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Jianpeng Qi

Publications and source records attributed to Jianpeng Qi.

14 recordsLinked to original sources

Update for Decisions, Not Freshness: Goal-Oriented Status Updating and Selective Offloading at the Network Edge

In an edge--cloud collaborative edge-computing environment, an edge node (EN) must decide whether each user task should be executed locally, forwarded to a remote service (or cloud) node (SN), or rejected. The EN observes its local state directly but receives the SN state only through an intermittently refreshed cache. Status updating and task control therefore form an asynchronous closed loop under partial observability. Freshness-driven schemes, including those based on Age of Information (AoI), do not directly value an update by its effect on subsequent task decisions. We propose CoSMO (Co-design of Semantic-state Management and Offloading), a cooperative event-driven reinforcement learning (RL) framework that coordinates semantic status management and selective offloading through realized task utility. CoSMO learns a compact representation of the heterogeneous SN service state. At the SN, a recurrent semi-Markov double deep Q-network (Double DQN) agent jointly selects send/no-send and the next decision interval. At the EN, a task-terminal off-policy value-learning agent makes hierarchical gate--route decisions from local observations and stale remote semantics. The agents maintain separate observations and value targets but share the same realized task-utility stream, without centralized execution. Across the evaluated workload families, CoSMO's reported relative improvement in on-time completion rate over the best-performing competing method averages 18.6%--21.2%. For capacity-aware decision accuracy across the three strict-overload points, the corresponding reported gains average 17.6%--$17.9%.

cs.DC

AutoSculpt: A Pattern-based Model Auto-pruning Framework Using Reinforcement Learning and Graph Learning

As deep neural networks (DNNs) are increasingly deployed on edge devices, optimizing models for constrained computational resources is critical. Existing auto-pruning methods face challenges due to the diversity of DNN models, various operators (e.g., filters), and the difficulty in balancing pruning granularity with model accuracy. To address these limitations, we introduce AutoSculpt, a pattern-based automated pruning framework designed to enhance efficiency and accuracy by leveraging graph learning and deep reinforcement learning (DRL). AutoSculpt automatically identifies and prunes regular patterns within DNN architectures that can be recognized by existing inference engines, enabling runtime acceleration. Three key steps in AutoSculpt include: (1) Constructing DNNs as graphs to encode their topology and parameter dependencies, (2) embedding computationally efficient pruning patterns, and (3) utilizing DRL to iteratively refine auto-pruning strategies until the optimal balance between compression and accuracy is achieved. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of AutoSculpt across various architectures, including ResNet, MobileNet, VGG, and Vision Transformer, achieving pruning rates of up to 90% and nearly 18% improvement in FLOPs reduction, outperforming all baselines. The codes can be available at https://github.com/jlx15588/AutoSculpt

cs.AI

ScaleGNN: Towards Scalable Graph Neural Networks via Adaptive High-order Neighboring Feature Fusion

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated impressive performance across diverse graph-based tasks by leveraging message passing to capture complex node relationships. However, on large-scale real-world graphs, GNNs face two major challenges: (1) GNNs struggle to ensure scalability and efficiency as repeated aggregation of large neighborhoods incurs significant computational overhead; (2) GNNs suffer from over-smoothing, where excessive propagation makes node representations indistinguishable, hindering model expressiveness. To tackle these, we propose ScaleGNN, which adaptively fuses multi-hop node features for scalable and effective graph learning. We first compute per-hop pure-neighbor matrices to isolate exclusive structural signals, then apply lightweight fusion to balance low- and high-order information, preserving both local detail and global correlations. To curb redundancy and over-smoothing, we introduce Local Contribution Score (LCS)-based masking to prune low-relevance high-order neighbors, and impose learnable sparsity to selectively integrate valuable multi-hop features. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that ScaleGNN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art GNNs in both predictive accuracy and computational efficiency.

cs.LG

Decision-Aware Semantic State Synchronization in Compute-First Networking

In Compute-First Networking (CFN), an Access Point (AP) makes task offloading decisions based on resource state information reported by a Service Node (SN). A fundamental challenge arises from the trade-off between update overhead and decision accuracy: Frequent state updates consume limited network resources, while infrequent updates lead to stale state views and degraded task performance, especially under high system load. Existing approaches based on periodic updates or Age of Information (AoI) mainly focus on temporal freshness and often overlook whether a state change is actually relevant to offloading decisions. This paper proposes SenseCFN, a decision-aware state synchronization framework for CFN. Instead of synchronizing raw resource states, SenseCFN focuses on identifying state changes that are likely to alter offloading decisions. To this end, we introduce a lightweight semantic state representation that captures decision-relevant system characteristics, along with a Semantic Deviation Index (SDI) to quantify the impact of state shifts on decision outcomes. Based on SDI, the SN triggers updates only when significant decision-impacting changes are detected. Meanwhile, the AP performs offloading decisions using cached semantic states with explicit awareness of potential staleness. The update and offloading policies are jointly optimized using a centralized training with distributed execution (CTDE) approach. Simulation results show that SenseCFN maintains a task success rate of up to 99.6% in saturation-prone scenarios, outperforming baseline methods by more than 25%, while reducing status update frequency by approximately 70% to 96%. These results indicate that decision-aware state synchronization provides an effective and practical alternative to purely time-based update strategies in CFN.

cs.NI

Efficient Discovery of Motif Transition Process for Large-Scale Temporal Graphs

Understanding the dynamic transition of motifs in temporal graphs is essential for revealing how graph structures evolve over time, identifying critical patterns, and predicting future behaviors, yet existing methods often focus on predefined motifs, limiting their ability to comprehensively capture transitions and interrelationships. We propose a parallel motif transition process discovery algorithm, PTMT, a novel parallel method for discovering motif transition processes in large-scale temporal graphs. PTMT integrates a tree-based framework with the temporal zone partitioning (TZP) strategy, which partitions temporal graphs by time and structure while preserving lossless motif transitions and enabling massive parallelism. PTMT comprises three phases: growth zone parallel expansion, overlap-aware result aggregation, and deterministic encoding of motif transitions, ensuring accurate tracking of dynamic transitions and interactions. Results on 10 real-world datasets demonstrate that PTMT achieves speedups ranging from 12.0$\times$ to 50.3$\times$ compared to the SOTA method.

cs.DB

Closed-Form and Boundary Expressions for Task-Success Probability in Status-Driven Systems

Timely and efficient dissemination of server status is critical in compute-first networking systems, where user tasks arrive dynamically and computing resources are limited and stochastic. In such systems, the access point plays a key role in forwarding tasks to a server based on its latest received server status. However, modeling the task-success probability suffering the factors of stochastic arrivals, limited server capacity, and bidirectional link delays. Therefore, we introduce a unified analytical framework that abstracts the AP forwarding rule as a single probability and models all network and waiting delays via their Laplace transforms. This approach yields a closed form expression for the end to end task success probability, together with upper and lower bounds that capture Erlang loss blocking, information staleness, and random uplink/downlink delays. We validate our results through simulations across a wide range of parameters, showing that theoretical predictions and bounds consistently enclose observed success rates. Our framework requires only two interchangeable inputs (the forwarding probability and the delay transforms), making it readily adaptable to alternative forwarding policies and delay distributions. Experiments demonstrate that our bounds are able to achieve accuracy within 0.01 (upper bound) and 0.016 (lower bound) of the empirical task success probability.

cs.NI

A Survey on Open-Source Edge Computing Simulators and Emulators: The Computing and Networking Convergence Perspective

Edge computing, with its low latency, dynamic scalability, and location awareness, along with the convergence of computing and communication paradigms, has been successfully applied in critical domains such as industrial IoT, smart healthcare, smart homes, and public safety. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of open-source edge computing simulators and emulators, presented in our GitHub repository (https://github.com/qijianpeng/awesome-edge-computing), emphasizing the convergence of computing and networking paradigms. By examining more than 40 tools, including CloudSim, NS-3, and others, we identify the strengths and limitations in simulating and emulating edge environments. This survey classifies these tools into three categories: packet-level, application-level, and emulators. Furthermore, we evaluate them across five dimensions, ranging from resource representation to resource utilization. The survey highlights the integration of different computing paradigms, packet processing capabilities, support for edge environments, user-defined metric interfaces, and scenario visualization. The findings aim to guide researchers in selecting appropriate tools for developing and validating advanced computing and networking technologies.

cs.NI

Efficient Information Updates in Compute-First Networking via Reinforcement Learning with Joint AoI and VoI

Timely and efficient dissemination of service information is critical in compute-first networking systems, where user requests arrive dynamically and computing resources are constrained. In such systems, the access point (AP) plays a key role in forwarding user requests to a server based on its latest received service information. This paper considers a single-source, single-destination system and introduces an Age-and-Value-Aware (AVA) metric that jointly captures both the timeliness and the task relevance of service information. Unlike traditional freshness-based metrics, AVA explicitly incorporates variations in server-side service capacity and AP forwarding decisions, allowing more context-aware update evaluation. Building upon AVA, we propose a reinforcement learning-based update policy that learns to selectively transmit service information updates to the AP. It aims to maximize overall task success while minimizing unnecessary communications. Extensive simulations under diverse user request patterns and varying service capacities demonstrate that AVA reduces the update frequency by over 90% on average compared to baselines, with reductions reaching 98% in certain configurations. Crucially, this reduction is achieved without compromising the accuracy of task execution or the quality of decision making.

cs.NI

UMGAD: Unsupervised Multiplex Graph Anomaly Detection

Graph anomaly detection (GAD) is a critical task in graph machine learning, with the primary objective of identifying anomalous nodes that deviate significantly from the majority. This task is widely applied in various real-world scenarios, including fraud detection and social network analysis. However, existing GAD methods still face two major challenges: (1) They are often limited to detecting anomalies in single-type interaction graphs and struggle with multiple interaction types in multiplex heterogeneous graphs. (2) In unsupervised scenarios, selecting appropriate anomaly score thresholds remains a significant challenge for accurate anomaly detection. To address the above challenges, we propose a novel Unsupervised Multiplex Graph Anomaly Detection method, named UMGAD. We first learn multi-relational correlations among nodes in multiplex heterogeneous graphs and capture anomaly information during node attribute and structure reconstruction through graph-masked autoencoder (GMAE). Then, to further extract abnormal information, we generate attribute-level and subgraph-level augmented-view graphs, respectively, and perform attribute and structure reconstruction through GMAE. Finally, we learn to optimize node attributes and structural features through contrastive learning between original-view and augmented-view graphs to improve the model's ability to capture anomalies. Meanwhile, we propose a new anomaly score threshold selection strategy, which allows the model to be independent of ground truth information in real unsupervised scenarios. Extensive experiments on six datasets show that our UMGAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving average improvements of 12.25% in AUC and 11.29% in Macro-F1 across all datasets.

cs.LG

Correlation-Attention Masked Temporal Transformer for User Identity Linkage Using Heterogeneous Mobility Data

With the rise of social media and Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN), check-in data across platforms has become crucial for User Identity Linkage (UIL). These data not only reveal users' spatio-temporal information but also provide insights into their behavior patterns and interests. However, cross-platform identity linkage faces challenges like poor data quality, high sparsity, and noise interference, which hinder existing methods from extracting cross-platform user information. To address these issues, we propose a Correlation-Attention Masked Transformer for User Identity Linkage Network (MT-Link), a transformer-based framework to enhance model performance by learning spatio-temporal co-occurrence patterns of cross-platform users. Our model effectively captures spatio-temporal co-occurrence in cross-platform user check-in sequences. It employs a correlation attention mechanism to detect the spatio-temporal co-occurrence between user check-in sequences. Guided by attention weight maps, the model focuses on co-occurrence points while filtering out noise, ultimately improving classification performance. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 12.92%~17.76% and 5.80%~8.38% improvements in terms of Macro-F1 and Area Under Curve (AUC).

cs.SI

Scalable Trajectory-User Linking with Dual-Stream Representation Networks

Trajectory-user linking (TUL) aims to match anonymous trajectories to the most likely users who generated them, offering benefits for a wide range of real-world spatio-temporal applications. However, existing TUL methods are limited by high model complexity and poor learning of the effective representations of trajectories, rendering them ineffective in handling large-scale user trajectory data. In this work, we propose a novel $\underline{Scal}$abl$\underline{e}$ Trajectory-User Linking with dual-stream representation networks for large-scale $\underline{TUL}$ problem, named ScaleTUL. Specifically, ScaleTUL generates two views using temporal and spatial augmentations to exploit supervised contrastive learning framework to effectively capture the irregularities of trajectories. In each view, a dual-stream trajectory encoder, consisting of a long-term encoder and a short-term encoder, is designed to learn unified trajectory representations that fuse different temporal-spatial dependencies. Then, a TUL layer is used to associate the trajectories with the corresponding users in the representation space using a two-stage training model. Experimental results on check-in mobility datasets from three real-world cities and the nationwide U.S. demonstrate the superiority of ScaleTUL over state-of-the-art baselines for large-scale TUL tasks.

cs.LG

TPAoI: Ensuring Fresh Service Status at the Network Edge in Compute-First Networking

In compute-first networking, maintaining fresh and accurate status information at the network edge is crucial for effective access to remote services. This process typically involves three phases: Status updating, user accessing, and user requesting. However, current studies on status effectiveness, such as Age of Information at Query (QAoI), do not comprehensively cover all these phases. Therefore, this paper introduces a novel metric, TPAoI, aimed at optimizing update decisions by measuring the freshness of service status. The stochastic nature of edge environments, characterized by unpredictable communication delays in updating, requesting, and user access times, poses a significant challenge when modeling. To address this, we model the problem as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and employ a Dueling Double Deep Q-Network (D3QN) algorithm for optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed TPAoI metric effectively minimizes AoI, ensuring timely and reliable service updates in dynamic edge environments. Results indicate that TPAoI reduces AoI by an average of 47\% compared to QAoI metrics and decreases update frequency by an average of 48\% relative to conventional AoI metrics, showing significant improvement.

cs.NI

R2: A Distributed Remote Function Execution Mechanism With Built-in Metadata

Named data networking (NDN) constructs a network by names, providing a flexible and decentralized way to manage resources within the edge computing continuum. This paper aims to solve the question, "Given a function with its parameters and metadata, how to select the executor in a distributed manner and obtain the result in NDN?" To answer it, we design R2 that involves the following stages. First, we design a name structure including data, function names, and other function parameters. Second, we develop a 2-phase mechanism, where in the first phase, the function request from a client-first reaches the data source and retrieves the metadata, then the best node is selected while the metadata is responding to the client. In the second phase, the chosen node directly retrieves the data, executes the function, and provides the result to the client. Furthermore, we propose a stop condition to intelligently reduce the processing time of the first phase and provide a simple proof and range analysis. Simulations confirm that R2 outperforms the current solutions in terms of resource allocation, especially when the data volume and the function complexity are high. In the experiments, when the data size is 100 KiB and the function complexity is $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$, the speedup ratio is 4.61. To further evaluate R2, we also implement a general intermediate data processing logic named ``Bolt'' implemented on an app-level in ndnSIM. We believe that R2 shall help the researchers and developers to verify their ideas smoothly.

cs.DC

REMR: A Reliability Evaluation Method for Dynamic Edge Computing Network under Time Constraints

While the concept of Artificial Intelligent Internet of Things\ (AIoT) is booming, computation and/or communication-intensive tasks accompanied by several sub-tasks are slowly moving from centralized deployment to edge-side deployment. The idea of edge computing also makes intelligent services sink locally. But in actual scenarios like dynamic edge computing networks (DECN), due to fluctuations in available computing resources of intermediate servers and changes in bandwidth during data transmission, service reliability becomes difficult to guarantee. Coupled with changes in the amount of data in a service, the above three problems all make the existing reliability evaluation methods no longer accurate. To study the effect of distributed service deployment strategies under such a background, this paper proposes a reliability evaluation method (REMR) based on lower boundary rule under time constraint to study the degree of the rationality of a service deployment plan combined with DECN. In this scenario, time delay is the main concern which would be affected by three quantitative factors: data packet storing and sending time, data transmission time and the calculation time of executing sub-tasks on the node devices, specially while the last two are in dynamic scenarios. In actual calculation, based on the idea of the minimal paths, the solution set would to be found that can meet requirements in the current deployment. Then the reliability of the service supported by the solution sets would be found out based on the principle of inclusion-exclusion combined with the distribution of available data transmission bandwidth and the distribution of node available computing resources. Besides a illustrative example was provided, to verify the calculated reliability of the designed service deployment plan, the NS3 is utilized along with Google cluster data set for simulation.

cs.PF