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Xiangyu Ke

Publications and source records attributed to Xiangyu Ke.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Common-Neighbor-Count-Based Representative Possible World Finding on Uncertain Graphs

A representative possible world (RPW) is a deterministic graph derived from an uncertain graph $\mathcal{G}$ where a designated structural feature closely approximates its expected value in $\mathcal{G}$. Serving as a proxy for $\mathcal{G}$, the RPW allows conventional deterministic algorithms to be directly executed on it for mining tasks targeting this feature, thereby avoiding computationally expensive enumeration or sampling on $\mathcal{G}$. Existing studies on RPWs primarily focus on individual node features, e.g., degree or triangle degree. However, many mining tasks, such as link prediction, critically rely on the number of common neighbors between two nodes, which is a pairwise feature. To bridge this gap, we study the \underline{C}ommon-neighbor-count-based \underline{R}epresentative \underline{P}ossible \underline{W}orld (CRPW) problem, extending RPWs from preserving node-level statistics to preserving pairwise structural relationships. The problem seeks the possible world that best preserves the expected numbers of common neighbors between node pair, and we prove that is NP-hard. To address it, we develop a two-stage basic algorithm that quickly initializes a possible world and then refines it iteratively. We next accelerate the refinement by replacing its costly floating-point evaluation with an efficient integer counting strategy, as the refinement only requires determining whether a change is beneficial, rather than computing its exact magnitude. Moreover, we design a Beta-based adaptive termination method to automatically stop the refinement once the desired quality of the possible world is reached, preventing over- or under-execution. Extensive experiments on real-world uncertain graphs demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms on diverse mining tasks. Especially on common-neighbor-related tasks, we achieve the best performance among all compared methods.

cs.DB

VikingMem: A Memory Base Management System for Stateful LLM-based Applications

Large Language Models have revolutionized interactive applications; however, their finite context windows pose a critical data management challenge for maintaining stateful, long-term interactions. Existing memory approaches often rely on simplistic extraction methods that lead to incomplete memories or use rigid, single-purpose memory extraction prompts tailored to a single use case, such as chatbots. Consequently, they lack generalizability and perform poorly across diverse downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Memory Base, a novel data management paradigm for managing the persistent state of long-term interactions. It is characterized by three core principles: selective extraction of high-value memories from raw information streams; inherent statefulness and evolution, where memory content is progressively summarized, corrected, and temporally weighted to prioritize recent interactions; and a generalizable abstraction paradigm designed for robust transferability across diverse applications, including education, recommendation, and agent memory. Building on this foundation, we present VikingMem, an end-to-end Memory Base Management System implemented on the VikingDB vector engine. VikingMem materializes this paradigm through interconnected event and entity abstractions. It features event-centric memory extraction to selectively handle complex information streams, while entities are dynamically updated by events to achieve stateful evolution. Using temporal compression via a topic-wise timeline and time-weighted recall, the system progressively produces high-level summary memories, prioritizes recent items, and compresses and fades older ones. Extensive evaluations on long-term memory benchmarks demonstrate that VikingMem outperformes baselines by up to 30% in memory retrieval effectiveness while maintaining the low latency essential for interactive applications.

cs.AI

Adaptive Graph Refinement and Label Propagation with LLMs for Cost-Effective Entity Resolution

Dirty entity resolution (ER), which identifies records referring to the same real-world entity from a single, messy dataset, is a fundamental task in data management and mining. However, the dominant blocking-matching-clustering paradigm for ER suffers from critical flaws. Its cascaded, decoupled workflow essentially produces a static, sparse graph plagued by missing edges (due to blocking failures) and noisy links (due to matching errors), causing error propagation and yielding suboptimal clusters, particularly when rigid transitivity is imposed in the clustering. We contend that matching and clustering are fundamentally synergistic, both optimizing for the construction of an ideal entity graph. Building upon this insight, we propose Alper, a unified framework that integrates these steps into an iterative probabilistic label propagation process over a global, evolving graph. Unlike disjoint blocking, Alper refines the graph structure and labels dynamically by adaptively integrating "weak but cheap" signals from graph propagation with "strong but expensive" LLM-based pairwise queries. For higher cost-effectiveness, we formulate the signal selection as a constrained optimization problem maximizing cumulative marginal gain under a query budget, solved via our greedy algorithm with provable theoretical guarantees. Our extensive experiments over eight benchmark datasets demonstrate that Alper is consistently superior to state-of-the-art cascaded pipelines.

cs.CL

Reveal Hidden Pitfalls and Navigate Next Generation of Vector Similarity Search from Task-Centric Views

Vector Similarity Search (VSS) in high-dimensional spaces is rapidly emerging as core functionality in next-generation database systems for numerous data-intensive services -- from embedding lookups in large language models (LLMs), to semantic information retrieval and recommendation engines. Current benchmarks, however, evaluate VSS primarily on the recall-latency trade-off against a ground truth defined solely by distance metrics, neglecting how retrieval quality ultimately impacts downstream tasks. This disconnect can mislead both academic research and industrial practice. We present Iceberg, a holistic benchmark suite for end-to-end evaluation of VSS methods in realistic application contexts. From a task-centric view, Iceberg uncovers the Information Loss Funnel, which identifies three principal sources of end-to-end performance degradation: (1) Embedding Loss during feature extraction; (2) Metric Misuse, where distances poorly reflect task relevance; (3) Data Distribution Sensitivity, highlighting index robustness across skews and modalities. For a more comprehensive assessment, Iceberg spans eight diverse datasets across key domains such as image classification, face recognition, text retrieval, and recommendation systems. Each dataset, ranging from 1M to 100M vectors, includes rich, task-specific labels and evaluation metrics, enabling assessment of retrieval algorithms within the full application pipeline rather than in isolation. Iceberg benchmarks 13 state-of-the-art VSS methods and re-ranks them based on application-level metrics, revealing substantial deviations from traditional rankings derived purely from recall-latency evaluations. Building on these insights, we define a set of task-centric meta-features and derive an interpretable decision tree to guide practitioners in selecting and tuning VSS methods for their specific workloads.

cs.IR

Beyond Relational: Semantic-Aware Multi-Modal Analytics with LLM-Native Query Optimization

Multi-modal analytical processing has the potential to transform applications in e-commerce, healthcare, entertainment, and beyond. However, real-world adoption remains elusive due to the limited ability of traditional relational query operators to capture query semantics. The emergence of foundation models, particularly the large language models (LLMs), opens up new opportunities to develop flexible, semantic-aware data analytics systems that transcend the relational paradigm. We present Nirvana, a multi-modal data analytics framework that incorporates programmable semantic operators while leveraging both logical and physical query optimization strategies, tailored for LLM-driven semantic query processing. Nirvana addresses two key challenges. First, it features an agentic logical optimizer that uses natural language-specified transformation rules and random-walk-based search to explore vast spaces of semantically equivalent query plans -- far beyond the capabilities of conventional optimizers. Second, it introduces a cost-aware physical optimizer that selects the most effective LLM backend for each operator using a novel improvement-score metric. To further enhance efficiency, Nirvana incorporates computation reuse and evaluation pushdown techniques guided by model capability hypotheses. Experimental evaluations on three real-world benchmarks demonstrate that Nirvana is able to reduce end-to-end runtime by 10%--85% and reduces system processing costs by 76% on average, outperforming state-of-the-art systems at both efficiency and scalability.

cs.DB

Balancing the Blend: An Experimental Analysis of Trade-offs in Hybrid Search

Hybrid search, the integration of lexical and semantic retrieval, has become a cornerstone of modern information retrieval systems, driven by demanding applications like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). The architectural design space for these systems is vast and complex, yet a systematic understanding of the trade-offs among their core components -- retrieval paradigms, combination schemes, and re-ranking methods -- is lacking. To address this, and informed by our experience building the Infinity open-source database, we present the first experimental analysis of advanced hybrid search architectures. Our framework integrates four retrieval paradigms -- Full-Text Search (FTS), Sparse Vector Search (SVS), Dense Vector Search (DVS), and Tensor Search (TenS) -- and evaluates their combinations and re-ranking strategies across 11 real-world datasets. Our results reveal three key findings: (1) A "weakest link" phenomenon, where a weak path can substantially degrade overall accuracy, highlighting the need for path-wise quality assessment before fusion. (2) A data-driven map of performance trade-offs, demonstrating that optimal configurations depend heavily on resource constraints and data characteristics, precluding a one-size-fits-all solution. (3) The identification of Tensor-based Re-ranking Fusion (TRF) as a high-efficacy alternative to mainstream fusion methods, offering the semantic power of tensor search at a fraction of the computational and memory cost. Our findings offer concrete guidelines for designing adaptive, scalable hybrid search systems and identify key directions for future research.

cs.DB

Scalable Graph Indexing using GPUs for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search

Approximate nearest neighbor search (ANNS) in high-dimensional vector spaces has a wide range of real-world applications. Numerous methods have been proposed to handle ANNS efficiently, while graph-based indexes have gained prominence due to their high accuracy and efficiency. However, the indexing overhead of graph-based indexes remains substantial. With exponential growth in data volume and increasing demands for dynamic index adjustments, this overhead continues to escalate, posing a critical challenge. In this paper, we introduce Tagore, a fast library accelerated by GPUs for graph indexing, which has powerful capabilities of constructing refinement-based graph indexes such as NSG and Vamana. We first introduce GNN-Descent, a GPU-specific algorithm for efficient k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) graph initialization. GNN-Descent speeds up the similarity comparison by a two-phase descent procedure and enables highly parallelized neighbor updates. Next, aiming to support various k-NN graph pruning strategies, we formulate a universal computing procedure termed CFS and devise two generalized GPU kernels for parallel processing complex dependencies in neighbor relationships. For large-scale datasets exceeding GPU memory capacity, we propose an asynchronous GPU-CPU-disk indexing framework with a cluster-aware caching mechanism to minimize the I/O pressure on the disk. Extensive experiments on 7 real-world datasets exhibit that Tagore achieves 1.32x-112.79x speedup while maintaining the index quality.

cs.DB

Maximum Inner Product is Query-Scaled Nearest Neighbor

Maximum Inner Product Search (MIPS) for high-dimensional vectors is pivotal across databases, information retrieval, and artificial intelligence. Existing methods either reduce MIPS to Nearest Neighbor Search (NNS) while suffering from harmful vector space transformations, or attempt to tackle MIPS directly but struggle to mitigate redundant computations due to the absence of the triangle inequality. This paper presents a novel theoretical framework that equates MIPS with NNS without requiring space transformation, thereby allowing us to leverage advanced graph-based indices for NNS and efficient edge pruning strategies, significantly reducing unnecessary computations. Despite a strong baseline set by our theoretical analysis, we identify and address two persistent challenges to further refine our method: the introduction of the Proximity Graph with Spherical Pathway (PSP), designed to mitigate the issue of MIPS solutions clustering around large-norm vectors, and the implementation of Adaptive Early Termination (AET), which efficiently curtails the excessive exploration once an accuracy bottleneck is reached. Extensive experiments reveal the superiority of our method over existing state-of-the-art techniques in search efficiency, scalability, and practical applicability. Compared with state-of-the-art graph based methods, it achieves an average 35% speed-up in query processing and a 3x reduction in index size. Notably, our approach has been validated and deployed in the search engines of Shopee, a well-known online shopping platform. Our code and an industrial-scale dataset for offline evaluation will also be released to address the absence of e-commerce data in public benchmarks.

cs.DB

Stitching Inner Product and Euclidean Metrics for Topology-aware Maximum Inner Product Search

Maximum Inner Product Search (MIPS) is a fundamental challenge in machine learning and information retrieval, particularly in high-dimensional data applications. Existing approaches to MIPS either rely solely on Inner Product (IP) similarity, which faces issues with local optima and redundant computations, or reduce the MIPS problem to the Nearest Neighbor Search under the Euclidean metric via space projection, leading to topology destruction and information loss. Despite the divergence of the two paradigms, we argue that there is no inherent binary opposition between IP and Euclidean metrics. By stitching IP and Euclidean in the design of indexing and search algorithms, we can significantly enhance MIPS performance. Specifically, this paper explores the theoretical and empirical connections between these two metrics from the MIPS perspective. Our investigation, grounded in graph-based search, reveals that different indexing and search strategies offer distinct advantages for MIPS, depending on the underlying data topology. Building on these insights, we introduce a novel graph-based index called Metric-Amphibious Graph (MAG) and a corresponding search algorithm, Adaptive Navigation with Metric Switch (ANMS). To facilitate parameter tuning for optimal performance, we identify three statistical indicators that capture essential data topology properties and correlate strongly with parameter tuning. Extensive experiments on 12 real-world datasets demonstrate that MAG outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 4x search speedup while maintaining adaptability and scalability.

cs.DB

OneDB: A Distributed Multi-Metric Data Similarity Search System

Increasingly massive volumes of multi-modal data are being accumulated in many {real world} settings, including in health care and e-commerce. This development calls for effective general-purpose data management solutions for multi-modal data. Such a solution must facilitate user-friendly and accurate retrieval of any multi-modal data according to diverse application requirements. Further, such a solution must be capable of efficient and scalable retrieval. To address this need, we present OneDB, a distributed multi-metric data similarity retrieval system. This system exploits the fact that data of diverse modalities, such as text, images, and video, can be represented as metric data. The system thus affords each data modality its own metric space with its own distance function and then uses a multi-metric model to unify multi-modal data. The system features several innovations: (i) an extended Spart SQL query interface; (ii) lightweight means of learning appropriate weights of different modalities when retrieving multi-modal data to enable accurate retrieval; (iii) smart search-space pruning strategies that improve efficiency; (iv) two-layered indexing of data to ensure load-balancing during distributed processing; and (v) end-to-end system parameter autotuning. Experiments on three real-life datasets and two synthetic datasets offer evidence that the system is capable of state-of-the-art performance: (i) efficient and effective weight learning; (ii) retrieval accuracy improvements of 12.63\%--30.75\% over the state-of-the-art vector similarity search system at comparable efficiency; (iii) accelerated search by 2.5--5.75x over state-of-the-art single- or multi-metric solutions; (iv) demonstrated high scalability; and (v) parameter tuning that enables performance improvements of 15+%.

cs.DB

SliceGX: Layer-wise GNN Explanation with Model-slicing

Ensuring the trustworthiness of graph neural networks (GNNs), which are often treated as black-box models, requires effective explanation techniques. Existing GNN explanations typically apply input perturbations to identify subgraphs that are responsible for the occurrence of the final output of GNNs. However, such approaches lack finer-grained, layer-wise analysis of how intermediate representations contribute to the final result, capabilities that are crucial for model diagnosis and architecture optimization. This paper introduces SliceGX, a novel GNN explanation approach that generates explanations at specific GNN layers in a progressive manner. Given a GNN model M, a set of selected intermediate layers, and a target layer, SliceGX slices M into layer blocks("model slice") and discovers high-quality explanatory subgraphs within each block that elucidate how the model output arises at the target layer. Although finding such layer-wise explanations is computationally challenging, we develop efficient algorithms and optimization techniques that incrementally construct and maintain these subgraphs with provable approximation guarantees. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of SliceGX, and illustrate its practical utility in supporting model debugging.

cs.LG

Empowering Graph-based Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search with Adaptive Awareness Capabilities

Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS) in high-dimensional spaces finds extensive applications in databases, information retrieval, recommender systems, etc. While graph-based methods have emerged as the leading solution for ANNS due to their superior query performance, they still face several challenges, such as struggling with local optima and redundant computations. These issues arise because existing methods (i) fail to fully exploit the topological information underlying the proximity graph G, and (ii) suffer from severe distribution mismatches between the base data and queries in practice. To this end, this paper proposes GATE, high-tier proximity Graph with Adaptive Topology and Query AwarEness, as a lightweight and adaptive module atop the graph-based indexes to accelerate ANNS. Specifically, GATE formulates the critical problem to identify an optimal entry point in the proximity graph for a given query, facilitating faster online search. By leveraging the inherent clusterability of high-dimensional data, GATE first extracts a small set of hub nodes V as candidate entry points. Then, resorting to a contrastive learning-based two-tower model, GATE encodes both the structural semantics underlying G and the query-relevant features into the latent representations of these hub nodes V. A navigation graph index on V is further constructed to minimize the model inference overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GATE achieves a 1.2-2.0X speed-up in query performance compared to state-of-the-art graph-based indexes.

cs.DB

In-context Clustering-based Entity Resolution with Large Language Models: A Design Space Exploration

Entity Resolution (ER) is a fundamental data quality improvement task that identifies and links records referring to the same real-world entity. Traditional ER approaches often rely on pairwise comparisons, which can be costly in terms of time and monetary resources, especially with large datasets. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in ER tasks. However, existing methods typically focus on pairwise matching, missing the potential of LLMs to perform clustering directly in a more cost-effective and scalable manner. In this paper, we propose a novel in-context clustering approach for ER, where LLMs are used to cluster records directly, reducing both time complexity and monetary costs. We systematically investigate the design space for in-context clustering, analyzing the impact of factors such as set size, diversity, variation, and ordering of records on clustering performance. Based on these insights, we develop LLM-CER (LLM-powered Clustering-based ER), which achieves high-quality ER results while minimizing LLM API calls. Our approach addresses key challenges, including efficient cluster merging and LLM hallucination, providing a scalable and effective solution for ER. Extensive experiments on nine real-world datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improves result quality, achieving up to 150% higher accuracy, 10% increase in the F-measure, and reducing API calls by up to 5 times, while maintaining comparable monetary cost to the most cost-effective baseline.

cs.DB

Efficient Graph Embedding at Scale: Optimizing CPU-GPU-SSD Integration

Graph embeddings map graph nodes to continuous vectors and are foundational to community detection, recommendation, and many scientific applications. At billion-scale, however, existing graph embedding systems face a trade-off: they either rely on large in-memory footprints across many GPUs (limited scalability) or repeatedly stream data from disk (incurring severe I/O overhead and low GPU utilization). In this paper, we propose Legend, a lightweight heterogeneous system for graph embedding that systematically redesigns data management across CPU, GPU, and NVMe SSD resources. Legend combines three practical ideas: (1) a prefetch-friendly embedding-loading order that lets GPUs efficiently prefetch necessary embeddings directly from NVMe SSD with low I/O amplification; (2) a high-throughput GPU-SSD direct-access driver tuned for the access patterns of embedding training; and (3) a customized parallel execution strategy that maximizes GPU utilization. Together, these components let Legend store and stream vast embedding data without overprovisioning GPU memory or suffering I/O stalls. Extensive experiments on billion-scale graphs demonstrate that Legend speeds up end-to-end workloads by up to 4.8x versus state-of-the-art systems, and matches their performance on the largest workloads while using only one quarter of the GPUs.

cs.DC

Accelerating Graph Indexing for ANNS on Modern CPUs

In high-dimensional vector spaces, Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS) is a key component in database and artificial intelligence infrastructures. Graph-based methods, particularly HNSW, have emerged as leading solutions among various ANNS approaches, offering an impressive trade-off between search efficiency and accuracy. Many modern vector databases utilize graph indexes as their core algorithms, benefiting from various optimizations to enhance search performance. However, the high indexing time associated with graph algorithms poses a significant challenge, especially given the increasing volume of data, query processing complexity, and dynamic index maintenance demand. This has rendered indexing time a critical performance metric for users. In this paper, we comprehensively analyze the underlying causes of the low graph indexing efficiency on modern CPUs, identifying that distance computation dominates indexing time, primarily due to high memory access latency and suboptimal arithmetic operation efficiency. We demonstrate that distance comparisons during index construction can be effectively performed using compact vector codes at an appropriate compression error. Drawing from insights gained through integrating existing compact coding methods in the graph indexing process, we propose a novel compact coding strategy, named Flash, designed explicitly for graph indexing and optimized for modern CPU architectures. By minimizing random memory accesses and maximizing the utilization of SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) instructions, Flash significantly enhances cache hit rates and arithmetic operations. Extensive experiments conducted on eight real-world datasets, ranging from ten million to one billion vectors, exhibit that Flash achieves a speedup of 10.4$\times$ to 22.9$\times$ in index construction efficiency, while maintaining or improving search performance.

cs.DB

Graph Data Management and Graph Machine Learning: Synergies and Opportunities

The ubiquity of machine learning, particularly deep learning, applied to graphs is evident in applications ranging from cheminformatics (drug discovery) and bioinformatics (protein interaction prediction) to knowledge graph-based query answering, fraud detection, and social network analysis. Concurrently, graph data management deals with the research and development of effective, efficient, scalable, robust, and user-friendly systems and algorithms for storing, processing, and analyzing vast quantities of heterogeneous and complex graph data. Our survey provides a comprehensive overview of the synergies between graph data management and graph machine learning, illustrating how they intertwine and mutually reinforce each other across the entire spectrum of the graph data science and machine learning pipeline. Specifically, the survey highlights two crucial aspects: (1) How graph data management enhances graph machine learning, including contributions such as improved graph neural network performance through graph data cleaning, scalable graph embedding, efficient graph-based vector data management, robust graph neural networks, user-friendly explainability methods; and (2) how graph machine learning, in turn, aids in graph data management, with a focus on applications like query answering over knowledge graphs and various data science tasks. We discuss pertinent open problems and delineate crucial research directions.

cs.DB

HC-SpMM: Accelerating Sparse Matrix-Matrix Multiplication for Graphs with Hybrid GPU Cores

Sparse Matrix-Matrix Multiplication (SpMM) is a fundamental operation in graph computing and analytics. However, the irregularity of real-world graphs poses significant challenges to achieving efficient SpMM operation for graph data on GPUs. Recently, significant advancements in GPU computing power and the introduction of new efficient computing cores within GPUs offer new opportunities for acceleration. In this paper, we present HC-SpMM, a pioneering algorithm that leverages hybrid GPU cores (Tensor cores and CUDA cores) to accelerate SpMM for graphs. To adapt to the computing characteristics of different GPU cores, we investigate the impact of sparse graph features on the performance of different cores, develop a data partitioning technique for the graph adjacency matrix, and devise a novel strategy for intelligently selecting the most efficient cores for processing each submatrix. Additionally, we optimize it by considering memory access and thread utilization, to utilize the computational resources to their fullest potential. To support complex graph computing workloads, we integrate HC-SpMM into the GNN training pipeline. Furthermore, we propose a kernel fusion strategy to enhance data reuse, as well as a cost-effective graph layout reorganization method to mitigate the irregular and sparse issues of real-world graphs, better fitting the computational models of hybrid GPU cores. Extensive experiments on 14 real-world graph datasets demonstrate that HC-SpMM achieves an average speedup of 1.33x and 1.23x over state-of-the-art SpMM kernels and GNN frameworks.

cs.DC

Spectral Subspace Clustering for Attributed Graphs

Subspace clustering seeks to identify subspaces that segment a set of n data points into k (k<<n) groups, which has emerged as a powerful tool for analyzing data from various domains, especially images and videos. Recently, several studies have demonstrated the great potential of subspace clustering models for partitioning vertices in attributed graphs, referred to as SCAG. However, these works either demand significant computational overhead for constructing the nxn self-expressive matrix, or fail to incorporate graph topology and attribute data into the subspace clustering framework effectively, and thus, compromise result quality. Motivated by this, this paper presents two effective and efficient algorithms, S2CAG and M-S2CAG, for SCAG computation. Particularly, S2CAG obtains superb performance through three major contributions. First, we formulate a new objective function for SCAG with a refined representation model for vertices and two non-trivial constraints. On top of that, an efficient linear-time optimization solver is developed based on our theoretically grounded problem transformation and well-thought-out adaptive strategy. We then conduct an in-depth analysis to disclose the theoretical connection of S2CAG to conductance minimization, which further inspires the design of M-S2CAG that maximizes the modularity. Our extensive experiments, comparing S2CAG and M-S2CAG against 17 competitors over 8 benchmark datasets, exhibit that our solutions outperform all baselines in terms of clustering quality measured against the ground truth while delivering high efficiency

cs.SI