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James Cheng

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Published work

26 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Knowing but Not Correcting: Routine Task Requests Suppress Factual Correction in LLMs

LLMs reliably correct false claims when presented in isolation, yet when the same claims are embedded in task-oriented requests, they often comply rather than correct. We term this failure mode \emph{correction suppression} and construct a benchmark of 300 false premises to systematically evaluate it across eight models. Suppression rates range from 19\% to 90\%, with four models exceeding 80\%, establishing correction suppression as a prevalent and severe phenomenon. Mechanistic analysis reveals that suppression is not a knowledge failure: the model registers the error internally but task context diverts early-layer attention from the false claim as output intent crystallizes toward compliance at middle layers. We characterize this as \emph{knowing but not correcting} -- suppression occurs at response selection rather than knowledge encoding. Guided by this mechanism, we propose two training-free interventions. Correction Direction Steering (CDS) estimates a correction-compliance direction from matched pairs and injects it at middle layers before output intent crystallizes. Dynamic Payload Amplification (DPA) localizes payload tokens via attention divergence between early and late layers and amplifies their representation at the final layer, requiring no calibration data. Experiments on Qwen3.5-9B and LLaMA3.1-8B show both methods substantially improve factual strictness. CDS achieves the highest correction rate on Qwen3.5-9B (0\%$\to$58.2\%). DPA is the only method that preserves or improves reasoning capability on both models. These findings introduce \emph{factual strictness} -- the willingness to uphold accuracy against contextual pressures -- as a new dimension of model reliability.

preprint2026arXiv

RecMem: Recurrence-based Memory Consolidation for Efficient and Effective Long-Running LLM Agents

Memory systems often organize user-agent interactions as retrievable external memory and are crucial for long-running agents by overcoming the limited context windows of LLMs. However, existing memory systems invoke LLMs to process every incoming interaction for memory extraction, and such an eager memory consolidation scheme leads to substantial token consumption. To tackle this problem, we propose RecMem by rethinking when memory consolidation should be conducted. RecMem stores incoming interactions in a subconscious memory layer and encode them using lightweight embedding models for retrieval. LLMs are only invoked to extract episodic and semantic memory when sustained recurrence are observed for semantically similar interactions. Such recurrence-based consolidation works because these interactions correspond to a semantic cluster with rich information and thus are worth extraction and summarization. To improve accuracy, RecMem also incorporates a semantic refinement mechanism that recovers the fine-grained facts omitted by memory extraction. Experiments show that RecMem reduces the memory construction token cost of three SOTA memory systems by up to 87% while exceeding their accuracy.

preprint2026arXiv

SEMA-RAG: A Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Medical Reasoning

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely employed to mitigate risks such as hallucinations and knowledge obsolescence in medical question answering, yet its predominantly single-round, static retrieval paradigm misaligns with the multi-stage process of clinical reasoning. This compressed workflow induces two structural deficiencies: question-to-query translation often lacks clinically grounded semantic interpretation, and retrieval lacks iterative sufficiency feedback, making it difficult to form reliable evidence chains. We argue that both issues stem from a deeper cause: overloading a single reasoning chain with heterogeneous tasks of interpretation, exploration, and adjudication. The remedy is to reconstruct the workflow via task decoupling and dynamic multi-round exploration. To this end, we propose SEMA-RAG, a Self-Evolving Multi-Agent RAG framework for medical question answering, which assigns these roles to three specialist agents: the Interpreter Agent for clinical schema interpretation, the Explorer Agent for sufficiency-driven self-evolving retrieval, and the Arbiter Agent for evidence adjudication and answer selection. Across five benchmarks and five LLM backbones, SEMA-RAG improves the strongest baseline by +6.46 accuracy points on average, measured per backbone.

preprint2022arXiv

A Representation Learning Framework for Property Graphs

Representation learning on graphs, also called graph embedding, has demonstrated its significant impact on a series of machine learning applications such as classification, prediction and recommendation. However, existing work has largely ignored the rich information contained in the properties (or attributes) of both nodes and edges of graphs in modern applications, e.g., those represented by property graphs. To date, most existing graph embedding methods either focus on plain graphs with only the graph topology, or consider properties on nodes only. We propose PGE, a graph representation learning framework that incorporates both node and edge properties into the graph embedding procedure. PGE uses node clustering to assign biases to differentiate neighbors of a node and leverages multiple data-driven matrices to aggregate the property information of neighbors sampled based on a biased strategy. PGE adopts the popular inductive model for neighborhood aggregation. We provide detailed analyses on the efficacy of our method and validate the performance of PGE by showing how PGE achieves better embedding results than the state-of-the-art graph embedding methods on benchmark applications such as node classification and link prediction over real-world datasets.

preprint2022arXiv

Fast and Reliable Evaluation of Adversarial Robustness with Minimum-Margin Attack

The AutoAttack (AA) has been the most reliable method to evaluate adversarial robustness when considerable computational resources are available. However, the high computational cost (e.g., 100 times more than that of the project gradient descent attack) makes AA infeasible for practitioners with limited computational resources, and also hinders applications of AA in the adversarial training (AT). In this paper, we propose a novel method, minimum-margin (MM) attack, to fast and reliably evaluate adversarial robustness. Compared with AA, our method achieves comparable performance but only costs 3% of the computational time in extensive experiments. The reliability of our method lies in that we evaluate the quality of adversarial examples using the margin between two targets that can precisely identify the most adversarial example. The computational efficiency of our method lies in an effective Sequential TArget Ranking Selection (STARS) method, ensuring that the cost of the MM attack is independent of the number of classes. The MM attack opens a new way for evaluating adversarial robustness and provides a feasible and reliable way to generate high-quality adversarial examples in AT.

preprint2022arXiv

Measuring and Improving the Use of Graph Information in Graph Neural Networks

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used for representation learning on graph data. However, there is limited understanding on how much performance GNNs actually gain from graph data. This paper introduces a context-surrounding GNN framework and proposes two smoothness metrics to measure the quantity and quality of information obtained from graph data. A new GNN model, called CS-GNN, is then designed to improve the use of graph information based on the smoothness values of a graph. CS-GNN is shown to achieve better performance than existing methods in different types of real graphs.

preprint2022arXiv

Understanding and Improving Graph Injection Attack by Promoting Unnoticeability

Recently Graph Injection Attack (GIA) emerges as a practical attack scenario on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), where the adversary can merely inject few malicious nodes instead of modifying existing nodes or edges, i.e., Graph Modification Attack (GMA). Although GIA has achieved promising results, little is known about why it is successful and whether there is any pitfall behind the success. To understand the power of GIA, we compare it with GMA and find that GIA can be provably more harmful than GMA due to its relatively high flexibility. However, the high flexibility will also lead to great damage to the homophily distribution of the original graph, i.e., similarity among neighbors. Consequently, the threats of GIA can be easily alleviated or even prevented by homophily-based defenses designed to recover the original homophily. To mitigate the issue, we introduce a novel constraint -- homophily unnoticeability that enforces GIA to preserve the homophily, and propose Harmonious Adversarial Objective (HAO) to instantiate it. Extensive experiments verify that GIA with HAO can break homophily-based defenses and outperform previous GIA attacks by a significant margin. We believe our methods can serve for a more reliable evaluation of the robustness of GNNs.

preprint2020arXiv

Convolutional Embedding for Edit Distance

Edit-distance-based string similarity search has many applications such as spell correction, data de-duplication, and sequence alignment. However, computing edit distance is known to have high complexity, which makes string similarity search challenging for large datasets. In this paper, we propose a deep learning pipeline (called CNN-ED) that embeds edit distance into Euclidean distance for fast approximate similarity search. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to generate fixed-length vector embeddings for a dataset of strings and the loss function is a combination of the triplet loss and the approximation error. To justify our choice of using CNN instead of other structures (e.g., RNN) as the model, theoretical analysis is conducted to show that some basic operations in our CNN model preserve edit distance. Experimental results show that CNN-ED outperforms data-independent CGK embedding and RNN-based GRU embedding in terms of both accuracy and efficiency by a large margin. We also show that string similarity search can be significantly accelerated using CNN-based embeddings, sometimes by orders of magnitude.

preprint2020arXiv

Hierarchical Graph Matching Network for Graph Similarity Computation

Graph edit distance / similarity is widely used in many tasks, such as graph similarity search, binary function analysis, and graph clustering. However, computing the exact graph edit distance (GED) or maximum common subgraph (MCS) between two graphs is known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we propose the hierarchical graph matching network (HGMN), which learns to compute graph similarity from data. HGMN is motivated by the observation that two similar graphs should also be similar when they are compressed into more compact graphs. HGMN utilizes multiple stages of hierarchical clustering to organize a graph into successively more compact graphs. At each stage, the earth mover distance (EMD) is adopted to obtain a one-to-one mapping between the nodes in two graphs (on which graph similarity is to be computed), and a correlation matrix is also derived from the embeddings of the nodes in the two graphs. The correlation matrices from all stages are used as input for a convolutional neural network (CNN), which is trained to predict graph similarity by minimizing the mean squared error (MSE). Experimental evaluation on 4 datasets in different domains and 4 performance metrics shows that HGMN consistently outperforms existing baselines in the accuracy of graph similarity approximation.

preprint2020arXiv

TensorOpt: Exploring the Tradeoffs in Distributed DNN Training with Auto-Parallelism

A good parallelization strategy can significantly improve the efficiency or reduce the cost for the distributed training of deep neural networks (DNNs). Recently, several methods have been proposed to find efficient parallelization strategies but they all optimize a single objective (e.g., execution time, memory consumption) and produce only one strategy. We propose FT, an efficient algorithm that searches for an optimal set of parallelization strategies to allow the trade-off among different objectives. FT can adapt to different scenarios by minimizing the memory consumption when the number of devices is limited and fully utilize additional resources to reduce the execution time. For popular DNN models (e.g., vision, language), an in-depth analysis is conducted to understand the trade-offs among different objectives and their influence on the parallelization strategies. We also develop a user-friendly system, called TensorOpt, which allows users to run their distributed DNN training jobs without caring the details of parallelization strategies. Experimental results show that FT runs efficiently and provides accurate estimation of runtime costs, and TensorOpt is more flexible in adapting to resource availability compared with existing frameworks.

preprint2020arXiv

Understanding Graph Neural Networks from Graph Signal Denoising Perspectives

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have attracted much attention because of their excellent performance on tasks such as node classification. However, there is inadequate understanding on how and why GNNs work, especially for node representation learning. This paper aims to provide a theoretical framework to understand GNNs, specifically, spectral graph convolutional networks and graph attention networks, from graph signal denoising perspectives. Our framework shows that GNNs are implicitly solving graph signal denoising problems: spectral graph convolutions work as denoising node features, while graph attentions work as denoising edge weights. We also show that a linear self-attention mechanism is able to compete with the state-of-the-art graph attention methods. Our theoretical results further lead to two new models, GSDN-F and GSDN-EF, which work effectively for graphs with noisy node features and/or noisy edges. We validate our theoretical findings and also the effectiveness of our new models by experiments on benchmark datasets. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/fuguoji/GSDN}.

preprint2016arXiv

Efficient Processing of Reachability and Time-Based Path Queries in a Temporal Graph

A temporal graph is a graph in which vertices communicate with each other at specific time, e.g., $A$ calls $B$ at 11 a.m. and talks for 7 minutes, which is modeled by an edge from $A$ to $B$ with starting time "11 a.m." and duration "7 mins". Temporal graphs can be used to model many networks with time-related activities, but efficient algorithms for analyzing temporal graphs are severely inadequate. We study fundamental problems such as answering reachability and time-based path queries in a temporal graph, and propose an efficient indexing technique specifically designed for processing these queries in a temporal graph. Our results show that our method is efficient and scalable in both index construction and query processing.

preprint2016arXiv

Efficient Processing of Very Large Graphs in a Small Cluster

Inspired by the success of Google's Pregel, many systems have been developed recently for iterative computation over big graphs. These systems provide a user-friendly vertex-centric programming interface, where a programmer only needs to specify the behavior of one generic vertex when developing a parallel graph algorithm. However, most existing systems require the input graph to reside in memories of the machines in a cluster, and the few out-of-core systems suffer from problems such as poor efficiency for sparse computation workload, high demand on network bandwidth, and expensive cost incurred by external-memory join and group-by. In this paper, we introduce the GraphD system for a user to process very large graphs with ordinary computing resources. GraphD fully overlaps computation with communication, by streaming edges and messages on local disks, while transmitting messages in parallel. For a broad class of Pregel algorithms where message combiner is applicable, GraphD eliminates the need of any expensive external-memory join or group-by. These key techniques allow GraphD to achieve comparable performance to in-memory Pregel-like systems without keeping edges and messages in memories. We prove that to process a graph G=(V, E) with n machines using GraphD, each machine only requires O(|V|/n) memory space, allowing GraphD to scale to very large graphs with a small cluster. Extensive experiments show that GraphD beats existing out-of-core systems by orders of magnitude, and achieves comparable performance to in-memory systems running with enough memories.

preprint2016arXiv

Lightweight Fault Tolerance in Large-Scale Distributed Graph Processing

The success of Google's Pregel framework in distributed graph processing has inspired a surging interest in developing Pregel-like platforms featuring a user-friendly "think like a vertex" programming model. Existing Pregel-like systems support a fault tolerance mechanism called checkpointing, which periodically saves computation states as checkpoints to HDFS, so that when a failure happens, computation rolls back to the latest checkpoint. However, a checkpoint in existing systems stores a huge amount of data, including vertex states, edges, and messages sent by vertices, which significantly degrades the failure-free performance. Moreover, the high checkpointing cost prevents frequent checkpointing, and thus recovery has to replay all the computations from a state checkpointed some time ago. In this paper, we propose a novel checkpointing approach which only stores vertex states and incremental edge updates to HDFS as a lightweight checkpoint (LWCP), so that writing an LWCP is typically tens of times faster than writing a conventional checkpoint. To recover from the latest LWCP, messages are generated from the vertex states, and graph topology is recovered by replaying incremental edge updates. We show how to realize lightweight checkpointing with minor modifications of the vertex-centric programming interface. We also apply the same idea to a recently-proposed log-based approach for fast recovery, to make it work efficiently in practice by significantly reducing the cost of garbage collection of logs. Extensive experiments on large real graphs verified the effectiveness of LWCP in improving both failure-free performance and the performance of recovery.

preprint2016arXiv

Quegel: A General-Purpose Query-Centric Framework for Querying Big Graphs

Pioneered by Google's Pregel, many distributed systems have been developed for large-scale graph analytics. These systems expose the user-friendly "think like a vertex" programming interface to users, and exhibit good horizontal scalability. However, these systems are designed for tasks where the majority of graph vertices participate in computation, but are not suitable for processing light-workload graph queries where only a small fraction of vertices need to be accessed. The programming paradigm adopted by these systems can seriously under-utilize the resources in a cluster for graph query processing. In this work, we develop a new open-source system, called Quegel, for querying big graphs, which treats queries as first-class citizens in the design of its computing model. Users only need to specify the Pregel-like algorithm for a generic query, and Quegel processes light-workload graph queries on demand using a novel superstep-sharing execution model to effectively utilize the cluster resources. Quegel further provides a convenient interface for constructing graph indexes, which significantly improve query performance but are not supported by existing graph-parallel systems. Our experiments verified that Quegel is highly efficient in answering various types of graph queries and is up to orders of magnitude faster than existing systems.

preprint2016arXiv

Regularized Orthogonal Tensor Decompositions for Multi-Relational Learning

Multi-relational learning has received lots of attention from researchers in various research communities. Most existing methods either suffer from superlinear per-iteration cost, or are sensitive to the given ranks. To address both issues, we propose a scalable core tensor trace norm Regularized Orthogonal Iteration Decomposition (ROID) method for full or incomplete tensor analytics, which can be generalized as a graph Laplacian regularized version by using auxiliary information or a sparse higher-order orthogonal iteration (SHOOI) version. We first induce the equivalence relation of the Schatten p-norm (0<p<\infty) of a low multi-linear rank tensor and its core tensor. Then we achieve a much smaller matrix trace norm minimization problem. Finally, we develop two efficient augmented Lagrange multiplier algorithms to solve our problems with convergence guarantees. Extensive experiments using both real and synthetic datasets, even though with only a few observations, verified both the efficiency and effectiveness of our methods.

preprint2016arXiv

Scalable Algorithms for Tractable Schatten Quasi-Norm Minimization

The Schatten-p quasi-norm $(0<p<1)$ is usually used to replace the standard nuclear norm in order to approximate the rank function more accurately. However, existing Schatten-p quasi-norm minimization algorithms involve singular value decomposition (SVD) or eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) in each iteration, and thus may become very slow and impractical for large-scale problems. In this paper, we first define two tractable Schatten quasi-norms, i.e., the Frobenius/nuclear hybrid and bi-nuclear quasi-norms, and then prove that they are in essence the Schatten-2/3 and 1/2 quasi-norms, respectively, which lead to the design of very efficient algorithms that only need to update two much smaller factor matrices. We also design two efficient proximal alternating linearized minimization algorithms for solving representative matrix completion problems. Finally, we provide the global convergence and performance guarantees for our algorithms, which have better convergence properties than existing algorithms. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world data show that our algorithms are more accurate than the state-of-the-art methods, and are orders of magnitude faster.

preprint2016arXiv

Unified Scalable Equivalent Formulations for Schatten Quasi-Norms

The Schatten quasi-norm can be used to bridge the gap between the nuclear norm and rank function, and is the tighter approximation to matrix rank. However, most existing Schatten quasi-norm minimization (SQNM) algorithms, as well as for nuclear norm minimization, are too slow or even impractical for large-scale problems, due to the SVD or EVD of the whole matrix in each iteration. In this paper, we rigorously prove that for any p, p1, p2>0 satisfying 1/p=1/p1+1/p2, the Schatten-p quasi-norm of any matrix is equivalent to minimizing the product of the Schatten-p1 norm (or quasi-norm) and Schatten-p2 norm (or quasi-norm) of its two factor matrices. Then we present and prove the equivalence relationship between the product formula of the Schatten quasi-norm and its weighted sum formula for the two cases of p1 and p2: p1=p2 and p1\neq p2. In particular, when p>1/2, there is an equivalence between the Schatten-p quasi-norm of any matrix and the Schatten-2p norms of its two factor matrices, where the widely used equivalent formulation of the nuclear norm can be viewed as a special case. That is, various SQNM problems with p>1/2 can be transformed into the one only involving smooth, convex norms of two factor matrices, which can lead to simpler and more efficient algorithms than conventional methods. We further extend the theoretical results of two factor matrices to the cases of three and more factor matrices, from which we can see that for any 0<p<1, the Schatten-p quasi-norm of any matrix is the minimization of the mean of the Schatten-(p3+1)p norms of all factor matrices, where p3 denotes the largest integer not exceeding 1/p. In other words, for any 0<p<1, the SQNM problem can be transformed into an optimization problem only involving the smooth, convex norms of multiple factor matrices.

preprint2015arXiv

Effective Techniques for Message Reduction and Load Balancing in Distributed Graph Computation

Massive graphs, such as online social networks and communication networks, have become common today. To efficiently analyze such large graphs, many distributed graph computing systems have been developed. These systems employ the "think like a vertex" programming paradigm, where a program proceeds in iterations and at each iteration, vertices exchange messages with each other. However, using Pregel's simple message passing mechanism, some vertices may send/receive significantly more messages than others due to either the high degree of these vertices or the logic of the algorithm used. This forms the communication bottleneck and leads to imbalanced workload among machines in the cluster. In this paper, we propose two effective message reduction techniques: (1)vertex mirroring with message combining, and (2)an additional request-respond API. These techniques not only reduce the total number of messages exchanged through the network, but also bound the number of messages sent/received by any single vertex. We theoretically analyze the effectiveness of our techniques, and implement them on top of our open-source Pregel implementation called Pregel+. Our experiments on various large real graphs demonstrate that our message reduction techniques significantly improve the performance of distributed graph computation.

preprint2014arXiv

Generalized Higher-Order Tensor Decomposition via Parallel ADMM

Higher-order tensors are becoming prevalent in many scientific areas such as computer vision, social network analysis, data mining and neuroscience. Traditional tensor decomposition approaches face three major challenges: model selecting, gross corruptions and computational efficiency. To address these problems, we first propose a parallel trace norm regularized tensor decomposition method, and formulate it as a convex optimization problem. This method does not require the rank of each mode to be specified beforehand, and can automatically determine the number of factors in each mode through our optimization scheme. By considering the low-rank structure of the observed tensor, we analyze the equivalent relationship of the trace norm between a low-rank tensor and its core tensor. Then, we cast a non-convex tensor decomposition model into a weighted combination of multiple much smaller-scale matrix trace norm minimization. Finally, we develop two parallel alternating direction methods of multipliers (ADMM) to solve our problems. Experimental results verify that our regularized formulation is effective, and our methods are robust to noise or outliers.

preprint2014arXiv

Structured Low-Rank Matrix Factorization with Missing and Grossly Corrupted Observations

Recovering low-rank and sparse matrices from incomplete or corrupted observations is an important problem in machine learning, statistics, bioinformatics, computer vision, as well as signal and image processing. In theory, this problem can be solved by the natural convex joint/mixed relaxations (i.e., l_{1}-norm and trace norm) under certain conditions. However, all current provable algorithms suffer from superlinear per-iteration cost, which severely limits their applicability to large-scale problems. In this paper, we propose a scalable, provable structured low-rank matrix factorization method to recover low-rank and sparse matrices from missing and grossly corrupted data, i.e., robust matrix completion (RMC) problems, or incomplete and grossly corrupted measurements, i.e., compressive principal component pursuit (CPCP) problems. Specifically, we first present two small-scale matrix trace norm regularized bilinear structured factorization models for RMC and CPCP problems, in which repetitively calculating SVD of a large-scale matrix is replaced by updating two much smaller factor matrices. Then, we apply the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to efficiently solve the RMC problems. Finally, we provide the convergence analysis of our algorithm, and extend it to address general CPCP problems. Experimental results verified both the efficiency and effectiveness of our method compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2014arXiv

Temporal Graph Traversals: Definitions, Algorithms, and Applications

A temporal graph is a graph in which connections between vertices are active at specific times, and such temporal information leads to completely new patterns and knowledge that are not present in a non-temporal graph. In this paper, we study traversal problems in a temporal graph. Graph traversals, such as DFS and BFS, are basic operations for processing and studying a graph. While both DFS and BFS are well-known simple concepts, it is non-trivial to adopt the same notions from a non-temporal graph to a temporal graph. We analyze the difficulties of defining temporal graph traversals and propose new definitions of DFS and BFS for a temporal graph. We investigate the properties of temporal DFS and BFS, and propose efficient algorithms with optimal complexity. In particular, we also study important applications of temporal DFS and BFS. We verify the efficiency and importance of our graph traversal algorithms in real world temporal graphs.

preprint2014arXiv

Tripartite Graph Clustering for Dynamic Sentiment Analysis on Social Media

The growing popularity of social media (e.g, Twitter) allows users to easily share information with each other and influence others by expressing their own sentiments on various subjects. In this work, we propose an unsupervised \emph{tri-clustering} framework, which analyzes both user-level and tweet-level sentiments through co-clustering of a tripartite graph. A compelling feature of the proposed framework is that the quality of sentiment clustering of tweets, users, and features can be mutually improved by joint clustering. We further investigate the evolution of user-level sentiments and latent feature vectors in an online framework and devise an efficient online algorithm to sequentially update the clustering of tweets, users and features with newly arrived data. The online framework not only provides better quality of both dynamic user-level and tweet-level sentiment analysis, but also improves the computational and storage efficiency. We verified the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches on the November 2012 California ballot Twitter data.

preprint2012arXiv

IS-LABEL: an Independent-Set based Labeling Scheme for Point-to-Point Distance Querying on Large Graphs

We study the problem of computing shortest path or distance between two query vertices in a graph, which has numerous important applications. Quite a number of indexes have been proposed to answer such distance queries. However, all of these indexes can only process graphs of size barely up to 1 million vertices, which is rather small in view of many of the fast-growing real-world graphs today such as social networks and Web graphs. We propose an efficient index, which is a novel labeling scheme based on the independent set of a graph. We show that our method can handle graphs of size three orders of magnitude larger than those existing indexes.

preprint2012arXiv

K-Reach: Who is in Your Small World

We study the problem of answering k-hop reachability queries in a directed graph, i.e., whether there exists a directed path of length k, from a source query vertex to a target query vertex in the input graph. The problem of k-hop reachability is a general problem of the classic reachability (where k=infinity). Existing indexes for processing classic reachability queries, as well as for processing shortest path queries, are not applicable or not efficient for processing k-hop reachability queries. We propose an index for processing k-hop reachability queries, which is simple in design and efficient to construct. Our experimental results on a wide range of real datasets show that our index is more efficient than the state-of-the-art indexes even for processing classic reachability queries, for which these indexes are primarily designed. We also show that our index is efficient in answering k-hop reachability queries.

preprint2012arXiv

Truss Decomposition in Massive Networks

The k-truss is a type of cohesive subgraphs proposed recently for the study of networks. While the problem of computing most cohesive subgraphs is NP-hard, there exists a polynomial time algorithm for computing k-truss. Compared with k-core which is also efficient to compute, k-truss represents the "core" of a k-core that keeps the key information of, while filtering out less important information from, the k-core. However, existing algorithms for computing k-truss are inefficient for handling today's massive networks. We first improve the existing in-memory algorithm for computing k-truss in networks of moderate size. Then, we propose two I/O-efficient algorithms to handle massive networks that cannot fit in main memory. Our experiments on real datasets verify the efficiency of our algorithms and the value of k-truss.