Aggregated time series are widely used in business and economics, where top-level sequences (e.g., category sales) aggregated from underlying sequences (e.g., individual items) often exhibit clearer trends and are therefore typically the primary focus of forecasting tasks. However, treating top-level sequences as ordinary multivariate time series is inappropriate in the presence of coupled aggregation constraints. The core challenge arises in coupled aggregation structures, where a single underlying sequence contributes to multiple top-level sequences, as simple nonnegativity constraints of underlying sequences induce highly complex constraints among top-level sequences. Existing methods fail to achieve high accuracy while satisfying these constraints. To address this, we propose ProCAST, a projection-based framework that adjusts forecasts from any multivariate base model to satisfy coupled aggregation constraints. By introducing virtual underlying sequences and leveraging orthogonal and oblique projection, our method ensures that the top-level forecasts are feasible without explicitly deriving complex constraints. Theoretically, we prove that the proposed method guarantees improved accuracy under distance-based loss functions. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our method completely eliminates constraint violations while achieving higher accuracy than current state-of-the-art approaches.

Many internet companies operate multiple flagship applications, each of which can be regarded as a distinct business domain, covering areas such as video, reading, and gaming. Within each domain, diverse recommendation scenarios coexist, and users engage in various tasks with heterogeneous behaviors. In our industrial setting, we observe three key phenomena that existing methods rarely address: (i) users' Cross-Domain Interests (CDI) are weakly exploited, since behavior sequences are often pooled for efficiency, losing transferable cross-domain dependencies; (ii) multi-domain, scenario, and task variations are under-modeled, making it difficult to capture fine-grained complementarities; and (iii) multimodal features remain misaligned with ID features, especially when different domains emphasize different modalities. These gaps hinder cross-product collaboration.

Carpooling Route Planning(CRP) has become an important issue with the growth of low-carbon traffic systems. We investigate a novel, meaningful and challenging scenario for CRP in industry, calledMulti-Candidate Carpooling Route Planning(MCRP) problem, where each passenger may have several potential positions to get on and off the car. We surprisingly notice that this problem can be easily generalized for similar services such as express, takeout, or crowdsensing services, which means MCRP is a new fundamental combinatorial optimization problem. Traditional graph search algorithms or indexing methods are usually time and space consuming or perform poorly, which are not suitable for solving the problem. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end encoder-decoder model to plan a route for each many-to-one carpooling order with various data-driven mechanisms such as graph partitioning and feature crossover. The encoder is a filter-integrated Graph Convolution Network with external information fusion combining a supervised pre-training classification task, while the latter mimics a pointer network with a rule-based mask mechanism and a domain feature crossover module. We validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our model based on both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Traffic flow prediction is a critical issue in transportation engineering and presents distinct challenges when handling large-scale datasets in the real world. Existing complex spatio-temporal forecasting paradigms use the same parameters to fit traffic sequences with varying spatio-temporal features, and tend to train an average performance model over different time series. This approach greatly reduces their accuracy when applied to larger road networks. Moreover, the significant differences in traffic data distribution from one city to another can also pose great challenges. The same model may be excellent for one city and mediocre when applied to another. To this end, we propose a Meta Backbone Agnostic Spatio-Temporal Clustering Framework for Traffic Forecasting on Large-Scale Road Networks named MetaSTC. We tackle the disparities of spatio-temporal features of traffic flow through a spatio-temporal clustering-based strategy. We design meta-learner for large-scale road network that dynamically extracts the shared information across roads in the same sub-task. In this way, the model can represent task-specific details with a simpler model and make quick and accurate predictions. Our paradigm is backbone-agnostic and can be combined with different traffic prediction models, solving the problem caused by the difference in data distribution. Extensive experimental results conducted on real-world traffic dataset demonstrate the high accuracy and computational efficiency of our model over SOTA approaches.

The sweep coverage problem is one of the important issues in spatial crowdsourcing, which requires task participants to monitor a series of Points of Interest (PoIs) periodically. In this paper, we study the Cooperative Sweep Coverage (CSC) problem with the objective of minimizing the maximum sweep period. We propose an iterative clustering algorithm based on spherical projection, called SP-Cycle. The algorithm firstly projects the points in the 2D space to a spherical surface in the 3D space. It then utilizes a new balancing clustering algorithm and uses an iterative coordinate updating method in the 3D spherical space based on the gradient descent, the aim of which is to use the simple minimum spanning tree length computation in the spherical surface to replace the complex Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) cycle computation in the original 2D space, which improves the performance while keeping a low computational complexity. After we get the clusters, we can compute the lengths of TSP cycles and enter a new iteration. Experimental results based on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. The code is available at https://github.com/GaoYucen/CSC.

Car-hailing services play an important role in the modern transportation system, and the utilities of the service providers highly depend on the efficiency of route planning algorithms. A widely adopted route planning framework is to assign weights to roads and compute the routes with the shortest path algorithms. Existing techniques of weight-assigning often focus on the traveling time and length of the roads, but cannot incorporate with the preferences of the passengers (users).

Spatial Crowdsourcing (SC) is a promising service that incentives workers to finish location-based tasks with high quality by providing rewards. Worker recruitment is a core issue in SC, for which most state-of-the-art algorithms focus on designing incentive mechanisms based on the existing SC worker pool. However, they may fail when the number of SC workers is not enough, especially for the new SC platforms. In recent years, social networks have been found to be helpful for worker recruitment by selecting seed workers to spread the task information so as to inspire more social users to participate, but how to select seed workers remains a challenge. Existing methods typically require numerous iterative searches leading to inefficiency in facing the big picture and failing to cope with dynamic environments.

Consistent routing updates through Software-Defined Networking (SDN) can be difficult due to the asynchronous and distributed nature of the data plane. Recent studies have achieved consistent unicast routing updates. However, achieving consistent updates with drop-freeness and duplicate-freeness remains a challenge for multicast with fewer known results. This paper proposes a Novel Ordered Update Scheme called Nous, a novel approach that offers a comprehensive solution for consistently updating multicast routing based on SDN. To avoid duplicate entries, Nous configures the inport match field in the forwarding rules. Nous implements a dependency graph to schedule update operations dynamically. It also solves the Replace Operation Tree Migration Problem (ROTMP) using a greedy solution. To compare the greedy solution with the optimal solution, we employ the state-of-the-art mathematical programming solver Gurobi Optimizer 7.5 (for solving the optimization problem), Mininet 2.0, and Floodlight 1.2 (for simulation and comparison) to obtain a near-optimal solution. Simulation results show that using the greedy solution, Nous can usually achieve near-optimal solutions to the ROTMP with an average of fewer than 1.2 rounds and within 10 ms in different scenarios. This makes Nous the first ordered update scheme to guarantee two consistent states simultaneously.

With the growing demand for global trade transportation, the shipping container market has gained an increasingly important position. As a key issue of the market, container pricing is regarded as an important indicator to adjust the market supply and demand as well as the revenue of liner enterprises. Although various methods aimed at increasing enterprise revenue, such as expert pricing and dynamic pricing, have been proposed by industry and academia in recent years, these approaches rarely yield worst-case performance guarantee for the double-sided online scenarios of commodities and buyers.To cater to the double-sided online scenario and provide theoretical performance guarantee, we propose an online learning-based pricing framework named Balancing Inventory and Revenue with -chasing Decider (BIRD). BIRD determines container price by combining advantages of given multiple online pricing strategies. We utilize a strategy selector A to select a proper target strategy and use an ϵ-chasing decider ${{{\mathfrak{D}}}^{Cha\operatorname{s} ing}}$ to determine the price. BIRD is proven to combine the advantages of multiple online pricing strategies to achieve the performance close to the posterior optimal strategy for any sequence of online buyers on realistic sales platforms with inventory limitation. BIRD is proved to yield a vanishing regret for the online posted pricing problem with the features of limited inventory and multi-unit demand. Based on the historical data provided by COSCO, one of the largest liner enterprises in the world, we experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Wireless Charging Vehicles (WCVs) have been widely explored as a means of enabling continuous operation of sensors that are powered by batteries. However, the energy consumption of WCVs can be inefficient, leading to insufficient energy supply for sensors that are located in challenging-to-access areas. Consequently, there is a need to design an effective charging and energy sharing scheme for sensors to improve the quality of service in this setup. This paper focuses on the Joint optimization of Mobile charging and Energy sharing of sensors (JOIN-ME) problem, which is known to be NP-hard. To address this challenge, we first transform JOIN-ME into a submodular maximization problem with general constraints. Subsequently, we propose the Routing planning, Mobile charging, and Energy sharing for Sensing devices (RMES) algorithm, which has an approximation ratio of 1/8(1-1/e). Finally, we conduct experiments to showcase the superior performance of RMES compared to existing baselines, under varying scales and constraints. Our work on the design of an efficient charging and energy sharing scheme for sensors can significantly improve the reliability and longevity of wireless sensor networks, enabling the deployment of these networks in critical applications such as environmental monitoring, crowd sensing, and security surveillance.