Problem with Executing Hive UDF's from Spark 2.2 Onwards

A user of sketches library(https://github.com/DataSketches/sketches-hive) reported an issue with HLL Sketch Hive UDAF that seems to be a bug in Spark or Hive. Their code runs fine in 2.1 but has an issue from 2.2 onwards. For more details on the issue, you can refer to the discussion in the sketches-user list:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/sketches-user/GmH4-OlHP9g/MW-J7Hg4BwAJ

On further debugging, we figured out that from 2.2 onwards, Spark hive UDAF provides support for partial aggregation, and has removed the functionality that supported complete mode aggregation(Refer https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-19060 and https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-18186). Thus, instead of expecting update method to be called, merge method is called here (https://github.com/DataSketches/sketches-hive/blob/master/src/main/java/com/yahoo/sketches/hive/hll/SketchEvaluator.java#L56) which throws the exception as described in the forums above.