arXiv subjects

Zhiyang Shen

Publications and source records attributed to Zhiyang Shen.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

VisPuzzle: Task-Aware Composite Visualization Construction

Compositing multiple visualizations into a coherent whole remains challenging due to the vast design space and the need to balance the coverage of task-relevant data insights (e.g., trends and outliers), perceptual clarity, and aesthetic quality. In this paper, we present VisPuzzle, a task-aware method that formulates visualization composition as a stepwise search problem over a composition graph. In this graph, nodes represent either data composition operations (e.g., union, join) or visual composition operations that determine component relationships, spatial arrangements, or component proportions, and edges encode feasible transitions between operations. We employ Monte Carlo Graph Search to efficiently identify high-quality composition candidates from this graph, guided by a reward function that balances task relevance, perceptual effectiveness, and aesthetic coherence. A use case and a user study show that the top-ranked candidates produced by VisPuzzle align closely with human judgments of composition quality, demonstrating its utility in supporting principled and scalable visualization composition.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

ZipFlow: a Compiler-based Framework to Unleash Compressed Data Movement for Modern GPUs

In GPU-accelerated data analytics, the overhead of data transfer from CPU to GPU becomes a performance bottleneck when the data scales beyond GPU memory capacity due to the limited PCIe bandwidth. Data compression has come to rescue for reducing the amount of data transfer while taking advantage of the powerful GPU computation for decompression. To optimize the end-to-end query performance, however, the workflow of data compression, transfer, and decompression must be holistically designed based on the compression strategies and hardware characteristics to balance the I/O latency and computational overhead. In this work, we present ZipFlow, a compiler-based framework for optimizing compressed data transfer in GPU-accelerated data analytics. ZipFlow classifies compression algorithms into three distinct patterns based on their inherent parallelism. For each pattern, ZipFlow employs generalized scheduling strategies to effectively exploit the computational power of GPUs across diverse architectures. Building on these patterns, ZipFlow delivers flexible, high-performance, and holistic optimization, which substantially advances end-to-end data transfer capabilities. We evaluate the effectiveness of ZipFlow on industry-standard benchmark, TPC-H. Overall, ZipFlow achieves an average improvement of 2.08 times over the state-of-the-art GPU compression library (nvCOMP) and 3.14 times speedup against CPU-based query processing engines (e.g., DuckDB).

cs.DB↗

arXiv2025

Cluster-Aware Grid Layout

Grid visualizations are widely used in many applications to visually explain a set of data and their proximity relationships. However, existing layout methods face difficulties when dealing with the inherent cluster structures within the data. To address this issue, we propose a cluster-aware grid layout method that aims to better preserve cluster structures by simultaneously considering proximity, compactness, and convexity in the optimization process. Our method utilizes a hybrid optimization strategy that consists of two phases. The global phase aims to balance proximity and compactness within each cluster, while the local phase ensures the convexity of cluster shapes. We evaluate the proposed grid layout method through a series of quantitative experiments and two use cases, demonstrating its effectiveness in preserving cluster structures and facilitating analysis tasks.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

ReorderBench: A Benchmark for Matrix Reordering

Matrix reordering permutes the rows and columns of a matrix to reveal meaningful visual patterns, such as blocks that represent clusters. A comprehensive collection of matrices, along with a scoring method for measuring the quality of visual patterns in these matrices, contributes to building a benchmark. This benchmark is essential for selecting or designing suitable reordering algorithms for specific tasks. In this paper, we build a matrix reordering benchmark, ReorderBench, with the goal of evaluating and improving matrix reordering techniques. This is achieved by generating a large set of representative and diverse matrices and scoring these matrices with a convolution- and entropy-based method. Our benchmark contains 2,835,000 binary matrices and 5,670,000 continuous matrices, each featuring one of four visual patterns: block, off-diagonal block, star, or band. We demonstrate the usefulness of ReorderBench through three main applications in matrix reordering: 1) evaluating different reordering algorithms, 2) creating a unified scoring model to measure the visual patterns in any matrix, and 3) developing a deep learning model for matrix reordering.

cs.HC↗