The ability to reconstruct realistic and controllable upper body avatars from casual monocular videos is critical for various applications in communication and entertainment. By equipping the most recent 3D Gaussian Splatting representation with head 3D morphable models (3DMM), existing methods manage to create head avatars with high fidelity. However, most existing methods only reconstruct a head without the body, substantially limiting their application scenarios. We found that naively applying Gaussians to model the clothed chest and shoulders tends to result in blurry reconstruction and noisy floaters under novel poses. This is because of the fundamental limitation of Gaussians and point clouds -- each Gaussian or point can only have a single directional radiance without spatial variance, therefore an unnecessarily large number of them is required to represent complicated spatially varying texture, even for simple geometry. In contrast, we propose to model the body part with a neural texture that consists of coarse and pose-dependent fine colors. To properly render the body texture for each view and pose without accurate geometry nor UV mapping, we optimize another sparse set of Gaussians as anchors that constrain the neural warping field that maps image plane coordinates to the texture space. We demonstrate that Gaussian Head & Shoulders can fit the high-frequency details on the clothed upper body with high fidelity and potentially improve the accuracy and fidelity of the head region. We evaluate our method with casual phone-captured and internet videos and show our method archives superior reconstruction quality and robustness in both self and cross reenactment tasks. To fully utilize the efficient rendering speed of Gaussian splatting, we additionally propose an accelerated inference method of our trained model without Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) queries and reach a stable rendering speed of around 130 FPS for any subjects.

Computing the shortest path distance between two vertices in a road network is a building block in numerous applications. To do so efficiently, the state-of-the-art proposals adopt a tree decomposition process with heuristic strategies to build 2-hop label indexes. However, these indexes suffer from large space overheads caused by either tree imbalance or a large tree height. Independently of this, reinforcement learning has recently show impressive performance at sequential decision making in spatial data management tasks. We observe that tree decomposition is naturally a sequential decision making problem that decides which vertex to process at each step. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning based tree decomposition (RLTD) approach that reduces the space overhead significantly. We model tree decomposition as a Markov Decision Process, exploiting features of both the network topological structure and the tree structure. We further optimize the tree decomposition process by taking the network density into account, which yields a great generalization of the model on large road networks. Extensive experiments with real-world data offer insights into the performance of the proposals, showing that they are able to reduce the space overhead by about 51% and achieve on average about 14% speedup for queries with almost the same preprocessing time when compared with the state-of-the-art proposals.

Growing demands for the efficient processing of extreme-scale time series workloads call for more capable time series database management systems (TSDBMS). Specifically, to maintain consistency and durability of transaction processing, systems employ write-ahead logging (WAL) whereby transactions are committed only after the related log entries are flushed to disk. However, when faced with massive I/O, this becomes a throughput bottleneck. Recent advances in byte-addressable Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) provide opportunities to improve logging performance by persisting logs to NVM instead. Existing studies typically track complex transaction dependencies and use barrier instructions of NVM to ensure log ordering. In contrast, few studies consider the heavy-tailed characteristics of time series workloads, where most transactions are independent of each other. We propose DecLog, a decentralized NVM-based logging system that enables concurrent logging of TSDBMS transactions. Specifically, we propose data-driven log sequence numbering and relaxed ordering strategies to track transaction dependencies and resolve serialization issues. We also propose a parallel logging method to persist logs to NVM after being compressed and aligned. An experimental study on the YCSB-TS benchmark offers insight into the performance properties of DecLog, showing that it improves throughput by up to 4.6× while offering lower recovery time in comparison to the open source TSDBMS Beringei.

Computing shortest-path distances in road networks is core functionality in a range of applications. To enable the efficient computation of such distance queries, existing proposals frequently apply 2-hop labeling that constructs a label for each vertex and enables the computation of a query by performing only a linear scan of labels. However, few proposals take into account the spatio-temporal characteristics of query workloads. We observe that real-world workloads exhibit (1) spatial skew, meaning that only a small subset of vertices are queried frequently, and (2) temporal locality, meaning that adjacent time intervals have similar query distributions. We propose a Workload-aware Core-Forest label index (WCF) to exploit spatial skew in workloads. In addition, we develop a Reinforcement Learning based Time Interval Partitioning (RL-TIP) algorithm that exploits temporal locality to partition workloads to achieve further performance improvements. Extensive experiments with real-world data offer insights into the performance of the proposals, showing that they achieve 62% speedup on average for query processing with less preprocessing time and space overhead when compared with the state-of-the-art proposals.

Shortest distance computing in road networks is an essential component in a range of applications. As a well-adopted method, 2-hop labeling assigns each vertex a label and enables the distance computation only by a sort-merge join on the labels. However, few existing 2-hop labeling based proposals consider the spatio-temporal characteristics of dynamic query workloads. To process massive-scale shortest distance query workloads, we propose a Workload-aware Core-Forest label index (WCF) to exploit spatial skew in workloads. In addition, we develop a Reinforcement Learning based Time Interval Partitioning (RL-TIP) that utilizes temporal locality to further improve the query performance. Extensive experiments on real-world data demonstrate that our proposal is capable of achieving a query processing speedup of an order of magnitude with less preprocessing time and space, when compared to the state-of-the-art proposals.