Byte-addressable persistent memory (PM) has been widely studied in the past few years. Recently, the emerging eADR technology further incorporates CPU cache into the persistence domain. The persistent CPU cache is promising to optimize the write performance of PM-based storage systems and facilitate the design of concurrent crash-consistent data structures. In this paper, we propose Spash, a highly scalable persistent hash index for PM systems with persistent CPU cache. Spash fully exploits the benefits of persistent CPU cache to implement a durable linearizable index with low PM access overhead and high concurrency. Spash employs a fine-grained extendible hash architecture and a metadata-free segment design to minimize the number of PM accesses. Moreover, Spash adopts adaptive in-place updates and compacted-flush insertions, which dramatically conserve scarce PM write bandwidth by absorbing a large amount of PM write in the persistent CPU cache. Furthermore, Spash proposes a two-phase concurrency protocol and a collaborative staged doubling mechanism, which leverage the persistent CPU cache and hardware transactional memory to achieve lock-free concurrency and durable linearizability. Spash outperforms the other state-of-the-art persistent hash indexes in YCSB workloads by up to 19.6×.

Prediction over tabular data is often a crucial task in many real-life applications. Recent advances in deep learning give rise to various deep models for tabular data prediction. A common and essential step in these models is to vectorize raw input features in tabular data into dense embeddings. Choosing a suitable dimension for each feature is challenging yet necessary to improve model’s performance and reduce memory cost of model parameters. Existing solutions to embedding dimensionality search always choose dimensions from a restricted candidate set. This restriction improves the search efficiency but would produce suboptimal embedding dimensions that hurt model’s predictive performance. In this paper, we develop AutoSrh, a flexible embedding dimensionality search framework that can select varying dimensions for different features through differentiable optimization. The key idea of AutoSrh is to relax the search space to be continuous and optimize the selection of embedding dimensions via gradient descent. After optimization, AutoSrh performs embedding pruning to derive the mixed embedding dimensions and retrains the model to further improve the performance. Extensive experiments on five real-world tabular datasets demonstrate that AutoSrh can achieve better predictive performance than the existing approaches with 1.1$\sim$1.6x lower training time cost and reserve model’s predictive performance while reducing 50$\sim$95% embedding parameters.

Persistent memory (PM) promises near-DRAM performance as well as data persistency. Recently, a new feature called eADR is available on the 2 nd generation Intel Optane PM with the 3 rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors. eADR ensures that data stored within the CPU caches will be flushed to PM upon the power failure. Thus, in eADR-enabled PM systems, the globally visible data is considered persistent, and explicit data flushes are no longer necessary. The emergence of eADR presents unique opportunities to build lock-free data structures and unleash the full potential of PM. In this paper, we propose NBTree, a lock-free PM-friendly B + -Tree, to deliver high scalability and low PM overhead. To our knowledge, NBTree is the first persistent index designed for eADR-enabled PM systems. To achieve lock-free, NBTree uses atomic primitives to serialize leaf node operations. Moreover, NBTree proposes four novel techniques to enable lock-free access to the leaf during structural modification operations (SMO), including three-phase SMO, sync-on-write, sync-on-read , and cooperative SMO. For inner node operations, we develop a shift-aware search algorithm to resolve read-write conflicts. To reduce PM overhead, NBTree decouples the leaf nodes into a metadata layer and a key-value layer. The metadata layer is stored in DRAM, along with the inner nodes, to reduce PM accesses. NBTree also adopts log-structured insert and in-place update/delete to improve cache utilization. Our evaluation shows that NBTree achieves up to 11X higher throughput and 43X lower 99% tail latency than state-of-the-art persistent B + -Trees under YCSB workloads.

Among various recommendation methods, latent factor models are usually considered to be state-of-the-art techniques, which aim to learn user and item embeddings for predicting user-item preferences. When applying latent factor models to the recommendation with implicit feedback, the quality of embeddings always suffers from inadequate positive feedback and noisy negative feedback. Inspired by the idea of NSVD that represents users based on their interacted items, this article proposes a dual-embedding based deep latent factor method for recommendation with implicit feedback. In addition to learning a primitive embedding for a user (resp. item), we represent each user (resp. item) with an additional embedding from the perspective of the interacted items (resp. users) and propose attentive neural methods to discriminate the importance of interacted users/items for dual-embedding learning. We design two dual-embedding based deep latent factor models, DELF and DESEQ, for pure collaborative filtering and temporal collaborative filtering (i.e., sequential recommendation), respectively. The novel attempt of the proposed models is to capture each user-item interaction with four deep representations that are subtly fused for preference prediction. We conducted extensive experiments on four real-world datasets. The results verify the effectiveness of user/item dual embeddings and the superior performance of our methods on item recommendation.

For the emerging mobility-on-demand services, it is of great significance to predict passenger demands based on historical mobility trips towards better vehicle distribution. Prior works have focused on predicting next-step passenger demands at selected locations or hotspots. However, we argue that multi-step citywide passenger demands encapsulate both time-varying demand trends and global statuses, and hence are more beneficial to avoiding demand-service mismatching and developing effective vehicle distribution/scheduling strategies. Furthermore, we find that adaptations of single-step methods are unable to achieve robust prediction with high accuracy for further steps. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep neural network model to the prediction task. We employ an encoder-decoder framework based on convolutional and ConvLSTM units to identify complex features that capture spatiotemporal influence and pickup-dropoff interactions on citywide passenger demands. We introduce a multi-level attention model (global attention and temporal attention) to emphasize the effects of latent citywide mobility regularities and capture relevant temporal dependencies. We evaluate our proposed method using real-world mobility trips (taxis and bikes) and the experimental results show that our method achieves higher prediction accuracy than the state-of-the-art approaches.

The goal of traffic prediction is to predict future traffic values such as speeds or flows in a transportation network. Existing studies mainly focus on exploring spatiotemporal dependencies in time and space domains. However, they generally neglect the frequency information encoded in the traffic data, which sheds light on the true spatiotemporal correlations among any vertices in the transportation network. In this paper, we aim to incorporate two kinds of frequency information, time-frequency and space-frequency, into the modeling of spatiotemporal dependencies towards more accurate traffic prediction. We investigate the importance of two frequencies using real traffic data and develop an end-to-end neural approach to utilizing both frequencies for traffic prediction effectively. Specifically, we propose an attention module to aggregate features from semantically related vertices according to their time-frequency similarities, and derive a semantic representation. A novel space-frequency-based gating mechanism is designed to control how much local information is propagated to the state updating, enforced with the graph convolution to generate an effective local representation. Finally, our model combines the semantic and local representations with gated recurrent units to predict future traffic values. Extensive experiments on two real-world traffic datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach yields better prediction performance than the state-of-the-art methods.

Latent factor models (LFMs) such as matrix factorization have achieved the state-of-the-art performance among various collaborative filtering approaches for recommendation. Despite the high recommendation accuracy of LFMs, a critical issue to be resolved is their lack of interpretability. Extensive efforts have been devoted to interpreting the prediction results of LFMs. However, they either rely on auxiliary information which may not be available in practice, or sacrifice recommendation accuracy for interpretability. Influence functions, stemming from robust statistics, have been developed to understand the effect of training points on the predictions of black-box models. Inspired by this, we propose a novel explanation method named FIA (Fast Influence Analysis) to understand the prediction of trained LFMs by tracing back to the training data with influence functions. We present how to employ influence functions to measure the impact of historical user-item interactions on the prediction results of LFMs and provide intuitive neighbor-style explanations based on the most influential interactions. Our proposed FIA exploits the characteristics of two important LFMs, matrix factorization and neural collaborative filtering, and is capable of accelerating the overall influence analysis process. We provide a detailed complexity analysis for FIA over LFMs and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate its performance using real-world datasets. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of FIA, and the usefulness of the generated explanations for the recommendation results.

For many large-scale multimedia datasets and web contents, the nearest neighbor search methods based on the hashing strategy for cross-modal retrieval have attracted considerable attention due to its fast query speed and low storage cost. Most existing hashing methods try to map different modalities to Hamming embedding in a supervised way where the semantic information comes from a large manual label matrix and each sample in different modalities is usually encoded by a sparse label vector. However, previous studies didn't address the semantic correlation learning challenges and couldn't make the best use of the prior semantic information. Therefore, they cannot preserve the accurate semantic similarities and often degrade the performance of hashing function learning. To fill this gap, we firstly proposed a novel Deep Semantic Correlation learning based Hashing framework (DSCH) that generates unified hash codes in an end-to-end deep learning architecture for cross-modal retrieval task. The major contribution in this work is to effectively automatically construct the semantic correlation between data representation and demonstrate how to utilize correlation information to generate hash codes for new samples. In particular, DSCH integrates latent semantic embedding with a unified hash embedding to strengthen the similarity information among multiple modalities. Furthermore, additional graph regularization is employed in our framework, to capture the correspondences from the inter-modal and intra-modal. Our model simultaneously learns the semantic correlation and the unified hash codes, which enhances the effectiveness of cross-modal retrieval task. Experimental results show the superior accuracy of our proposed approach to several state-of-the-art cross-modality methods on two large datasets.

Predicting passenger pickup/dropoff demands based on historical mobility trips has been of great importance towards better vehicle distribution for the emerging mobility-on-demand (MOD) services. Prior works focused on predicting next-step passenger demands at selected locations or hotspots. However, we argue that multi-step citywide passenger demands encapsulate both time-varying demand trends and global statuses, and hence are more beneficial to avoiding demand-service mismatching and developing effective vehicle distribution/scheduling strategies. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end deep neural network solution to the prediction task. We employ the encoder-decoder framework based on convolutional and ConvLSTM units to identify complex features that capture spatiotemporal influences and pickup-dropoff interactions on citywide passenger demands. A novel attention model is incorporated to emphasize the effects of latent citywide mobility regularities. We evaluate our proposed method using real-word mobility trips (taxis and bikes) and the experimental results show that our method achieves higher prediction accuracy than the adaptations of the state-of-the-art approaches.

Modern Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) promises persistence, byte-addressability and DRAM-like read and write latency, which offers great opportunities for big data storage architecture. These excellent properties indicate that NVM has the potential to be incorporated with key-value stores to achieve high performance and durability simultaneously.