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This survey paper conducts a comprehensive analysis of the evolution and contemporary landscape of recommendation systems, which have been extensively incorporated across a myriad of web applications. It delves into the progression of personalized recommendation methodologies tailored for online products or services, organizing the array of recommendation techniques into four main categories: content-based, collaborative filtering, knowledge-based, and hybrid approaches, each designed to cater to specific contexts. The document provides an in-depth review of both the historical underpinnings and the cutting-edge innovations in the domain of recommendation systems, with a special focus on implementations leveraging big data analytics. The paper also highlights the utilization of prominent datasets such as MovieLens, Amazon Reviews, Netflix Prize, Last.fm, and Yelp in evaluating recommendation algorithms. It further outlines and explores the predominant challenges encountered in the current generation of recommendation systems, including issues related to data sparsity, scalability, and the imperative for diversified recommendation outputs. The survey underscores these challenges as promising directions for subsequent research endeavors within the discipline. Additionally, the paper examines various real-life applications driven by recommendation systems, addressing the hurdles involved in seamlessly integrating these systems into everyday life. Ultimately, the survey underscores how the advancements in recommendation systems, propelled by big data technologies, have the potential to significantly enhance real-world experiences., Comment: 34 pages, 8 figures, 2 table

To enhance robustness of complex networked systems, a simple method is introducing reinforced nodes which always function during failure propagation. A random scheme of node reinforcement can be considered as a benchmark for finding an optimal reinforcement solution. Yet there still lacks a systematic evaluation on how node reinforcement affects network structure at a mesoscopic level upon failures. Here we study this problem through the lens of $K$-cores of networks. Based on an analytical percolation framework, we first show that, on uncorrelated random graphs, with a critical size of reinforced nodes, an abrupt emergence of $K$-cores is smoothed out to a continuous one, and a detailed phase diagram is derived. We then show that, with a cost-benefit analysis on random reinforcement, for proper weight factors in cost functions with constant and increasing marginal costs, a gain function shows a unimodality, thus we can analytically find an optimal reinforcement fraction by locating the maximal gain. In all, our framework offers a gain-oriented analytical perspective to designing robust interconnected systems., Comment: 14 pages, including 10 figures

The design automation of analog circuits is a longstanding challenge. This paper presents a reinforcement learning method enhanced by graph learning to automate the analog circuit parameter optimization at the pre-layout stage, i.e., finding device parameters to fulfill desired circuit specifications. Unlike all prior methods, our approach is inspired by human experts who rely on domain knowledge of analog circuit design (e.g., circuit topology and couplings between circuit specifications) to tackle the problem. By originally incorporating such key domain knowledge into policy training with a multimodal network, the method best learns the complex relations between circuit parameters and design targets, enabling optimal decisions in the optimization process. Experimental results on exemplary circuits show it achieves human-level design accuracy (99%) 1.5X efficiency of existing best-performing methods. Our method also shows better generalization ability to unseen specifications and optimality in circuit performance optimization. Moreover, it applies to design radio-frequency circuits on emerging semiconductor technologies, breaking the limitations of prior learning methods in designing conventional analog circuits., Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2202.13185

Rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technology have led to significant accuracy improvements in a myriad of application domains at the cost of larger and more compute-intensive models. Training such models on massive amounts of data typically requires scaling to many compute nodes and relies heavily on collective communication algorithms, such as all-reduce, to exchange the weight gradients between different nodes. The overhead of these collective communication operations in a distributed AI training system can bottleneck its performance, with more pronounced effects as the number of nodes increases. In this paper, we first characterize the all-reduce operation overhead by profiling distributed AI training. Then, we propose a new smart network interface card (NIC) for distributed AI training systems using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to accelerate all-reduce operations and optimize network bandwidth utilization via data compression. The AI smart NIC frees up the system's compute resources to perform the more compute-intensive tensor operations and increases the overall node-to-node communication efficiency. We perform real measurements on a prototype distributed AI training system comprised of 6 compute nodes to evaluate the performance gains of our proposed FPGA-based AI smart NIC compared to a baseline system with regular NICs. We also use these measurements to validate an analytical model that we formulate to predict performance when scaling to larger systems. Our proposed FPGA-based AI smart NIC enhances overall training performance by 1.6x at 6 nodes, with an estimated 2.5x performance improvement at 32 nodes, compared to the baseline system using conventional NICs., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures

In this paper, the first family of conforming finite element divdiv complexes on cuboid grids in three dimensions is constructed. Besides, a new family of conforming finite element divdiv complexes with enhanced smoothness on tetrahedral grids is presented. These complexes are exact in the sense that the range of each discrete map is the kernel space of the succeeding one.

JPEG is a popular image compression method widely used by individuals, data center, cloud storage and network filesystems. However, most recent progress on image compression mainly focuses on uncompressed images while ignoring trillions of already-existing JPEG images. To compress these JPEG images adequately and restore them back to JPEG format losslessly when needed, we propose a deep learning based JPEG recompression method that operates on DCT domain and propose a Multi-Level Cross-Channel Entropy Model to compress the most informative Y component. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with traditional JPEG recompression methods including Lepton, JPEG XL and CMIX. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first learned compression method that losslessly transcodes JPEG images to more storage-saving bitstreams., Comment: CVPR 2022

Recently, learned image compression techniques have achieved remarkable performance, even surpassing the best manually designed lossy image coders. They are promising to be large-scale adopted. For the sake of practicality, a thorough investigation of the architecture design of learned image compression, regarding both compression performance and running speed, is essential. In this paper, we first propose uneven channel-conditional adaptive coding, motivated by the observation of energy compaction in learned image compression. Combining the proposed uneven grouping model with existing context models, we obtain a spatial-channel contextual adaptive model to improve the coding performance without damage to running speed. Then we study the structure of the main transform and propose an efficient model, ELIC, to achieve state-of-the-art speed and compression ability. With superior performance, the proposed model also supports extremely fast preview decoding and progressive decoding, which makes the coming application of learning-based image compression more promising., Comment: accepted by CVPR 2022 (oral)