While learned video codecs have demonstrated great promise, they have yet to achieve sufficient efficiency for practical deployment. In this work, we propose several novel ideas for learned video compression which allow for improved performance for the low-latency mode (I- and P-frames only) along with a considerable increase in computational efficiency. In this setting, for natural videos our approach compares favorably across the entire R-D curve under metrics PSNR, MS-SSIM and VMAF against all mainstream video standards (H.264, H.265, AV1) and all ML codecs. At the same time, our approach runs at least 5x faster and has fewer parameters than all ML codecs which report these figures.Our contributions include a flexible-rate framework allowing a single model to cover a large and dense range of bitrates, at a negligible increase in computation and parameter count; an efficient backbone optimized for ML-based codecs; and a novel in-loop flow prediction scheme which leverages prior information towards more efficient compression.We benchmark our method, which we call ELF-VC (Efficient, Learned and Flexible Video Coding) on popular video test sets UVG and MCL-JCV under metrics PSNR, MS-SSIM and VMAF. For example, on UVG under PSNR, it reduces the BD-rate by 44% against H.264, 26% against H.265, 15% against AV1, and 35% against the current best ML codec. At the same time, on an NVIDIA Titan V GPU our approach encodes/decodes VGA at 49/91 FPS, HD 720 at 19/35 FPS, and HD 1080 at 10/18 FPS.

Teradata Vantage is a platform for integrating a broad range of analytical functions and capabilities with the Teradata's SQL engine. One of the main challenges in optimizing the execution of these analytical functions is that many of them are not only black boxes, but also have polymorphic nature, i.e., their behavior and properties may change depending on the invocation context. In this paper, we first demonstrate the inherent complexity in optimizing polymorphic functions, and then present the Vantage's Collaborative Optimizer , which is a cross-platform optimizer designed for optimizing the analytical functions invoked from within the SQL engine. The Collaborative Optimizer is the industry-first effort towards enabling analytics-aware optimizations over polymorphic analytical functions. We present a novel markup language-based approach for expressing the functions' polymorphic properties via a set of well-defined instructions. The Collaborative Optimizer uses these instructions at query time to infer the corresponding properties, and then decide on the applicable optimizations. From several possible optimizations, we showcase two core optimizations, namely "projection push" and "predicate push" , which aim at optimizing the data movement to and from the analytical functions. The experiments using the Teradata-MLE analytical system demonstrate the expressiveness power and flexibility of the proposed markup language. Moreover, benchmark and real-world customer queries show the significant performance gain that the Collaborative Optimizer brings to the Vantage system.

We present a new algorithm for video coding, learned end-to-end for the low-latency mode. In this setting, our approach outperforms all existing video codecs across nearly the entire bitrate range. To our knowledge, this is the first ML-based method to do so. We evaluate our approach on standard video compression test sets of varying resolutions, and benchmark against all mainstream commercial codecs in the low-latency mode. On standard-definition videos, HEVC/H.265, AVC/H.264 and VP9 typically produce codes up to 60% larger than our algorithm. On high-definition 1080p videos, H.265 and VP9 typically produce codes up to 20% larger, and H.264 up to 35% larger. Furthermore, our approach does not suffer from blocking artifacts and pixelation, and thus produces videos that are more visually pleasing. We propose two main contributions. The first is a novel architecture for video compression, which (1) generalizes motion estimation to perform any learned compensation beyond simple translations, (2) rather than strictly relying on previously transmitted reference frames, maintains a state of arbitrary information learned by the model, and (3) enables jointly compressing all transmitted signals (such as optical flow and residual). Secondly, we present a framework for ML-based spatial rate control - a mechanism for assigning variable bitrates across space for each frame. This is a critical component for video coding, which to our knowledge had not been developed within a machine learning setting.

Machine learning has enabled many interesting applications and is extensively being used in big data systems. The popular approach - training machine learning models in frameworks like Tensorflow, Pytorch and Keras - requires movement of data from database engines to analytical engines, which adds an excessive overhead on data scientists and becomes a performance bottleneck for model training. In this demonstration, we give a practical exhibition of a solution for the enablement of distributed machine learning natively inside database engines. During the demo, the audience will interactively use Python APIs in Jupyter Notebooks to train multiple linear regression models on synthetic regression datasets and neural network models on vision and sensory datasets directly inside Teradata SQL Engine.

The UNION ALL set operator is useful for combining data from multiple sources. With the emergence and prevalence of big data ecosystems in which data is typically stored on multiple systems, UNION ALL has become even more important in many analytical queries. In this project, we demonstrate novel cost-based optimization techniques implemented in Teradata Database for join queries involving UNION ALL views and derived tables. Instead of the naive and traditional way of spooling each UNION ALL branch to a common spool prior to performing join operations, which can be prohibitively expensive, we demonstrate new techniques developed in Teradata Database including: 1) Cost-based pushing of joins into UNION ALL branches, 2) Branch grouping strategy prior to join pushing, 3) Geography adjustment of the pushed relations to avoid unnecessary redistribution or duplication, 4) Iterative join decomposition of a pushed join to multiple joins, and 5) Combining multiple join steps into a single multisource join step. In the demonstration, we use the Teradata Visual Explain tool, which offers a rich set of visual rendering capabilities of query plans, the display of various metadata information for each plan step, and several interactive UGI options for end-users.

The UNION ALL set operator is useful for combining data from multiple sources. With the emergence of big data ecosystems in which data is typically stored on multiple systems, UNION ALL has become even more important. In this paper, we present optimization techniques implemented in Teradata Database for join queries with UNION ALL. Instead of spooling all branches of UNION ALL before performing join operations, we propose cost-based pushing of joins into branches. Join pushing not only addresses the prohibitive cost of spooling all branches, but also helps in exposing more efficient join methods (e.g., direct hash-based joins) which, otherwise, would not be considered by the query optimizer. The geography of relations being pushed to UNION ALL branches is also adjusted to avoid unnecessary redistributions and duplications of data. We conclude the paper with a performance study that demonstrates the impact of the proposed optimization techniques on query performance.