Magnetic microrobots capable of autonomous operation hold significant promise for critical cell and small creature manipulation tasks, including trapping, transportation, sorting, etc. Although conventional microrobot navigation methods have shown notable performance, they often lack adaptability to novel environments. To address these limitations, we propose a learning-based framework for real-world microrobot navigation and dynamic target tracking. Our approach employs spatial-temporal transformer reinforcement learning (STTRL) with a deterministic velocity obstacle (DVO) that processes historical navigation states and virtual light detection and ranging (LiDAR) scans to predict optimal actions. The key innovation lies in the model's ability to extract and utilize contextual information from observation histories, enabling adaptive behavior even in previously unseen environments. Through large-scale model-free reinforcement learning trained in randomized simulation environments, our method achieves remarkable real-world performance with zero-shot transfer capability. Experimental results demonstrate superior navigation agility with an 89.8% success rate in the base environment, representing a 7.4% improvement over state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms. Furthermore, the method exhibits robust generalization in diverse unseen environments, validating its adaptability to different environmental characteristics.

Industrial recommendation models typically involve numerous feature fields. The embedding computation workloads are heterogeneous across these fields, thus requiring varied optimal code schedules. While existing solutions apply basic fusion optimization for embedding operations, they inefficiently treat all feature fields with identical schedules, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we introduce RecFlex, which generates fused kernels with distinct schedules for different feature fields. RecFlex employs the interference-aware schedule tuner to tune schedules and the heterogeneous schedule fusion compiler to generate fused kernels, addressing two major challenges. To determine optimal schedules of different feature fields within the fused kernel, RecFlex proposes a two-stage interferencesimulated tuning strategy. To handle dynamic workloads that challenge tuning and fusion, RecFlex combines compile-time schedule tuning with runtime kernel thread mapping. RecFlex surpasses state-of-the-art libraries and compilers, achieving average speedups of $2.64 \times, 20.77 \times$, and $11.31 \times$ over TorchRec, HugeCTR, and RECom, respectively. RecFlex is publicly available at https://github.com/PanZaifeng/RecFlex.

Quantum circuit mapping (QCM) is a crucial preprocessing step for executing a logical circuit (LC) on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. Balancing the introduction of extra gates and the efficiency of preprocessing poses a significant challenge for the mapping process. To address this challenge, we propose the mutual-influence-aware (MIA) heuristic method by integrating an initial mapping search framework, an initial mapping generator, and a heuristic circuit mapper. Initially, the framework utilizes the generator to obtain a favorable starting point for the initial mapping search. With this starting point, the search process can efficiently discover a promising initial mapping within a few bidirectional iterations. The circuit mapper considers mutual influences of SWAP gates and is invoked once per iteration. Ultimately, the best result from all iterations is considered the QCM outcome. The experimental results on extensive benchmark circuits demonstrate that, compared to the iterated local search (ILS) method, which represents the current state-of-the-art, our MIA method introduces a similar number of extra gates while achieving nearly 95 times faster execution.

Deep matching models aim to facilitate search engines retrieving more relevant documents by mapping queries and documents into semantic vectors in the first-stage retrieval. When leveraging BERT as the deep matching model, the attention score across two words are solely built upon local contextualized word embeddings. It lacks prior global knowledge to distinguish the importance of different words, which has been proved to play a critical role in information retrieval tasks. In addition to this, BERT only performs attention across sub-words tokens which weakens whole word attention representation. We propose a novel Global Weighted Self-Attention (GLOW) network for web document search. GLOW fuses global corpus statistics into the deep matching model. By adding prior weights into attention generation from global information, like BM25, GLOW successfully learns weighted attention scores jointly with query matrix Q and key matrix K. We also present an efficient whole word weight sharing solution to bring prior whole word knowledge into sub-words level attention. It aids Transformer to learn whole word level attention. To make our models applicable to complicated web search scenarios, we introduce combined fields representation to accommodate documents with multiple fields even with variable number of instances. We demonstrate GLOW is more efficient to capture the topical and semantic representation both in queries and documents. Intrinsic evaluation and experiments conducted on public data sets reveal GLOW to be a general framework for document retrieve task. It significantly outperforms BERT and other competitive baselines by a large margin while retaining the same model complexity with BERT. The source code is available at https://github.com/GLOW-deep/GLOW.

The in-memory algorithms for approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) have achieved great success for fast high-recall search, but are extremely expensive when handling very large scale database. Thus, there is an increasing request for the hybrid ANNS solutions with small memory and inexpensive solid-state drive (SSD). In this paper, we present a simple but efficient memory-disk hybrid indexing and search system, named SPANN, that follows the inverted index methodology. It stores the centroid points of the posting lists in the memory and the large posting lists in the disk. We guarantee both disk-access efficiency (low latency) and high recall by effectively reducing the disk-access number and retrieving high-quality posting lists. In the index-building stage, we adopt a hierarchical balanced clustering algorithm to balance the length of posting lists and augment the posting list by adding the points in the closure of the corresponding clusters. In the search stage, we use a query-aware scheme to dynamically prune the access of unnecessary posting lists. Experiment results demonstrate that SPANN is 2X faster than the state-of-the-art ANNS solution DiskANN to reach the same recall quality 90% with same memory cost in three billion-scale datasets. It can reach 90% recall@1 and recall@10 in just around one millisecond with only about 10% of original memory cost. Code is available at: https://github.com/microsoft/SPTAG.

To achieve good result quality and short query response time, search engines use specific match plans on Inverted Index to help retrieve a small set of relevant documents from billions of web pages. A match plan is composed of a sequence of match rules, which contain discrete match rule types and continuous stopping quotas. Currently, match plans are manually designed by experts according to their several years’ experience, which encounters difficulty in dealing with heterogeneous queries and varying data distribution. In this work, we formulate the match plan generation as a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) with a parameterized action space, and propose a novel reinforcement learning algorithm Parameterized Action Soft Actor-Critic (PASAC) to effectively enhance the exploration in both spaces. In our scene, we also discover a skew prioritizing issue of the original Prioritized Experience Replay (PER) and introduce Stratified Prioritized Experience Replay (SPER) to address it. We are the first group to generalize this task for all queries as a learning problem with zero prior knowledge and successfully apply deep reinforcement learning in the real web search environment. Our approach greatly outperforms the well-designed production match plans by over 70% reduction of index block accesses with the quality of documents almost unchanged, and 9% reduction of query response time even with model inference cost. Our method also beats the baselines on some open-source benchmarks1.

We study the problem of deep recall model in industrial web search, which is, given a user query, retrieve hundreds of most relevant documents from billions of candidates. The common framework is to encoding queries and documents separately into distributed representations and match them in latent semantic space. However, all the exiting deep encoding models only leverage the information of the document itself, which is often not sufficient in practice when matching with query terms, especially for the hard tail queries. In this work we aim to leverage the additional information for documents from their co-click neighbours to help document retrieval. The challenges include how to effectively extract information and eliminate noise when involving co-click information while meet the demands of industrial scalability for real time online serving.