Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multidimensional Blockchain Fees are (Essentially) Optimal

In this paper we show that, using only mild assumptions, previously proposed multidimensional blockchain fee markets are essentially optimal, even against worst-case adversaries. In particular, we show that the average welfare gap between the following two scenarios is at most $O(1/\sqrt{T})$, where $T$ is the length of the time horizon considered. In the first scenario, the designer knows all future actions by users and is allowed to fix the optimal prices of resources ahead of time, based on the designer's oracular knowledge of those actions. In the second, the prices are updated by a very simple algorithm that does not have this oracular knowledge, a special case of which is similar to EIP-1559, the base fee mechanism used by the Ethereum blockchain. Roughly speaking, this means that, on average, over a reasonable timescale, there is no difference in welfare between 'correctly' fixing the prices, with oracular knowledge of the future, when compared to the proposed algorithm. We show a matching lower bound of $\Omega(1/\sqrt{T})$ for any implementable algorithm and also separately consider the case where the adversary is known to be stochastic.
Plausible Extractive Rationalization through Semi-Supervised Entailment Signal

The increasing use of complex and opaque black box models requires the adoption of interpretable measures, one such option is extractive rationalizing models, which serve as a more interpretable alternative. These models, also known as Explain-Then-Predict models, employ an explainer model to extract rationales and subsequently condition the predictor with the extracted information. Their primary objective is to provide precise and faithful explanations, represented by the extracted rationales. In this paper, we take a semi-supervised approach to optimize for the plausibility of extracted rationales. We adopt a pre-trained natural language inference (NLI) model and further fine-tune it on a small set of supervised rationales ($10\%$). The NLI predictor is leveraged as a source of supervisory signals to the explainer via entailment alignment. We show that, by enforcing the alignment agreement between the explanation and answer in a question-answering task, the performance can be improved without access to ground truth labels. We evaluate our approach on the ERASER dataset and show that our approach achieves comparable results with supervised extractive models and outperforms unsupervised approaches by $>100\%$.
Semiclassical asymptotics of the Bloch--Torrey operator in two dimensions

The Bloch--Torrey operator $-h^2\Delta+e^{i\alpha}x_1$ on a bounded smooth planar domain, subject to Dirichlet boundary conditions, is analyzed. Assuming $\alpha\in\left[0,\frac{3\pi}{5}\right)$ and a non-degeneracy assumption on the left-hand side of the domain, asymptotics of the eigenvalues with the smallest real part in the limit $h \to 0$ are derived. The strategy is a backward complex scaling and the reduction to a tensorized operator involving a real Airy operator and a complex harmonic oscillator.
Quasineutral multistability in an epidemiological-like model for defective-helper betacoronavirus infection in cell cultures

It is well known that, during replication, RNA viruses spontaneously generate defective viral genomes (DVGs). DVGs are unable to complete an infectious cycle autonomously, and depend on coinfection with a helper wild-type virus (HV) for their replication and/or transmission. The study of the dynamics arising from a HV and its DVGs has been a longstanding question in virology. It has been shown that DVGs can modulate HV replication and, depending on the strength of interference, result in HV extinctions or self-sustained persistent fluctuations. Extensive experimental work has provided mechanistic explanations for DVG generation and compelling evidences of HV-DVGs virus coevolution. Some of these observations have been captured in mathematical models. Here, we develop and investigate an epidemiological-like mathematical model specifically designed to study the dynamics of betacoronavirus in cell cultures experiments. The dynamics of the model is governed by several degenerate normally hyperbolic invariant manifolds given by quasineutral planes - i.e. filled by equilibrium points. Three different quasineutral planes have been identified depending on parameters and involving: (i) persistence of HV and DVGs; (\emph{ii}) persistence of non-infected cells and DVG-infected cells; and (iii) persistence of DVG-infected cells and DVGs. Sensitivity analyses indicate that model dynamics largely depend on the maximum burst size ($B$), and both the production rate ($\beta$) and replicative advantage ($\delta$) of DVGs. Finally, the model has been fitted to single-passage experimental data using artificial intelligence and key virological parameters have been estimated.
Glass Segmentation with Multi Scales and Primary Prediction Guiding

Glass-like objects can be seen everywhere in our daily life which are very hard for existing methods to segment them. The properties of transparencies pose great challenges of detecting them from the chaotic background and the vague separation boundaries further impede the acquisition of their exact contours. Moving machines which ignore glasses have great risks of crashing into transparent barriers or difficulties in analysing objects reflected in the mirror, thus it is of substantial significance to accurately locate glass-like objects and completely figure out their contours. In this paper, inspired by the scale integration strategy and the refinement method, we proposed a brand-new network, named as MGNet, which consists of a Fine-Rescaling and Merging module (FRM) to improve the ability to extract spatially relationship and a Primary Prediction Guiding module (PPG) to better mine the leftover semantics from the fused features. Moreover, we supervise the model with a novel loss function with the uncertainty-aware loss to produce high-confidence segmentation maps. Unlike the existing glass segmentation models that must be trained on different settings with respect to varied datasets, our model are trained under consistent settings and has achieved superior performance on three popular public datasets. Code is available at
Complete Asymptotic Expansions for the Normalizing Constants of High-Dimensional Matrix Bingham and Matrix Langevin Distributions

For positive integers $d$ and $p$ such that $d \ge p$, we obtain complete asymptotic expansions, for large $d$, of the normalizing constants for the matrix Bingham and matrix Langevin distributions on Stiefel manifolds. The accuracy of each truncated expansion is strictly increasing in $d$; also, for sufficiently large $d$, the accuracy is strictly increasing in $m$, the number of terms in the truncated expansion. We apply these results to obtain the rate of convergence of these asymptotic expansions if both $d, p \to \infty$. Using values of $d$ and $p$ arising in various data sets, we illustrate the rate of convergence of the truncated approximations as $d$ or $m$ increases. These results extend our recent work on asymptotic expansions for the normalizing constants of the high-dimensional Bingham distributions.
Portobello: Extending Driving Simulation from the Lab to the Road

In automotive user interface design, testing often starts with lab-based driving simulators and migrates toward on-road studies to mitigate risks. Mixed reality (XR) helps translate virtual study designs to the real road to increase ecological validity. However, researchers rarely run the same study in both in-lab and on-road simulators due to the challenges of replicating studies in both physical and virtual worlds. To provide a common infrastructure to port in-lab study designs on-road, we built a platform-portable infrastructure, Portobello, to enable us to run twinned physical-virtual studies. As a proof-of-concept, we extended the on-road simulator XR-OOM with Portobello. We ran a within-subjects, autonomous-vehicle crosswalk cooperation study (N=32) both in-lab and on-road to investigate study design portability and platform-driven influences on study outcomes. To our knowledge, this is the first system that enables the twinning of studies originally designed for in-lab simulators to be carried out in an on-road platform.
Why Studying Cut-ins? Comparing Cut-ins and Other Lane Changes Based on Naturalistic Driving Data

Extensive research has been conducted to explore vehicle lane changes, while the study on cut-ins has not received sufficient attention. The existing studies have not addressed the fundamental question of why studying cut-ins is crucial, despite the extensive investigation into lane changes. To tackle this issue, it is important to demonstrate how cut-ins, as a special type of lane change, differ from other lane changes. In this paper, we explore to compare driving characteristics of cut-ins and other lane changes based on naturalistic driving data. The highD dataset is employed to conduct the comparison. We extract all lane-change events from the dataset and exclude events that are not suitable for our comparison. Lane-change events are then categorized into the cut-in events and other lane-change events based on various gap-based rules. Several performance metrics are designed to measure the driving characteristics of the two types of events. We prove the significant differences between the cut-in behavior and other lane-change behavior by using the Wilcoxon rank-sum test. The results suggest the necessity of conducting specialized studies on cut-ins, offering valuable insights for future research in this field.
Thresholding Data Shapley for Data Cleansing Using Multi-Armed Bandits

Data cleansing aims to improve model performance by removing a set of harmful instances from the training dataset. Data Shapley is a common theoretically guaranteed method to evaluate the contribution of each instance to model performance; however, it requires training on all subsets of the training data, which is computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose an iterativemethod to fast identify a subset of instances with low data Shapley values by using the thresholding bandit algorithm. We provide a theoretical guarantee that the proposed method can accurately select harmful instances if a sufficiently large number of iterations is conducted. Empirical evaluation using various models and datasets demonstrated that the proposed method efficiently improved the computational speed while maintaining the model performance.
Approximately Piecewise E(3) Equivariant Point Networks

Integrating a notion of symmetry into point cloud neural networks is a provably effective way to improve their generalization capability. Of particular interest are $E(3)$ equivariant point cloud networks where Euclidean transformations applied to the inputs are preserved in the outputs. Recent efforts aim to extend networks that are $E(3)$ equivariant, to accommodate inputs made of multiple parts, each of which exhibits local $E(3)$ symmetry. In practical settings, however, the partitioning into individually transforming regions is unknown a priori. Errors in the partition prediction would unavoidably map to errors in respecting the true input symmetry. Past works have proposed different ways to predict the partition, which may exhibit uncontrolled errors in their ability to maintain equivariance to the actual partition. To this end, we introduce APEN: a general framework for constructing approximate piecewise-$E(3)$ equivariant point networks. Our primary insight is that functions that are equivariant with respect to a finer partition will also maintain equivariance in relation to the true partition. Leveraging this observation, we propose a design where the equivariance approximation error at each layers can be bounded solely in terms of (i) uncertainty quantification of the partition prediction, and (ii) bounds on the probability of failing to suggest a proper subpartition of the ground truth one. We demonstrate the effectiveness of APEN using two data types exemplifying part-based symmetry: (i) real-world scans of room scenes containing multiple furniture-type objects; and, (ii) human motions, characterized by articulated parts exhibiting rigid movement. Our empirical results demonstrate the advantage of integrating piecewise $E(3)$ symmetry into network design, showing a distinct improvement in generalization compared to prior works for both classification and segmentation tasks.
Theoretical Analysis of Leave-one-out Cross Validation for Non-differentiable Penalties under High-dimensional Settings

Despite a large and significant body of recent work focused on estimating the out-of-sample risk of regularized models in the high dimensional regime, a theoretical understanding of this problem for non-differentiable penalties such as generalized LASSO and nuclear norm is missing. In this paper we resolve this challenge. We study this problem in the proportional high dimensional regime where both the sample size n and number of features p are large, and n/p and the signal-to-noise ratio (per observation) remain finite. We provide finite sample upper bounds on the expected squared error of leave-one-out cross-validation (LO) in estimating the out-of-sample risk. The theoretical framework presented here provides a solid foundation for elucidating empirical findings that show the accuracy of LO.
T-semidefinite programming relaxation with third-order tensors for constrained polynomial optimization

We study T-semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation for constrained polynomial optimization problems (POPs). T-SDP relaxation for unconstrained POPs was introduced by Zheng, Huang and Hu in 2022. In this work, we propose a T-SDP relaxation for POPs with polynomial inequality constraints and show that the resulting T-SDP relaxation formulated with third-order tensors can be transformed into the standard SDP relaxation with block-diagonal structures. The convergence of the T-SDP relaxation to the optimal value of a given constrained POP is established under moderate assumptions as the relaxation level increases. Additionally, the feasibility and optimality of the T-SDP relaxation are discussed. Numerical results illustrate that the proposed T-SDP relaxation enhances numerical efficiency.
Computational complexity of isometric tensor network states

We determine the computational power of isometric tensor network states (isoTNS), a variational ansatz originally developed to numerically find and compute properties of gapped ground states and topological states in two dimensions. By mapping 2D isoTNS to 1+1D unitary quantum circuits, we find that computing local expectation values in isoTNS is $\textsf{BQP}$-complete. We then introduce injective isoTNS, which are those isoTNS that are the unique ground states of frustration-free Hamiltonians, and which are characterized by an injectivity parameter $\delta\in(0,1/D]$, where $D$ is the bond dimension of the isoTNS. We show that injectivity necessarily adds depolarizing noise to the circuit at a rate $\eta=\delta^2D^2$. We show that weakly injective isoTNS (small $\delta$) are still $\textsf{BQP}$-complete, but that there exists an efficient classical algorithm to compute local expectation values in strongly injective isoTNS ($\eta\geq0.41$). Sampling from isoTNS corresponds to monitored quantum dynamics and we exhibit a family of isoTNS that undergo a phase transition from a hard regime to an easy phase where the monitored circuit can be sampled efficiently. Our results can be used to design provable algorithms to contract isoTNS. Our mapping between ground states of certain frustration-free Hamiltonians to open circuit dynamics in one dimension fewer may be of independent interest.
On The Nature Of The Phenotype In Tree Genetic Programming

In this contribution, we discuss the basic concepts of genotypes and phenotypes in tree-based GP (TGP), and then analyze their behavior using five benchmark datasets. We show that TGP exhibits the same behavior that we can observe in other GP representations: At the genotypic level trees show frequently unchecked growth with seemingly ineffective code, but on the phenotypic level, much smaller trees can be observed. To generate phenotypes, we provide a unique technique for removing semantically ineffective code from GP trees. The approach extracts considerably simpler phenotypes while not being limited to local operations in the genotype. We generalize this transformation based on a problem-independent parameter that enables a further simplification of the exact phenotype by coarse-graining to produce approximate phenotypes. The concept of these phenotypes (exact and approximate) allows us to clarify what evolved solutions truly predict, making GP models considered at the phenotypic level much better interpretable.
CycPUF: Cyclic Physical Unclonable Function

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) leverage manufacturing process imperfections that cause propagation delay discrepancies for the signals traveling along these paths. While PUFs can be used for device authentication and chip-specific key generation, strong PUFs have been shown to be vulnerable to machine learning modeling attacks. Although there is an impression that combinational circuits must be designed without any loops, cyclic combinational circuits have been shown to increase design security against hardware intellectual property theft. In this paper, we introduce feedback signals into traditional delay-based PUF designs such as arbiter PUF, ring oscillator PUF, and butterfly PUF to give them a wider range of possible output behaviors and thus an edge against modeling attacks. Based on our analysis, cyclic PUFs produce responses that can be binary, steady-state, oscillating, or pseudo-random under fixed challenges. The proposed cyclic PUFs are implemented in field programmable gate arrays, and their power and area overhead, in addition to functional metrics, are reported compared with their traditional counterparts. The security gain of the proposed cyclic PUFs is also shown against state-of-the-art attacks.
Strategies for Community Resilience Practice for the Jamaica Bay Watershed

The interconnections between community resilience and vulnerability are complex and fraught. They are also different in kind and scope from aspects of ecological resilience described in earlier chapters. Building on interviews conducted with community leaders and experts in 2014 and reported in chapter 6, this chapter highlights best practices that can be adapted to develop the resilience capacity of communities in Jamaica Bay and frames community resilience through a socio-ecological lens (see also chapters 1, 3).
A Human-Machine Collaboration Framework for the Development of Schemas

The Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC), a seemingly well-thought-out test for machine intelligence, has been proposed to shed light on developing systems that exhibit human behavior. Since its introduction, it aimed to pivot the focus of the AI community from the technology to the science of AI. While common and trivial for humans, studies show that it is still challenging for machines, especially when they have to deal with novel schemas, that is, well-designed sentences that require the resolving of definite pronouns. As researchers have become increasingly interested in the challenge itself, this presumably necessitates the availability of an extensive collection of Winograd schemas, which goes beyond what human experts can reasonably develop themselves, especially after proposed ways of utilizing them as novel forms of CAPTCHAs. To address this necessity, we propose a novel framework that explicitly focuses on how humans and machines can collaborate as teammates to design novel schemas from scratch. This is being accomplished by combining two recent studies from the literature: i) Winventor, a machine-driven approach for the development of large amounts of Winograd schemas, albeit not of high quality, and ii) WinoFlexi, an online crowdsourcing system that allows crowd workers to develop a limited number of schemas often of similar quality to that of experts. Our proposal crafts a new road map toward developing a novel collaborative platform that amplifies human and machine intelligence by combining their complementary strengths.
Lying Blindly: Bypassing ChatGPT's Safeguards to Generate Hard-to-Detect Disinformation Claims at Scale

As Large Language Models (LLMs) become more proficient, their misuse in large-scale viral disinformation campaigns is a growing concern. This study explores the capability of ChatGPT to generate unconditioned claims about the war in Ukraine, an event beyond its knowledge cutoff, and evaluates whether such claims can be differentiated by human readers and automated tools from human-written ones. We compare war-related claims from ClaimReview, authored by IFCN-registered fact-checkers, and similar short-form content generated by ChatGPT. We demonstrate that ChatGPT can produce realistic, target-specific disinformation cheaply, fast, and at scale, and that these claims cannot be reliably distinguished by humans or existing automated tools.
Monolithic Silicon-Photonics Linear-Algebra Accelerators Enabling Next-Gen Massive MIMO

A system-on-chip (SoC) photonic-electronic linear-algebra accelerator with the features of wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) based broadband photodetections and high-dimensional matrix-inversion operations fabricated in advanced monolithic silicon-photonics (M-SiPh) semiconductor process technology is proposed to achieve substantial leaps in computation density and energy efficiency, including realistic considerations of energy/area overhead due to electronic/photonic on-chip conversions, integrations, and calibrations through holistic co-design methodologies to support linear-detection based massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) decoding technology requiring the inversion of channel matrices and other emergent applications limited by linear-algebra computation capacities.
Mirror Descent-Ascent for mean-field min-max problems

We study two variants of the mirror descent-ascent algorithm for solving min-max problems on the space of measures: simultaneous and sequential. We work under assumptions of convexity-concavity and relative smoothness of the payoff function with respect to a suitable Bregman divergence, defined on the space of measures via flat derivatives. We show that the convergence rates to mixed Nash equilibria, measured in the Nikaid\`o-Isoda error, are of order $\mathcal{O}\left(N^{-1/2}\right)$ and $\mathcal{O}\left(N^{-2/3}\right)$ for the simultaneous and sequential schemes, respectively, which is in line with the state-of-the-art results for related finite-dimensional algorithms.
Color Image Denoising Using The Green Channel Prior

Noise removal in the standard RGB (sRGB) space remains a challenging task, in that the noise statistics of real-world images can be different in R, G and B channels. In fact, the green channel usually has twice the sampling rate in raw data and a higher signal-to-noise ratio than red/blue ones. However, the green channel prior (GCP) is often understated or ignored in color image denoising since many existing approaches mainly focus on modeling the relationship among image patches. In this paper, we propose a simple and effective one step GCP-based image denoising (GCP-ID) method, which aims to exploit the GCP for denoising in the sRGB space by integrating it into the classic nonlocal transform domain denoising framework. Briefly, we first take advantage of the green channel to guide the search of similar patches, which improves the patch search quality and encourages sparsity in the transform domain. Then we reformulate RGB patches into RGGB arrays to explicitly characterize the density of green samples. The block circulant representation is utilized to capture the cross-channel correlation and the channel redundancy. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the competitive performance of the proposed GCP-ID method for the color image and video denoising tasks. The code is available at github.com/ZhaomingKong/GCP-ID.