Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with one-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) face a severe trade-off between hardware efficiency and channel estimation accuracy. While generative adversarial networks (GANs) show promise for this challenge, their deployment is hindered by training instability and mode collapse. To address these issues, we propose ReRpGAN, a novel adversarial learning framework that integrates a regularized relativistic pairing GAN loss and anL1loss within a deep residual network. This architecture effectively stabilizes the training process and prevents mode collapse, enabling precise channel reconstruction from severely quantized signals. Extensive experiments on a realistic ray-tracing channel dataset validate our theoretical claims. Key findings demonstrate that ReRpGAN consistently outperforms conventional GAN-based and deep learning estimators, particularly in challenging scenarios with low signal-to-noise ratios and limited pilot overhead. Furthermore, unlike existing methods that suffer from divergence, ReRpGAN exhibits superior scalability, delivering improved estimation accuracy as the number of base station antennas increases. This work sets a new benchmark for robust, data-driven channel estimation in next-generation wireless systems.

The rapid development of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has enabled the integration of multiple modalities, including texts and images, within the large language model (LLM) framework. However, texts and images are usually interconnected, forming a multimodal attributed graph (MMAG). It is underexplored how MLLMs can incorporate the relational information (i.e., graph structure) and semantic information (i.e., texts and images) on such graphs for multimodal comprehension and generation. In this paper, we propose GraphGPT-o, which supports omni-multimodal understanding and creation on MMAGs. We first comprehensively study linearization variants to transform semantic and structural information as input for MLLMs. Then, we propose a hierarchical aligner that enables deep graph encoding, bridging the gap between MMAGs and MLLMs. Finally, we explore the inference choices, adapting MLLM to interleaved text and image generation in graph scenarios. Extensive experiments on three datasets from different domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Datasets and codes will be publicly available at https://github.com/YiFang99/GraphGPT-o.

Mean field games (MFGs) have emerged as a powerful framework for modeling interactions in large-scale multi-agent systems. Despite recent advancements in reinforcement learning (RL) for MFGs, existing methods are typically limited to finite spaces or stationary models, hindering their applicability to real-world problems. This paper introduces a novel deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm specifically designed for non-stationary continuous MFGs. The proposed approach builds upon a Fictitious Play (FP) methodology, leveraging DRL for best-response computation and supervised learning for average policy representation. Furthermore, it learns a representation of the time-dependent population distribution using a Conditional Normalizing Flow. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we evaluate it on three different examples of increasing complexity. By addressing critical limitations in scalability and density approximation, this work represents a significant advancement in applying DRL techniques to complex MFG problems, bringing the field closer to real-world multi-agent systems.

Microservice resilience, the ability of microservices to recover from failures and continue providing reliable and responsive services, is crucial for cloud vendors. However, the current practice relies on manually configured rules specific to a certain microservice system, resulting in labor-intensity and flexibility issues, given the large scale and high dynamics of microservices. A more labor-efficient and versatile solution is desired. Our insight is that resilient deployment can effectively prevent the dissemination of degradation from system performance metrics to user-aware metrics, and the latter directly affects service quality. In other words, failures in a non-resilient deployment can impact both types of metrics, leading to user dissatisfaction. With this in mind, we propose MicroRes, the first versatile resilience profiling framework for microservices via degradation dissemination indexing. MicroRes first injects failures into microservices and collects available monitoring metrics. Then, it ranks the metrics according to their contributions to the overall service degradation. It produces a resilience index by how much the degradation is disseminated from system performance metrics to user-aware metrics. Higher degradation dissemination indicates lower resilience. We evaluate MicroRes on two open-source and one industrial microservice system. The experiments show MicroRes' efficient and effective resilience profiling of microservices. We also showcase MicroRes' practical usage in production.

Disaggregated memory (DM) is a widely discussed datacenter architecture in academia and industry. It decouples computing and memory resources from monolithic servers into two network-connected resource pools. Range indexes are widely adopted by storage systems on DM to efficiently locate and query remote data. However, existing range indexes on DM suffer from either high computing-side cache consumption or high memory-side read amplifications. In this paper, we propose CHIME, a hybrid index combining B+ trees with hopscotch hashing, to achieve low cache consumption and low read amplifications simultaneously. There are three challenges in constructing CHIME on DM, i.e., the complicated optimistic synchronization, the extra metadata access, and the read amplifications introduced by hopscotch hashing. CHIME leverages 1) a three-level optimistic synchronization scheme to synchronize read and write operations with various granularities, 2) an access-aggregated metadata management technique to eliminate extra metadata accesses by piggybacking and replicating metadata, and 3) an effective hotness-aware speculative read mechanism to mitigate the read amplifications of hopscotch hashing. Experimental results show that CHIME outperforms the state-of-the-art range indexes on DM by up to 5.1× with the same cache size and achieves similar performance with up to 8.7× lower cache consumption.

Disaggregated memory (DM) is an increasingly prevalent architecture with high resource utilization. It separates computing and memory resources into two pools and interconnects them with fast networks. Existing range indexes on DM are based on B+ trees, which suffer from large inherent read and write amplifications. The read and write amplifications rapidly saturate the network bandwidth, resulting in low request throughput and high access latency of B+ trees on DM. In this article, we propose that the radix tree is more suitable for DM than the B+ tree due to smaller read and write amplifications. However, constructing a radix tree on DM is challenging due to the costly lock-based concurrency control, the bounded memory-side IOPS, and the complicated computing-side cache validation. To address these challenges, we design SMART , the first radix tree for disaggregated memory with high performance. Specifically, we leverage (1) a hybrid concurrency control scheme including lock-free internal nodes and fine-grained lock-based leaf nodes to reduce lock overhead, (2) a computing-side read-delegation and write-combining technique to break through the IOPS upper bound by reducing redundant I/Os, and (3) a simple yet effective reverse check mechanism for computing-side cache validation. Experimental results show that SMART achieves 6.1× higher throughput under typical write-intensive workloads and 2.8× higher throughput under read-only workloads in YCSB benchmarks, compared with state-of-the-art B+ trees on DM.

In-memory caching systems are fundamental building blocks in cloud services. However, due to the coupled CPU and memory on monolithic servers, existing caching systems cannot elastically adjust resources in a resource-efficient and agile manner. To achieve better elasticity, we propose to port in-memory caching systems to the disaggregated memory (DM) architecture, where compute and memory resources are decoupled and can be allocated flexibly. However, constructing an elastic caching system on DM is challenging since accessing cached objects with CPU-bypass remote memory accesses hinders the execution of caching algorithms. Moreover, the elastic changes of compute and memory resources on DM affect the access patterns of cached data, compromising the hit rates of caching algorithms. We design Ditto, the first caching system on DM, to address these challenges. Ditto first proposes a client-centric caching framework to efficiently execute various caching algorithms in the compute pool of DM, relying only on remote memory accesses. Then, Ditto employs a distributed adaptive caching scheme that adaptively switches to the best-fit caching algorithm in real-time based on the performance of multiple caching algorithms to improve cache hit rates. Our experiments show that Ditto effectively adapts to the changing resources on DM and outperforms the state-of-the-art caching systems by up to 3.6× in real-world workloads and 9× in YCSB benchmarks.

Code comment is important to facilitate code comprehension for developers. Recent studies suggest to generate comments automatically with deep learning, in particular, based on neural machine translation models. However, such a promising Neural Comment Generation (NCG) technique suffers from unsatisfactory performance, as well as poor usability, i.e., developers cannot easily understand and modify the auto-generated comments. This paper suggests that a proper interpretation of how the comments are generated can significantly improve the usability of NCG approaches. We propose a novel model-independent framework, namely CCLink, to interpret the auto-generated comments. CCLink generates a set of code mutants and obtains their corresponding comments. Based on these data, several contribution mining algorithms are designed to infer the key elements in code that contributes to the generation of the key phrases in the comments. The links between code and its auto-generated comment can thus be constructed. This in turn allows CCLink to visualize the links as the comment interpretations to developers. It greatly facilitates manual verification and correction of the comments. We examine the performance of CCLink with different contribution mining algorithms, NCG approaches, and real-world datasets. We also conduct an empirical study on 32 experienced Java programmers to evaluate the effectiveness of CCLink. The results show that CCLink is promising in making NCG more usable with a proper interpretation of the auto-generated comments.

Alerts are crucial for requesting prompt human intervention upon cloud anomalies. The quality of alerts significantly affects the cloud reliability and the cloud provider’s business revenue. In practice, we observe on-call engineers being hindered from quickly locating and fixing faulty cloud services because of the vast existence of misleading, non-informative, non-actionable alerts. We call the ineffectiveness of alerts "anti-patterns of alerts". To better understand the anti-patterns of alerts and provide actionable measures to mitigate anti-patterns, in this paper, we conduct the first empirical study on the practices of mitigating anti-patterns of alerts in an industrial cloud system. We study the alert strategies and the alert processing procedure at Huawei Cloud, a leading cloud provider. Our study combines the quantitative analysis of millions of alerts in two years and a survey with eighteen experienced engineers. As a result, we summarized four individual anti-patterns and two collective anti-patterns of alerts. We also summarize four current reactions to mitigate the anti-patterns of alerts, and the general preventative guidelines for the configuration of alert strategy. Lastly, we propose to explore the automatic evaluation of the Quality of Alerts (QoA), including the indicativeness, precision, and handleability of alerts, as a future research direction that assists in the automatic detection of alerts’ anti-patterns. The findings of our study are valuable for optimizing cloud monitoring systems and improving the reliability of cloud services.

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is becoming a prevalent paradigm in developing cloud applications. With FaaS, clients can develop applications as serverless functions, leaving the burden of resource management to cloud providers. However, FaaS platforms suffer from the performance degradation caused by the cold starts of serverless functions. Cold starts happen when serverless functions are invoked before they have been loaded into the memory. The problem is unavoidable because the memory in datacenters is typically too limited to hold all serverless functions simultaneously. The latency of cold function invocations will greatly degenerate the performance of FaaS platforms. Currently, FaaS platforms employ various scheduling methods to reduce the occurrences of cold starts. However, they do not consider the ubiquitous dependencies between serverless functions. Observing the potential of using dependencies to mitigate cold starts, we propose Defuse, a Dependency-guided Function Scheduler on FaaS platforms. Specifically, Defuse identifies two types of dependencies between serverless functions, i.e., strong dependencies and weak ones. It uses frequent pattern mining and positive point-wise mutual information to mine such dependencies respectively from function invocation histories. In this way, Defuse constructs a function dependency graph. The connected components (i.e., dependent functions) on the graph can be scheduled to diminish the occurrences of cold starts. We evaluate the effectiveness of Defuse by applying it to an industrial serverless dataset. The experimental results show that Defuse can reduce 22% of memory usage while having a 35% decrease in function cold-start rates compared with the state-of-the-art method.

Service reliability is one of the key challenges that cloud providers have to deal with. In cloud systems, unplanned service failures may cause severe cascading impacts on their dependent services, deteriorating customer satisfaction. Predicting the cascading impacts accurately and efficiently is critical to the operation and maintenance of cloud systems. Existing approaches identify whether one service depends on another via distributed tracing but no prior work focused on discriminating to what extent the dependency between cloud services is. In this paper, we survey the outages and the procedure for failure diagnosis in two cloud providers to motivate the definition of the intensity of dependency. We define the intensity of dependency between two services as how much the status of the callee service influences the caller service. Then we propose AID, the first approach to predict the intensity of dependencies between cloud services. AID first generates a set of candidate dependency pairs from the spans. AID then represents the status of each cloud service with a multivariate time series aggregated from the spans. With the representation of services, AID calculates the similarities between the statuses of the caller and the callee of each candidate pair. Finally, AID aggregates the similarities to produce a unified value as the intensity of the dependency. We evaluate AID on the data collected from an open-source microservice benchmark and a cloud system in production. The experimental results show that AID can efficiently and accurately predict the intensity of dependencies. We further demonstrate the usefulness of our method in a large-scale commercial cloud system.