General recommender systems deliver personalized services by learning user and item representations, with the central challenge being how to capture latent user preferences. However, representations derived from sparse interactions often fail to comprehensively characterize user behaviors, thereby limiting recommendation effectiveness. Recent studies attempt to enhance user representations through sophisticated modeling strategies (e.g., intent or language modeling). Nevertheless, most works primarily concentrate on model interpretability instead of representation optimization. This imbalance has led to limited progress, as representation optimization is crucial for recommendation quality by promoting the affinity between users and their interacted items in the feature space, yet remains largely overlooked. To overcome these limitations, we propose DIAURec, a novel representation learning framework that unifies intent and language modeling for recommendation. DIAURec reconstructs representations based on the prototype and distribution intent spaces formed by collaborative and language signals. Furthermore, we design a comprehensive representation optimization strategy. Specifically, we adopts alignment and uniformity as the primary optimization objectives, and incorporates both coarse- and fine-grained matching to achieve effective alignment across different spaces, thereby enhancing representational consistency. Additionally, we further introduce intra-space and interaction regularization to enhance model robustness and prevent representation collapse in reconstructed space representation. Experiments on three public datasets against fifteen baseline methods show that DIAURec consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, fully validating its effectiveness and superiority.

Graph processing suffers from severe locality challenges due to considerable inefficient irregular memory accesses, which mainly originate from random accesses to neighbors of active vertices (a.k.a frontiers). Graph reordering, which assigns continuous IDs to vertices that are more likely to be accessed consecutively, can improve access locality effectively and has demonstrated significant speedups across various architectures and systems. Existing graph reordering methods primarily explore the overlapping intensity of in-neighbor vertices for the data access locality characterization. However, many graph algorithms often activate a fraction of the vertices across the graphs, which vary substantially over different inputs and processing iterations. Many of these vertices are neither connected nor have any shared neighbors, but they are actually processed at the same time and exhibit potential data access locality, which is generally overlooked in prior graph reordering methods. We notice that the data locality between concurrently activated vertices are usually attributed to the overlapped$k$-order in-neighbors. As the number of$k$-order in-neighbors grows explosively, it is unacceptably time-consuming to analyze the overlapping of$k$-order in-neighbors for graph reordering directly. In this case, we propose to replace the overlapping calculation of$k$-order in-neighbors with frontier distribution analysis of a few BFS samplings. Specifically, we profile the frontiers distributed across iterations of different BFS samplings first and build a feature vector based on the activated iteration order of each vertex in the BFS samplings. On top of the feature vectors, we propose FrontOrder, which has a customized distance metric to characterize the locality between different vertices and leverages$K$-means to cluster vertices with high locality to guide graph reordering. In addition, FrontOrder also takes the load balance into consideration by predicting the runtime computing intensity with the learned clusters of vertices. According to our experiments, FrontOrder delivers an average performance speedup of${2.33\times}$and${1.57\times}$on Ligra and GPOP, respectively, and consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art graph reordering methods on a set of representative graph algorithms and datasets with moderate preprocessing overhead.

Personalized recommendation is widely used in the web applications, and graph contrastive learning (GCL) has gradually become a dominant approach in recommender systems, primarily due to its ability to extract self-supervised signals from raw interaction data, effectively alleviating the problem of data sparsity. A classic GCL-based method typically uses data augmentation during graph convolution to generates more contrastive views, and performs contrast on these new views to obtain rich self-supervised signals. Despite this paradigm is effective, the reasons behind the performance gains remain a mystery. In this paper, we first reveal via theoretical derivation that the gradient descent process of the CL objective is formally equivalent to graph convolution, which implies that CL objective inherently supports neighborhood aggregation on interaction graphs. We further substantiate this capability through experimental validation and identify common misconceptions in the selection of positive samples in previous methods, which limit the potential of CL objective. Based on this discovery, we propose the Light Contrastive Collaborative Filtering (LightCCF) method, which introduces a novel neighborhood aggregation objective to bring users closer to all interacted items while pushing them away from other positive pairs, thus achieving high-quality neighborhood aggregation with very low time complexity. On three highly sparse public datasets, the proposed method effectively aggregate neighborhood information while preventing graph over-smoothing, demonstrating significant improvements over existing GCL-based counterparts in both training efficiency and recommendation accuracy. Our implementations are publicly accessible.

Transactional stream processing engines (TSPEs) have gained increasing attention due to their capability of processing real-time stream applications with transactional semantics. However, TSPEs remain susceptible to system failures and power outages. Existing TSPEs mainly focus on performance improvement, but still face a significant challenge to guarantee fault tolerance while offering high-performance services. We revisit commonly-used fault tolerance approaches in stream processing and database systems, and find that these approaches do not work well on TSPEs due to complex data dependencies. In this paper, we propose a novel TSPE called MorphStreamR to achieve fast failure recovery while guaranteeing low performance overhead at runtime. The key idea of MorphStreamR is to record intermediate results of resolved dependencies at runtime, and thus eliminate data dependencies to improve task parallelism during failure recovery. MorphStreamR further mitigates the runtime overhead by selectively tracking data dependencies and incorporating workload-aware log commitment. Experimental results show that MorphStreamR can significantly reduce the recovery time by up to 3.1 x while experiencing much less performance slowdown at runtime, compared with other applicable fault tolerance approaches.

Recent studies have shown the promise of directly processing compressed graphs. However, its benefits have been limited by high peak-memory usage and unbearably long compression time. In this paper, we introduce Laconic, a novel rule-based graph processing solution that overcomes the challenges of restricted memory and impractical compression time faced by existing approaches. Laconic, for the first time, ensures minimal memory overhead during compression and significantly reduces graph sizes, thus reducing peak memory demand during computations. By employing an efficient parallel compression algorithm, Laconic achieves a remarkable reduction in compression time. In our experiments, we compare Laconic with state-of-the-art solutions. The results demonstrate that Laconic outperforms other methods, reducing peak memory consumption by an average of 70% during compression and 66% during computation. Additionally, Laconic reduces rule compression time by an average of 93% compared to traditional rule-based compression, achieving a 2.47× higher compression ratio, and providing a 2.12× performance speedup.

With the development of recommendation algorithms, researchers are paying increasing attention to fairness issues such as user discrimination in recommendations. To address these issues, existing works often filter users’ sensitive information that may cause discrimination during the process of learning user representations. However, these approaches overlook the latent relationship between items’ content attributes and users’ sensitive information. In this article, we propose DALFRec, a fairness-aware recommendation algorithm based on user-side and item-side adversarial learning to mitigate the effects of sensitive information on both sides of the recommendation process. First, we conduct a statistical analysis to demonstrate the latent relationship between items’ information and users’ sensitive attributes. Then, we design a dual-side adversarial learning network that simultaneously filters out users’ sensitive information on the user and item side. Additionally, we propose a new evaluation strategy that leverages the latent relationship between items’ content attributes and users’ sensitive attributes to better assess the algorithm’s ability to reduce discrimination. Our experiments on three real datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed algorithm over state-of-the-art methods.

Stream processing has been in widespread use, and one of the most common application scenarios is SQL query on streams. By 2021, the global deployment of IoT endpoints reached 12.3 billion, indicating a surge in data generation. However, the escalating demands for high throughput and low latency in stream processing systems have posed significant challenges due to the increasing data volume and evolving user requirements. We present a compression-based stream processing engine, called CompressStreamDB, which enables adaptive fine-grained stream processing directly on compressed streams, to significantly enhance the performance of existing stream processing solutions. CompressStreamDB utilizes nine diverse compression methods tailored for different stream data types and integrates a cost model to automatically select the most efficient compression schemes. CompressStreamDB provides high throughput with low latency in stream SQL processing by identifying and eliminating redundant data among streams. Our evaluation demonstrates that CompressStreamDB improves average performance by 3.84× and reduces average delay by 68.0% compared to the state-of-the-art stream processing solution for uncompressed streams, along with 68.7% space savings. Besides, our edge trials show an average throughput/price ratio of 9.95× and a throughput/power ratio of 7.32× compared to the cloud design.

Stream processing prevails and SQL query on streams has become one of the most popular application scenarios. For example, in 2021, the global number of active IoT endpoints reaches 12.3 billion. Unfortunately, the increasing scale of data and strict user requests place much pressure on existing stream processing systems, requiring high processing throughput with low latency. To further improve the performance of current stream processing systems, we propose a compression-based stream processing engine, called CompressStreamDB, which enables adaptive fine-grained stream processing directly on compressed streams, without decompression. Particularly, CompressStreamDB involves eight compression methods targeting various data types in streams, and it also provides a cost model for dynamically selecting the appropriate compression methods. By exploring data redundancy among streams, CompressStreamDB not only saves space in data transmission between client and server, but also achieves high throughput with low latency in SQL query on stream processing. Our experimental results show that compared to the state-of-the-art stream processing system on uncompressed streams, CompressStreamDB achieves 3.24× throughput improvement and 66.0% lower latency on average. Besides, CompressStreamDB saves 66.8% space.

In many applications of the analysis of dynamic graph, manyTiming iterative Graph Processing(TGP) jobs usually need to be generated for the processing of the corresponding snapshots of the dynamic graph to obtain the results at different points of time. For high throughput of such applications, it is expected to run the TGP jobs on the GPU concurrently. Although many GPU-based systems have been recently developed, for out-of-GPU-memory dynamic graph processing, this concurrent way suffers from significant data access overhead due to a large volume of data transfer between CPU and GPU and the interference between these concurrently running jobs, which eventually incurs low GPU utilization ratio. In this work, we observed that the TGP jobs have strong temporal and spatial similarity when they access different snapshots for their own processing as most parts of the snapshots are the same and only a few parts are changing with time. It creates ideal opportunities for efficient concurrent execution of the TGP jobs by dramatically reducing CPU-GPU graph data transfer cost. Based on this observation, we develop the first GPU-based dynamic graph processing systemEGraph, which can be integrated into the existing out-of-GPU-memory static graph processing systems to enable them to efficiently support concurrent execution of TGP jobs on dynamic graphs with the help of GPU accelerators. Different from the existing approaches, we propose in EGraph an effectiveLoading-Processing-Switching(LPS) execution model. It is able to effectively reduce the overhead of CPU-GPU data transfer and ensures a higher GPU utilization ratio for efficient execution of the TGP jobs by fully utilizing the data access similarity between the TGP jobs. Experimental results show that the existing GPU-accelerated systems achieve performance improvements of 2.3-3.5 times after being integrated with EGraph.

Graph algorithm is pervasive in many applications ranging from targeted advertising to natural language processing. Recently, Asynchronous Graph Processing (AGP) is becoming a promising model to support graph algorithm on large-scale distributed computing platforms because it enables faster convergence speed and lower synchronization cost than the synchronous model for no barrier between iterations. However, existing AGP methods still suffer from poor performance for inefficient vertex state propagation. In this paper, we propose an effective and low-cost forward and backward sweeping execution method to accelerate state propagation for AGP, based on a key observation that states in AGP can be propagated between vertices much faster when the vertices are processed sequentially along the graph path within each round. Through dividing graph into paths and asynchronously processing vertices on each path in an alternative forward and backward way according to their order on this path, vertex states in our approach can be quickly propagated to other vertices and converge in a faster way with only little additional overhead. In order to efficiently support it over distributed platforms, we also propose a scheme to reduce the communication overhead along with a static priority ordering scheme to further improve the convergence speed. Experimental results on a cluster with 1,024 cores show that our approach achieves excellent scalability for large-scale graph algorithms and the overall execution time is reduced by at least 39.8 percent, in comparison with the most cutting-edge methods.