The growing demand for advanced analytics beyond statistical aggregation calls for database systems that support effective model selection of deep neural networks (DNNs). However, existing model selection strategies are based on either training-based algorithms that deliver high-performing models at the expense of high computational cost, or training-free algorithms that enhance computational efficiency with reduced effectiveness. These strategies often disregard computational cost and response time Service-Level Objectives (SLOs), which are of concern to average or budget-conscious machine learning users. In addition, they lack a well-designed integration of the model selection algorithms with DBMSs, which hinders efficient in-database model selection. This paper presents TRAILS, a resource-efficient and SLO-aware in-database model selection system. To leverage the strengths of both training-free and training-based model selection, we first characterize nine state-of-the-art training-free model evaluation metrics and propose a more effective one named JacFlow, and then, restructure the conventional model selection procedure into two phases: filtering and refinement. A novel coordinator is also introduced to strike a balance between the high efficiency of train-free algorithms and the high effectiveness of training-based algorithms, ensuring high-performing model selection while adhering to target SLOs. Moreover, we incorporate the proposed algorithm into PostgreSQL to develop TRAILS, thereby both enhancing resource efficiency and reducing model selection latency. This integration establishes a foundation for declarative model definition and selection within DBMSs. Empirical results demonstrate that our TRAILS reduces model selection time and computational expenses considerably by up to 24.38x and 29.32x respectively compared to existing model selection systems.

Relational database management systems (RDBMS) are widely used for the storage of structured data. To derive insights beyond statistical aggregation, we typically have to extract specific subdatasets from the database using conventional database operations, and then apply deep neural networks (DNN) training and inference on these subdatasets in a separate analytics system. The process can be prohibitively expensive, especially when there are various subdatasets extracted for different analytical purposes. This calls for efficient in-database support of advanced analytical methods. In this paper, we introduce LEADS, a novel SQL-aware dynamic model slicing technique to customize models for specified SQL queries. LEADS improves the predictive modeling of structured data via the mixture of experts (MoE) and maintains efficiency by a SQL-aware gating network. At the core of LEADS is the construction of a general model with multiple expert sub-models trained over the database. The MoE scales up the modeling capacity, enhances effectiveness, and preserves efficiency by activating necessary experts via the SQL-aware gating network during inference. To support in-database analytics, we build an inference extension that integrates LEADS onto PostgreSQL. Our extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that LEADS consistently outperforms the baseline models, and the in-database inference extension delivers a considerable reduction in inference latency compared to traditional solutions.

Federated learning (FL) enables multiple data owners to collaboratively train machine learning (ML) models without disclosing their raw data. In the vertical federated learning (VFL) setting, the collaborating parties have data from the same set of users but with disjoint attributes. After constructing the VFL models, the parties deploy the models in production systems to infer prediction requests. In practice, the prediction output itself may not be convincing for party users to make the decisions, especially in high-stakes applications. Model interpretability is therefore essential to provide meaningful insights and better comprehension on the prediction output. In this paper, we propose Falcon, a novel privacy-preserving and interpretable VFL system. First, Falcon supports VFL training and prediction with strong and efficient privacy protection for a wide range of ML models, including linear regression, logistic regression, and multi-layer perceptron. The protection is achieved by a hybrid strategy of threshold partially homomorphic encryption (PHE) and additive secret sharing scheme (SSS), ensuring no intermediate information disclosure. Second, Falcon facilitates understanding of VFL model predictions by a flexible and privacy-preserving interpretability framework, which enables the implementation of state-of-the-art interpretable methods in a decentralized setting. Third, Falcon supports efficient data parallelism of VFL tasks and optimizes the parallelism factors to reduce the overall execution time. Falcon is fully implemented, and on which, we conduct extensive experiments using six real-world and multiple synthetic datasets. The results demonstrate that Falcon achieves comparable accuracy to non-private algorithms and outperforms three secure baselines in terms of efficiency.

Deep learning has achieved great success in a wide spectrum of multimedia applications such as image classification, natural language processing and multimodal data analysis. Recent years have seen the development of many deep learning frameworks that provide a high-level programming interface for users to design models, conduct training and deploy inference. However, it remains challenging to build an efficient end-to-end multimedia application with most existing frameworks. Specifically, in terms of usability, it is demanding for non-experts to implement deep learning models, obtain the right settings for the entire machine learning pipeline, manage models and datasets, and exploit external data sources all together. Further, in terms of adaptability, elastic computation solutions are much needed as the actual serving workload fluctuates constantly, and scaling the hardware resources to handle the fluctuating workload is typically infeasible. To address these challenges, we introduce SINGA-Easy, a new deep learning framework that provides distributed hyper-parameter tuning at the training stage, dynamic computational cost control at the inference stage, and intuitive user interactions with multimedia contents facilitated by model explanation. Our experiments on the training and deployment of multi-modality data analysis applications show that the framework is both usable and adaptable to dynamic inference loads. We implement SINGA-Easy on top of Apache SINGA and demonstrate our system with the entire machine learning life cycle.