Shixun Huang

Hai Lan, Zhifeng Bao, Divesh Srivastava et al.

We study the problem of cardinality estimation for LIKE queries on string data, focusing on the most common patterns in real workloads: prefix, suffix, and substring queries. We propose LEARNT, a LIKE query Estimator with Accuracy, Robustness, Negligible overhead, Tunability, and Theoretical guarantees. LEARNT formulates estimation as a bucket-classification problem, and upon correct classification, it yields formal bounds on Q-error for the queries with non-empty answer. It employs a memory-efficient bucketed layered-filter architecture with Bloom filters and compact auxiliary tables, together with optimizations that exploit query skew to reduce storage. For the queries that have empty answer, LEARNT incorporates dedicated filter-based and prefix-walk strategies, providing probabilistic guarantees on correct identification. Furthermore, to support arbitrarily long query strings, we extend LEARNT with Markov modeling scheme that composes short-query statistics into estimates for longer queries. A theoretical framework guides parameter selection to minimize storage under accuracy and robustness constraints. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show that LEARNT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods such as CLIQUE and LPLM, achieving 1.3-1.7x lower mean Q-error, significantly lower tail errors, and up to 70x faster construction with comparable memory usage.

Shixun Huang, Siyuan Chen, Yue Chang et al.

Cyclic animation is widely used in computer graphics and interactive content.It supports seamless playback in games, VR, and interactive simulation,where short clips must repeat smoothly over long durations. Achievingphysically plausible cyclic synthesis from an input sequence is challengingbecause the endpoint states of the observed sequence rarely match exactly,and the governing equations of the underlying system are often unavailable.We therefore propose an equation-free framework that identiffes a Koopmansurrogate from the observed trajectory and computes a cyclic trajectory byapplying a Fourier-parameterized, time-varying control force under a hardtemporal periodicity constraint. The resulting formulation reduces cyclicsynthesis to a linearly constrained quadratic program that can be solvedefffciently through a structured KKT system. Our method is applicable toa diverse range of examples, including N-body systems, cloth, deformableobjects, shallow water, etc.

Zepeng Liu, Sheng Wang, Shixun Huang et al.

Graph-centric cross-model data integration and analytics (GCDIA) refer to tasks that leverage the graph model as a central paradigm to integrate relevant information across heterogeneous data models, such as relational and document, and subsequently perform complex analytics such as regression and similarity computation. As modern applications generate increasingly diverse data and move beyond simple retrieval toward advanced analytical objectives (e.g., prediction and recommendation), GCDIA has become increasingly important. Existing multi-model databases (MMDBs) struggle to efficiently support both integration (GCDI) and analytics (GCDA) in GCDIA. They typically separate graph processing from other models without global optimization for GCDI, while relying on tuple-at-a-time execution for GCDA, leading to limited performance and scalability. To address these limitations, we propose GredoDB, a unified MMDB that natively supports storing graph, relational, and document models, while efficiently processing GCDIA. Specifically, we design 1) topology- and attribute-aware graph operators for efficient predicate-aware traversal, 2) a unified GCDI optimization framework to exploit cross-model correlations, and 3) a parallel GCDA architecture that materializes intermediate results for operator-level execution. Experiments on the widely adopted multi-model benchmark M2Bench demonstrate that, in terms of response time, GredoDB achieves up to 107.89 times and an average of 10.89 times speedup on GCDI, and up to 356.72 times and an average of 37.79 times on GCDA, compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) MMDBs.

Ge Lee, Shixun Huang, Zhifeng Bao et al.

Understanding how two tables overlap is useful for many data management tasks, but challenging because tables often differ in row and column orders and lack reliable metadata in practice. Prior work defines the largest rectangular overlap, which identifies the maximal contiguous region of matching cells under row and column permutations. However, real overlaps are rarely rectangular, where many valid matches may lie outside any single contiguous block. In this paper, we introduce the Shape-Agnostic Largest Table Overlap (SALTO), a novel generalized notion of overlap that captures arbitrary-shaped, non-contiguous overlaps between tables. To tackle the combinatorial complexity of row and column permutations, we propose to model each table as a hypergraph, casting SALTO computation into a maximum common subhypergraph problem. We prove their equivalence and show the problem is NP-hard to approximate. To solve it, we propose HyperSplit, a novel branch-and-bound algorithm tailored to table-induced hypergraphs. HyperSplit introduces (i) hypergraph-aware label classes that jointly encode cell values and their row-column memberships to ensure structurally valid correspondences without explicit permutation enumeration, (ii) incidence-guided refinement and upper-bound pruning that leverage row-column connectivity to eliminate infeasible partial matches early, and (iii) a tolerance-based optimization mechanism with a tunable parameter that relaxes pruning by a bounded margin to accelerate convergence, enabling scalable yet accurate overlap discovery. Experiments on real-world datasets show that HyperSplit discovers overlaps more effectively (larger overlaps in up to 78.8% of the cases) and more efficiently than state of the art. Three case studies further demonstrate its practical impact across three tasks: cross-source copy detection, data deduplication, and version comparison.

Runsheng Ren, Jing Li, Yanxiu Li et al.

Accurately forecasting carbon prices is essential for informed energy market decision-making, guiding sustainable energy planning, and supporting effective decarbonization strategies. However, it remains challenging due to structural breaks and high-frequency noise caused by frequent policy interventions and market shocks. Existing studies, including the most recent baseline approaches, have attempted to incorporate breakpoints but often treat denoising and modeling as separate processes and lack systematic evaluation across advanced deep learning architectures, limiting the robustness and the generalization capability. To address these gaps, this paper proposes a comprehensive hybrid framework that integrates structural break detection (Bai-Perron, ICSS, and PELT algorithms), wavelet signal denoising, and three state-of-the-art deep learning models (LSTM, GRU, and TCN). Using European Union Allowance (EUA) spot prices from 2007 to 2024 and exogenous features such as energy prices and policy indicators, the framework constructs univariate and multivariate datasets for comparative evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed PELT-WT-TCN achieves the highest prediction accuracy, reducing forecasting errors by 22.35% in RMSE and 18.63% in MAE compared to the state-of-the-art baseline model (Breakpoints with Wavelet and LSTM), and by 70.55% in RMSE and 74.42% in MAE compared to the original LSTM without decomposition from the same baseline study. These findings underscore the value of integrating structural awareness and multiscale decomposition into deep learning architectures to enhance accuracy and interpretability in carbon price forecasting and other nonstationary financial time series.

Tingting Wang, Shixun Huang, Zhifeng Bao et al.

Data discovery - retrieving relevant tables from a data lake in response to user queries - is a fundamental building block for downstream analytics. In practice, data discovery must support different query modalities, including natural language (NL) statements and tables, and accommodate diverse user intents, ranging from open-ended enrichment to task-driven inference for applications such as table question answering and fact verification. However, most existing methods are designed for a single query modality or a specific user intent, limiting their generalizability. We propose UniDisc, a unified data discovery framework that supports both NL statements and tables as queries and generalizes across diverse user intents without intent-specific representations or relevance modeling. UniDisc learns a common cross-modal representation model that produces unified representations for queries of different modalities and candidate tables, enabling uniform relevance assessment across discovery scenarios. Since learning such a model typically requires large labeled collections of query-table pairs, which are expensive to obtain, UniDisc instead exploits contextual signals naturally available in data lakes. Specifically, it models NL statements and tables as nodes in a heterogeneous graph with multiple edge types, and applies dual-view neighbor aggregation and joint optimization to learn robust, context-aware representations under limited supervision. These representations support flexible relevance estimation during retrieval. Experiments on seven datasets show that UniDisc consistently outperforms strong baselines on both NL- and table-based discovery.

Yaqi Chen, Shixun Huang, Ryan Twemlow et al.

GNN prompting aims to adapt models across tasks and graphs without requiring extensive retraining. However, most existing graph prompt methods still require task-specific parameter updates and face the issue of generalizing across graphs, limiting their performance and undermining the core promise of prompting. In this work, we introduce a Cross-graph Tuning-free Prompting Framework (CTP), which supports both homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs, can be directly deployed to unseen graphs without further parameter tuning, and thus enables a plug-and-play GNN inference engine. Extensive experiments on few-shot prediction tasks show that, compared to SOTAs, CTP achieves an average accuracy gain of 30.8% and a maximum gain of 54%, confirming its effectiveness and offering a new perspective on graph prompt learning.

Shixun Huang, Zhifeng Bao, Guoliang Li et al.

Network embedding is an effective method to learn low-dimensional representations of nodes, which can be applied to various real-life applications such as visualization, node classification, and link prediction. Although significant progress has been made on this problem in recent years, several important challenges remain, such as how to properly capture temporal information in evolving networks. In practice, most networks are continually evolving. Some networks only add new edges or nodes such as authorship networks, while others support removal of nodes or edges such as internet data routing. If patterns exist in the changes of the network structure, we can better understand the relationships between nodes and the evolution of the network, which can be further leveraged to learn node representations with more meaningful information. In this paper, we propose the Embedding via Historical Neighborhoods Aggregation (EHNA) algorithm. More specifically, we first propose a temporal random walk that can identify relevant nodes in historical neighborhoods which have impact on edge formations. Then we apply a deep learning model which uses a custom attention mechanism to induce node embeddings that directly capture temporal information in the underlying feature representation. We perform extensive experiments on a range of real-world datasets, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our new approach in the network reconstruction task and the link prediction task.