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Index is an important component in database systems. Learned indexes have been shown to outperform traditional tree-based index structures for fixed-sized integer or floating point keys. However, the application of the learned solution to variable-length string keys is under-researched. Our experiments show that existing learned indexes for strings fail to outperform traditional string indexes, such as HOT and ART. String keys are long and variable sized, and often contain skewed prefixes, which make the last-mile search expensive, and adversely impact the capability of learned models to capture the skewed distribution of string keys. In this paper, we propose a novel learned index for string keys, LITS (Learned Index with Hash-enhanced Prefix Table and Sub-tries). We propose an optimized learned model, combining a global Hash-enhanced Prefix Table (HPT) and a per-node local linear model to better distinguish string keys. Moreover, LITS exploits compact leaf nodes and hybrid structures with a PMSS model for efficient point and range operations. Our experimental results using eleven string data sets show that LITS achieves up to 2.43x and 2.27x improvement over HOT and ART for point operations, and attains comparable scan performance.

Amidst the advancements in image-based Large Vision-Language Models (image-LVLM), the transition to video-based models (video-LVLM) is hindered by the limited availability of quality video data. This paper addresses the challenge by leveraging the visual commonalities between images and videos to efficiently evolve image-LVLMs into video-LVLMs. We present a cost-effective video-LVLM that enhances model architecture, introduces innovative training strategies, and identifies the most effective types of video instruction data. Our innovative weighted token sampler significantly compresses the visual token numbers of each video frame, effectively cutting computational expenses. We also find that judiciously using just 10% of the video data, compared to prior video-LVLMs, yields impressive results during various training phases. Moreover, we delve into the influence of video instruction data in limited-resource settings, highlighting the significance of incorporating video training data that emphasizes temporal understanding to enhance model performance. The resulting Fewer Tokens and Fewer Videos LVLM (FTFV-LVLM) exhibits exceptional performance across video and image benchmarks, validating our model's design and training approaches.

The SoccerNet 2023 challenges were the third annual video understanding challenges organized by the SoccerNet team. For this third edition, the challenges were composed of seven vision-based tasks split into three main themes. The first theme, broadcast video understanding, is composed of three high-level tasks related to describing events occurring in the video broadcasts: (1) action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to global actions in soccer, (2) ball action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to the soccer ball change of state, and (3) dense video captioning, focusing on describing the broadcast with natural language and anchored timestamps. The second theme, field understanding, relates to the single task of (4) camera calibration, focusing on retrieving the intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters from images. The third and last theme, player understanding, is composed of three low-level tasks related to extracting information about the players: (5) re-identification, focusing on retrieving the same players across multiple views, (6) multiple object tracking, focusing on tracking players and the ball through unedited video streams, and (7) jersey number recognition, focusing on recognizing the jersey number of players from tracklets. Compared to the previous editions of the SoccerNet challenges, tasks (2-3-7) are novel, including new annotations and data, task (4) was enhanced with more data and annotations, and task (6) now focuses on end-to-end approaches. More information on the tasks, challenges, and leaderboards are available on https://www.soccer-net.org. Baselines and development kits can be found on https://github.com/SoccerNet.

The SoccerNet 2022 challenges were the second annual video understanding challenges organized by the SoccerNet team. In 2022, the challenges were composed of 6 vision-based tasks: (1) action spotting, focusing on retrieving action timestamps in long untrimmed videos, (2) replay grounding, focusing on retrieving the live moment of an action shown in a replay, (3) pitch localization, focusing on detecting line and goal part elements, (4) camera calibration, dedicated to retrieving the intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters, (5) player re-identification, focusing on retrieving the same players across multiple views, and (6) multiple object tracking, focusing on tracking players and the ball through unedited video streams. Compared to last year's challenges, tasks (1-2) had their evaluation metrics redefined to consider tighter temporal accuracies, and tasks (3-6) were novel, including their underlying data and annotations. More information on the tasks, challenges and leaderboards are available on https://www.soccer-net.org. Baselines and development kits are available on https://github.com/SoccerNet., Comment: Accepted at ACM MMSports 2022

A Join-Project operation is a join operation followed by a duplicate eliminating projection operation. It is used in a large variety of applications, including entity matching, set analytics, and graph analytics. Previous work proposes a hybrid design that exploits the classical solution (i.e., join and deduplication), and MM (matrix multiplication) to process the sparse and the dense portions of the input data, respectively. However, we observe three problems in the state-of-the-art solution: 1) The outputs of the sparse and dense portions overlap, requiring an extra deduplication step; 2) Its table-to-matrix transformation makes an over-simplified assumption of the attribute values; and 3) There is a mismatch between the employed MM in BLAS packages and the characteristics of the Join-Project operation. In this paper, we propose DIM3, an optimized algorithm for the Join-Project operation. To address 1), we propose an intersection-free partition method to completely remove the final deduplication step. For 2), we develop an optimized design for mapping attribute values to natural numbers. For 3), we propose DenseEC and SparseBMM algorithms to exploit the structure of Join-Project for better efficiency. Moreover, we extend DIM3 to consider partial result caching and support Join-op queries, including Join-Aggregate and MJP (Multi-way Joins with Projection). Experimental results using both real-world and synthetic data sets show that DIM3 outperforms previous Join-Project solutions by a factor of 2.3x-18x. Compared to RDBMSs, DIM3 achieves orders of magnitude speedups.

In spite of many dataset efforts for human action recognition, current computer vision algorithms are still limited to coarse-grained spatial and temporal annotations among human daily life. In this paper, we introduce a novel large-scale video dataset dubbed SEAL for multi-grained Spatio-tEmporal Action Localization. SEAL consists of two kinds of annotations, SEAL Tubes and SEAL Clips. We observe that atomic actions can be combined into many complex activities. SEAL Tubes provide both atomic action and complex activity annotations in tubelet level, producing 49.6k atomic actions spanning 172 action categories and 17.7k complex activities spanning 200 activity categories. SEAL Clips localizes atomic actions in space during two-second clips, producing 510.4k action labels with multiple labels per person. Extensive experimental results show that SEAL significantly helps to advance video understanding., Comment: 17 pages,6 figures

Temporal action detection (TAD) aims to detect the semantic labels and boundaries of action instances in untrimmed videos. Current mainstream approaches are multi-step solutions, which fall short in efficiency and flexibility. In this paper, we propose a unified network for TAD, termed Faster-TAD, by re-purposing a Faster-RCNN like architecture. To tackle the unique difficulty in TAD, we make important improvements over the original framework. We propose a new Context-Adaptive Proposal Module and an innovative Fake-Proposal Generation Block. What's more, we use atomic action features to improve the performance. Faster-TAD simplifies the pipeline of TAD and gets remarkable performance on lots of benchmarks, i.e., ActivityNet-1.3 (40.01% mAP), HACS Segments (38.39% mAP), SoccerNet-Action Spotting (54.09% mAP). It outperforms existing single-network detector by a large margin., Comment: 16 pages,5 figures

Index plays an essential role in modern database engines to accelerate the query processing. The new paradigm of "learned index" has significantly changed the way of designing index structures in DBMS. The key insight is that indexes could be regarded as learned models that predict the position of a lookup key in the dataset. While such studies show promising results in both lookup time and index size, they cannot efficiently support update operations. Although recent studies have proposed some preliminary approaches to support update, they are at the cost of scarifying the lookup performance as they suffer from the overheads brought by imprecise predictions in the leaf nodes. In this paper, we propose LIPP, a brand new framework of learned index to address such issues. Similar with state-of-the-art learned index structures, LIPP is able to support all kinds of index operations, namely lookup query, range query, insert, delete, update and bulkload. Meanwhile, we overcome the limitations of previous studies by properly extending the tree structure when dealing with update operations so as to eliminate the deviation of location predicted by the models in the leaf nodes. Moreover, we further propose a dynamic adjustment strategy to ensure that the height of the tree index is tightly bounded and provide comprehensive theoretical analysis to illustrate it. We conduct an extensive set of experiments on several real-life and synthetic datasets. The results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art solutions, achieving by up to 4x for a broader class of workloads with different index operations.

Real-world graphs often contain spatio-temporal information and evolve over time. Compared with static graphs, spatio-temporal graphs have very different characteristics, presenting more significant challenges in data volume, data velocity, and query processing. In this paper, we describe three representative applications to understand the features of spatio-temporal graphs. Based on the commonalities of the applications, we define a formal spatio-temporal graph model, where a graph consists of location vertices, object vertices, and event edges. Then we discuss a set of design goals to meet the requirements of the applications: (i) supporting up to 10 billion object vertices, 10 million location vertices, and 100 trillion edges in the graph, (ii) supporting up to 1 trillion new edges that are streamed in daily, and (iii) minimizing cross-machine communication for query processing. We propose and evaluate PAST, a framework for efficient PArtitioning and query processing of Spatio-Temporal graphs. Experimental results show that PAST successfully achieves the above goals. It improves query performance by orders of magnitude compared with state-of-the-art solutions, including JanusGraph, Greenplum, Spark and ST-Hadoop., Comment: Section 5.1.1 is modified

Node2Vec is a state-of-the-art general-purpose feature learning method for network analysis. However, current solutions cannot run Node2Vec on large-scale graphs with billions of vertices and edges, which are common in real-world applications. The existing distributed Node2Vec on Spark incurs significant space and time overhead. It runs out of memory even for mid-sized graphs with millions of vertices. Moreover, it considers at most 30 edges for every vertex in generating random walks, causing poor result quality. In this paper, we propose Fast-Node2Vec, a family of efficient Node2Vec random walk algorithms on a Pregel-like graph computation framework. Fast-Node2Vec computes transition probabilities during random walks to reduce memory space consumption and computation overhead for large-scale graphs. The Pregel-like scheme avoids space and time overhead of Spark's read-only RDD structures and shuffle operations. Moreover, we propose a number of optimization techniques to further reduce the computation overhead for popular vertices with large degrees. Empirical evaluation show that Fast-Node2Vec is capable of computing Node2Vec on graphs with billions of vertices and edges on a mid-sized machine cluster. Compared to Spark-Node2Vec, Fast-Node2Vec achieves 7.7--122x speedups.