Aug 2024, Volume 18 Issue 4
    

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    Architecture
  • REVIEW ARTICLE
    Hongru GAO, Xiaofei LIAO, Zhiyuan SHAO, Kexin LI, Jiajie CHEN, Hai JIN

    Graphs that are used to model real-world entities with vertices and relationships among entities with edges, have proven to be a powerful tool for describing real-world problems in applications. In most real-world scenarios, entities and their relationships are subject to constant changes. Graphs that record such changes are called dynamic graphs. In recent years, the widespread application scenarios of dynamic graphs have stimulated extensive research on dynamic graph processing systems that continuously ingest graph updates and produce up-to-date graph analytics results. As the scale of dynamic graphs becomes larger, higher performance requirements are demanded to dynamic graph processing systems. With the massive parallel processing power and high memory bandwidth, GPUs become mainstream vehicles to accelerate dynamic graph processing tasks. GPU-based dynamic graph processing systems mainly address two challenges: maintaining the graph data when updates occur (i.e., graph updating) and producing analytics results in time (i.e., graph computing). In this paper, we survey GPU-based dynamic graph processing systems and review their methods on addressing both graph updating and graph computing. To comprehensively discuss existing dynamic graph processing systems on GPUs, we first introduce the terminologies of dynamic graph processing and then develop a taxonomy to describe the methods employed for graph updating and graph computing. In addition, we discuss the challenges and future research directions of dynamic graph processing on GPUs.

  • Software
  • LETTER
    Zexuan LI, Kaixin HUANG
  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Xinyuan WANG, Yun PENG, Hejiao HUANG

    Deterministic databases are able to reduce coordination costs in a replication. This property has fostered a significant interest in the design of efficient deterministic concurrency control protocols. However, the state-of-the-art deterministic concurrency control protocol Aria has three issues. First, it is impractical to configure a suitable batch size when the read-write set is unknown. Second, Aria running in low-concurrency scenarios, e.g., a single-thread scenario, suffers from the same conflicts as running in high-concurrency scenarios. Third, the single-version schema brings write-after-write conflicts.

    To address these issues, we propose Gria, an efficient deterministic concurrency control protocol. Gria has the following properties. First, the batch size of Gria is auto-scaling. Second, Gria’s conflict probability in low-concurrency scenarios is lower than that in high-concurrency scenarios. Third, Gria has no write-after-write conflicts by adopting a multi-version structure. To further reduce conflicts, we propose two optimizations: a reordering mechanism as well as a rechecking strategy. The evaluation result on two popular benchmarks shows that Gria outperforms Aria by 13x.

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • LETTER
    Mingtao SUN, Yan WEI, Shan JIANG, Guozhu JIA
  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Wei SONG, Hongfei HAN, Xu HAN, Miaomiao CHENG, Jiefu GONG, Shijin WANG, Ting LIU

    Discourse relation classification is a fundamental task for discourse analysis, which is essential for understanding the structure and connection of texts. Implicit discourse relation classification aims to determine the relationship between adjacent sentences and is very challenging because it lacks explicit discourse connectives as linguistic cues and sufficient annotated training data. In this paper, we propose a discriminative instance selection method to construct synthetic implicit discourse relation data from easy-to-collect explicit discourse relations. An expanded instance consists of an argument pair and its sense label. We introduce the argument pair type classification task, which aims to distinguish between implicit and explicit argument pairs and select the explicit argument pairs that are most similar to natural implicit argument pairs for data expansion. We also propose a simple label-smoothing technique to assign robust sense labels for the selected argument pairs. We evaluate our method on PDTB 2.0 and PDTB 3.0. The results show that our method can consistently improve the performance of the baseline model, and achieve competitive results with the state-of-the-art models.

  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Chengxing JIA, Fuxiang ZHANG, Tian XU, Jing-Cheng PANG, Zongzhang ZHANG, Yang YU

    Model-based reinforcement learning is a promising direction to improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning with learning a model of the environment. Previous model learning methods aim at fitting the transition data, and commonly employ a supervised learning approach to minimize the distance between the predicted state and the real state. The supervised model learning methods, however, diverge from the ultimate goal of model learning, i.e., optimizing the learned-in-the-model policy. In this work, we investigate how model learning and policy learning can share the same objective of maximizing the expected return in the real environment. We find model learning towards this objective can result in a target of enhancing the similarity between the gradient on generated data and the gradient on the real data. We thus derive the gradient of the model from this target and propose the Model Gradient algorithm (MG) to integrate this novel model learning approach with policy-gradient-based policy optimization. We conduct experiments on multiple locomotion control tasks and find that MG can not only achieve high sample efficiency but also lead to better convergence performance compared to traditional model-based reinforcement learning approaches.

  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Yitao LIU, Chenxin AN, Xipeng QIU

    With current success of large-scale pre-trained models (PTMs), how efficiently adapting PTMs to downstream tasks has attracted tremendous attention, especially for PTMs with billions of parameters. Previous work focuses on designing parameter-efficient tuning paradigms but needs to save and compute the gradient of the whole computational graph. In this paper, we propose Y-Tuning, an efficient yet effective paradigm to adapt frozen large-scale PTMs to specific downstream tasks. Y-Tuning learns dense representations for labels Y defined in a given task and aligns them to fixed feature representation. Without computing the gradients of text encoder at training phrase, Y-Tuning is not only parameter-efficient but also training-efficient. Experimental results show that for DeBERTaXXL with 1.6 billion parameters, Y-Tuning achieves performance more than 96% of full fine-tuning on GLUE Benchmark with only 2% tunable parameters and much fewer training costs.

  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Junfei TANG, Ran SONG, Yuxin HUANG, Shengxiang GAO, Zhengtao YU

    Entity alignment (EA) is an important technique aiming to find the same real entity between two different source knowledge graphs (KGs). Current methods typically learn the embedding of entities for EA from the structure of KGs for EA. Most EA models are designed for rich-resource languages, requiring sufficient resources such as a parallel corpus and pre-trained language models. However, low-resource language KGs have received less attention, and current models demonstrate poor performance on those low-resource KGs. Recently, researchers have fused relation information and attributes for entity representations to enhance the entity alignment performance, but the relation semantics are often ignored. To address these issues, we propose a novel Semantic-aware Graph Neural Network (SGNN) for entity alignment. First, we generate pseudo sentences according to the relation triples and produce representations using pre-trained models. Second, our approach explores semantic information from the connected relations by a graph neural network. Our model captures expanded feature information from KGs. Experimental results using three low-resource languages demonstrate that our proposed SGNN approach out performs better than state-of-the-art alignment methods on three proposed datasets and three public datasets.

  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Yuting YANG, Pei HUANG, Juan CAO, Jintao LI, Yun LIN, Feifei MA

    Recent years have seen the wide application of natural language processing (NLP) models in crucial areas such as finance, medical treatment, and news media, raising concerns about the model robustness and vulnerabilities. We find that prompt paradigm can probe special robust defects of pre-trained language models. Malicious prompt texts are first constructed for inputs and a pre-trained language model can generate adversarial examples for victim models via mask-filling. Experimental results show that prompt paradigm can efficiently generate more diverse adversarial examples besides synonym substitution. Then, we propose a novel robust training approach based on prompt paradigm which incorporates prompt texts as the alternatives to adversarial examples and enhances robustness under a lightweight minimax-style optimization framework. Experiments on three real-world tasks and two deep neural models show that our approach can significantly improve the robustness of models to resist adversarial attacks.

  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Haochen SHI, Mingkun XIE, Shengjun HUANG

    Supervised learning often requires a large number of labeled examples, which has become a critical bottleneck in the case that manual annotating the class labels is costly. To mitigate this issue, a new framework called pairwise comparison (Pcomp) classification is proposed to allow training examples only weakly annotated with pairwise comparison, i.e., which one of two examples is more likely to be positive. The previous study solves Pcomp problems by minimizing the classification error, which may lead to less robust model due to its sensitivity to class distribution. In this paper, we propose a robust learning framework for Pcomp data along with a pairwise surrogate loss called Pcomp-AUC. It provides an unbiased estimator to equivalently maximize AUC without accessing the precise class labels. Theoretically, we prove the consistency with respect to AUC and further provide the estimation error bound for the proposed method. Empirical studies on multiple datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Yi ZHU, Yishuai GENG, Yun LI, Jipeng QIANG, Xindong WU

    Nowadays, the personalized recommendation has become a research hotspot for addressing information overload. Despite this, generating effective recommendations from sparse data remains a challenge. Recently, auxiliary information has been widely used to address data sparsity, but most models using auxiliary information are linear and have limited expressiveness. Due to the advantages of feature extraction and no-label requirements, autoencoder-based methods have become quite popular. However, most existing autoencoder-based methods discard the reconstruction of auxiliary information, which poses huge challenges for better representation learning and model scalability. To address these problems, we propose Serial-Autoencoder for Personalized Recommendation (SAPR), which aims to reduce the loss of critical information and enhance the learning of feature representations. Specifically, we first combine the original rating matrix and item attribute features and feed them into the first autoencoder for generating a higher-level representation of the input. Second, we use a second autoencoder to enhance the reconstruction of the data representation of the prediciton rating matrix. The output rating information is used for recommendation prediction. Extensive experiments on the MovieTweetings and MovieLens datasets have verified the effectiveness of SAPR compared to state-of-the-art models.

  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Enes DEDEOGLU, Himmet Toprak KESGIN, Mehmet Fatih AMASYALI

    The use of all samples in the optimization process does not produce robust results in datasets with label noise. Because the gradients calculated according to the losses of the noisy samples cause the optimization process to go in the wrong direction. In this paper, we recommend using samples with loss less than a threshold determined during the optimization, instead of using all samples in the mini-batch. Our proposed method, Adaptive-k, aims to exclude label noise samples from the optimization process and make the process robust. On noisy datasets, we found that using a threshold-based approach, such as Adaptive-k, produces better results than using all samples or a fixed number of low-loss samples in the mini-batch. On the basis of our theoretical analysis and experimental results, we show that the Adaptive-k method is closest to the performance of the Oracle, in which noisy samples are entirely removed from the dataset. Adaptive-k is a simple but effective method. It does not require prior knowledge of the noise ratio of the dataset, does not require additional model training, and does not increase training time significantly. In the experiments, we also show that Adaptive-k is compatible with different optimizers such as SGD, SGDM, and Adam. The code for Adaptive-k is available at GitHub.

  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Ziwang FU, Feng LIU, Qing XU, Xiangling FU, Jiayin QI

    Learning modality-fused representations and processing unaligned multimodal sequences are meaningful and challenging in multimodal emotion recognition. Existing approaches use directional pairwise attention or a message hub to fuse language, visual, and audio modalities. However, these fusion methods are often quadratic in complexity with respect to the modal sequence length, bring redundant information and are not efficient. In this paper, we propose an efficient neural network to learn modality-fused representations with CB-Transformer (LMR-CBT) for multimodal emotion recognition from unaligned multi-modal sequences. Specifically, we first perform feature extraction for the three modalities respectively to obtain the local structure of the sequences. Then, we design an innovative asymmetric transformer with cross-modal blocks (CB-Transformer) that enables complementary learning of different modalities, mainly divided into local temporal learning, cross-modal feature fusion and global self-attention representations. In addition, we splice the fused features with the original features to classify the emotions of the sequences. Finally, we conduct word-aligned and unaligned experiments on three challenging datasets, IEMOCAP, CMU-MOSI, and CMU-MOSEI. The experimental results show the superiority and efficiency of our proposed method in both settings. Compared with the mainstream methods, our approach reaches the state-of-the-art with a minimum number of parameters.

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • LETTER
    Yueguo LUO, Yi LIU, Yuzhen ZHAO, Ping GUO
  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Yongping WANG, Daoyun XU, Jincheng ZHOU

    This paper explores the conditions which make a regular balanced random (k,2s)-CNF formula (1,0)-unsatisfiable with high probability. The conditions also make a random instance of the regular balanced (k1,2(k1)s)-SAT problem unsatisfiable with high probability, where the instance obeys a distribution which differs from the distribution obeyed by a regular balanced random (k1,2(k1)s)-CNF formula. Let F be a regular balanced random (k,2s)-CNF formula where k3, then there exists a number s0 such that F is (1,0)-unsatisfiable with high probability if s>s0. A numerical solution of the number s0 when k{5,6,,14} is given to conduct simulated experiments. The simulated experiments verify the theoretical result. Besides, the experiments also suggest that F is (1,0)-satisfiable with high probability if s is less than a certain value.

  • Networks and Communication
  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Yuya CUI, Degan ZHANG, Jie ZHANG, Ting ZHANG, Lixiang CAO, Lu CHEN

    Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is a promising approach. Dynamic service migration is a key technology in MEC. In order to maintain the continuity of services in a dynamic environment, mobile users need to migrate tasks between multiple servers in real time. Due to the uncertainty of movement, frequent migration will increase delays and costs and non-migration will lead to service interruption. Therefore, it is very challenging to design an optimal migration strategy. In this paper, we investigate the multi-user task migration problem in a dynamic environment and minimizes the average service delay while meeting the migration cost. In order to optimize the service delay and migration cost, we propose an adaptive weight deep deterministic policy gradient (AWDDPG) algorithm. And distributed execution and centralized training are adopted to solve the high-dimensional problem. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm can greatly reduce the migration cost and service delay compared with the other related algorithms.

  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Jingbin WANG, Weijie ZHANG, Zhiyong YU, Fangwan HUANG, Weiping ZHU, Longbiao CHEN

    Accurate monitoring of urban waterlogging contributes to the city’s normal operation and the safety of residents’ daily travel. However, due to feedback delays or high costs, existing methods make large-scale, fine-grained waterlogging monitoring impossible. A common method is to forecast the city’s global waterlogging status using its partial waterlogging data. This method has two challenges: first, existing predictive algorithms are either driven by knowledge or data alone; and second, the partial waterlogging data is not collected selectively, resulting in poor predictions. To overcome the aforementioned challenges, this paper proposes a framework for large-scale and fine-grained spatiotemporal waterlogging monitoring based on the opportunistic sensing of limited bus routes. This framework follows the Sparse Crowdsensing and mainly comprises a pair of iterative predictor and selector. The predictor uses the collected waterlogging status and the predicted status of the uncollected area to train the graph convolutional neural network. It combines both knowledge-driven and data-driven approaches and can be used to forecast waterlogging status in all regions for the upcoming term. The selector consists of a two-stage selection procedure that can select valuable bus routes while satisfying budget constraints. The experimental results on real waterlogging and bus routes in Shenzhen show that the proposed framework could easily perform urban waterlogging monitoring with low cost, high accuracy, wide coverage, and fine granularity.

  • Information Systems
  • LETTER
    Yunhong JI, Wentao HUANG, Xuan ZHOU
  • LETTER
    Chilei WANG, Qiang-Sheng HUA, Hai JIN, Chaodong ZHENG
  • Image and Graphics
  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Rui HE, Zehua FU, Qingjie LIU, Yunhong WANG, Xunxun CHEN

    Learning activities interactions between small groups is a key step in understanding team sports videos. Recent research focusing on team sports videos can be strictly regarded from the perspective of the audience rather than the athlete. For team sports videos such as volleyball and basketball videos, there are plenty of intra-team and inter-team relations. In this paper, a new task named Group Scene Graph Generation is introduced to better understand intra-team relations and inter-team relations in sports videos. To tackle this problem, a novel Hierarchical Relation Network is proposed. After all players in a video are finely divided into two teams, the feature of the two teams’ activities and interactions will be enhanced by Graph Convolutional Networks, which are finally recognized to generate Group Scene Graph. For evaluation, built on Volleyball dataset with additional 9660 team activity labels, a Volleyball+ dataset is proposed. A baseline is set for better comparison and our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Moreover, the idea of our method can be directly utilized in another video-based task, Group Activity Recognition. Experiments show the priority of our method and display the link between the two tasks. Finally, from the athlete’s view, we elaborately present an interpretation that shows how to utilize Group Scene Graph to analyze teams’ activities and provide professional gaming suggestions.

  • Information Security
  • LETTER
    Chenhao JIA, Qing LING, Ting WU, Tingting CUI
  • LETTER
    Sadegh SADEGHI, Nasour BAGHERI
  • LETTER
    Zhichuang LIANG, Yunlei ZHAO, Zhenfeng ZHANG
  • Interdisciplinary
  • RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Xiaowei HUANG, Jingquan LUO, Lvzhou LI

    Matroid theory has been developed to be a mature branch of mathematics and has extensive applications in combinatorial optimization, algorithm design and so on. On the other hand, quantum computing has attracted much attention and has been shown to surpass classical computing on solving some computational problems. Surprisingly, crossover studies of the two fields seem to be missing in the literature. This paper initiates the study of quantum algorithms for matroid property problems. It is shown that quadratic quantum speedup is possible for the calculation problem of finding the girth or the number of circuits (bases, flats, hyperplanes) of a matroid, and for the decision problem of deciding whether a matroid is uniform or Eulerian, by giving a uniform lower bound Ω((nn/2)) on the query complexity of all these problems. On the other hand, for the uniform matroid decision problem, an asymptotically optimal quantum algorithm is proposed which achieves the lower bound, and for the girth problem, an almost optimal quantum algorithm is given with query complexity O(logn(nn/2)). In addition, for the paving matroid decision problem, a lower bound Ω((nn/2)/n) on the query complexity is obtained, and an O((nn/2)) quantum algorithm is presented.