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Jun-Peng Zhu

Associate Professor
Northwest A&F University, PingCAP



Last Update: 2026-11-02

Short Biography

Jun-Peng Zhu is currently an associate professor at Northwest A&F University. He is also a member of the PingCAP TiDB team. He received his Ph.D. degree from the School of Data Science and Engineering, East China Normal University. He was selected for the National Key Software High-level Talent Doctoral Program jointly administered by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. His research interests span various database topics, with a current focus on data analysis systems through LLMs and distributed database systems. He is also exploring AI for Science applications in areas such as bioinformatics and healthcare. He worked as an R&D engineer in the TiDB Cloud Platform Group at PingCAP, focusing on autonomous services for TiDB. Previously, he worked as a kernel R&D engineer at the VMware Greenplum database team, focusing on nested transactions and query optimization for MPP distributed database systems. He has published more than ten papers at top-tier international database conferences in the field of data management, such as SIGMOD, VLDB, and ICDE. Feel free to reach out for potential collaborations.

Research Interests

Representative Work

Product Demo

DataStudio

An LLM-Powered General-Purpose Data Analysis Platform
Screenshot of the DataStudio demo 6:16 Chinese narration

DataStudio lets people ask questions of their data in plain language and get answers they can check. It builds a semantic layer over connected databases, breaks complex questions into multi-step plans, generates SQL grounded in the data context instead of letting the model invent numbers, and records every result in a notebook that can be edited, re-run, and shared.

Demo scenario: student daily management at Northwest A&F University (7 tables covering students, scores, attendance, dorm access, library, and canteen)

  • 12 kinds of data sources: DuckDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL, TiDB, Greenplum, StarRocks, ClickHouse, Trino/Presto, CSV/Parquet/Excel, and more; database passwords stay out of config files.
  • LLM-built semantic layer: column meanings, value ranges, table purposes, and business definitions are retrieved automatically when a question is asked.
  • Visible plans: multi-step plans are drawn as a dependency graph on a canvas with 75 built-in operators, and the execution trace shows every SQL statement sent to the database.
  • Notebook to dashboard: results land in editable notebook cells, the system suggests drill-down follow-ups, and charts can be pinned to dashboards.
  • Built for teams: real-time co-editing, per-role dataset and column permissions, and an audit log of every query.
System Demo

WeaveData

A Multimodal Data Analysis System with Self-Critiquing and Self-Evolving LLM Plans
Screenshot of the WeaveData demo 4:20 Chinese narration

WeaveData answers natural-language questions that span relational tables, free text, and images. The LLM writes a typed logical plan that is checked before it runs, and the result is critiqued afterwards to decide whether it actually answers the question. When a plan fails or comes back incomplete, WeaveData diagnoses the problem against the real data, repairs the plan, reuses valid intermediate results, and records the lesson for future questions.

Demo scenarios: linking airlines to their logos (SemBench MMQA) and exploring real-estate listings with photos (Palimpzest)

  • Self-critique before execution: flawed plan drafts are rejected and revised before any data is touched.
  • Self-repair after execution: when the answer is incomplete, the system finds the evidence gap in the actual data and fixes the plan without starting over.
  • Inspectable multimodal evidence: every image or text judgment made by the model is shown alongside its explanation.
  • Clarification for ambiguous questions: a metadata knowledge graph links tables, texts, and images, and the system asks the user to pick an interpretation when a question can be read several ways.

News

Selected Publications [View All]

For more details, please view the Google Scholar profile.

2026

  1. arXiv
    Min Jia, Shihao Zhou, Jun-Peng Zhu, Peng Cai, Kai Xu, Chao Zhang, Li Li, Aoying Zhou, Heng Long, Qiu Cui, Liu Tang, Qi Liu
    arXiv, 2026.09.28
    Preprint
    Data Analytics Multimodal Queries
  2. Canadian AI 2026
    Wei Cao, Rachid Hedjam, Bessam Abdulrazak, Jun-Peng Zhu
    The 39th Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2026
    Deep Learning
  3. arXiv
    Jun-Peng Zhu, Qizhi Wang, Yulong Zhai, Yishen Sun, Sen Chen, Kai Xu, Peng Cai, Hongming Zhang, Heng Long, Liu Tang, Qi Liu
    arXiv, 2026.03.24
    In Submission
    AI4DB
  4. SIGMOD
    Jun-Peng Zhu, Boyan Niu, Peng Cai, Zheming Ni, Kai Xu, Jiajun Huang, Shengbo Ma, Bing Wang, Xuan Zhou, Guanglei Bao, Donghui Zhang, Liu Tang, Qi Liu
    ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2026
    CCF-A
    Data Analytics LLM-based EDA
  5. ICDE
    Automatic Parameter Tuning for Compaction in LSM-Tree based Databases
    Pinshan Cao, Peng Cai, Xuan Zhou, Jun-Peng Zhu, Kecheng Luo, Sijia Li, Quanqing Xu, Chuanhui Yang
    42nd IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2026
    CCF-A
    AI4DB
  6. SIGMOD
    Zhongwei Yue, Jun-Peng Zhu, Peng Cai, Xuan Zhou, Quanqing Xu, and Chuanhui Yang
    ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2026
    CCF-A
    AI4DB
  7. NDBC
    TiMAR: Entity-Graph-Guided Interactive Clarification for Ambiguous Multimodal Natural Language Queries
    Min Jia, Jun-Peng Zhu, Peng Cai, Kai Xu, Li Li, Aoying Zhou, Hongming Zhang, Heng Long, Liu Tang, Qi Liu
    National Database Conference (NDBC), 2026
    Multimodal Queries LLM-based QA

2025

  1. PVLDB
    Jun-Peng Zhu, Boyan Niu, Peng Cai, Zheming Ni, Jianwei Wan, Kai Xu, Jiajun Huang, Shengbo Ma, Bing Wang, Xuan Zhou, Guanglei Bao, Donghui Zhang, Liu Tang, Qi Liu
    Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), 2025.
    CCF-A
    Data Analytics LLM-based EDA
  2. PVLDB
    Jun-Peng Zhu, Lingfeng Zhang, Peng Cai, Xuan Zhou, Peisen Zhao, Xue Wang, Lingpeng Tang
    Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), 2025.
    CCF-A
    Coordination Services Distributed Database Systems
  3. PVLDB
    Rongrong Zhang, Zhiwei Ye, Jun-Peng Zhu, Peng Cai, Xuan Zhou, Dunbo Cai, Ling Qian
    Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), 2025.
    CCF-A
    Deadlock Detection Distributed Database Systems
  4. ICDE
    Jun-Peng Zhu, Zhiwei Ye, Xiaolong He, Peng Cai, Xuan Zhou, Aoying Zhou, Dunbo Cai, Ling Qian, Kai Xu, Liu Tang, Qi Liu
    41st IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2025
    CCF-A
    Storage Engine LSM-tree
  5. SIGMOD
    Jun-Peng Zhu, Peng Cai, Kai Xu, Li Li, Yishen Sun, Shuai Zhou, Haihuang Su, Liu Tang, Qi Liu
    ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2025
    CCF-A
    LLM-based TQA
  6. SIGMOD
    Shihao Zhou, Qi Mao, Yi Cheng, Hongcheng Qi, Yilun Huang, Peng Cai, Jun-Peng Zhu
    ACM SIGMOD/PODS International Conference on Management of Data (SIGMOD), 2025
    CCF-A
    Storage Engine Distributed Database Systems

2024

  1. PVLDB
    Jun-Peng Zhu, Peng Cai, Kai Xu, Li Li, Yishen Sun, Shuai Zhou, Haihuang Su, Liu Tang, Qi Liu
    Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB), 2024.
    CCF-A
    LLM-based TQA
  2. ICDE
    Jun-Peng Zhu, Peng Cai, Boyan Niu, Zheming Ni, Kai Xu, Jiajun Huang, Jianwei Wan, Shengbo Ma, Bing Wang, Donghui Zhang, Liu Tang, Qi Liu
    2024 IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2024.
    CCF-A
    LLM-based EDA

2023

  1. ICDE
    Jun-Peng Zhu, Zhiwei Ye, Peng Cai, Donghui Wang, Fengyan Zhang, Dunbo Cai, Ling Qian
    2024 IEEE 40th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2024.
    CCF-A
    Replication Log Replaying

Honors and Awards

Research Projects

Experience

Database R&D Engineer

Database Kernel R&D Engineer

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