Trajectory streams are being generated from location-aware devices, such as smartphones and in-vehicle navigation systems. Due to the sensitive nature of the location data, directly sharing user trajectories suffers from privacy leakage issues. Local differential privacy (LDP), which perturbs sensitive data on the user side before it is shared or analyzed, emerges as a promising solution for private trajectory stream collection and analysis. Unfortunately, existing stream release approaches often neglect the rich spatial-temporal context information within trajectory streams, resulting in suboptimal utility and limited types of downstream applications. To this end, we propose RetraSyn, a novel real-time trajectory synthesis framework, which is able to perform on-the-f1y trajectory synthesis based on the mobility patterns privately extracted from users' trajectory streams. Thus, the downstream trajectory analysis can be performed on the high-utility synthesized data with privacy protection. We also take the genuine behaviors of real-world mobile travelers into consideration, ensuring authenticity and practicality. The key components of RetraSyn include the global mobility model, dynamic mobility update mechanism, real-time synthesis, and adaptive allocation strategy. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple real-world and synthetic trajectory datasets under various location-based utility metrics, encompassing both streaming and historical scenarios. The empirical results demonstrate the superiority and versatility of our proposed framework.

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a paradigm to train a global machine learning model in a distributed manner while taking privacy concerns and data protection regulations into consideration. Although a variety of FL algorithms have been proposed, the training efficiency of FL remains challenging due to massive mathematical computations and expensive client-server communication costs. However, existing FL-acceleration studies are limited as they can only solve the computation and communication overheads separately, which is suboptimal and constrains their acceleration ability. Moreover, previous studies are typically designed for specific FL scenarios and can support only one or two FL models, thus exhibiting poor generality.To fill these critical voids, we propose FLBooster, which provides unified and efficient acceleration capacity for a broad range of FL models. This is the first proposal to solve the computation and communication overheads simultaneously. Specifically, we utilize GPUs to boost the computation-intensive homomorphic encryption (HE) operations in a parallel manner, which significantly reduces the computation costs. On the other hand, a simple but efficient compression method is designed to lighten the exchange of data volumes between client and server. Extensive experiments using four standard FL models on three datasets show that FLBooster acquires superior speed-up gains (i.e., 14.3× – 138×) over state-of-the-art acceleration systems. Finally, we integrate FLBooster into the open-source FL benchmark FATE and offer user-friendly APIs for development.

Knowledge graph (KG), which contains rich side information, becomes an essential part to boost the recommendation performance and improve its explainability. However, existing knowledge-aware recommendation methods directly perform information propagation on KG and user-item bipartite graph, ignoring the impacts of task-irrelevant knowledge propagation and vulnerability to interaction noise, which limits their performance. To solve these issues, we propose a robust knowledge-aware recommendation framework, called Knowledge-refined Denoising Network (KRDN), to prune the task-irrelevant knowledge associations and noisy implicit feedback simultaneously. KRDN consists of an adaptive knowledge refining strategy and a contrastive denoising mechanism, which are able to automatically distill high-quality KG triplets for aggregation and prune noisy implicit feedback respectively. Besides, we also design the self-adapted loss function and the gradient estimator for model optimization. The experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of KRDN over the state-of-the-art knowledge-aware methods like KGIN, MCCLK, and KGCL, and also outperform robust recommendation models like SGL and SimGCL. The implementations are available at https://github.com/xj-zhu98/KRDN.

Collaborative Filtering (CF) is a widely used and effective technique for recommender systems. In recent decades, there have been significant advancements in latent embedding-based CF methods for improved accuracy, such as matrix factorization, neural collaborative filtering, and LightGCN. However, the explainability of these models has not been fully explored. Adding explainability to recommendation models can not only increase trust in the decision-making process, but also have multiple benefits such as providing persuasive explanations for item recommendations, creating explicit profiles for users and items, and assisting item producers in design improvements.

Trajectory data has the potential to greatly benefit a wide-range of real-world applications, such as tracking the spread of the disease through people's movement patterns and providing personalized location-based services based on travel preference. However, privacy concerns and data protection regulations have limited the extent to which this data is shared and utilized. To overcome this challenge, local differential privacy provides a solution by allowing people to share a perturbed version of their data, ensuring privacy as only the data owners have access to the original information. Despite its potential, existing point-based perturbation mechanisms are not suitable for real-world scenarios due to poor utility, dependence on external knowledge, high computational overhead, and vulnerability to attacks. To address these limitations, we introduce LDPTrace, a novel locally differentially private trajectory synthesis framework. Our framework takes into account three crucial patterns inferred from users' trajectories in the local setting, allowing us to synthesize trajectories that closely resemble real ones with minimal computational cost. Additionally, we present a new method for selecting a proper grid granularity without compromising privacy. Our extensive experiments using real-world as well as synthetic data, various utility metrics and attacks, demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of LDPTrace.

A knowledge graph (KG) consists of a set of interconnected typed entities and their attributes. Recently, KGs are popularly used as the auxiliary information to enable more accurate, explainable, and diverse user preference recommendations. Specifically, existing KG-based recommendation methods target modeling high-order relations/dependencies from long connectivity user-item interactions hidden in KG. However, most of them ignore the cold-start problems (i.e., user cold-start and item cold-start) of recommendation analytics, which restricts their performance in scenarios when involving new users or new items. Inspired by the success of meta-learning on scarce training samples, we propose a novel meta-learning based framework called MetaKG, which encompasses a collaborative-aware meta learner and a knowledge-aware meta learner, to capturemetausers’ preference and entities’ knowledge for cold-start recommendations. The collaborative-aware meta learner aims to locally aggregate user preferences for each preference learning task. In contrast, the knowledge-aware meta learner is to globally generalize knowledge representation across different user preference learning tasks. Guided by two meta learners, MetaKG can effectively capture the high-order collaborative relations and semantic representations, which could be easily adapted to cold-start scenarios. Besides, we devise a novel adaptive task scheduler which can adaptively select the informative tasks for meta learning in order to prevent the model from being corrupted by noisy tasks. Extensive experiments on various cold-start scenarios using three real datasets demonstrate that our presented MetaKG outperforms all the existing state-of-the-art competitors in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability.

Materialized model query aims to find the most appropriate materialized model as the initial model for model reuse. It is the precondition of model reuse, and has recently attracted much attention. Nonetheless, the existing methods suffer from the need to provide source data, limited range of applications, and inefficiency since they do not construct a suitable metric to measure the target-related knowledge of materialized models. To address this, we present${\sf MMQ}$, a source-data free, general, efficient, and effective materialized model query framework. It uses a Gaussian mixture-based metric called separation degree to rank materialized models. For each materialized model,${\sf MMQ}$first vectorizes the samples in the target dataset into probability vectors by directly applying this model, then utilizes Gaussian distribution to fit for each class of probability vectors, and finally uses separation degree on the Gaussian distributions to measure the target-related knowledge of the materialized model. Moreover, we propose an improved${\sf MMQ}$(${\sf I\text{-}MMQ}$), which significantly reduces the query time while retaining the query performance of${\sf MMQ}$. Extensive experiments on a range of practical model reuse workloads demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of${\sf MMQ}$.

Deep learning based trajectory similarity computation holds the potential for improved efficiency and adaptability over traditional similarity computation. However, existing learning-based trajectory similarity learning solutions prioritize spatial similarity over temporal similarity, making them suboptimal for time-aware analyses. To this end, we propose ST2Vec, a representation learning based solution that considers fine-grained spatial and temporal relations between trajectories to enable spatio-temporal similarity computation in road networks. Specifically, ST2Vec encompasses two steps: (i) spatial and temporal modeling that encode spatial and temporal information of trajectories, where a generic temporal modeling module is proposed for the first time; and (ii) spatio-temporal co-attention fusion, where two fusion strategies are designed to enable the generation of unified spatio-temporal embeddings of trajectories. Further, under the guidance of triplet loss, ST2Vec employs curriculum learning in model optimization to improve convergence and effectiveness. An experimental study offers evidence that ST2Vec outperforms state-of-the-art competitors substantially in terms of effectiveness and efficiency, while showing low parameter sensitivity and good model robustness. Moreover, similarity involved case studies including top-k querying and DBSCAN clustering offer further insight into the capabilities of ST2Vec.

Knowledge graph (KG) plays an increasingly important role to improve the recommendation performance and interpretability. A recent technical trend is to design end-to-end models based on the information propagation schemes. However, existing propagation-based methods fail to (1) model the underlying hierarchical structures and relations, and (2) capture the high-order collaborative signals of items for learning high-quality user and item representations.

The ubiquity of implicit feedback makes them the default choice to build modern recommender systems. Generally speaking, observed interactions are considered as positive samples, while unobserved interactions are considered as negative ones. However, implicit feedback is inherently noisy because of the ubiquitous presence of noisy-positive and noisy-negative interactions. Recently, some studies have noticed the importance of denoising implicit feedback for recommendations, and enhanced the robustness of recommendation models to some extent. Nonetheless, they typically fail to (1) capture the hard yet clean interactions for learning comprehensive user preference, and (2) provide a universal denoising solution that can be applied to various kinds of recommendation models.

Trajectory clustering has played an essential role in trajectory mining tasks. It serves in a wide range of real-life applications, including transportation, location-based services, behavioral study, and so on. To support trajectory clustering analytics, a plethora of trajectory clustering methods have been proposed, which mainly extend traditional clustering algorithms by using spatio-temporal characteristics of trajectories. However, existing traditional trajectory clustering approaches based on raw trajectory representation highly rely on hand-craft similarity metrics, and can not capture hidden spatial dependencies in trajectory data, which is inefficient and inflexible for clustering analysis. To this end, we propose an end-to-end deep trajectory clustering framework via self-training, termed as E2DTC, inspired by the data-driven capabilities of deep neural networks. E2DTC does not require any additional manual feature extraction operations, and can be easily adapted for trajectory clustering analytics on any trajectory dataset. Extensive experimental evaluations on three real-life datasets show that our framework E2DTC achieves superior accuracy and efficiency, compared with classical clustering methods (i.e., K-Medoids) and state-of-the-art neural-network based approaches (i.e., t2vec).

Traffic prediction has drawn increasing attention for its ubiquitous real-life applications in traffic management, urban computing, public safety, and so on. Recently, the availability of massive trajectory data and the success of deep learning motivate a plethora of deep traffic prediction studies. However, the existing neural-network-based approaches tend to ignore the correlations between multiple types of moving objects located in the same spatio-temporal traffic area, which is suboptimal for traffic prediction analytics. In this paper, we propose a multi-source deep traffic prediction framework over spatio-temporal trajectory data, termed as MDTP. The framework includes two phases: spatio-temporal feature modeling and multi-source bridging. We present an enhanced graph convolutional network (GCN) model combined with long short-term memory network (LSTM) to capture the spatial dependencies and temporal dynamics of traffic in the feature modeling phase. In the multi-source bridging phase, we propose two methods, Sum and Concat, to connect the learned features from different trajectory data sources. Extensive experiments on two real-life datasets show that MDTP i) has superior efficiency, compared with classical time-series methods, machine learning methods, and state-of-the-art neural-network-based approaches; ii) offers a significant performance improvement over the single-source traffic prediction approach; and iii) performs traffic predictions in seconds even on tens of millions of trajectory data. we develop MDTP + , a user-friendly interactive system to demonstrate traffic prediction analysis.

Large collections of GPS trajectory data provide us unprecedented opportunity to detect the road intersection automatically. However, in the real-world scenarios, the precision of existing detection methods cannot be guaranteed due to severe challenges including (i) low-quality raw GPS trajectory data and (ii) the difficulty of differentiating intersections from nonintersections. To tackle above issues, we propose a novel twophase road intersection detection framework, called as RIDF, which is comprised of trajectory quality improving and intersection extracting. More importantly, through extracting candidate cells based on direction statistic analysis and refining the locations of intersections using hybrid clustering strategy, our approach can effectively detect road intersections of different size. An experimental evaluation on two real data sets extensively assesses the quality of RIDF method by comparing it with state-of-theart methods. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposal can overcome the limitations of existing methods and thus have better accuracy than the existing work.