https://sparsenotes.com/series/weekly-papers-2026-11-14/ Recent content in weekly-papers-2026-11-14 on Sparse Notes https://sparsenotes.com/images/og-default.png https://sparsenotes.com/images/og-default.png Hugo -- gohugo.io Sat, 14 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://sparsenotes.com/posts/2026/11/papers/access-path-selection-selinger-1979/ Sat, 14 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://sparsenotes.com/posts/2026/11/papers/access-path-selection-selinger-1979/ Seminal paper of the week: the System R optimizer paper that made SQL practical. Pat Selinger and colleagues combined a cost formula, selectivity estimates from catalog statistics, and dynamic programming over join orders with 'interesting orders'. Nearly every relational optimizer since has used the same structure. https://sparsenotes.com/posts/2026/11/papers/raven-unified-file-management-lakehouse/ Sat, 14 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://sparsenotes.com/posts/2026/11/papers/raven-unified-file-management-lakehouse/ University of Maryland and Dolby put a lakehouse catalog's transactional metadata (which files are visible, who references them) in Postgres and leave the bulky per-file statistics in Iceberg or Delta Lake. That one split gives cheaper small commits, multi-table snapshot-isolation transactions, and reachability-based garbage collection that won't delete files a clone or a running job still needs. https://sparsenotes.com/posts/2026/11/papers/unbundling-multimodal-vision-encoding/ Sat, 14 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://sparsenotes.com/posts/2026/11/papers/unbundling-multimodal-vision-encoding/ Meta FAIR and NYU split the vision encoder into three separate design choices (a pretrained prior, dedicated vision parameters, and placement before fusion) and test each one with every model trained from scratch at matched compute. Only the dedicated parameters matter, and they work just as well as vision-only branches inside the first eight layers of the language model. https://sparsenotes.com/posts/2026/11/papers/ Sat, 14 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://sparsenotes.com/posts/2026/11/papers/ This week's picks: Meta FAIR and NYU's controlled study showing vision-language models need dedicated vision parameters but not a pretrained encoder; Raven, a lakehouse catalog that puts file visibility in Postgres and leaves statistics in Iceberg and Delta; and Selinger et al.'s 1979 System R optimizer paper as the seminal pick.