research Lab, working on AI×Database systems — in-database analytics, learned database components, and autonomous data systems. I am a core contributor to NeurDB and an Apache SINGA committer.

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science, National University of Singapore Aug 2021 – Sep 2026 (expected)
Research focus: in-database structured data analytics; AI×Database. NUS Database Research Lab.
M.Sc. in Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore
B.Eng. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Awards

Research Achievement Award, NUS School of Computing AY 2025/2026, Semester 2
ACM SIGMOD Systems Award, Apache SINGA 2024
Dean's Graduate Research Excellence Award, NUS School of Computing AY 2023/2024, Semester 2
Research Achievement Award, NUS School of Computing AY 2021/2022, Semester 2

Publications

First Author

pTNAS: Progressive Neural Architecture Search for Tabular Data
Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026. [Paper]
Database Native Model Selection: Harnessing Deep Neural Networks in Database Systems
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), vol. 17, 2024. [Paper]
Singa-Easy: An Easy-to-Use Framework for Multimodal Analysis
Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM), 2021. [Paper]
Towards Effective Orchestration of AI×DB Workloads
Under revision of VLDB 2027. [Paper]
NQO: Query Optimization as a Learnable Function
Under revision of SIGMOD 2027.
MoQOE: Mixture of Learned Query Optimization Experts for End-to-End Efficiency
Under submission, 2026.

Corresponding Author

NeurBench: A Benchmark Suite for Learned Database Components with Drift Modeling
Proceedings of the ACM on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2026. [Paper]
NeurIDA: Dynamic Modeling for Effective In-Database Analytics
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), 2026. [Paper]

Second Author

Powering In-Database Dynamic Model Slicing for Structured Data Analytics
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), 2024. [Paper]
Falcon: A Privacy-Preserving and Interpretable Vertical Federated Learning System
Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), 2023. [Paper]
LogicTree-RAG: Logic Tree-guided Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Long-form Patent Drafting
Under submission, 2026.

Co-author

NeurDB: On the Design and Implementation of an AI-powered Autonomous Database
Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR), 2025. [Paper]
NeurDB: An AI-powered Autonomous Data System
Science China Information Sciences, 2024. [Paper]

Experience

NUS Database Research Lab — Ph.D. Researcher Apr 2021 – Present
- Published at SIGMOD, VLDB, ICML, CIDR, and ACM Multimedia (see Publications).
Mindtranz Pte. Ltd. — Chief Executive / Technology Officer Apr 2023 – Present
[Website]
- Led a 5-person team to build IP8Value, an IP management platform for tech innovation and commercialization.
- Built LLM agent for automated patent drafting with logic-tree-guided RAG and structured generation.
- Architected end-to-end platform spanning business backend, ML/algorithm backend, and cloud infrastructure.
NUS Database Research Lab — Research Assistant Jan 2020 – Apr 2021
- Designed and deployed scalable AutoML infrastructure on Kubernetes, enabling distributed training for ML services (e.g., Mask R-CNN object detection) and ELK/Kafka/Spark Streaming log monitoring.
Igloo (formerly Axinan) — Software Engineer Apr 2019 – Dec 2019
- Built resume recommendation system using NLP (word2vec, NER) and deep learning classifiers (CNN, LSTM).
Self-employed — Trader Jan 2021 – Present
- Trading with own capital; maintained approximately 80% win rate over the past four years.

Open-Source Contributions

NeurDB — AI-Powered Autonomous Data System
Core contributor: Designed and built AI engine; integrated in-database ML operators (PREDICT) into PostgreSQL planner/executor and cost-based scheduling; TabPFN runtime and distributed inference.

[Code] (C/Python)
Apache SINGA — Distributed Deep Learning Platform
Contributor: Extended model support and integrated SINGA inference into PostgreSQL.

[Code] (C++/Python)
Falcon — Privacy-Preserving Vertical Federated Learning System
Core contributor: Built MapReduce-based coordinator for task scheduling; distributed VFL training/inference; secure algorithms (PHE/secret sharing) for linear/logistic regression and MLP.

[Code] (Go/C++)
COOL — Cohort OnLine Analytical Processing System
Core contributor: OLAP query optimization and distributed query processing (ZooKeeper, HDFS).

[Code] (Java/Python)
MIT 6.824 — Distributed Systems
Personal project: MapReduce and full Raft (leader election, log replication, persistence) in Go.

[Code] (Go)