arXiv subjects

Hailiang Zhao

Publications and source records attributed to Hailiang Zhao.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Learning-Augmented Algorithms: Guarantees, Construction Mechanisms, and System-Level Implications

Learning-augmented algorithms use fallible predictions while retaining formal performance guarantees. This survey synthesizes prediction interfaces, error measures, consistency--robustness trade-offs, and five representative construction mechanisms across online optimization, caching, learned data structures, graph problems, and mechanism design. An orthogonal theorem-level axis distinguishes achieved upper bounds from matched asymptotic dependence. Formal guarantees are separated from empirical systems evidence, with explicit treatment of prediction cost, feedback, and composition. The resulting synthesis states sufficient conditions for limited end-to-end reasoning and delineates open problems in cost-aware prediction, endogenous error, semantic predictors, and benchmarking.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Prediction-Robust Service Deployment with Capacity-Aware Edge Admission

Edge platforms instantiate executable services close to users to reduce request-serving cost, but each instance incurs a one-time deployment cost and remains useful only for a finite time-to-live (TTL). The resulting online decision is both prediction-sensitive and capacity-coupled: an optimistic forecast can waste deployment cost, whereas a delayed decision misses the burst it is intended to serve. We study this problem under a common TTL cost model and propose CAPSUM, a capacity-aware admission policy with an elastic specialization, CAPSUM-E. In the local elastic setting, every node-service trace is exactly a variable-price Bahncard instance. This reduction lets CAPSUM-E inherit PFSUM's tight prediction-error-dependent ratio, including $2/(1+\beta)$ consistency and $1/\beta$ robustness for $\beta>0$. A redirect-aware variant preserves the same local deployment schedule. For finite-capacity nodes, CAPSUM combines size-scaled break-even tests, a utilization-dependent shadow price, and evidence-density eviction; we prove capacity feasibility, scale invariance, and exact agreement with CAPSUM-E under an elastic configuration. We implement an exact local offline dynamic program and compare against direct common-model baselines and documented source-derived adapters for EDP-A, OREO, and uEDC-L. Experiments cover controlled prediction error, three synthetic demand regimes, a causal predictor on a public Globus Compute trace, and joint scaling to 1,024 nodes and 10,000 services. Under the common model, CAPSUM reduces normalized cost by 33.7-42.9% relative to the best source-derived adapter across the synthetic regimes and by 45.5% on the sampled trace.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

LipCache: A Local Inference Proxy with Certified Caching for Edge Image Classification Service

As edge-side vision services continue to expand toward low-latency, high-throughput scenarios, reducing the inference cost of vision models without sacrificing reliability has become a central concern. Existing semantic caching methods largely rely on empirical similarity thresholds; while such thresholds improve hit rates, they tend to introduce silent misclassifications near decision boundaries. To address this, we propose \texttt{LipCache}, a certified semantic caching framework for image classification. Without modifying the existing deployed main model, \texttt{MainNet}, the framework introduces a lightweight network, \texttt{GuardNet}, that maps inputs into a low-dimensional feature space subject to a Lipschitz constraint. It then computes a per-sample certified reuse radius from the local classification margin and the spectral norm of the classification head. At runtime, a cached result is reused only when the query feature falls inside the certified reuse ball; otherwise, the query falls back to \texttt{MainNet}. Thus, cache hits are transformed from empirical threshold tests into geometric certification decisions with explicit theoretical boundaries. Across standard image classification tasks like CIFAR, Tiny-ImageNet, and SVHN, \texttt{LipCache} achieves a measured speedup of up to $1.65\times$ with limited end-to-end accuracy degradation, while all accepted cache hits satisfy the \texttt{GuardNet}-side certified-consistency condition. Furthermore, an enhanced \texttt{GuardNet} training recipe substantially improves cache hit rates in the Tiny-ImageNet multi-class extension while maintaining a certified-consistency rate of $100\%$. These results demonstrate that per-sample certified reuse can reduce main-model fallback while preserving theoretical consistency, providing a feasible approach to reliable cache-assisted inference at the edge.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

Towards Optimal Robustness in Learning-Augmented Paging

Learning-augmented paging has been extensively studied in recent years. A key advantage over naive ML-based approaches is \emph{bounded robustness}, which guarantees worst-case performance even when predictions are inaccurate, making these algorithms valuable for real-world systems. Prior work achieves robustness bounds of $2H_k + O(1)$ in the randomized setting, leaving a gap to the optimal competitive ratio $H_k$. In this paper, we study how to close this gap. We begin by reviewing online optimality and proving a new property of the latest $H_k$-competitive algorithm, which facilitates our analysis in the learning-augmented setting. Then, we review existing learning-augmented paging algorithms and introduce a unifying primitive, the \emph{relative prediction budget}, which captures the essence of establishing robustness and reveals that prior algorithms either overuse or underutilize predictions. Guided by the above analysis, we develop a new framework that achieves the best-possible robustness up to an additive constant for learning-augmented paging: $H_k + O(1)$. Experiments further demonstrate strong practical performance.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2026

When Does Hierarchy Help? Benchmarking Agent Coordination in Event-Driven Industrial Scheduling

Recent advances in agent and multi-agent systems have shown strong performance on tool use, reasoning, and collaborative tasks. However, existing benchmarks mostly evaluate task completion in weakly coupled environments, and provide limited support for studying coordination in shared, dynamically evolving systems with hierarchy and coupled constraints. This leaves an important question underexplored: when do different coordination paradigms succeed or fail? We introduce Distributed Event-driven Scheduling Benchmark (DESBench), a benchmark for evaluating agent coordination in hierarchical event-driven scheduling. Built on a shared discrete-event driven environment in industrial scheduling, our benchmark captures multi-timescale decision making, partial observability, and dynamically coupled constraints. We define tasks and metrics that evaluate effectiveness, constraint alignment, coordination efficiency, and robustness, and focus on four representative coordination paradigms: centralized, hierarchical, heterarchical, and holonic. These paradigms correspond to distinct mechanisms of information flow, decision authority, and conflict resolution. Our controlled evaluations reveal clear coordination trade-offs: centralized coordination is robust and communication-efficient but scales poorly with difficulty; hierarchical coordination improves efficiency through decomposition but suffers from cross-level misalignment; heterarchical coordination is flexible but communication-heavy; and holonic coordination satisfies constraints well but loses global robustness. These findings demonstrate that coordination design fundamentally shapes agent system behavior in complex environments, revealing structural trade-offs that cannot be captured by outcome metrics alone and underscoring the imperative for more adaptive, principled, and dynamic coordination mechanisms in future MAS research.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2026

Frequency Matching in Spiking Neural Networks for mmWave Sensing

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) sensing enables privacy-preserving, always-on edge perception, but its measurements are often sparse, temporally irregular, and corrupted by high-frequency noise. Existing mmWave pipelines predominantly rely on artificial neural networks (ANNs), which achieve robustness through extensive preprocessing or deep architectures, thereby limiting their efficiency on edge devices. In this work, we study spiking neural networks (SNNs) for mmWave sensing from a mechanism-data alignment perspective. By leveraging the low-pass filtering behavior of leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) dynamics, we analyze how their implicit temporal filtering interacts with the frequency structure of mmWave signals. Our analysis shows that when discriminative information resides in low-to-mid frequencies, LIF dynamics can inherently suppress high-frequency noise, clarifying when and why SNNs outperform ANNs. Based on this insight, we derive a principled criterion for configuring the membrane decay factor by matching the effective bandwidth of LIF dynamics to the data's discriminative spectral content. Experimental results across four widely used mmWave datasets validate the proposed frequency-matching hypothesis, yielding an average test-accuracy improvement of 6.22% and a 3.64$\times$ reduction in theoretical energy consumption relative to ANN baselines, under a unified evaluation protocol.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2026

Scene-Aware Latency Estimation for Microservices via Multi-Scale Graph Fusion

Cloud-Native microservice architectures have become prevalent owing to their inherent flexibility and scalability properties. To satisfy service quality guarantees, cloud providers must implement efficient proactive autoscaling algorithms. However, effective proactive scaling critically depends on accurately estimating end-to-end latency under given resource quotas, which remains highly challenging. Existing methods struggle with the multi-hierarchical nature and dynamic operational contexts of microservice systems. They primarily employ single-scale modeling that fails to capture inherent organizational structures and lacks adaptability to varying workload types. To address these limitations, we propose MSGAF, a Multi-Scale Graph Adaptive Fusion framework with Scene-Aware Learning for microservice latency estimation. Our approach constructs hierarchical graph representations through learnable aggregation-based coarsening, capturing system behaviors across microscopic, mesoscopic, and macroscopic levels. The framework comprises three components: a system state encoding module transforming heterogeneous monitoring data into unified representations, a multi-scale graph adaptive fusion module leveraging graph attention networks for hierarchical feature extraction, and a scene-aware learning module employing specialized expert networks with dynamic weight allocation for context-specific estimation. Additionally, we design and implement a comprehensive non-intrusive monitoring system for real-time data collection. Extensive experiments on benchmark microservice applications demonstrate that MSGAF significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse operational scenarios, providing substantial improvements for cloud-native performance optimization.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2026

ARMOR: A Robust Self-Supervised Framework for Root Cause Analysis in Microservices under Missing Modality

Automated incident management is critical for microservice reliability. While recent unified frameworks leverage multimodal data for joint optimization, they unrealistically assume perfect data completeness. In practice, network fluctuations and agent failures frequently cause missing modalities. Existing approaches relying on static placeholders introduce imputation noise that masks anomalies and degrades performance. To address this, we propose ARMOR, a robust self-supervised framework designed for missing modality scenarios. ARMOR features: (i) a modality-specific asymmetric encoder that isolates distribution disparities among metrics, logs, and traces; and (ii) a missing-aware gated fusion mechanism utilizing learnable placeholders and dynamic bias compensation to prevent cross-modal interference from incomplete inputs. By employing self-supervised auto-regression with mask-guided reconstruction, ARMOR jointly optimizes anomaly detection (AD), failure triage (FT), and root cause localization (RCL). AD and RCL require no fault labels, while FT relies solely on failure-type annotations for the downstream classifier. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ARMOR achieves state-of-the-art performance under complete data conditions and maintains robust diagnostic accuracy even with severe modality loss.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Shiva-DiT: Residual-Based Differentiable Top-$k$ Selection for Efficient Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) are costly at high resolution because self-attention scales quadratically with token sequence length. Existing pruning methods do not jointly provide end-to-end learnability, low training overhead, and deterministic token counts for predictable token-dependent computation. We propose Shiva-DiT, based on Residual-Based Differentiable Top-k Selection. Its forward pass executes hard top-k selection, while a residual-aware straight-through estimator propagates gradients to both token scores and the budget k without evaluating a second backbone path. A Context-Aware Router and Adaptive Ratio Policy learn layer- and timestep-dependent retention schedules under a target average budget. Experiments on SD3-Medium, Flux.1-dev, and PixArt-{\Sigma} show consistent reductions in FLOPs and measured latency. On SD3-Medium, Shiva-DiT provides four fidelity-latency operating points and reaches a 1.54x wall-clock speedup with competitive fidelity.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Adaptive Dual-Weighting Framework for Federated Learning via Out-of-Distribution Detection

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across large-scale distributed service nodes while preserving data privacy, making it a cornerstone of intelligent service systems in edge-cloud environments. However, in real-world service-oriented deployments, data generated by heterogeneous users, devices, and application scenarios are inherently non-IID. This severe data heterogeneity critically undermines the convergence stability, generalization ability, and ultimately the quality of service delivered by the global model. To address this challenge, we propose FLood, a novel FL framework inspired by out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. FLood dynamically counteracts the adverse effects of heterogeneity through a dual-weighting mechanism that jointly governs local training and global aggregation. At the client level, it adaptively reweights the supervised loss by upweighting pseudo-OOD samples, thereby encouraging more robust learning from distributionally misaligned or challenging data. At the server level, it refines model aggregation by weighting client contributions according to their OOD confidence scores, prioritizing updates from clients with higher in-distribution consistency and enhancing the global model's robustness and convergence stability. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks under diverse non-IID settings demonstrate that FLood consistently outperforms state-of-the-art FL methods in both accuracy and generalization. Furthermore, FLood functions as an orthogonal plug-in module: it seamlessly integrates with existing FL algorithms to boost their performance under heterogeneity without modifying their core optimization logic. These properties make FLood a practical and scalable solution for deploying reliable intelligent services in real-world federated environments.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Morphis: SLO-Aware Resource Scheduling for Microservices with Time-Varying Call Graphs

Modern microservice systems exhibit continuous structural evolution in their runtime call graphs due to workload fluctuations, fault responses, and deployment activities. Despite this complexity, our analysis of over 500,000 production traces from ByteDance reveals a latent regularity: execution paths concentrate around a small set of recurring invocation patterns. However, existing resource management approaches fail to exploit this structure. Industrial autoscalers like Kubernetes HPA ignore inter-service dependencies, while recent academic methods often assume static topologies, rendering them ineffective under dynamic execution contexts. In this work, we propose Morphis, a dependency-aware provisioning framework that unifies pattern-aware trace analysis with global optimization. It introduces structural fingerprinting that decomposes traces into a stable execution backbone and interpretable deviation subgraphs. Then, resource allocation is formulated as a constrained optimization problem over predicted pattern distributions, jointly minimizing aggregate CPU usage while satisfying end-to-end tail-latency SLOs. Our extensive evaluations on the TrainTicket benchmark demonstrate that Morphis reduces CPU consumption by 35-38% compared to state-of-the-art baselines while maintaining 98.8% SLO compliance.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Industrial Data-Service-Knowledge Governance: Toward Integrated and Trusted Intelligence

The convergence of artificial intelligence, cyber-physical systems, and distributed networking has accelerated the evolution of industrial intelligence across edge, cloud, and cross-organizational communication environments. However, existing governance mechanisms remain fragmented across data management, service orchestration, and knowledge-based decision-making, making it difficult to ensure reliability, accountability, compliance, and explainability throughout the industrial intelligence stack. To address this gap, we present TRISK (TRusted Industrial Data-Service-Knowledge governance), a conceptual and taxonomic framework for trustworthy industrial intelligence. TRISK is grounded in a five-dimensional trust model covering quality, security, privacy, fairness, and explainability, and formalizes how trust is constructed, propagated, aggregated, and fed back across data, service, and knowledge layers in networked industrial systems. Through a structured synthesis of more than 100 representative studies, standards, and technical reports, we examine data governance as the foundation of trust construction, service governance as the mediation layer for trustworthy execution, and knowledge governance as the semantic anchor for reasoning, validation, and feedback adaptation. We further discuss industrial implementation patterns, cross-industry implications, and the role of emerging communication and computing technologies. Finally, we outline a future research roadmap toward adaptive, verifiable, and human-aligned industrial governance for Industry 5.0.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2025

TrackTeller: Temporal Multimodal 3D Grounding for Behavior-Dependent Object References

Understanding natural-language references to objects in dynamic 3D driving scenes is essential for interactive autonomous systems. In practice, many referring expressions describe targets through recent motion or short-term interactions, which cannot be resolved from static appearance or geometry alone. We study temporal language-based 3D grounding, where the objective is to identify the referred object in the current frame by leveraging multi-frame observations. We propose TrackTeller, a temporal multimodal grounding framework that integrates LiDAR-image fusion, language-conditioned decoding, and temporal reasoning in a unified architecture. TrackTeller constructs a shared UniScene representation aligned with textual semantics, generates language-aware 3D proposals, and refines grounding decisions using motion history and short-term dynamics. Experiments on the NuPrompt benchmark demonstrate that TrackTeller consistently improves language-grounded tracking performance, outperforming strong baselines with a 70% relative improvement in Average Multi-Object Tracking Accuracy and a 3.15-3.4 times reduction in False Alarm Frequency.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

OmniFuser: Adaptive Multimodal Fusion for Service-Oriented Predictive Maintenance

Accurate and timely prediction of tool conditions is critical for intelligent manufacturing systems, where unplanned tool failures can lead to quality degradation and production downtime. In modern industrial environments, predictive maintenance is increasingly implemented as an intelligent service that integrates sensing, analysis, and decision support across production processes. To meet the demand for reliable and service-oriented operation, we present OmniFuser, a multimodal learning framework for predictive maintenance of milling tools that leverages both visual and sensor data. It performs parallel feature extraction from high-resolution tool images and cutting-force signals, capturing complementary spatiotemporal patterns across modalities. To effectively integrate heterogeneous features, OmniFuser employs a contamination-free cross-modal fusion mechanism that disentangles shared and modality-specific components, allowing for efficient cross-modal interaction. Furthermore, a recursive refinement pathway functions as an anchor mechanism, consistently retaining residual information to stabilize fusion dynamics. The learned representations can be encapsulated as reusable maintenance service modules, supporting both tool-state classification (e.g., Sharp, Used, Dulled) and multi-step force signal forecasting. Experiments on real-world milling datasets demonstrate that OmniFuser consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, providing a dependable foundation for building intelligent industrial maintenance services.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Agentic Services Computing

Services computing has evolved from Web services and microservices to cloud-native and serverless paradigms. These approaches established mature principles for describing, composing, deploying, operating, and governing reusable software functions. LLM-based agents now introduce a fundamentally different service form. Service value in this paradigm emerges not only from invoking predefined functions but also from delegating goals to autonomous entities. These entities understand context, use tools, collaborate with peers, and act across open environments. This shift raises a core question for services computing. How can goal-driven, stateful, tool-mediated, and accountable autonomous behavior be engineered and managed as a service? Recent studies on LLM agents and multi-agent systems provide important foundations. A clear service-centered research roadmap for this emerging paradigm nevertheless remains absent. This work introduces Agentic Services Computing (ASC) to address this gap. ASC extends services computing from managing reusable functional endpoints to engineering and governing autonomous service entities. It defines agentic services as service-oriented autonomous agents. Related research is organized through a lifecycle view that connects service objects, system structures, enabling infrastructure, evaluation metrics, application evidence, and open challenges. This service-centered perspective establishes a foundation for future service ecosystems. Autonomous agents can thus be systematically described, composed, delivered, monitored, audited, and evolved as first-class services.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Toward Robust and Efficient ML-Based GPU Caching for Modern Inference

In modern GPU inference, cache efficiency remains a major bottleneck, and heuristic policies such as \textsc{LRU} can perform far worse than the offline optimum. Existing learning-based caching systems improve hit rates mainly through predictor design, but often follow learned predictions blindly, making performance unreliable when predictions are inaccurate. In contrast, emerging learning-augmented caching algorithms~\cite{pmlr-v80-lykouris18a,mitzenmacher2022algorithms} provide performance guarantees by carefully integrating predictions into caching policies, achieving both \emph{consistency} (near-optimality under perfect predictions) and \emph{robustness} (bounded worst-case performance under prediction errors). However, deployment remains challenging. A practical algorithm should satisfy strict time and space efficiency constraints, which some theoretical work overlooks, while also incurring low deployment overhead. We propose learning-augmented LRU, a deployment-oriented learning-augmented caching algorithm that guarantees \emph{1-consistency} and \emph{$O(k)$-robustness}, incurs low time and space overhead, and maintains strong compatibility. We further build a GPU cache, called \textsc{LCR}, on top of learning-augmented LRU to benefit from its theoretical guarantees and translate them into practical performance. In experiments, \textsc{LCR} reduces P99 time-to-first-token (TTFT) by up to 28.3\% on LLM workloads and increases throughput by up to 24.2\% on deep learning recommendation (DLRM) workloads. Even with poor predictions, performance degrades gracefully and remains close to \textsc{LRU}, demonstrating robustness with practical value.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Reliable Microservice Tail Latency Prediction via Decoupled Dual-Stream Learning and Gradient Modulation

Microservice architectures enable scalable cloud-native applications; however, the distributed nature of these systems complicates the maintenance of strict Service Level Objectives. Accurately predicting window-level P95 tail latency remains difficult due to the complex interactions between software workload propagation and infrastructure resource limits. Existing predictive models struggle to capture these dynamics because the lack of explicit separation between traffic metrics and resource metrics causes misaligned feature representations. Building on this suboptimal data treatment, the unified architectures of prior approaches fail to isolate cascading service dependencies from localized processing capacity. Due to this entanglement, joint training suffers from an optimization imbalance wherein resource features converge faster and dominate gradient updates, thereby preventing the learning of underlying software topologies. To address these challenges, we propose USRFNet, a dual-stream framework that separates the modeling of demand and capacity. The proposed framework utilizes a Graph Neural Network to model the spatial interactions of traffic workloads across software-level service dependencies, and a gating MLP to independently extract infrastructure-level resource dynamics. The model then integrates these representations through hierarchical tensor fusion. To resolve the training imbalance, we introduce a Reliability-Aware Gradient Modulation strategy that dynamically rescales gradients based on the generalization ratio of each data stream. Experiments on three large-scale real-world benchmarks demonstrate that USRFNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in prediction accuracy. Specifically, compared to the best-performing baselines, the proposed framework achieves relative MAPE reductions ranging from 15.62% to 26.11% across the evaluated datasets.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Learning Intrinsic Water-Quality Dynamics with Rainfall for Data-Driven Forecasting

Rainfall is an important environmental driver of water-quality variations through processes such as runoff, pollutant transport, dilution, and resuspension. Traditional mechanistic models can explicitly describe these processes but often require substantial process specification and site-specific calibration, limiting their flexibility under changing hydrological conditions. In this work, we explore a data-driven alternative by proposing RaiNet to jointly model multiscale water-quality dynamics and station-specific rainfall effects across relative lags and temporal scales. RaiNet employs LocTrend to capture irregular water-quality dynamics, constructs station-oriented rainfall events from gridded precipitation, and introduces XGateFusion for conditional lag-aware fusion across scales. We further release three real-world multimodal datasets comprising over 150,000 temporally aligned water quality observations and gridded precipitation raster images. Experiments show that RaiNet outperforms general time-series, water quality, diffusion-based, and spatiotemporal models by over 20%, while component-wise analyses confirm the distinct contribution of each module.

cs.LG↗