Jun Zhou

Zhongshu Zhu, Bin Jing, Xiaopei Wan et al.

As a powerful tool for modeling graph data, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received increasing attention in both academia and industry. Nevertheless, it is notoriously difficult to deploy GNNs on industrial scale graphs, due to their huge data size and complex topological structures. In this paper, we propose GLISP, a sampling based GNN learning system for industrial scale graphs. By exploiting the inherent structural properties of graphs, such as power law distribution and data locality, GLISP addresses the scalability and performance issues that arise at different stages of the graph learning process. GLISP consists of three core components: graph partitioner, graph sampling service and graph inference engine. The graph partitioner adopts the proposed vertex-cut graph partitioning algorithm AdaDNE to produce balanced partitioning for power law graphs, which is essential for sampling based GNN systems. The graph sampling service employs a load balancing design that allows the one hop sampling request of high degree vertices to be handled by multiple servers. In conjunction with the memory efficient data structure, the efficiency and scalability are effectively improved. The graph inference engine splits the $K$-layer GNN into $K$ slices and caches the vertex embeddings produced by each slice in the data locality aware hybrid caching system for reuse, thus completely eliminating redundant computation caused by the data dependency of graph. Extensive experiments show that GLISP achieves up to $6.53\times$ and $70.77\times$ speedups over existing GNN systems for training and inference tasks, respectively, and can scale to the graph with over 10 billion vertices and 40 billion edges with limited resources.

Siyuan Li, Youshao Xiao, Fanzhuang Meng et al.

Offline batch inference is a common task in the industry for deep learning applications, but it can be challenging to ensure stability and performance when dealing with large amounts of data and complicated inference pipelines. This paper demonstrated AntBatchInfer, an elastic batch inference framework, which is specially optimized for the non-dedicated cluster. AntBatchInfer addresses these challenges by providing multi-level fault-tolerant capabilities, enabling the stable execution of versatile and long-running inference tasks. It also improves inference efficiency by pipelining, intra-node, and inter-node scaling. It further optimizes the performance in complicated multiple-model batch inference scenarios. Through extensive experiments and real-world statistics, we demonstrate the superiority of our framework in terms of stability and efficiency. In the experiment, it outperforms the baseline by at least $2\times$ and $6\times$ in the single-model or multiple-model batch inference. Also, it is widely used at Ant Group, with thousands of daily jobs from various scenarios, including DLRM, CV, and NLP, which proves its practicability in the industry.

Min Chen, Jun Zhou, Guangming Tao et al.

With the development of the artificial intelligence (AI), the AI applications have influenced and changed people's daily life greatly. Here, a wearable affective robot that integrates the affective robot, social robot, brain wearable, and wearable 2.0 is proposed for the first time. The proposed wearable affective robot is intended for a wide population, and we believe that it can improve the human health on the spirit level, meeting the fashion requirements at the same time. In this paper, the architecture and design of an innovative wearable affective robot, which is dubbed as Fitbot, are introduced in terms of hardware and algorithm's perspectives. In addition, the important functional component of the robot-brain wearable device is introduced from the aspect of the hardware design, EEG data acquisition and analysis, user behavior perception, and algorithm deployment, etc. Then, the EEG based cognition of user's behavior is realized. Through the continuous acquisition of the in-depth, in-breadth data, the Fitbot we present can gradually enrich user's life modeling and enable the wearable robot to recognize user's intention and further understand the behavioral motivation behind the user's emotion. The learning algorithm for the life modeling embedded in Fitbot can achieve better user's experience of affective social interaction. Finally, the application service scenarios and some challenging issues of a wearable affective robot are discussed.