Xiaocui Li

Jiagang Liu, Yun Mi, Xinyu Zhang et al.

Various mobile applications that comprise dependent tasks are gaining widespread popularity and are increasingly complex. These applications often have low-latency requirements, resulting in a significant surge in demand for computing resources. With the emergence of mobile edge computing (MEC), it becomes the most significant issue to offload the application tasks onto small-scale devices deployed at the edge of the mobile network for obtaining a high-quality user experience. However, since the environment of MEC is dynamic, most existing works focusing on task graph offloading, which rely heavily on expert knowledge or accurate analytical models, fail to fully adapt to such environmental changes, resulting in the reduction of user experience. This paper investigates the task graph offloading in MEC, considering the time-varying computation capabilities of edge computing devices. To adapt to environmental changes, we model the task graph scheduling for computation offloading as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Then, we design a deep reinforcement learning algorithm (SATA-DRL) to learn the task scheduling strategy from the interaction with the environment, to improve user experience. Extensive simulations validate that SATA-DRL is superior to existing strategies in terms of reducing average makespan and deadline violation.

Fei Gao, Ruyue Xin, Xiaocui Li et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are widely adopted for fault diagnosis in microservice systems, premised on their ability to model service dependencies. However, the necessity of explicit graph structures remains underexamined, as existing evaluations conflate preprocessing with architectural contributions. To isolate the true value of GNNs, we propose DiagMLP, a deliberately minimal, topology-agnostic baseline that retains multimodal fusion capabilities while excluding graph modeling. Through ablation experiments across five datasets, DiagMLP achieves performance parity with state-of-the-art GNN-based methods in fault detection, localization, and classification. These findings challenge the prevailing assumption that graph structures are indispensable, revealing that: (i) preprocessing pipelines already encode critical dependency information, and (ii) GNN modules contribute marginally beyond multimodality fusion. Our work advocates for systematic re-evaluation of architectural complexity and highlights the need for standardized baseline protocols to validate model innovations.