arXiv subjects

Xiangyu Ke

Publications and source records attributed to Xiangyu Ke.

35 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

A Benchmark Study of Deep-RL Methods for Maximum Coverage Problems over Graphs

Recent years have witnessed a growing trend toward employing deep reinforcement learning (Deep-RL) to derive heuristics for combinatorial optimization (CO) problems on graphs. Maximum Coverage Problem (MCP) and its probabilistic variant on social networks, Influence Maximization (IM), have been particularly prominent in this line of research. In this paper, we present a comprehensive benchmark study that thoroughly investigates the effectiveness and efficiency of five recent Deep-RL methods for MCP and IM. These methods were published in top data science venues, namely S2V-DQN, Geometric-QN, GCOMB, RL4IM, and LeNSE. Our findings reveal that, across various scenarios, the Lazy Greedy algorithm consistently outperforms all Deep-RL methods for MCP. In the case of IM, theoretically sound algorithms like IMM and OPIM demonstrate superior performance compared to Deep-RL methods in most scenarios. Notably, we observe an abnormal phenomenon in IM problem where Deep-RL methods slightly outperform IMM and OPIM when the influence spread nearly does not increase as the budget increases. Furthermore, our experimental results highlight common issues when applying Deep-RL methods to MCP and IM in practical settings. Finally, we discuss potential avenues for improving Deep-RL methods. Our benchmark study sheds light on potential challenges in current deep reinforcement learning research for solving combinatorial optimization problems.

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arXiv2024

An Interactive Multi-modal Query Answering System with Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models

Retrieval-augmented Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped traditional query-answering systems, offering unparalleled user experiences. However, existing retrieval techniques often struggle to handle multi-modal query contexts. In this paper, we present an interactive Multi-modal Query Answering (MQA) system, empowered by our newly developed multi-modal retrieval framework and navigation graph index, integrated with cutting-edge LLMs. It comprises five core components: Data Preprocessing, Vector Representation, Index Construction, Query Execution, and Answer Generation, all orchestrated by a dedicated coordinator to ensure smooth data flow from input to answer generation. One notable aspect of MQA is its utilization of contrastive learning to assess the significance of different modalities, facilitating precise measurement of multi-modal information similarity. Furthermore, the system achieves efficient retrieval through our advanced navigation graph index, refined using computational pruning techniques. Another highlight of our system is its pluggable processing framework, allowing seamless integration of embedding models, graph indexes, and LLMs. This flexibility provides users diverse options for gaining insights from their multi-modal knowledge base. A preliminary video introduction of MQA is available at https://youtu.be/xvUuo2ZIqWk.

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arXiv2024

GTS: GPU-based Tree Index for Fast Similarity Search

Similarity search, the task of identifying objects most similar to a given query object under a specific metric, has gathered significant attention due to its practical applications. However, the absence of coordinate information to accelerate similarity search and the high computational cost of measuring object similarity hinder the efficiency of existing CPU-based methods. Additionally, these methods struggle to meet the demand for high throughput data management. To address these challenges, we propose GTS, a GPU-based tree index designed for the parallel processing of similarity search in general metric spaces, where only the distance metric for measuring object similarity is known. The GTS index utilizes a pivot-based tree structure to efficiently prune objects and employs list tables to facilitate GPU computing. To efficiently manage concurrent similarity queries with limited GPU memory, we have developed a two-stage search method that combines batch processing and sequential strategies to optimize memory usage. The paper also introduces an effective update strategy for the proposed GPU-based index, encompassing streaming data updates and batch data updates. Additionally, we present a cost model to evaluate search performance. Extensive experiments on five real-life datasets demonstrate that GTS achieves efficiency gains of up to two orders of magnitude over existing CPU baselines and up to 20x efficiency improvements compared to state-of-the-art GPU-based methods.

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arXiv2024

Accelerating Biclique Counting on GPU

Counting (p,q)-bicliques in bipartite graphs poses a foundational challenge with broad applications, from densest subgraph discovery in algorithmic research to personalized content recommendation in practical scenarios. Despite its significance, current leading (p,q)-biclique counting algorithms fall short, particularly when faced with larger graph sizes and clique scales. Fortunately, the problem's inherent structure, allowing for the independent counting of each biclique starting from every vertex, combined with a substantial set intersections, makes it highly amenable to parallelization. Recent successes in GPU-accelerated algorithms across various domains motivate our exploration into harnessing the parallelism power of GPUs to efficiently address the (p,q)-biclique counting challenge. We introduce GBC (GPU-based Biclique Counting), a novel approach designed to enable efficient and scalable (p,q)-biclique counting on GPUs. To address major bottleneck arising from redundant comparisons in set intersections (occupying an average of 90% of the runtime), we introduce a novel data structure that hashes adjacency lists into truncated bitmaps to enable efficient set intersection on GPUs via bit-wise AND operations. Our innovative hybrid DFS-BFS exploration strategy further enhances thread utilization and effectively manages memory constraints. A composite load balancing strategy, integrating pre-runtime and runtime workload allocation, ensures equitable distribution among threads. Additionally, we employ vertex reordering and graph partitioning strategies for improved compactness and scalability. Experimental evaluations on eight real-life and two synthetic datasets demonstrate that GBC outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms by a substantial margin. In particular, GBC achieves an average speedup of 497.8x, with the largest instance achieving a remarkable 1217.7x speedup when p = q = 8.

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arXiv2024

Starling: An I/O-Efficient Disk-Resident Graph Index Framework for High-Dimensional Vector Similarity Search on Data Segment

High-dimensional vector similarity search (HVSS) is gaining prominence as a powerful tool for various data science and AI applications. As vector data scales up, in-memory indexes pose a significant challenge due to the substantial increase in main memory requirements. A potential solution involves leveraging disk-based implementation, which stores and searches vector data on high-performance devices like NVMe SSDs. However, implementing HVSS for data segments proves to be intricate in vector databases where a single machine comprises multiple segments for system scalability. In this context, each segment operates with limited memory and disk space, necessitating a delicate balance between accuracy, efficiency, and space cost. Existing disk-based methods fall short as they do not holistically address all these requirements simultaneously. In this paper, we present Starling, an I/O-efficient disk-resident graph index framework that optimizes data layout and search strategy within the segment. It has two primary components: (1) a data layout incorporating an in-memory navigation graph and a reordered disk-based graph with enhanced locality, reducing the search path length and minimizing disk bandwidth wastage; and (2) a block search strategy designed to minimize costly disk I/O operations during vector query execution. Through extensive experiments, we validate the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of Starling. On a data segment with 2GB memory and 10GB disk capacity, Starling can accommodate up to 33 million vectors in 128 dimensions, offering HVSS with over 0.9 average precision and top-10 recall rate, and latency under 1 millisecond. The results showcase Starling's superior performance, exhibiting 43.9$\times$ higher throughput with 98% lower query latency compared to state-of-the-art methods while maintaining the same level of accuracy.

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arXiv2024

Scalable Community Search with Accuracy Guarantee on Attributed Graphs

Given an attributed graph $G$ and a query node $q$, \underline{C}ommunity \underline{S}earch over \underline{A}ttributed \underline{G}raphs (CS-AG) aims to find a structure- and attribute-cohesive subgraph from $G$ that contains $q$. Although CS-AG has been widely studied, they still face three challenges. (1) Exact methods based on graph traversal are time-consuming, especially for large graphs. Some tailored indices can improve efficiency, but introduce nonnegligible storage and maintenance overhead. (2) Approximate methods with a loose approximation ratio only provide a coarse-grained evaluation of a community's quality, rather than a reliable evaluation with an accuracy guarantee in runtime. (3) Attribute cohesiveness metrics often ignores the important correlation with the query node $q$. We formally define our CS-AG problem atop a $q$-centric attribute cohesiveness metric considering both textual and numerical attributes, for $k$-core model on homogeneous graphs. We show the problem is NP-hard. To solve it, we first propose an exact baseline with three pruning strategies. Then, we propose an index-free sampling-estimation-based method to quickly return an approximate community with an accuracy guarantee, in the form of a confidence interval. Once a good result satisfying a user-desired error bound is reached, we terminate it early. We extend it to heterogeneous graphs, $k$-truss model, and size-bounded CS. Comprehensive experimental studies on ten real-world datasets show its superiority, e.g., at least 1.54$\times$ (41.1$\times$ on average) faster in response time and a reliable relative error (within a user-specific error bound) of attribute cohesiveness is achieved.

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arXiv2024

GPU-Accelerated Batch-Dynamic Subgraph Matching

Subgraph matching has garnered increasing attention for its diverse real-world applications. Given the dynamic nature of real-world graphs, addressing evolving scenarios without incurring prohibitive overheads has been a focus of research. However, existing approaches for dynamic subgraph matching often proceed serially, retrieving incremental matches for each updated edge individually. This approach falls short when handling batch data updates, leading to a decrease in system throughput. Leveraging the parallel processing power of GPUs, which can execute a massive number of cores simultaneously, has been widely recognized for performance acceleration in various domains. Surprisingly, systematic exploration of subgraph matching in the context of batch-dynamic graphs, particularly on a GPU platform, remains untouched. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing an efficient framework, GAMMA (GPU-Accelerated Batch-Dynamic Subgraph Matching). Our approach features a DFS-based warp-centric batch-dynamic subgraph matching algorithm. To ensure load balance in the DFS-based search, we propose warp-level work stealing via shared memory. Additionally, we introduce coalesced search to reduce redundant computations. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of GAMMA. Compared to state-of-the-art algorithms, GAMMA showcases a performance improvement up to hundreds of times.

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arXiv2024

View-based Explanations for Graph Neural Networks

Generating explanations for graph neural networks (GNNs) has been studied to understand their behavior in analytical tasks such as graph classification. Existing approaches aim to understand the overall results of GNNs rather than providing explanations for specific class labels of interest, and may return explanation structures that are hard to access, nor directly queryable.We propose GVEX, a novel paradigm that generates Graph Views for EXplanation. (1) We design a two-tier explanation structure called explanation views. An explanation view consists of a set of graph patterns and a set of induced explanation subgraphs. Given a database G of multiple graphs and a specific class label l assigned by a GNN-based classifier M, it concisely describes the fraction of G that best explains why l is assigned by M. (2) We propose quality measures and formulate an optimization problem to compute optimal explanation views for GNN explanation. We show that the problem is $Σ^2_P$-hard. (3) We present two algorithms. The first one follows an explain-and-summarize strategy that first generates high-quality explanation subgraphs which best explain GNNs in terms of feature influence maximization, and then performs a summarization step to generate patterns. We show that this strategy provides an approximation ratio of 1/2. Our second algorithm performs a single-pass to an input node stream in batches to incrementally maintain explanation views, having an anytime quality guarantee of 1/4 approximation. Using real-world benchmark data, we experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of GVEX. Through case studies, we showcase the practical applications of GVEX.

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arXiv2024

Efficient Temporal Butterfly Counting and Enumeration on Temporal Bipartite Graphs

Bipartite graphs characterize relationships between two different sets of entities, like actor-movie, user-item, and author-paper. The butterfly, a 4-vertices 4-edges (2,2)-biclique, is the simplest cohesive motif in a bipartite graph and is the fundamental component of higher-order substructures. Counting and enumerating the butterflies offer significant benefits across various applications, including fraud detection, graph embedding, and community search. While the corresponding motif, the triangle, in the unipartite graphs has been widely studied in both static and temporal settings, the extension of butterfly to temporal bipartite graphs remains unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the temporal butterfly counting and enumeration problem: count and enumerate the butterflies whose edges establish following a certain order within a given duration. Towards efficient computation, we devise a non-trivial baseline rooted in the state-of-the-art butterfly counting algorithm on static graphs, further, explore the intrinsic property of the temporal butterfly, and develop a new optimization framework with a compact data structure and effective priority strategy. The time complexity is proved to be significantly reduced without compromising on space efficiency. In addition, we generalize our algorithms to practical streaming settings and multi-core computing architectures. Our extensive experiments on 11 large-scale real-world datasets demonstrate the efficiency and scalability of our solutions.

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arXiv2023

MUST: An Effective and Scalable Framework for Multimodal Search of Target Modality

We investigate the problem of multimodal search of target modality, where the task involves enhancing a query in a specific target modality by integrating information from auxiliary modalities. The goal is to retrieve relevant objects whose contents in the target modality match the specified multimodal query. The paper first introduces two baseline approaches that integrate techniques from the Database, Information Retrieval, and Computer Vision communities. These baselines either merge the results of separate vector searches for each modality or perform a single-channel vector search by fusing all modalities. However, both baselines have limitations in terms of efficiency and accuracy as they fail to adequately consider the varying importance of fusing information across modalities. To overcome these limitations, the paper proposes a novel framework, called MUST. Our framework employs a hybrid fusion mechanism, combining different modalities at multiple stages. Notably, we leverage vector weight learning to determine the importance of each modality, thereby enhancing the accuracy of joint similarity measurement. Additionally, the proposed framework utilizes a fused proximity graph index, enabling efficient joint search for multimodal queries. MUST offers several other advantageous properties, including pluggable design to integrate any advanced embedding techniques, user flexibility to customize weight preferences, and modularized index construction. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of MUST over the baselines in terms of both search accuracy and efficiency. Our framework achieves over 10x faster search times while attaining an average of 93% higher accuracy. Furthermore, MUST exhibits scalability to datasets containing more than 10 million data elements.

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arXiv2023

Random Walk-based Community Key-members Search over Large Graphs

Given a graph $G$, a query node $q$, and an integer $k$, community search (CS) seeks a cohesive subgraph (measured by community models such as $k$-core or $k$-truss) from $G$ that contains $q$. It is difficult for ordinary users with less knowledge of graphs' complexity to set an appropriate $k$. Even if we define quite a large $k$, the community size returned by CS is often too large for users to gain much insight about it. Compared against the entire community, key-members in the community appear more valuable than others. To contend with this, we focus on Community Key-members Search problem (CKS). We turn our perspective to the key-members in the community containing $q$ instead of the entire community. To solve CKS problem, we first propose an exact algorithm based on truss decomposition as a baseline. Then, we present four random walk-based optimized algorithms to achieve a trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency, by carefully considering three important cohesiveness features in the design of transition matrix. As a result, we return key-members according to the stationary distribution when random walk converges. We theoretically analyze the rationality of designing the cohesiveness-aware transition matrix for random walk, through Bayesian theory based on Gaussian Mixture Model with Box-Cox Transformation and Copula Function Fitting. Moreover, we propose a lightweight refinement method following an ``expand-replace" manner to further optimize the result with little overhead, and we extend our method for CKS with multiple query nodes. Comprehensive experimental studies on various real-world datasets demonstrate our method's superiority.

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arXiv2022

Most Probable Densest Subgraphs

Computing the densest subgraph is a primitive graph operation with critical applications in detecting communities, events, and anomalies in biological, social, Web, and financial networks. In this paper, we study the novel problem of Most Probable Densest Subgraph (MPDS) discovery in uncertain graphs: Find the node set that is the most likely to induce a densest subgraph in an uncertain graph. We further extend our problem by considering various notions of density, e.g., clique and pattern densities, studying the top-k MPDSs, and finding the node set with the largest containment probability within densest subgraphs. We show that it is #P-hard to compute the probability of a node set inducing a densest subgraph. We then devise sampling-based efficient algorithms, with end-to-end accuracy guarantees, to compute the MPDS. Our thorough experimental results and real-world case studies on brain and social networks validate the effectiveness, efficiency, and usefulness of our solution.

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arXiv2022

Voting-based Opinion Maximization

We investigate the novel problem of voting-based opinion maximization in a social network: Find a given number of seed nodes for a target campaigner, in the presence of other competing campaigns, so as to maximize a voting-based score for the target campaigner at a given time horizon. The bulk of the influence maximization literature assumes that social network users can switch between only two discrete states, inactive and active, and the choice to switch is frozen upon one-time activation. In reality, even when having a preferred opinion, a user may not completely despise the other opinions, and the preference level may vary over time due to social influence. To this end, we employ models rooted in opinion formation and diffusion, and use several voting-based scores to determine a user's vote for each of the multiple campaigners at a given time horizon. Our problem is NP-hard and non-submodular for various scores. We design greedy seed selection algorithms with quality guarantees for our scoring functions via sandwich approximation. To improve the efficiency, we develop random walk and sketch-based opinion computation, with quality guarantees. Empirical results validate our effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability.

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arXiv2021

Multi-relation Graph Summarization

Graph summarization is beneficial in a wide range of applications, such as visualization, interactive and exploratory analysis, approximate query processing, reducing the on-disk storage footprint, and graph processing in modern hardware. However, the bulk of the literature on graph summarization surprisingly overlooks the possibility of having edges of different types. In this paper, we study the novel problem of producing summaries of multi-relation networks, i.e., graphs where multiple edges of different types may exist between any pair of nodes. Multi-relation graphs are an expressive model of real-world activities, in which a relation can be a topic in social networks, an interaction type in genetic networks, or a snapshot in temporal graphs. The first approach that we consider for multi-relation graph summarization is a two-step method based on summarizing each relation in isolation, and then aggregating the resulting summaries in some clever way to produce a final unique summary. In doing this, as a side contribution, we provide the first polynomial-time approximation algorithm based on the k-Median clustering for the classic problem of lossless single-relation graph summarization. Then, we demonstrate the shortcomings of these two-step methods, and propose holistic approaches, both approximate and heuristic algorithms, to compute a summary directly for multi-relation graphs. In particular, we prove that the approximation bound of k-Median clustering for the single relation solution can be maintained in a multi-relation graph with proper aggregation operation over adjacency matrices corresponding to its multiple relations. Experimental results and case studies (on co-authorship networks and brain networks) validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms.

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arXiv2020

Reliability Maximization in Uncertain Graphs

Network reliability measures the probability that a target node is reachable from a source node in an uncertain graph, i.e., a graph where every edge is associated with a probability of existence. In this paper, we investigate the novel and fundamental problem of adding a small number of edges in the uncertain network for maximizing the reliability between a given pair of nodes. We study the NP-hardness and the approximation hardness of our problem, and design effective, scalable solutions. Furthermore, we consider extended versions of our problem (e.g., multiple source and target nodes can be provided as input) to support and demonstrate a wider family of queries and applications, including sensor network reliability maximization and social influence maximization. Experimental results validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms.

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arXiv2019

An In-Depth Comparison of s-t Reliability Algorithms over Uncertain Graphs

Uncertain, or probabilistic, graphs have been increasingly used to represent noisy linked data in many emerging applications, and have recently attracted the attention of the database research community. A fundamental problem on uncertain graphs is the s-t reliability, which measures the probability that a target node t is reachable from a source node s in a probabilistic (or uncertain) graph, i.e., a graph where every edge is assigned a probability of existence. Due to the inherent complexity of the s-t reliability estimation problem (#P-hard), various sampling and indexing based efficient algorithms were proposed in the literature. However, since they have not been thoroughly compared with each other, it is not clear whether the later algorithm outperforms the earlier ones. More importantly, the comparison framework, datasets, and metrics were often not consistent (e.g., different convergence criteria were employed to find the optimal number of samples) across these works. We address this serious concern by re-implementing six state-of-the-art s-t reliability estimation methods in a common system and code base, using several medium and large-scale, real-world graph datasets, identical evaluation metrics, and query workloads. Through our systematic and in-depth analysis of experimental results, we report surprising findings, such as many follow-up algorithms can actually be several orders of magnitude inefficient, less accurate, and more memory intensive compared to the ones that were proposed earlier. We conclude by discussing our recommendations on the road ahead.

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arXiv2017

Select Your Questions Wisely: For Entity Resolution With Crowd Errors

Crowdsourcing is becoming increasingly important in entity resolution tasks due to their inherent complexity such as clustering of images and natural language processing. Humans can provide more insightful information for these difficult problems compared to machine-based automatic techniques. Nevertheless, human workers can make mistakes due to lack of domain expertise or seriousness, ambiguity, or even due to malicious intents. The state-of-the-art literature usually deals with human errors via majority voting or by assigning a universal error rate over crowd workers. However, such approaches are incomplete, and often inconsistent, because the expertise of crowd workers are diverse with possible biases, thereby making it largely inappropriate to assume a universal error rate for all workers over all crowdsourcing tasks. To this end, we mitigate the above challenges by considering an uncertain graph model, where the edge probability between two records A and B denotes the ratio of crowd workers who voted Yes on the question if A and B are same entity. In order to reflect independence across different crowdsourcing tasks, we apply the well-established notion of possible worlds, and develop parameter-free algorithms both for next crowdsourcing, as well as for entity resolution problems. In particular, using our framework, the problem of entity resolution becomes equivalent to finding the maximum-likelihood clustering; whereas for the next crowdsourcing, we identify the record pair that maximally increases the reliability of the maximum-likelihood clustering. Based on detailed empirical analysis over real-world datasets, we find that our proposed solution, PERC (probabilistic entity resolution with imperfect crowd) improves the quality by 15% and reduces the overall cost by 50% for the crowdsourcing-based entity resolution problem.

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