Using a machine learning (ML) model as a core component in database knob tuning has demonstrated remarkable advancements in recent years. However, a model that optimizes both categorical and continuous values in the same way may not guarantee efficiency and effectiveness in knob tuning. This is due to the fact that the usual assumption of a differentiable input space for efficient exploration of continuous spaces does not hold true in categorical spaces. Moreover, the inherent complexity of interdependences among knobs and the high-dimensionality of the configuration space compound the challenges of tuning. In this paper, we propose TopTune, which employs tailored optimization for continuous and categorical knobs, to achieve accelerated tuning efficiency and improved tuning performance. Specifically, we decompose the configuration space into two orthogonal subspaces: categorical and continuous spaces. Subsequently, we employ Bayesian optimization models, i.e., SMAC and GP to explore the categorical and continuous subspaces, respectively. These two models will alternately explore the two spaces with the proposed communication mechanism to ensure TopTune can capture the dependence between continuous and categorical knobs. Furthermore, to balance efficiency and accuracy, we utilize a knob-dimensional projection strategy to reduce the exploration domain by embedding the high-dimension configuration space into a lower-dimensional proxy space. In addition, we implement batch Bayesian optimization technology, which enables parallel knob evaluation while balancing exploration and exploitation. We evaluate TopTune under different benchmarks (SYSBENCH, TPC-C, and JOB), metrics (throughput and latency), and DBMSs (MySQL and Dameng). Extensive experiments demonstrate that TopTune identifies better configurations in up to approximately 12.2× less time while achieving a 10.7% improvement in throughput compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Implementing cross-modal hashing between 2D images and 3D point-cloud data is a growing concern in real-world retrieval systems. Simply applying existing cross-modal approaches to this new task fails to adequately capture latent multi-modal semantics and effectively bridge the modality gap between 2D and 3D. To address these issues without relying on hand-crafted labels, we propose contrastive masked autoencoders based self-supervised hashing (CMAH) for retrieval between images and point-cloud data. We start by contrasting 2D-3D pairs and explicitly constraining them into a joint Hamming space. This contrastive learning process ensures robust discriminability for the generated hash codes and effectively reduces the modality gap. Moreover, we utilize multi-modal auto-encoders to enhance the model’s understanding of multi-modal semantics. By completing the masked image/point-cloud data modeling task, the model is encouraged to capture more localized clues. In addition, the proposed multi-modal fusion block facilitates fine-grained interactions among different modalities. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that the proposed CMAH significantly outperforms all baseline methods.

The canonical video action recognition methods usually label categories with numbers or one-hot vectors and train neural networks to classify a fixed set of predefined categories, thereby constraining their ability to recognise complex actions and transferable ability to unseen concepts.In contrast, cross-modal learning can improve the performance of individual modalities.Based on the facts that a better action recogniser can be built by reading the statements used to describe actions, we exploited the recent multimodal foundation model CLIP for action recognition.In this study, an effective Vision-Language action recognition adaptation was implemented based on few-shot examples spanning different modalities.We added semantic information to action categories by treating textual and visual label as training examples for action classifier construction rather than simply labelling them with numbers.Due to the different importance of words in text and video frames, simply averaging all sequential features may result in ignoring keywords or key video frames.To capture sequential and hierarchical representation, a weighted token-wise interaction mechanism was employed to exploit the pair-wise correlations adaptively.Extensive experiments with public datasets show that cross-modal action recognition learning helps for downstream action images classification, in other words, the proposed method can train better action classifiers by reading the sentences describing action itself.The method proposed in this study not only reaches good generalisation and zero-shot/few-shot transfer ability on Out of Distribution (OOD) test sets, but also performs lower computational complexity due to the lightweight interaction mechanism with 84.15% Top-1 accuracy on the Kinetics-400.