Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MIRA: Cracking Black-box Watermarking on Deep Neural Networks via Model Inversion-based Removal Attacks

To protect the intellectual property of well-trained deep neural networks (DNNs), black-box DNN watermarks, which are embedded into the prediction behavior of DNN models on a set of specially-crafted samples, have gained increasing popularity in both academy and industry. Watermark robustness is usually implemented against attackers who steal the protected model and obfuscate its parameters for watermark removal. Recent studies empirically prove the robustness of most black-box watermarking schemes against known removal attempts. In this paper, we propose a novel Model Inversion-based Removal Attack (\textsc{Mira}), which is watermark-agnostic and effective against most of mainstream black-box DNN watermarking schemes. In general, our attack pipeline exploits the internals of the protected model to recover and unlearn the watermark message. We further design target class detection and recovered sample splitting algorithms to reduce the utility loss caused by \textsc{Mira} and achieve data-free watermark removal on half of the watermarking schemes. We conduct comprehensive evaluation of \textsc{Mira} against ten mainstream black-box watermarks on three benchmark datasets and DNN architectures. Compared with six baseline removal attacks, \textsc{Mira} achieves strong watermark removal effects on the covered watermarks, preserving at least $90\%$ of the stolen model utility, under more relaxed or even no assumptions on the dataset availability.
Scale-Score: Food Label to Support Nutritious and Sustainable Online Grocery Shopping - Extended Abstract

To empower online grocery shoppers in making nutritionally and environmentally informed decisions, we investigate the efficacy of the Scale-Score, a label combining nutritional and environmental information to highlight a product's benefit to both the consumer's and the planet's health, without obscuring either information. We conducted an experimental study in a mock online grocery environment, and assessed label efficacy. We find that the Scale-Score supports nutritious purchases, yet needs improving regarding sustainability support. Our research shows first insights into design considerations and performance of a combined yet disjoint food label.
Equal Long-term Benefit Rate: Adapting Static Fairness Notions to Sequential Decision Making

Decisions made by machine learning models may have lasting impacts over time, making long-term fairness a crucial consideration. It has been shown that when ignoring the long-term effect, naively imposing fairness criterion in static settings can actually exacerbate bias over time. To explicitly address biases in sequential decision-making, recent works formulate long-term fairness notions in Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework. They define the long-term bias to be the sum of static bias over each time step. However, we demonstrate that naively summing up the step-wise bias can cause a false sense of fairness since it fails to consider the importance difference of different time steps during transition. In this work, we introduce a long-term fairness notion called Equal Long-term Benefit Rate (ELBERT), which explicitly considers varying temporal importance and adapts static fairness principles to the sequential setting. Moreover, we show that the policy gradient of Long-term Benefit Rate can be analytically reduced to standard policy gradient. This makes standard policy optimization methods applicable for reducing the bias, leading to our proposed bias mitigation method ELBERT-PO. Experiments on three sequential decision making environments show that ELBERT-PO significantly reduces bias and maintains high utility. Code is available at https://github.com/Yuancheng-Xu/ELBERT.
Learning from Limited Heterogeneous Training Data: Meta-Learning for Unsupervised Zero-Day Web Attack Detection across Web Domains

Recently unsupervised machine learning based systems have been developed to detect zero-day Web attacks, which can effectively enhance existing Web Application Firewalls (WAFs). However, prior arts only consider detecting attacks on specific domains by training particular detection models for the domains. These systems require a large amount of training data, which causes a long period of time for model training and deployment. In this paper, we propose RETSINA, a novel meta-learning based framework that enables zero-day Web attack detection across different domains in an organization with limited training data. Specifically, it utilizes meta-learning to share knowledge across these domains, e.g., the relationship between HTTP requests in heterogeneous domains, to efficiently train detection models. Moreover, we develop an adaptive preprocessing module to facilitate semantic analysis of Web requests across different domains and design a multi-domain representation method to capture semantic correlations between different domains for cross-domain model training. We conduct experiments using four real-world datasets on different domains with a total of 293M Web requests. The experimental results demonstrate that RETSINA outperforms the existing unsupervised Web attack detection methods with limited training data, e.g., RETSINA needs only 5-minute training data to achieve comparable detection performance to the existing methods that train separate models for different domains using 1-day training data. We also conduct real-world deployment in an Internet company. RETSINA captures on average 126 and 218 zero-day attack requests per day in two domains, respectively, in one month.
Privacy-preserving Continual Federated Clustering via Adaptive Resonance Theory

With the increasing importance of data privacy protection, various privacy-preserving machine learning methods have been proposed. In the clustering domain, various algorithms with a federated learning framework (i.e., federated clustering) have been actively studied and showed high clustering performance while preserving data privacy. However, most of the base clusterers (i.e., clustering algorithms) used in existing federated clustering algorithms need to specify the number of clusters in advance. These algorithms, therefore, are unable to deal with data whose distributions are unknown or continually changing. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a privacy-preserving continual federated clustering algorithm. In the proposed algorithm, an adaptive resonance theory-based clustering algorithm capable of continual learning is used as a base clusterer. Therefore, the proposed algorithm inherits the ability of continual learning. Experimental results with synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed algorithm has superior clustering performance to state-of-the-art federated clustering algorithms while realizing data privacy protection and continual learning ability. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/Masuyama-lab/FCAC}.
USA: Universal Sentiment Analysis Model & Construction of Japanese Sentiment Text Classification and Part of Speech Dataset

Sentiment analysis is a pivotal task in the domain of natural language processing. It encompasses both text-level sentiment polarity classification and word-level Part of Speech(POS) sentiment polarity determination. Such analysis challenges models to understand text holistically while also extracting nuanced information. With the rise of Large Language Models(LLMs), new avenues for sentiment analysis have opened. This paper proposes enhancing performance by leveraging the Mutual Reinforcement Effect(MRE) between individual words and the overall text. It delves into how word polarity influences the overarching sentiment of a passage. To support our research, we annotated four novel Sentiment Text Classification and Part of Speech(SCPOS) datasets, building upon existing sentiment classification datasets. Furthermore, we developed a Universal Sentiment Analysis(USA) model, with a 7-billion parameter size. Experimental results revealed that our model surpassed the performance of gpt-3.5-turbo across all four datasets, underscoring the significance of MRE in sentiment analysis.
Quantum Graph-State Synthesis with SAT

In quantum computing and quantum information processing, graph states are a specific type of quantum states which are commonly used in quantum networking and quantum error correction. A recurring problem is finding a transformation from a given source graph state to a desired target graph state using only local operations. Recently it has been shown that deciding transformability is already NP-hard. In this paper, we present a CNF encoding for both local and non-local graph state operations, corresponding to one- and two-qubit Clifford gates and single-qubit Pauli measurements. We use this encoding in a bounded-model-checking set-up to synthesize the desired transformation. For a completeness threshold, we provide an upper bound on the length of the transformation if it exists. We evaluate the approach in two settings: the first is the synthesis of the ubiquitous GHZ state from a random graph state where we can vary the number of qubits, while the second is based on a proposed 14 node quantum network. We find that the approach is able to synthesize transformations for graphs up to 17 qubits in under 30 minutes.
Novel Power-Imbalanced Dense Codebooks for Reliable Multiplexing in Nakagami Channels

This letter studies enhanced dense code multiple access (DCMA) system design for downlink transmission over the Nakagami-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> fading channels. By studying the DCMA pairwise error probability (PEP) in a Nakagami-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> channel, a novel design metric called minimum logarithmic sum distance (MLSD) is first derived. With respect to the proposed MLSD, we introduce a new family of power-imbalanced dense codebooks by deleting certain rows of a special non-unimodular circulant matrix. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed dense codebooks lead to both larger minimum Euclidean distance and MLSD, thus yielding significant improvements of error performance over the existing sparse code multiple access and conventional unimodular DCMA schemes in Nakagami-<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> fading channels under different overloading factors.
Password-Stealing without Hacking: Wi-Fi Enabled Practical Keystroke Eavesdropping

The contact-free sensing nature of Wi-Fi has been leveraged to achieve privacy breaches, yet existing attacks relying on Wi-Fi CSI (channel state information) demand hacking Wi-Fi hardware to obtain desired CSIs. Since such hacking has proven prohibitively hard due to compact hardware, its feasibility in keeping up with fast-developing Wi-Fi technology becomes very questionable. To this end, we propose WiKI-Eve to eavesdrop keystrokes on smartphones without the need for hacking. WiKI-Eve exploits a new feature, BFI (beamforming feedback information), offered by latest Wi-Fi hardware: since BFI is transmitted from a smartphone to an AP in clear-text, it can be overheard (hence eavesdropped) by any other Wi-Fi devices switching to monitor mode. As existing keystroke inference methods offer very limited generalizability, WiKI-Eve further innovates in an adversarial learning scheme to enable its inference generalizable towards unseen scenarios. We implement WiKI-Eve and conduct extensive evaluation on it; the results demonstrate that WiKI-Eve achieves 88.9% inference accuracy for individual keystrokes and up to 65.8% top-10 accuracy for stealing passwords of mobile applications (e.g., WeChat).
LDMRes-Net: Enabling Efficient Medical Image Segmentation on IoT and Edge Platforms

In this study, we propose LDMRes-Net, a lightweight dual-multiscale residual block-based computational neural network tailored for medical image segmentation on IoT and edge platforms. Conventional U-Net-based models face challenges in meeting the speed and efficiency demands of real-time clinical applications, such as disease monitoring, radiation therapy, and image-guided surgery. LDMRes-Net overcomes these limitations with its remarkably low number of learnable parameters (0.072M), making it highly suitable for resource-constrained devices. The model's key innovation lies in its dual multi-residual block architecture, which enables the extraction of refined features on multiple scales, enhancing overall segmentation performance. To further optimize efficiency, the number of filters is carefully selected to prevent overlap, reduce training time, and improve computational efficiency. The study includes comprehensive evaluations, focusing on segmentation of the retinal image of vessels and hard exudates crucial for the diagnosis and treatment of ophthalmology. The results demonstrate the robustness, generalizability, and high segmentation accuracy of LDMRes-Net, positioning it as an efficient tool for accurate and rapid medical image segmentation in diverse clinical applications, particularly on IoT and edge platforms. Such advances hold significant promise for improving healthcare outcomes and enabling real-time medical image analysis in resource-limited settings.
On the optimal error exponents for classical and quantum antidistinguishability

The concept of antidistinguishability of quantum states has been studied to investigate foundational questions in quantum mechanics. It is also called quantum state elimination, because the goal of such a protocol is to guess which state, among finitely many chosen at random, the system is not prepared in (that is, it can be thought of as the first step in a process of elimination). Antidistinguishability has been used to investigate the reality of quantum states, ruling out $\psi$-epistemic ontological models of quantum mechanics [Pusey et al., Nat. Phys., 8(6):475-478, 2012]. Thus, due to the established importance of antidistinguishability in quantum mechanics, exploring it further is warranted. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive study of the optimal error exponent -- the rate at which the optimal error probability vanishes to zero asymptotically -- for classical and quantum antidistinguishability. We derive an exact expression for the optimal error exponent in the classical case and show that it is given by the classical Chernoff--Hellinger divergence. Our work thus provides this multi-variate divergence with a meaningful operational interpretation as the optimal error exponent for antidistinguishing a set of probability measures. We provide several bounds on the optimal error exponent in the quantum case: a lower bound given by the best pairwise Chernoff divergence of the states, an upper bound in terms of max-relative entropy, and lower and upper bounds in terms of minimal and maximal quantum Chernoff--Hellinger divergences. It remains an open problem to obtain an explicit expression for the optimal error exponent for quantum antidistinguishability.
On dataset tensions and signatures of new cosmological physics

Can new cosmic physics be uncovered through tensions amongst datasets? Tensions in parameter determinations amongst different types of cosmological observation, especially the `Hubble tension' between probes of the expansion rate, have been invoked as possible indicators of new physics, requiring extension of the $\Lambda$CDM paradigm to resolve. Within a fully Bayesian framework, we show that the standard tension metric gives only part of the updating of model probabilities, supplying a data co-dependence term that must be combined with the Bayes factors of individual datasets. This shows that, on its own, a reduction of dataset tension under an extension to $\Lambda$CDM is insufficient to demonstrate that the extended model is favoured. Any analysis that claims evidence for new physics {\it solely} on the basis of alleviating dataset tensions should be considered incomplete and suspect. We describe the implications of our results for the interpretation of the Hubble tension.
Crossing numbers of cable knots

We use the degree of the colored Jones knot polynomials to show that the crossing number of a $(p,q)$-cable of an adequate knot with crossing number $c$ is larger than $q^2\, c$. As an application we determine the crossing number of $2$-cables of adequate knots. We also determine the crossing number of the connected sum of any adequate knot with a $2$-cable of an adequate knot.
Multivariate, Multi-step, and Spatiotemporal Traffic Prediction for NextG Network Slicing under SLA Constraints

This study presents a spatiotemporal traffic prediction approach for NextG mobile networks, ensuring the service-level agreements (SLAs) of each network slice. Our approach is multivariate, multi-step, and spatiotemporal. Leveraging 20 radio access network (RAN) features, peak traffic hour data, and mobility-based clustering, we propose a parametric SLA-based loss function to guarantee an SLA violation rate. We focus on single-cell, multi-cell, and slice-based prediction approaches and present a detailed comparative analysis of their performances, strengths, and limitations. First, we address the application of single-cell and multi-cell training architectures. While single-cell training offers individual cell-level prediction, multi-cell training involves training a model using traffic from multiple cells from the same or different base stations. We show that the single-cell approach outperforms the multi-cell approach and results in test loss improvements of 11.4% and 38.1% compared to baseline SLA-based and MAE-based models, respectively. Next, we explore slice-based traffic prediction. We present single-slice and multi-slice methods for slice-based downlink traffic volume prediction, arguing that multi-slice prediction offers a more accurate forecast. The slice-based model we introduce offers substantial test loss improvements of 28.2%, 36.4%, and 55.6% compared to our cell-based model, the baseline SLA-based model, and the baseline MAE-based model, respectively.
Efficient Single Object Detection on Image Patches with Early Exit Enhanced High-Precision CNNs

This paper proposes a novel approach for detecting objects using mobile robots in the context of the RoboCup Standard Platform League, with a primary focus on detecting the ball. The challenge lies in detecting a dynamic object in varying lighting conditions and blurred images caused by fast movements. To address this challenge, the paper presents a convolutional neural network architecture designed specifically for computationally constrained robotic platforms. The proposed CNN is trained to achieve high precision classification of single objects in image patches and to determine their precise spatial positions. The paper further integrates Early Exits into the existing high-precision CNN architecture to reduce the computational cost of easily rejectable cases in the background class. The training process involves a composite loss function based on confidence and positional losses with dynamic weighting and data augmentation. The proposed approach achieves a precision of 100% on the validation dataset and a recall of almost 87%, while maintaining an execution time of around 170 $\mu$s per hypotheses. By combining the proposed approach with an Early Exit, a runtime optimization of more than 28%, on average, can be achieved compared to the original CNN. Overall, this paper provides an efficient solution for an enhanced detection of objects, especially the ball, in computationally constrained robotic platforms.
Linear Regularity and Strong CHIP of Closed Sets in Asplund Spaces

In this paper, we mainly study linear regularity and two types of strong CHIP (given via Fr\'echet and limiting normal cones) for a collection of finitely many closed sets. We first prove characterizations of Asplund spaces in terms of linear regularity and intersection formulae of Fr\'echet normal cones. Several necessary conditions for linear regularity of closed sets are obtained via Fr\'echet/limiting normal cones in Asplund spaces. Then, we consider linear regularity for some special closed sets in convex-composite optimization and prove the equivalence result on linear regularity, strong Fr\'echet CHIP and property (G) so as to extend duality characterization for linear regularity of finitely many closed convex sets via strong CHIP and property (G) to the possibly non-convex case. As applications, we use these results on linear regularity and strong CHIP to study error bounds of inequality systems and give several dual criteria for error bounds via Fr\'echet normal cones and subdifferentials.
Square Pattern Formation as Stable Fixed Point in Driven Two-Dimensional Bose-Einstein Condensates

We investigate pattern formation in two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) caused by temporal periodic modulation of the interatomic interaction. Temporal modulation of the interaction causes the so-called Faraday instability in the condensate, which we show generically leads to a stable square grid density pattern. We take the amplitudes in each of the two directions spanning the two-dimensional density pattern as order parameters in pattern formation and derive a set of simultaneous time evolution equations for those order parameters from the Gross--Pitaevskii (GP) equation with a time-periodic interaction. We identify the fixed points of the time evolution and show by stability analysis that the inhomogeneous density exhibits a square grid pattern as a stable fixed point.
Hopper: Interpretative Fuzzing for Libraries

Despite the fact that the state-of-the-art fuzzers can generate inputs efficiently, existing fuzz drivers still cannot adequately cover entries in libraries. Most of these fuzz drivers are crafted manually by developers, and their quality depends on the developers' understanding of the code. Existing works have attempted to automate the generation of fuzz drivers by learning API usage from code and execution traces. However, the generated fuzz drivers are limited to a few specific call sequences by the code being learned. To address these challenges, we present HOPPER, which can fuzz libraries without requiring any domain knowledge to craft fuzz drivers. It transforms the problem of library fuzzing into the problem of interpreter fuzzing. The interpreters linked against libraries under test can interpret the inputs that describe arbitrary API usage. To generate semantically correct inputs for the interpreter, HOPPER learns the intra-and inter-API constraints in the libraries and mutates the program with grammar awareness. We implemented HOPPER and evaluated its effectiveness on 11 real-world libraries against manually crafted fuzzers and other automatic solutions. Our results show that HOPPER greatly outperformed the other fuzzers in both code coverage and bug finding, having uncovered 25 previously unknown bugs that other fuzzers couldn't. Moreover, we have demonstrated that the proposed intra- and inter-API constraint learning methods can correctly learn constraints implied by the library and, therefore, significantly improve the fuzzing efficiency. The experiment results indicate that HOPPER is able to explore a vast range of API usages for library fuzzing out of the box.