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Accurate workload forecasting is critical for efficient resource management in cloud computing systems, enabling effective scheduling and autoscaling. Despite recent advances with transformer-based forecasting models, challenges remain due to the non-stationary, nonlinear characteristics of workload time series and the long-term dependencies. In particular, inconsistent performance between long-term history and near-term forecasts hinders long-range predictions. This paper proposes a novel framework leveraging self-supervised multiscale representation learning to capture both long-term and near-term workload patterns. The long-term history is encoded through multiscale representations while the near-term observations are modeled via temporal flow fusion. These representations of different scales are fused using an attention mechanism and characterized with normalizing flows to handle non-Gaussian/non-linear distributions of time series. Extensive experiments on 9 benchmarks demonstrate superiority over existing methods., Comment: Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM '24), October 21--25, 2024, Boise, ID, USA

Fact knowledge memorization is crucial for Large Language Models (LLM) to generate factual and reliable responses. However, the behaviors of LLM fact memorization remain under-explored. In this paper, we analyze the scaling laws for LLM's fact knowledge and LLMs' behaviors of memorizing different types of facts. We find that LLMs' fact knowledge capacity has a linear and negative exponential law relationship with model size and training epochs, respectively. Estimated by the built scaling law, memorizing the whole Wikidata's facts requires training an LLM with 1000B non-embed parameters for 100 epochs, suggesting that using LLMs to memorize all public facts is almost implausible for a general pre-training setting. Meanwhile, we find that LLMs can generalize on unseen fact knowledge and its scaling law is similar to general pre-training. Additionally, we analyze the compatibility and preference of LLMs' fact memorization. For compatibility, we find LLMs struggle with memorizing redundant facts in a unified way. Only when correlated facts have the same direction and structure, the LLM can compatibly memorize them. This shows the inefficiency of LLM memorization for redundant facts. For preference, the LLM pays more attention to memorizing more frequent and difficult facts, and the subsequent facts can overwrite prior facts' memorization, which significantly hinders low-frequency facts memorization. Our findings reveal the capacity and characteristics of LLMs' fact knowledge learning, which provide directions for LLMs' fact knowledge augmentation.

Fast and accurate depth sensing has long been a significant research challenge. Event camera, as a device that quickly responds to intensity changes, provides a new solution for structured light (SL) systems. In this paper, we introduce Gray code into event-based SL systems for the first time. Our setup includes an event camera and Digital Light Processing (DLP) projector, enabling depth estimation through high-speed projection and decoding of Gray code patterns. By employing spatio-temporal encoding for point matching, our method is immune to timestamp noise, realizing high-speed depth estimation without loss of accuracy. The binary nature of events and Gray code minimizes data redundancy, enabling us to fully utilize sensor bandwidth at 100%. Experimental results show that our approach achieves accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art scanning methods while surpassing them in data acquisition speed (up to 41 times improvement) without sacrificing accuracy. Our proposed approach offers a highly promising solution for ultra-fast, real-time, and high-precision dense depth estimation. Code and dataset will be publicly available.

Large language models are playing an increasingly significant role in molecular research, yet existing models often generate erroneous information, posing challenges to accurate molecular comprehension. Traditional evaluation metrics for generated content fail to assess a model's accuracy in molecular understanding. To rectify the absence of factual evaluation, we present MoleculeQA, a novel question answering (QA) dataset which possesses 62K QA pairs over 23K molecules. Each QA pair, composed of a manual question, a positive option and three negative options, has consistent semantics with a molecular description from authoritative molecular corpus. MoleculeQA is not only the first benchmark for molecular factual bias evaluation but also the largest QA dataset for molecular research. A comprehensive evaluation on MoleculeQA for existing molecular LLMs exposes their deficiencies in specific areas and pinpoints several particularly crucial factors for molecular understanding., Comment: 19 pages, 8 figures

Exceptional points (EPs) refer to degeneracies in non-Hermitian systems where two or more eigenvalues and their corresponding eigenvectors coalesce. Recently, there has been growing interest in harnessing EPs to enhance the responsivity of sensors. Significant improvements in the sensitivity of sensors in optics and electronics have been developed. In this work, we present a novel ultrasensitive surface acoustic wave (SAW) gas sensor based on EP. We demonstrate its ability to significantly respond to trace amount of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) gas by tuning additional loss to approach the EP, thereby enhancing the responsivity compared to the conventional delay line gas sensors. In addition to high sensitivity, our sensor is robust to temperature variation and exclusive to H2S gas. We propose an innovative method for designing a new generation of ultrasensitive gas sensor.

Given the enormous number of users and items, industrial cascade recommendation systems (RS) are continuously expanded in size and complexity to deliver relevant items, such as news, services, and commodities, to the appropriate users. In a real-world scenario with hundreds of thousands requests per second, significant computation is required to infer personalized results for each request, resulting in a massive energy consumption and carbon emission that raises concern. This paper proposes GreenFlow, a practical computation allocation framework for RS, that considers both accuracy and carbon emission during inference. For each stage (e.g., recall, pre-ranking, ranking, etc.) of a cascade RS, when a user triggers a request, we define two actions that determine the computation: (1) the trained instances of models with different computational complexity; and (2) the number of items to be inferred in the stage. We refer to the combinations of actions in all stages as action chains. A reward score is estimated for each action chain, followed by dynamic primal-dual optimization considering both the reward and computation budget. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of the framework, reducing computation consumption by 41% in an industrial mobile application while maintaining commercial revenue. Moreover, the proposed framework saves approximately 5000kWh of electricity and reduces 3 tons of carbon emissions per day.

Autoscaling is a vital mechanism in cloud computing that supports the autonomous adjustment of computing resources under dynamic workloads. A primary goal of autoscaling is to stabilize resource utilization at a desirable level, thus reconciling the need for resource-saving with the satisfaction of Service Level Objectives (SLOs). Existing proactive autoscaling methods anticipate the future workload and scale the resources in advance, whereas the reliability may suffer from prediction deviations arising from the frequent fluctuations and noise of cloud workloads; reactive methods rely on real-time system feedback, while the hysteretic nature of reactive methods could cause violations of the rigorous SLOs. To this end, this paper presents OptScaler, a hybrid autoscaling framework that integrates the power of both proactive and reactive methods for regulating CPU utilization. Specifically, the proactive module of OptScaler consists of a sophisticated workload prediction model and an optimization model, where the former provides reliable inputs to the latter for making optimal scaling decisions. The reactive module provides a self-tuning estimator of CPU utilization to the optimization model. We embed Model Predictive Control (MPC) mechanism and robust optimization techniques into the optimization model to further enhance its reliability. Numerical results have demonstrated the superiority of both the workload prediction model and the hybrid framework of OptScaler in the scenario of online services compared to prevalent reactive, proactive, or hybrid autoscalers. OptScaler has been successfully deployed at Alipay, supporting the autoscaling of applets in the world-leading payment platform.

In text documents such as news articles, the content and key events usually revolve around a subset of all the entities mentioned in a document. These entities, often deemed as salient entities, provide useful cues of the aboutness of a document to a reader. Identifying the salience of entities was found helpful in several downstream applications such as search, ranking, and entity-centric summarization, among others. Prior work on salient entity detection mainly focused on machine learning models that require heavy feature engineering. We show that fine-tuning medium-sized language models with a cross-encoder style architecture yields substantial performance gains over feature engineering approaches. To this end, we conduct a comprehensive benchmarking of four publicly available datasets using models representative of the medium-sized pre-trained language model family. Additionally, we show that zero-shot prompting of instruction-tuned language models yields inferior results, indicating the task's uniqueness and complexity.

The goal of sequential recommendation (SR) is to predict a user's potential interested items based on her/his historical interaction sequences. Most existing sequential recommenders are developed based on ID features, which, despite their widespread use, often underperform with sparse IDs and struggle with the cold-start problem. Besides, inconsistent ID mappings hinder the model's transferability, isolating similar recommendation domains that could have been co-optimized. This paper aims to address these issues by exploring the potential of multi-modal information in learning robust and generalizable sequence representations. We propose MISSRec, a multi-modal pre-training and transfer learning framework for SR. On the user side, we design a Transformer-based encoder-decoder model, where the contextual encoder learns to capture the sequence-level multi-modal user interests while a novel interest-aware decoder is developed to grasp item-modality-interest relations for better sequence representation. On the candidate item side, we adopt a dynamic fusion module to produce user-adaptive item representation, providing more precise matching between users and items. We pre-train the model with contrastive learning objectives and fine-tune it in an efficient manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of MISSRec, promising a practical solution for real-world recommendation scenarios. Data and code are available on \url{https://github.com/gimpong/MM23-MISSRec}., Comment: Accepted to ACM MM 2023. Data and code are available

Entity Linking (EL) is a fundamental task for Information Extraction and Knowledge Graphs. The general form of EL (i.e., end-to-end EL) aims to first find mentions in the given input document and then link the mentions to corresponding entities in a specific knowledge base. Recently, the paradigm of retriever-reader promotes the progress of end-to-end EL, benefiting from the advantages of dense entity retrieval and machine reading comprehension. However, the existing study only trains the retriever and the reader separately in a pipeline manner, which ignores the benefit that the interaction between the retriever and the reader can bring to the task. To advance the retriever-reader paradigm to perform more perfectly on end-to-end EL, we propose BEER$^2$, a Bidirectional End-to-End training framework for Retriever and Reader. Through our designed bidirectional end-to-end training, BEER$^2$ guides the retriever and the reader to learn from each other, make progress together, and ultimately improve EL performance. Extensive experiments on benchmarks of multiple domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed BEER$^2$.

Hashing is very popular for remote sensing image search. This article proposes a multiview hashing with learnable parameters to retrieve the queried images for a large-scale remote sensing dataset. Existing methods always neglect that real-world remote sensing data lies on a low-dimensional manifold embedded in high-dimensional ambient space. Unlike previous methods, this article proposes to learn the consensus compact codes in a view-specific low-dimensional subspace. Furthermore, we have added a hyperparameter learnable module to avoid complex parameter tuning. In order to prove the effectiveness of our method, we carried out experiments on three widely used remote sensing data sets and compared them with seven state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method can achieve competitive results compared to the other method., Comment: 5 pages,icassp accepted

Web and artificial intelligence technologies, especially semantic web and knowledge graph (KG), have recently raised significant attention in educational scenarios. Nevertheless, subject-specific KGs for K-12 education still lack sufficiency and sustainability from knowledge and data perspectives. To tackle these issues, we propose EDUKG, a heterogeneous sustainable K-12 Educational Knowledge Graph. We first design an interdisciplinary and fine-grained ontology for uniformly modeling knowledge and resource in K-12 education, where we define 635 classes, 445 object properties, and 1314 datatype properties in total. Guided by this ontology, we propose a flexible methodology for interactively extracting factual knowledge from textbooks. Furthermore, we establish a general mechanism based on our proposed generalized entity linking system for EDUKG's sustainable maintenance, which can dynamically index numerous heterogeneous resources and data with knowledge topics in EDUKG. We further evaluate EDUKG to illustrate its sufficiency, richness, and variability. We publish EDUKG with more than 252 million entities and 3.86 billion triplets. Our code and data repository is now available at https://github.com/THU-KEG/EDUKG., Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures

Technology companies building consumer-facing platforms may have access to massive-scale user population. In recent years, promotion with quantifiable incentive has become a popular approach for increasing active users on such platforms. On one hand, increased user activities can introduce network effect, bring in advertisement audience, and produce other benefits. On the other hand, massive-scale promotion causes massive cost. Therefore making promotion campaigns efficient in terms of return-on-investment (ROI) is of great interest to many companies. This paper proposes a practical two-stage framework that can optimize the ROI of various massive-scale promotion campaigns. In the first stage, users' personal promotion-response curves are modeled by machine learning techniques. In the second stage, business objectives and resource constraints are formulated into an optimization problem, the decision variables of which are how much incentive to give to each user. In order to do effective optimization in the second stage, counterfactual prediction and noise-reduction are essential for the first stage. We leverage existing counterfactual prediction techniques to correct treatment bias in data. We also introduce a novel deep neural network (DNN) architecture, the deep-isotonic-promotion-network (DIPN), to reduce noise in the promotion response curves. The DIPN architecture incorporates our prior knowledge of response curve shape, by enforcing isotonicity and smoothness. It out-performed regular DNN and other state-of-the-art shape-constrained models in our experiments.

While most network embedding techniques model the relative positions of nodes in a network, recently there has been significant interest in structural embeddings that model node role equivalences, irrespective of their distances to any specific nodes. We present PhUSION, a proximity-based unified framework for computing structural and positional node embeddings, which leverages well-established methods for calculating node proximity scores. Clarifying a point of contention in the literature, we show which step of PhUSION produces the different kinds of embeddings and what steps can be used by both. Moreover, by aggregating the PhUSION node embeddings, we obtain graph-level features that model information lost by previous graph feature learning and kernel methods. In a comprehensive empirical study with over 10 datasets, 4 tasks, and 35 methods, we systematically reveal successful design choices for node and graph-level machine learning with embeddings., Comment: SDM 2021

While the state-of-the-art performance on entity resolution (ER) has been achieved by deep learning, its effectiveness depends on large quantities of accurately labeled training data. To alleviate the data labeling burden, Active Learning (AL) presents itself as a feasible solution that focuses on data deemed useful for model training. Building upon the recent advances in risk analysis for ER, which can provide a more refined estimate on label misprediction risk than the simpler classifier outputs, we propose a novel AL approach of risk sampling for ER. Risk sampling leverages misprediction risk estimation for active instance selection. Based on the core-set characterization for AL, we theoretically derive an optimization model which aims to minimize core-set loss with non-uniform Lipschitz continuity. Since the defined weighted K-medoids problem is NP-hard, we then present an efficient heuristic algorithm. Finally, we empirically verify the efficacy of the proposed approach on real data by a comparative study. Our extensive experiments have shown that it outperforms the existing alternatives by considerable margins. Using ER as a test case, we demonstrate that risk sampling is a promising approach potentially applicable to other challenging classification tasks., Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures

Despite the significant progress of deep reinforcement learning (RL) in solving sequential decision making problems, RL agents often overfit to training environments and struggle to adapt to new, unseen environments. This prevents robust applications of RL in real world situations, where system dynamics may deviate wildly from the training settings. In this work, our primary contribution is to propose an information theoretic regularization objective and an annealing-based optimization method to achieve better generalization ability in RL agents. We demonstrate the extreme generalization benefits of our approach in different domains ranging from maze navigation to robotic tasks; for the first time, we show that agents can generalize to test parameters more than 10 standard deviations away from the training parameter distribution. This work provides a principled way to improve generalization in RL by gradually removing information that is redundant for task-solving; it opens doors for the systematic study of generalization from training to extremely different testing settings, focusing on the established connections between information theory and machine learning., Comment: 16 pages

While recent progress in deep reinforcement learning has enabled robots to learn complex behaviors, tasks with long horizons and sparse rewards remain an ongoing challenge. In this work, we propose an effective reward shaping method through predictive coding to tackle sparse reward problems. By learning predictive representations offline and using these representations for reward shaping, we gain access to reward signals that understand the structure and dynamics of the environment. In particular, our method achieves better learning by providing reward signals that 1) understand environment dynamics 2) emphasize on features most useful for learning 3) resist noise in learned representations through reward accumulation. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach in different domains ranging from robotic manipulation to navigation, and we show that reward signals produced through predictive coding are as effective for learning as hand-crafted rewards.

Hierarchical reinforcement learning has demonstrated significant success at solving difficult reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. Previous works have motivated the use of hierarchy by appealing to a number of intuitive benefits, including learning over temporally extended transitions, exploring over temporally extended periods, and training and exploring in a more semantically meaningful action space, among others. However, in fully observed, Markovian settings, it is not immediately clear why hierarchical RL should provide benefits over standard "shallow" RL architectures. In this work, we isolate and evaluate the claimed benefits of hierarchical RL on a suite of tasks encompassing locomotion, navigation, and manipulation. Surprisingly, we find that most of the observed benefits of hierarchy can be attributed to improved exploration, as opposed to easier policy learning or imposed hierarchical structures. Given this insight, we present exploration techniques inspired by hierarchy that achieve performance competitive with hierarchical RL while at the same time being much simpler to use and implement., Comment: Presented as an oral at the NeurIPS 2019 DeepRL Workshop