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Hui Ma

Publications and source records attributed to Hui Ma.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

HGraphScale: Hierarchical Graph Learning for Autoscaling Microservice Applications in Container-based Cloud Computing

Microservice architecture has become a dominant paradigm in application development due to its advantages of being lightweight, flexible, and resilient. Deploying microservice applications in the container-based cloud enables fine-grained elastic resource allocation. Autoscaling is an effective approach to dynamically adjust the resource provisioned to containers. However, the intricate microservice dependencies and the deployment scheme of the container-based cloud bring extra challenges of resource scaling. This article proposes a novel autoscaling approach named HGraphScale. In particular, HGraphScale captures microservice dependencies and the deployment scheme by a newly designed hierarchical graph neural network, and makes effective scaling actions for rapidly changing user requests workloads. Extensive experiments based on real-world traces of user requests are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of HGraphScale. The experiment results show that the HGraphScale outperforms existing state-of-the-art autoscaling approaches by reducing at most 80.16\% of the average response time under a certain VM rental budget of application providers.

cs.DC↗

Stencil-Lifting: Hierarchical Recursive Lifting System for Extracting Summary of Stencil Kernel in Legacy Codes

We introduce Stencil-Lifting, a novel system for automatically converting stencil kernels written in low-level languages in legacy code into semantically equivalent Domain-Specific Language (DSL) implementations. Targeting the efficiency bottlenecks of existing verified lifting systems, Stencil-Lifting achieves scalable stencil kernel abstraction through two key innovations. First, we propose a hierarchical recursive lifting theory that represents stencil kernels, structured as nested loops, using invariant subgraphs, which are customized data dependency graphs that capture loop-carried computation and structural invariants. Each vertex in the invariant subgraph is associated with a predicate-based summary, encoding its computational semantics. By enforcing self-consistency across these summaries, Stencil-Lifting ensures the derivation of correct loop invariants and postconditions for nested loops, eliminating the need for external verification. Second, we develop a hierarchical recursive lifting algorithm that guarantees termination through a convergent recursive process, avoiding the inefficiencies of search-based synthesis. The algorithm efficiently derives the valid summaries of stencil kernels, and its completeness is formally proven. We evaluate Stencil-Lifting on diverse stencil benchmarks from two different suites and on four real-world applications. Experimental results demonstrate that Stencil-Lifting achieves 31.62$\times$ and 5.8$\times$ speedups compared to the state-of-the-art verified lifting systems STNG and Dexter, respectively, while maintaining full semantic equivalence. Our work significantly enhances the translation efficiency of low-level stencil kernels to DSL implementations, effectively bridging the gap between legacy optimization techniques and modern DSL-based paradigms.

cs.SE↗

GATES: Cost-aware Dynamic Workflow Scheduling via Graph Attention Networks and Evolution Strategy

Cost-aware Dynamic Workflow Scheduling (CADWS) is a key challenge in cloud computing, focusing on devising an effective scheduling policy to efficiently schedule dynamically arriving workflow tasks, represented as Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG), to suitable virtual machines (VMs). Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been widely employed for automated scheduling policy design. However, the performance of DRL is heavily influenced by the design of the problem-tailored policy network and is highly sensitive to hyperparameters and the design of reward feedback. Considering the above-mentioned issues, this study proposes a novel DRL method combining Graph Attention Networks-based policy network and Evolution Strategy, referred to as GATES. The contributions of GATES are summarized as follows: (1) GATES can capture the impact of current task scheduling on subsequent tasks by learning the topological relationships between tasks in a DAG. (2) GATES can assess the importance of each VM to the ready task, enabling it to adapt to dynamically changing VM resources. (3) Utilizing Evolution Strategy's robustness, exploratory nature, and tolerance for delayed rewards, GATES achieves stable policy learning in CADWS. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed GATES in CADWS, outperforming several state-of-the-art algorithms. The source code is available at: https://github.com/YaShen998/GATES.

cs.AI↗

In-Context Examples Matter: Improving Emotion Recognition in Conversation with Instruction Tuning

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims to identify the emotion of each utterance in a conversation, playing a vital role in empathetic artificial intelligence. With the growing of large language models (LLMs), instruction tuning has emerged as a critical paradigm for ERC. Existing studies mainly focus on multi-stage instruction tuning, which first endows LLMs with speaker characteristics, and then conducts context-aware instruction tuning to comprehend emotional states. However, these methods inherently constrains the capacity to jointly capture the dynamic interaction between speaker characteristics and conversational context, resulting in weak alignment among speaker identity, contextual cues, and emotion states within a unified framework. In this paper, we propose InitERC, a simple yet effective one-stage in-context instruction tuning framework for ERC. InitERC adapts LLMs to learn speaker-context-emotion alignment from context examples via in-context instruction tuning. Specifically, InitERC comprises four components, i.e., demonstration pool construction, in-context example selection, prompt template design, and in-context instruction tuning. To explore the impact of in-context examples, we conduct a comprehensive study on three key factors: retrieval strategy, example ordering, and the number of examples. Extensive experiments on three widely used datasets demonstrate that our proposed InitERC achieves substantial improvements over the state-of-the-art baselines.

cs.CL↗

AgentMental: An Interactive Multi-Agent Framework for Explainable and Adaptive Mental Health Assessment

Mental health assessment is crucial for early intervention and effective treatment, yet traditional clinician-based approaches are limited by the shortage of qualified professionals. Recent advances in artificial intelligence have sparked growing interest in automated psychological assessment, yet most existing approaches are constrained by their reliance on static text analysis, limiting their ability to capture deeper and more informative insights that emerge through dynamic interaction and iterative questioning. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a multi-agent framework for mental health evaluation that simulates clinical doctor-patient dialogues, with specialized agents assigned to questioning, adequacy evaluation, scoring, and updating. We introduce an adaptive questioning mechanism in which an evaluation agent assesses the adequacy of user responses to determine the necessity of generating targeted follow-up queries to address ambiguity and missing information. Additionally, we employ a tree-structured memory in which the root node encodes the user's basic information, while child nodes (e.g., topic and statement) organize key information according to distinct symptom categories and interaction turns. This memory is dynamically updated throughout the interaction to reduce redundant questioning and further enhance the information extraction and contextual tracking capabilities. Experimental results on the DAIC-WOZ dataset illustrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which achieves better performance than existing approaches.

cs.CL↗

A reconfigurable arbitrary retarder array as complex structured matter

Tuneable retarder arrays, such as spatially patterned liquid crystal devices, have given rise to impressive photonic functionality, fuelling diverse applications ranging from microscopy and holography to encryption and communications. Presently these solutions are limited by the controllable degrees of freedom of structured matter, hindering applications that demand photonic systems with high flexibility and reconfigurable topologies. Here we demonstrate a compound modulator that implements a synthetic tuneable arbitrary retarder array as virtual pixels derived by cascading low functionality tuneable devices, realising full dynamic control of its arbitrary elliptical axis geometry, retardance value, and induced phase. Our approach offers unprecedented functionality that is user-defined and possesses high flexibility, allowing our modulator to act as a new beam generator, analyser, and corrector, opening an exciting path to tuneable topologies of light and matter.

physics.optics↗

Benchmarking Unified Face Attack Detection via Hierarchical Prompt Tuning

PAD and FFD are proposed to protect face data from physical media-based Presentation Attacks and digital editing-based DeepFakes, respectively. However, isolated training of these two models significantly increases vulnerability towards unknown attacks, burdening deployment environments. The lack of a Unified Face Attack Detection model to simultaneously handle attacks in these two categories is mainly attributed to two factors: (1) A benchmark that is sufficient for models to explore is lacking. Existing UAD datasets only contain limited attack types and samples, leading to the model's confined ability to address abundant advanced threats. In light of these, through an explainable hierarchical way, we propose the most extensive and sophisticated collection of forgery techniques available to date, namely UniAttackDataPlus. Our UniAttackData+ encompasses 2,875 identities and their 54 kinds of corresponding falsified samples, in a total of 697,347 videos. (2) The absence of a trustworthy classification criterion. Current methods endeavor to explore an arbitrary criterion within the same semantic space, which fails to exist when encountering diverse attacks. Thus, we present a novel Visual-Language Model-based Hierarchical Prompt Tuning Framework that adaptively explores multiple classification criteria from different semantic spaces. Specifically, we construct a VP-Tree to explore various classification rules hierarchically. Then, by adaptively pruning the prompts, the model can select the most suitable prompts guiding the encoder to extract discriminative features at different levels in a coarse-to-fine manner. Finally, to help the model understand the classification criteria in visual space, we propose a DPI module to project the visual prompts to the text encoder to help obtain a more accurate semantics.

cs.CV↗

UrbanMind: Towards Urban General Intelligence via Tool-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation and Multilevel Optimization

Urban general intelligence (UGI) refers to the capacity of AI systems to autonomously perceive, reason, and act within dynamic and complex urban environments. In this paper, we introduce UrbanMind, a tool-enhanced retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework designed to facilitate UGI. Central to UrbanMind is a novel architecture based on Continual Retrieval-Augmented MoE-based LLM (C-RAG-LLM), which dynamically incorporates domain-specific knowledge and evolving urban data to support long-term adaptability. The architecture of C-RAG-LLM aligns naturally with a multilevel optimization framework, where different layers are treated as interdependent sub-problems. Each layer has distinct objectives and can be optimized either independently or jointly through a hierarchical learning process. The framework is highly flexible, supporting both end-to-end training and partial layer-wise optimization based on resource or deployment constraints. To remain adaptive under data drift, it is further integrated with an incremental corpus updating mechanism. Evaluations on real-world urban tasks of a variety of complexity verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework. This work presents a promising step toward the realization of general-purpose LLM agents in future urban environments.

cs.LG↗

Hamiltonian cycles in $ 15 $-tough ($ P_{3}\cup 3P_{1} $)-free graphs

A graph $ G $ is called $ t $-tough if $ \left|S\right|\geq t\cdot w\left(G-S\right)$ for every cutset $ S $ of $G$. Chvátal conjectured that there exists a constant $ t_{0} $ such that every $ t_{0} $-tough graph has a hamiltonian cycle. Gao and Shan have proved that every $7$-tough $(P_{3}\cup 2P_{1})$-free grah is hamiltonian. In this paper, we confirm this conjecture for $ (P_{3}\cup 3P_{1}) $-free graphs.

math.CO↗

2-factors in $\frac{3}{2}$-tough maximal planar graphs

The toughness of a graph $G$ is defined as the minimum value of $|S|/c(G-S)$ over all cutsets $S$ of $G$ if $G$ is noncomplete, and is defined to be $\infty$ if $G$ is complete. For a real number $t$, we say that $G$ is $t$-tough if its toughness is at least $t$. Followed from the classic 1956 result of Tutte, every more than $\frac{3}{2}$-tough planar graph on at least three vertices has a 2-factor. In 1999, Owens constructed a sequence of maximal planar graphs with toughness $\frac{3}{2}-\varepsilon$ for any $\varepsilon >0$, but the graphs do not contain any 2-factor. He then posed the question of whether there exists a maximal planar graph with toughness exactly $\frac{3}{2}$ and with no 2-factor. This question was recently answered affirmatively by the third author. This naturally leads to the question: under what conditions does a $\frac{3}{2}$-tough maximal planar graph contain a 2-factor? In this paper, we provide a sufficient condition for the existence of 2-factors in $\frac{3}{2}$-tough maximal planar graphs, stated as a bound on the distance between vertices of degree 3.

math.CO↗

Not All Frame Features Are Equal: Video-to-4D Generation via Decoupling Dynamic-Static Features

Recently, the generation of dynamic 3D objects from a video has shown impressive results. Existing methods directly optimize Gaussians using whole information in frames. However, when dynamic regions are interwoven with static regions within frames, particularly if the static regions account for a large proportion, existing methods often overlook information in dynamic regions and are prone to overfitting on static regions. This leads to producing results with blurry textures. We consider that decoupling dynamic-static features to enhance dynamic representations can alleviate this issue. Thus, we propose a dynamic-static feature decoupling module (DSFD). Along temporal axes, it regards the regions of current frame features that possess significant differences relative to reference frame features as dynamic features. Conversely, the remaining parts are the static features. Then, we acquire decoupled features driven by dynamic features and current frame features. Moreover, to further enhance the dynamic representation of decoupled features from different viewpoints and ensure accurate motion prediction, we design a temporal-spatial similarity fusion module (TSSF). Along spatial axes, it adaptively selects similar information of dynamic regions. Hinging on the above, we construct a novel approach, DS4D. Experimental results verify our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results in video-to-4D. In addition, the experiments on a real-world scenario dataset demonstrate its effectiveness on the 4D scene. Our code will be publicly available.

cs.CV↗

Fog Intelligence for Network Anomaly Detection

Anomalies are common in network system monitoring. When manifested as network threats to be mitigated, service outages to be prevented, and security risks to be ameliorated, detecting such anomalous network behaviors becomes of great importance. However, the growing scale and complexity of the mobile communication networks, as well as the ever-increasing amount and dimensionality of the network surveillance data, make it extremely difficult to monitor a mobile network and discover abnormal network behaviors. Recent advances in machine learning allow for obtaining near-optimal solutions to complicated decision-making problems with many sources of uncertainty that cannot be accurately characterized by traditional mathematical models. However, most machine learning algorithms are centralized, which renders them inapplicable to a large-scale distributed wireless networks with tens of millions of mobile devices. In this article, we present fog intelligence, a distributed machine learning architecture that enables intelligent wireless network management. It preserves the advantage of both edge processing and centralized cloud computing. In addition, the proposed architecture is scalable, privacy-preserving, and well suited for intelligent management of a distributed wireless network.

cs.NI↗

MetaSTNet: Multimodal Meta-learning for Cellular Traffic Conformal Prediction

Network traffic prediction techniques have attracted much attention since they are valuable for network congestion control and user experience improvement. While existing prediction techniques can achieve favorable performance when there is sufficient training data, it remains a great challenge to make accurate predictions when only a small amount of training data is available. To tackle this problem, we propose a deep learning model, entitled MetaSTNet, based on a multimodal meta-learning framework. It is an end-to-end network architecture that trains the model in a simulator and transfers the meta-knowledge to a real-world environment, which can quickly adapt and obtain accurate predictions on a new task with only a small amount of real-world training data. In addition, we further employ cross conformal prediction to assess the calibrated prediction intervals. Extensive experiments have been conducted on real-world datasets to illustrate the efficiency and effectiveness of MetaSTNet.

cs.NI↗

Cellular Traffic Prediction via Deep State Space Models with Attention Mechanism

Cellular traffic prediction is of great importance for operators to manage network resources and make decisions. Traffic is highly dynamic and influenced by many exogenous factors, which would lead to the degradation of traffic prediction accuracy. This paper proposes an end-to-end framework with two variants to explicitly characterize the spatiotemporal patterns of cellular traffic among neighboring cells. It uses convolutional neural networks with an attention mechanism to capture the spatial dynamics and Kalman filter for temporal modelling. Besides, we can fully exploit the auxiliary information such as social activities to improve prediction performance. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets. The results show that our proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art machine learning techniques in terms of prediction accuracy.

cs.LG↗

Cellular Traffic Prediction via Byzantine-robust Asynchronous Federated Learning

Network traffic prediction plays a crucial role in intelligent network operation. Traditional prediction methods often rely on centralized training, necessitating the transfer of vast amounts of traffic data to a central server. This approach can lead to latency and privacy concerns. To address these issues, federated learning integrated with differential privacy has emerged as a solution to improve data privacy and model robustness in distributed settings. Nonetheless, existing federated learning protocols are vulnerable to Byzantine attacks, which may significantly compromise model robustness. Developing a robust and privacy-preserving prediction model in the presence of Byzantine clients remains a significant challenge. To this end, we propose an asynchronous differential federated learning framework based on distributionally robust optimization. The proposed framework utilizes multiple clients to train the prediction model collaboratively with local differential privacy. In addition, regularization techniques have been employed to further improve the Byzantine robustness of the models. We have conducted extensive experiments on three real-world datasets, and the results elucidate that our proposed distributed algorithm can achieve superior performance over existing methods.

cs.LG↗

Advancing Community Detection with Graph Convolutional Neural Networks: Bridging Topological and Attributive Cohesion

Community detection, a vital technology for real-world applications, uncovers cohesive node groups (communities) by leveraging both topological and attribute similarities in social networks. However, existing Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) trained to maximize modularity often converge to suboptimal solutions. Additionally, directly using human-labeled communities for training can undermine topological cohesiveness by grouping disconnected nodes based solely on node attributes. We address these issues by proposing a novel Topological and Attributive Similarity-based Community detection (TAS-Com) method. TAS-Com introduces a novel loss function that exploits the highly effective and scalable Leiden algorithm to detect community structures with global optimal modularity. Leiden is further utilized to refine human-labeled communities to ensure connectivity within each community, enabling TAS-Com to detect community structures with desirable trade-offs between modularity and compliance with human labels. Experimental results on multiple benchmark networks confirm that TAS-Com can significantly outperform several state-of-the-art algorithms.

cs.SI↗

Efficient moment tensor machine-learning interatomic potential for accurate description of defects in Ni-Al Alloys

Combining the efficiency of semi-empirical potentials with the accuracy of quantum mechanical methods, machine-learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have significantly advanced atomistic modeling in computational materials science and chemistry. This necessitates the continual development of MLIP models with improved accuracy and efficiency, which enable long-time scale molecular dynamics simulations to unveil the intricate underlying mechanisms that would otherwise remain elusive. Among various existing MLIP models, the moment tensor potential (MTP) model employs a highly descriptive rotationally-covariant moment tensor to describe the local atomic environment, enabling the use of even linear regression for model fitting. Although the current MTP model has achieved state-of-the-art efficiency for similar accuracy, there is still room for optimizing the contraction process of moment tensors. In this work, we propose an effective genetic algorithm based optimization scheme that can significantly reduce the number of independent moment tensor components and intermediate tensor components. This leads to a speedup of nearly one order of magnitude in efficiency and also improved accuracy compared to the traditional MTP model for intricate basis sets. We have applied our improved MTP model to predicting the energetic and dynamical properties of various point and planar defects in Ni-Al alloys, showing overall good performances and in general outperforming the semi-empirical potentials. This work paves the way for fast and accurate atomistic modeling of complex systems and provides a useful tool for modeling defects in Ni-Al alloys.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Quantum Delocalization Enables Water Dissociation on Ru(0001)

We revisit the long-standing question of whether water molecules dissociate on the Ru(0001) surface through nanosecond-scale path-integral molecular dynamics simulations on a sizable supercell. This is made possible through the development of an efficient and reliable machine-learning potential with near first-principles accuracy, overcoming the limitations of previous ab initio studies. We show that the quantum delocalization associated with nuclear quantum effects enables rapid and frequent proton transfers between water molecules, thereby facilitating the water dissociation on Ru(0001). This work provides the direct theoretical evidence of water dissociation on Ru(0001), resolving the enduring issue in surface sciences and offering crucial atomistic insights into water-metal interfaces.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗