Remote sensing image super-resolution (SR) aims to reconstruct high-resolution remote sensing images from low-resolution inputs, thereby addressing limitations imposed by sensors and imaging conditions. However, the inherent characteristics of remote sensing images, including diverse ground object types and complex details, pose significant challenges to achieving high-quality reconstruction. Existing methods typically employ a uniform structure to process various types of ground objects without distinction, making it difficult to adapt to the complex characteristics of remote sensing images. To address this issue, we introduce a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model and design a set of heterogeneous experts. These experts are organized into multiple expert groups, where experts within each group are homogeneous while being heterogeneous across groups. This design ensures that specialized activation parameters can be employed to handle the diverse and intricate details of ground objects effectively. To better accommodate the heterogeneous experts, we propose a multi-level feature aggregation strategy to guide the routing process. Additionally, we develop a dual-routing mechanism to adaptively select the optimal expert for each pixel. Experiments conducted on the UCMerced and AID datasets demonstrate that our proposed method achieves superior SR reconstruction accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods. The code will be available at https://github.com/Mr-Bamboo/MFG-HMoE.

High-resolution (HR) remote sensing imagery plays a vital role in a wide range of applications, including urban planning and environmental monitoring. However, due to limitations in sensors and data transmission links, the images acquired in practice often suffer from resolution degradation. Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution (RSISR) aims to reconstruct HR images from low-resolution (LR) inputs, providing a cost-effective and efficient alternative to direct HR image acquisition. Existing RSISR methods primarily focus on low-level characteristics in pixel space, while neglecting the high-level understanding of remote sensing scenes. This may lead to semantically inconsistent artifacts in the reconstructed results. Motivated by this observation, our work aims to explore the role of high-level semantic knowledge in improving RSISR performance. We propose a Semantic-Guided Super-Resolution framework, SeG-SR, which leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to extract semantic knowledge from input images and uses it to guide the super resolution (SR) process. Specifically, we first design a Semantic Feature Extraction Module (SFEM) that utilizes a pretrained VLM to extract semantic knowledge from remote sensing images. Next, we propose a Semantic Localization Module (SLM), which derives a series of semantic guidance from the extracted semantic knowledge. Finally, we develop a Learnable Modulation Module (LMM) that uses semantic guidance to modulate the features extracted by the SR network, effectively incorporating high-level scene understanding into the SR pipeline. We validate the effectiveness and generalizability of SeG-SR through extensive experiments: SeG-SR achieves state-of-the-art performance on three datasets, and consistently improves performance across various SR architectures. Notably, for the ×4 SR task on the UCMerced dataset, it attained a PSNR of 29.3042 dB and an SSIM of 0.7961. Codes can be found at https://github.com/Mr-Bamboo/SeG-SR.

Thanks to a simple SQL extension, Recursive-aggregate-SQL (RaSQL) can express very powerful queries and declarative algorithms, such as classical graph algorithms and data mining algorithms. A novel compiler implementation allows RaSQL to map declarative queries into one basic fixpoint operator supporting aggregates in recursive queries. A fully optimized implementation of this fixpoint operator leads to superior performance, scalability and portability. Thus, our RaSQL system, which extends Spark SQL with the before-mentioned new constructs and implementation techniques, matches and often surpasses the performance of other systems, including Apache Giraph, GraphX and Myria.

F1 Query is a stand-alone, federated query processing platform that executes SQL queries against data stored in different file-based formats as well as different storage systems at Google (e.g., Bigtable, Spanner, Google Spreadsheets, etc.). F1 Query eliminates the need to maintain the traditional distinction between different types of data processing workloads by simultaneously supporting: (i) OLTP-style point queries that affect only a few records; (ii) low-latency OLAP querying of large amounts of data; and (iii) large ETL pipelines. F1 Query has also significantly reduced the need for developing hard-coded data processing pipelines by enabling declarative queries integrated with custom business logic. F1 Query satisfies key requirements that are highly desirable within Google: (i) it provides a unified view over data that is fragmented and distributed over multiple data sources; (ii) it leverages datacenter resources for performant query processing with high throughput and low latency; (iii) it provides high scalability for large data sizes by increasing computational parallelism; and (iv) it is extensible and uses innovative approaches to integrate complex business logic in declarative query processing. This paper presents the end-to-end design of F1 Query. Evolved out of F1, the distributed database originally built to manage Google's advertising data, F1 Query has been in production for multiple years at Google and serves the querying needs of a large number of users and systems.

Abstract BigDatalog is an extension of Datalog that achieves performance and scalability on both Apache Spark and multicore systems to the point that its graph analytics outperform those written in GraphX. Looking back, we see how this realizes the ambitious goal pursued by deductive database researchers beginning 40 years ago: this is the goal of combining the rigor and power of logic in expressing queries and reasoning with the performance and scalability by which relational databases managed BigData. This goal led to Datalog which is based on Horn Clauses like Prolog but employs implementation techniques, such as semi-naïve fixpoint and magic sets, that extend the bottom-up computation model of relational systems, and thus obtain the performance and scalability that relational systems had achieved, as far back as the 80s, using data-parallelization on shared-nothing architectures. But this goal proved difficult to achieve because of major issues at (i) the language level and (ii) at the system level. The paper describes how (i) was addressed by simple rules under which the fixpoint semantics extends to programs using count, sum and extrema in recursion, and (ii) was tamed by parallel compilation techniques that achieve scalability on multicore systems and Apache Spark. This paper is under consideration for acceptance in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming.

Many recent works have demonstrated the benefits of knowledge graph embeddings in completing monolingual knowledge graphs. Inasmuch as related knowledge bases are built in several different languages, achieving cross-lingual knowledge alignment will help people in constructing a coherent knowledge base, and assist machines in dealing with different expressions of entity relationships across diverse human languages. Unfortunately, achieving this highly desirable cross-lingual alignment by human labor is very costly and error-prone. Thus, we propose MTransE, a translation-based model for multilingual knowledge graph embeddings, to provide a simple and automated solution. By encoding entities and relations of each language in a separated embedding space, MTransE provides transitions for each embedding vector to its cross-lingual counterparts in other spaces, while preserving the functionalities of monolingual embeddings. We deploy three different techniques to represent cross-lingual transitions, namely axis calibration, translation vectors, and linear transformations, and derive five variants for MTransE using different loss functions. Our models can be trained on partially aligned graphs, where just a small portion of triples are aligned with their cross-lingual counterparts. The experiments on cross-lingual entity matching and triple-wise alignment verification show promising results, with some variants consistently outperforming others on different tasks. We also explore how MTransE preserves the key properties of its monolingual counterpart.

Abstract A very desirable Datalog extension investigated by many researchers in the last 30 years consists in allowing the use of the basic SQL aggregates min, max, count and sum in recursive rules. In this paper, we propose a simple comprehensive solution that extends the declarative least-fixpoint semantics of Horn Clauses, along with the optimization techniques used in the bottom-up implementation approach adopted by many Datalog systems. We start by identifying a large class of programs of great practical interest in which the use of min or max in recursive rules does not compromise the declarative fixpoint semantics of the programs using those rules. Then, we revisit the monotonic versions of count and sum aggregates proposed by Mazuran et al. (2013b, The VLDB Journal 22, 4, 471–493) and named, respectively, mcount and msum. Since mcount, and also msum on positive numbers, are monotonic in the lattice of set-containment, they preserve the fixpoint semantics of Horn Clauses. However, in many applications of practical interest, their use can lead to inefficiencies, that can be eliminated by combining them with max, whereby mcount and msum become the standard count and sum. Therefore, the semantics and optimization techniques of Datalog are extended to recursive programs with min, max, count and sum, making possible the advanced applications of superior performance and scalability demonstrated by BigDatalog (Shkapsky et al. 2016. In SIGMOD. ACM, 1135–1149) and Datalog-MC (Yang et al. 2017. The VLDB Journal 26, 2, 229–248).

There is great interest in exploiting the opportunity provided by cloud computing platforms for large-scale analytics. Among these platforms, Apache Spark is growing in popularity for machine learning and graph analytics. Developing efficient complex analytics in Spark requires deep understanding of both the algorithm at hand and the Spark API or subsystem APIs (e.g., Spark SQL, GraphX). Our BigDatalog system addresses the problem by providing concise declarative specification of complex queries amenable to efficient evaluation. Towards this goal, we propose compilation and optimization techniques that tackle the important problem of efficiently supporting recursion in Spark. We perform an experimental comparison with other state-of-the-art large-scale Datalog systems and verify the efficacy of our techniques and effectiveness of Spark in supporting Datalog-based analytics.

The exploding demand for analytics has refocused the attention of data scientists on applications requiring aggregation in recursion. After resisting the efforts of researchers for more than twenty years, this problem is being addressed by innovative systems that are raising logic-oriented data languages to the levels of generality and performance that are needed to support efficiently a broad range of applications. Foremost among these new systems, the Deductive Application Language System (DeALS) achieves superior generality and performance via new constructs and optimization techniques for monotonic aggregates which are described in the paper. The use of a special class of monotonic aggregates in recursion was made possible by recent theoretical results that proved that they preserve the rigorous least-fixpoint semantics of core Datalog programs. This paper thus describes how DeALS extends their definitions and modifies their syntax to enable a concise expression of applications that, without them, could not be expressed in performance-conducive ways, or could not be expressed at all. Then the paper turns to the performance issue, and introduces novel implementation and optimization techniques that outperform traditional approaches, including Semi-naive evaluation. An extensive experimental evaluation was executed comparing DeALS with other systems on large datasets. The results suggest that, unlike other systems, DeALS indeed combines superior generality with superior performance.

Supporting iteration and/or recursion for advanced big data analytics requires reexamination of classical algorithms on modern computing environments. Several recent studies have focused on the implementation of transitive closure in multi-node clusters. Algorithms that deliver optimal performance on multi-node clusters are hardly optimal on multicore machines. We present an experimental study on finding efficient main memory recursive query evaluation algorithms on modern multi-core machines. We review SEMINAIVE, SMART and a pair of single-source closure (SSC) algorithms. We also propose a new hybrid SSC algorithm, named SSC12, which combines two previously known SSC algorithms. We implement these algorithms on a multicore shared memory machine, and compare their memory utilization, speed and scalability on synthetic and real-life datasets. Our experiments show that, on multicore machines, the surprisingly simple SSC12 is the only transitive-closure algorithm that is consistently fast and memory-efficient on all test graphs.

We aim to provide table answers to keyword queries using a knowledge base. For queries referring to multiple entities, like "Washington cities population" and "Mel Gibson movies", it is better to represent each relevant answer as a table which aggregates a set of entities or joins of entities within the same table scheme or pattern. In this paper, we study how to find highly relevant patterns in a knowledge base for user-given keyword queries to compose table answers. A knowledge base is modeled as a directed graph called knowledge graph, where nodes represent its entities and edges represent the relationships among them. Each node/edge is labeled with type and text. A pattern is an aggregation of subtrees which contain all keywords in the texts and have the same structure and types on node/edges. We propose efficient algorithms to find patterns that are relevant to the query for a class of scoring functions. We show the hardness of the problem in theory, and propose path-based indexes that are affordable in memory. Two query-processing algorithms are proposed: one is fast in practice for small queries (with small numbers of patterns as answers) by utilizing the indexes; and the other one is better in theory, with running time linear in the sizes of indexes and answers, which can handle large queries better. We also conduct extensive experimental study to compare our approaches with a naive adaption of known techniques.

There is much current interest in applications of complex event processing over data streams and of complex pattern matching over stored sequences. While some applications use streams of flat records, XML and various semi-structured information formats are preferred by many others-in particular, applications that deal with domain science, social networks, RSS feeds, and finance. XSeq and its system improve complex pattern matching technology significantly, both in terms of expressive power and efficient implementation. XSeq achieves higher expressiveness through an extension of XPath based on Kleene-* pattern constructs, and achieves very efficient execution, on both stored and streaming data, using Visibly Pushdown Automata (VPA). In our demo, we will (i) show examples of XSeq in different application domains, (ii) explain its compilation/query optimization techniques and show the speed-ups they deliver, and (iii) demonstrate how powerful and efficient application-specific languages were implemented by superimposing simple `skins' on XSeq and its system.

Data uncertainty arises in many situations. A common approach to query processing uncertain data is to sample many "possible worlds" from the uncertain data and to run queries against the possible worlds. However, sampling is not a trivial task, as a randomly sampled possible world may not satisfy known constraints imposed on the data. In this paper, we focus on an important category of constraints, the aggregate constraints. An aggregate constraint is placed on a set of records instead of on a single record, and a real-life system usually has a large number of aggregate constraints. It is a challenging task to find qualified possible worlds in this scenario, since tuple by tuple sampling is extremely inefficient because it rarely leads to a qualified possible world. In this paper, we introduce two approaches for querying uncertain data with aggregate constraints: constraint aware sampling and MCMC sampling. Our experiments show that the new approaches lead to high quality query results with reasonable cost.

An increasing number of applications operate on data obtained from the Web. These applications typically maintain local copies of the web data to avoid network latency in data accesses. As the data on the Web evolves, it is critical that the local copy be kept up-to-date. Data freshness is one of the most important data quality issues, and has been extensively studied for various applications including web crawling. However, web crawling is focused on obtaining as many raw web pages as possible. Our applications, on the other hand, are interested in specific content from specific data sources. Knowing the content or the semantics of the data enables us to differentiate data items based on their importance and volatility, which are key factors that impact the design of the data synchronization strategy. In this work, we formulate the concept of content freshness, and present a novel approach that maintains content freshness with least amount of web communication. Specifically, we assume data is accessible through a general keyword search interface, and we form keyword queries based on their selectivity, as well their contribution to content freshness of the local copy. Experiments show the effectiveness of our approach compared with several naive methods for keeping data fresh.