Tamara Cucumides

Tamara Cucumides

PhD. student - University of Antwerp

Tamara Cucumides

I’m Tamara Cucumides, a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the University of Antwerp, advised by Floris Geerts. My thesis sits at the intersection of graph neural networks, query answering on knowledge graphs, and graph representations for tabular and relational learning.

My research interests include graph learning, databases, and computational complexity — and, more broadly, understanding when and how structure helps predictive models learn from relational and tabular data.

👀 Looking for visual summaries of my work? Explore my gallery for video presentations and posters.

📚 Publications

📄 preprint · 🧩 workshop · 🎓 conference/journal

  • 📄 Simone Varriale, Tamara Cucumides, Floris Geerts, and Paolo Papotti. Latent Bridges for Multi-Table Question Answering. arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.28916, 2026. Paper
  • 📄 Tamara Cucumides and Floris Geerts. Grables: Tabular Learning Beyond Independent Rows. arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.03945, 2026. Paper
  • 🎓 Tamara Cucumides, Juan Reutter, and Domagoj Vrgoč. Output Bounds for Conjunctions of Path Queries. Information Processing Letters, Vol. 193, 2026 (IPL). Paper
  • 🧩 Tamara Cucumides and Floris Geerts. The Missing Structure: When Graph Representations Outperform Tabular Models. In EurIPS 2025 Workshop: AI for Tabular Data. Paper
  • 🧩 Tamara Cucumides and Floris Geerts. From Features to Structure: Task-Aware Graph Construction for Relational and Tabular Learning with GNNs. In VLDB 2025 Workshop: Tabular Data Analysis (TaDA). Paper
  • 🎓 🏆 Tamara Cucumides, Daniel Daza, Pablo Barceló, Michael Cochez, Floris Geerts, Juan L. Reutter, Miguel Romero. UnRavL: A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Answering Graph Pattern Queries in Knowledge Graphs. LoG 2024 (Learning on Graphs). Paper
  • 🎓 Tamara Cucumides and Juan Reutter. Communication Cost of Joins over Federated Data. In 27th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2024). LIPIcs, Vol. 290, pp. 5:1–5:19, 2024. Paper
  • 🎓 Tamara Cucumides, Juan Reutter, and Domagoj Vrgoč. Size Bounds and Algorithms for Conjunctive Regular Path Queries. In 26th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2023). LIPIcs, Vol. 255, pp. 13:1–13:17, 2023. Paper

🏆 Awards

  • 2025 — Top Reviewer Award, Learning on Graphs Conference (LoG 2025)
  • 2024 — Best Paper Honorable Mention, Learning on Graphs Conference (LoG 2024)
  • 2022 — Best Master’s Thesis, Instituto de Ingeniería Matemática y Computacional, PUC

👩‍🏫 Teaching

As a lecturer

As a teaching assistant

  • Too many to be listed: algorithms and complexity, discrete mathematics, mathematical foundations of machine learning, database systems, ethics for engineers, capstone for mathematical engineers, calculus, linear algebra, etc.