The missing data problem widely exists in real-life scenarios. The incomplete data analysis through imputation can amplify the errors or bias, hindering the effective analysis. Ex-isting tabular data representation methods overlook the missing state of data values, and thus cannot effectively deal with the incomplete data. In this paper, we propose a novel incomplete tabular data representation system, named MISS. It is capable of enabling all Transformer-based tabular representation methods to effectively handle incomplete data. MISS consists of two modules, i.e., missing mechanism learning (MML) and incomplete data representation (IDR). MML leverages a new missingness propensity score calculation strategy to learn the observed data distribution and missing mechanisms within incomplete data. IDR introduces a novel probability-driven Transformer block, in conjunction with an unbiased representation loss function, for effective representation. We prove that, MISS can eliminate the bias resulting from missingness. Extensive experiments on four public real-world datasets demonstrate that, MISS yields a more than 57 % accuracy gain with competitive efficiency, compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.

Correcting missing or erroneous data values is an essential task in data cleaning. Traditional pre-configuration error correction (EC) methods rely heavily on predefined rules or constraints, demanding significant domain knowledge and manual effort. While configuration-free EC approaches have been explored, they still demand extensive feature engineering or labeled data for intensive model training. In this paper, we propose a zero-training and interpretable EC system, named ZeroEC, that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate chain-of-thoughts (CoTs) and correction rules for EC, without the need for model training. ZeroEC consists of two modules, contextual-relevant tuple search (CTS) and training-free explainable correction (TEC). CTS constructs a contextual-relevant tuple retriever using a weighted cosine similarity function to efficiently identify the most relevant tuples for each dirty tuple, reducing redundancy in the LLM prompts and lowering computational costs. TEC employs a clustering-based representative tuple sampling strategy to alleviate “hallucination” risk by exposing LLMs to diverse types of data errors. It further prompts for generating correction CoTs for user-corrected representative tuples, as well as prompts for creating correction rules and explainable ECs, which automatically provide explanations for EC, all without the need for model training. Extensive experiments conducted on various real-world datasets demonstrate that ZeroEC achieves a 66.82% increase in accuracy and a 6.87x speedup compared to state-of-the-art methods. The codes and datasets of this paper are available at https://github.com/YangChen32768/ZeroEC.

Incomplete multi-view partial multi-label classification (IMvPMLC), which tackles the combined challenges of incompleteness in both multi-view and multi-label problems, has drawn considerable attention. Existing IMvPMLC methods have made progress but still face several challenges: (i) They mainly focus on the consistency of representations across multiple views but overlook the relationships among instances, leading to suboptimal representations. (ii) They primarily utilize only the available labels for supervised learning, ignoring the missing label distribution and limiting their ability to capture label correlations. In this paper, we propose a novel model named Dual Structure-guided Contrastive Network (DSCN) for IMvPMLC. Specifically, we introduce a similarity-guided instance-level contrastive learning mechanism to achieve multi-view consistent and discriminative representations across instances by leveraging instance structures, while a multi-view attention-based fusion strategy dynamically facilitates the fusion of multi-view representations to derive a robust consensus representation. Then, we design a multi-view shared classifier integrated with a correlation-guided label-level contrastive learning mechanism to enhance predictions by leveraging complementary information across multiple views and capturing label structures, effectively exploiting missing label distribution. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that, DSCN yields a more than 13% accuracy, compared with the state-of-the-art approaches. The code and datasets are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DSCN-D471.

Snapshot technology is crucial for data protection and system recovery in virtualized environments, particularly with the growing need for continuous snapshots to maintain the integrity of long-running web-based and distributed applications. However, traditional snapshot methods often suffer from performance bottlenecks, and inefficient storage usage. These challenges are closely tied to the way memory pages are accessed during VM execution, where memory access patterns show significant disparities between frequently accessed "hot" pages and less-used "cold" pages. In this paper, we introduce HeatSnap, a continuous snapshot system designed to address these issues by leveraging the uneven access frequencies of memory pages. HeatSnap distinguishes between intensive hot pages and dirty pages, applying specialized snapshotting and storage strategies to optimize the handling of both hot and cold memory regions. This approach aims to optimize snapshot efficiency, minimize performance impact on the VM, and decrease storage costs. Our implementation of HeatSnap on QEMU/KVM demonstrates significant improvements in VM performance loss, snapshot duration, and storage efficiency compared to existing methods, as evidenced by evaluations on common web and cloud-based workloads.

As a dominant paradigm in modern web applications, cloud computing has seen a surge in adoption. The deployment of vast and various workloads encapsulated within containers has become ubiquitous across cloud platforms, imposing substantial demands on the supporting infrastructure. However, Kubernetes (k8s), the de facto standard for container orchestration, struggles with low scheduling throughput and high latency in large-scale clusters. The primary challenges are identified as excessive load from read requests and resource contention between co-located components. In this paper, we present MerKury, a general and lightweight framework designed to enhance the Kubernetes performance for large-scale clusters. MerKury employs a dual strategy: first, it preprocesses specific requests to alleviate excessive load; second, it introduces an adaptive resource allocation algorithm to mitigate resource contention. Evaluations across various cluster scales demonstrate that MerKury notably augments node capacity by up to 4.5×, increases scheduling throughput by up to 7.3×, and reduces request latency by 5.6%-57.7%, outperforming vanilla Kubernetes and baseline resource allocation methods.

Hybrid storage solutions have emerged as potent strategies to alleviate the data storage bottlenecks prevalent in blockchain systems. These solutions harness off-chain Storage Services Providers (SP) in conjunction with Authenticated Data Structures (ADS) to ensure data integrity and accuracy. Despite these advancements, the reliance on centralized SPs raises concerns about query correctness, as the integrity of query results depends on the SPs' trustworthiness. Although ADS can verify the integrity of individual data points, they fall short of preventing SPs from omitting valid results. In this paper, we delineate the fundamental distinctions between data retrieval in blockchains and traditional database systems. Drawing upon these insights, we introduce the BPI framework, which employs a suite of validation models that ascertain the inclusion of all valid content in retrieval outcomes, with low overhead. We further present ''Articulated Search'', a query pattern specifically tailored for blockchain environments, which not only enhances retrieval efficiency but also substantially reduces costs during data user updates. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that the BPI framework achieves outstanding scalability and performance in keyword searches within blockchain environments, surpassing EthMB+ and state-of-the-art search databases commonly used in mainstream hybrid storage blockchains (HSB). Notably, the Articulated Search pattern improves query performance by over three orders of magnitude, highlighting its potential as a transformative approach to blockchain query optimization.

The storage location assignment problem for export containers (EC-SLAP) is crucial to the efficiency of cargo turnover in ports. Existing methods fall short in real-world applications due to the challenges of the unpredictability of container arrival sequences and the large-scale problem. We propose a new buffer-wise framework based on hierarchical reinforcement learning for EC-SLAP, aimed at optimizing container turnover efficiency. The framework comprises two processes: 1)Ranking Agentranks containers in the buffer, reducing the uncertainty of random arrival sequences compared to the immediate assignment. 2)Assigning Agentsassign storage locations in a two-step process by block and slot, diminishing the dimensionality of the large-scale discrete action space. We iteratively optimize agents by asynchronously obtaining rewards from the environment. In addition, to address the challenge of sparse rewards in long-sequence decision-making, we have developed a novel immediate reward function to enhance learning efficiency and accelerate convergence. We propose a new large-scale dataset, NZP-SLAD, collected from real-world historical data from the terminal operating system of Ningbo-Zhoushan Port and develop a realistic container terminal simulator. We conducted numerous offline simulations and tests with this dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves rapid convergence and significantly surpasses expert methods used in real-world production.