Existing large language model (LLM)-based table question answering (TableQA) methods primarily involve decomposition reasoning and answer verification processes. However, decomposing questions solely at the semantic level, without considering the factual evidence in tables, fails to significantly reduce the difficulty for LLMs in understanding the key information in questions. Furthermore, reasoning and verification without supporting factual evidence are often arbitrary and unreliable. In light of these issues, this paper proposes a Syllogism-Inspired Reasoning and Verification method (SIRV), which performs reliable decomposition reasoning and answer verification based on the evidential concept of syllogism. Specifically, SIRV extracts question-relevant factual evidence from the table to construct the premises. Based on the constructed premises, SIRV plans reasoning paths and generates sub-questions that explicitly indicate relevant factual evidence, performing evidence-centered reasoning. Additionally, SIRV examines the consistency between the premises and the table to focus on factual evidence, thereby reliably identifying and correcting errors in the reasoning process. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, SIRV achieves performance improvements of up to 5.24% in single-mode and 2.89% in joint reasoning, while also demonstrating excellent generalization ability and efficiency.

Multimodal emotion analysis is pivotal in decoding complex human affect by integrating diverse data sources such as text, audio, and visual signals. In this article, we introduce contextual interaction-based multimodal emotion analysis with enhanced semantic information (CIME), a novel spatio-temporal interaction network that significantly improves emotion recognition accuracy and robustness. CIME employs a text-centric cross-modal attention mechanism to refine semantic representations, while simultaneously leveraging a graph convolutional network to model contextual dialog information by capturing both intraspeaker and interspeaker relationships. This dual approach enables the effective fusion of modality-specific cues and the mining of latent emotional associations across modalities. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark datasets—including IEMOCAP and MOSEI—demonstrate that CIME consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of overall classification accuracy and weighted F1-scores. Furthermore, detailed ablation studies underscore the critical contributions of both the cross-modal attention and graph-based contextual modules.

Modern data centers exist as infrastructure in the era of Big Data. Big data processing applications are the major computing workload of data centers. Electricity cost accounts for about 50% of data centers’ operational costs. Therefore, the energy consumed for running distributed data processing algorithms on a data center is starting to attract both academia and industry. Most works study the energy consumption from the hardware perspective and only a few of them from the algorithm perspective. A general and hardware-independent energy evaluation model for the algorithms is in demand. With the model, algorithm designers can evaluate the energy consumption, compare energy consumption features and facilitate energy consumption optimization of distributed data processing algorithms. Inspired by the time complexity model, we propose an energy complexity model for describing the trends that an algorithm's energy consumption grows with the algorithm's input size. We argue that a good algorithm, especially for processing Big Data, should have a ‘small’ energy complexity. We define$E(n)$to represent the functional relationship that associates an algorithm's input size$n$with its notional energy consumption$E$. Based on the well-known abstract Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP) computer and programming model, we present a complete$E(n)$solution, including abstraction, generalization, quantification, derivation, comparison, analysis, examples, verification, and applications. Comprehensive experimental analysis shows that the proposed energy complexity model is practical, interestingly, and not equivalent to time complexity.

A lot of cloud systems are adopted in industry and academia to face the explosion of the data volume and the arrival of the big data era. Meanwhile, energy efficiency and energy saving become major concerns for data centers where massive cloud systems are deployed. However, energy waste is quite common due to resource over-provisioning. In this paper, using Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS), a frequency selection approach is introduced to improve the energy efficiency of cloud systems in terms of resource over-provisioning. In the approach, two algorithms, Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Monte Carlo Tree Search Algorithm (MCTS), are proposed. Cloud database system is taken as an example to evaluate the approach. The results of the experiments show that the algorithms have great scalability which can be applied to a 120-nodes case with high accuracy compared to optimal solutions (up to 99.9% and 99.6% for GA and MCTS respectively). According to an optimality bound analysis, 21 % of energy can be saved at most using our frequency selection approach.