OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
A tiny public key scheme based on Niederreiter Cryptosystem
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Due to the weakness of public key cryptosystems encounter of quantum computers, the need to provide a solution was emerged. The McEliece cryptosystem and its security equivalent, the Niederreiter cryptosystem, which are based on Goppa codes, are one of the solutions, but they are not practical due to their long key length. Several prior attempts to decrease the length of the public key in code-based cryptosystems involved substituting the Goppa code family with other code families. However, these efforts ultimately proved to be insecure. In 2016, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) called for proposals from around the world to standardize post-quantum cryptography (PQC) schemes to solve this issue. After receiving of various proposals in this field, the Classic McEliece cryptosystem, as well as the Hamming Quasi-Cyclic (HQC) and Bit Flipping Key Encapsulation (BIKE), chosen as code-based encryption category cryptosystems that successfully progressed to the final stage. This article proposes a method for developing a code-based public key cryptography scheme that is both simple and implementable. The proposed scheme has a much shorter public key length compared to the NIST finalist cryptosystems. The key length for the primary parameters of the McEliece cryptosystem (n=1024, k=524, t=50) ranges from 18 to 500 bits. The security of this system is at least as strong as the security of the Niederreiter cryptosystem. The proposed structure is based on the Niederreiter cryptosystem which exhibits a set of highly advantageous properties that make it a suitable candidate for implementation in all extant systems.
slash: A Technique for Static Configuration-Logic Identification
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Researchers have recently devised tools for debloating software and detecting configuration errors. Several of these tools rely on the observation that programs are composed of an initialization phase followed by a main-computation phase. Users of these tools are required to manually annotate the boundary that separates these phases, a task that can be time-consuming and error-prone (typically, the user has to read and understand the source code or trace executions with a debugger). Because errors can impair the tool's accuracy and functionality, the manual-annotation requirement hinders the ability to apply the tools on a large scale. In this paper, we present a field study of 24 widely-used C/C++ programs, identifying common boundary properties in 96\% of them. We then introduce \textit{slash}, an automated tool that locates the boundary based on the identified properties. \textit{slash} successfully identifies the boundary in 87.5\% of the studied programs within 8.5\ minutes, using up to 4.4\ GB memory. In an independent test, carried out after \textit{slash} was developed, \textit{slash} identified the boundary in 85.7\% of a dataset of 21 popular C/C++ GitHub repositories. Finally, we demonstrate \textit{slash}'s potential to streamline the boundary-identification process of software-debloating and error-detection tools.
Exploiting Language Models as a Source of Knowledge for Cognitive Agents
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2023
Year: 2023

Large language models (LLMs) provide capabilities far beyond sentence completion, including question answering, summarization, and natural-language inference. While many of these capabilities have potential application to cognitive systems, our research is exploiting language models as a source of task knowledge for cognitive agents, that is, agents realized via a cognitive architecture. We identify challenges and opportunities for using language models as an external knowledge source for cognitive systems and possible ways to improve the effectiveness of knowledge extraction by integrating extraction with cognitive architecture capabilities, highlighting with examples from our recent work in this area.
DeepTriNet: A Tri-Level Attention Based DeepLabv3+ Architecture for Semantic Segmentation of Satellite Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

The segmentation of satellite images is crucial in remote sensing applications. Existing methods face challenges in recognizing small-scale objects in satellite images for semantic segmentation primarily due to ignoring the low-level characteristics of the underlying network and due to containing distinct amounts of information by different feature maps. Thus, in this research, a tri-level attention-based DeepLabv3+ architecture (DeepTriNet) is proposed for the semantic segmentation of satellite images. The proposed hybrid method combines squeeze-and-excitation networks (SENets) and tri-level attention units (TAUs) with the vanilla DeepLabv3+ architecture, where the TAUs are used to bridge the semantic feature gap among encoders output and the SENets used to put more weight on relevant features. The proposed DeepTriNet finds which features are the more relevant and more generalized way by its self-supervision rather we annotate them. The study showed that the proposed DeepTriNet performs better than many conventional techniques with an accuracy of 98% and 77%, IoU 80% and 58%, precision 88% and 68%, and recall of 79% and 55% on the 4-class Land-Cover.ai dataset and the 15-class GID-2 dataset respectively. The proposed method will greatly contribute to natural resource management and change detection in rural and urban regions through efficient and semantic satellite image segmentation
Learning with Noisy Labels for Human Fall Events Classification: Joint Cooperative Training with Trinity Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

With the increasing ageing population, fall events classification has drawn much research attention. In the development of deep learning, the quality of data labels is crucial. Most of the datasets are labelled automatically or semi-automatically, and the samples may be mislabeled, which constrains the performance of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Recent research on noisy label learning confirms that neural networks first focus on the clean and simple instances and then follow the noisy and hard instances in the training stage. To address the learning with noisy label problem and protect the human subjects' privacy, we propose a simple but effective approach named Joint Cooperative training with Trinity Networks (JoCoT). To mitigate the privacy issue, human skeleton data are used. The robustness and performance of the noisy label learning framework is improved by using the two teacher modules and one student module in the proposed JoCoT. To mitigate the incorrect selections, the predictions from the teacher modules are applied with the consensus-based method to guide the student module training. The performance evaluation on the widely used UP-Fall dataset and comparison with the state-of-the-art, confirms the effectiveness of the proposed JoCoT in high noise rates. Precisely, JoCoT outperforms the state-of-the-art by 5.17% and 3.35% with the averaged pairflip and symmetric noises, respectively.
Genetic Algorithm-Based Dynamic Backdoor Attack on Federated Learning-Based Network Traffic Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Federated learning enables multiple clients to collaboratively contribute to the learning of a global model orchestrated by a central server. This learning scheme promotes clients' data privacy and requires reduced communication overheads. In an application like network traffic classification, this helps hide the network vulnerabilities and weakness points. However, federated learning is susceptible to backdoor attacks, in which adversaries inject manipulated model updates into the global model. These updates inject a salient functionality in the global model that can be launched with specific input patterns. Nonetheless, the vulnerability of network traffic classification models based on federated learning to these attacks remains unexplored. In this paper, we propose GABAttack, a novel genetic algorithm-based backdoor attack against federated learning for network traffic classification. GABAttack utilizes a genetic algorithm to optimize the values and locations of backdoor trigger patterns, ensuring a better fit with the input and the model. This input-tailored dynamic attack is promising for improved attack evasiveness while being effective. Extensive experiments conducted over real-world network datasets validate the success of the proposed GABAttack in various situations while maintaining almost invisible activity. This research serves as an alarming call for network security experts and practitioners to develop robust defense measures against such attacks.
TDPP: Two-Dimensional Permutation-Based Protection of Memristive Deep Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

The execution of deep neural network (DNN) algorithms suffers from significant bottlenecks due to the separation of the processing and memory units in traditional computer systems. Emerging memristive computing systems introduce an in situ approach that overcomes this bottleneck. The non-volatility of memristive devices, however, may expose the DNN weights stored in memristive crossbars to potential theft attacks. Therefore, this paper proposes a two-dimensional permutation-based protection (TDPP) method that thwarts such attacks. We first introduce the underlying concept that motivates the TDPP method: permuting both the rows and columns of the DNN weight matrices. This contrasts with previous methods, which focused solely on permuting a single dimension of the weight matrices, either the rows or columns. While it's possible for an adversary to access the matrix values, the original arrangement of rows and columns in the matrices remains concealed. As a result, the extracted DNN model from the accessed matrix values would fail to operate correctly. We consider two different memristive computing systems (designed for layer-by-layer and layer-parallel processing, respectively) and demonstrate the design of the TDPP method that could be embedded into the two systems. Finally, we present a security analysis. Our experiments demonstrate that TDPP can achieve comparable effectiveness to prior approaches, with a high level of security when appropriately parameterized. In addition, TDPP is more scalable than previous methods and results in reduced area and power overheads. The area and power are reduced by, respectively, 1218$\times$ and 2815$\times$ for the layer-by-layer system and by 178$\times$ and 203$\times$ for the layer-parallel system compared to prior works.
Answer Candidate Type Selection: Text-to-Text Language Model for Closed Book Question Answering Meets Knowledge Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Pre-trained Text-to-Text Language Models (LMs), such as T5 or BART yield promising results in the Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) task. However, the capacity of the models is limited and the quality decreases for questions with less popular entities. In this paper, we present a novel approach which works on top of the pre-trained Text-to-Text QA system to address this issue. Our simple yet effective method performs filtering and re-ranking of generated candidates based on their types derived from Wikidata "instance_of" property.
NEWTON: Are Large Language Models Capable of Physical Reasoning?
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Large Language Models (LLMs), through their contextualized representations, have been empirically proven to encapsulate syntactic, semantic, word sense, and common-sense knowledge. However, there has been limited exploration of their physical reasoning abilities, specifically concerning the crucial attributes for comprehending everyday objects. To address this gap, we introduce NEWTON, a repository and benchmark for evaluating the physics reasoning skills of LLMs. Further, to enable domain-specific adaptation of this benchmark, we present a pipeline to enable researchers to generate a variant of this benchmark that has been customized to the objects and attributes relevant for their application. The NEWTON repository comprises a collection of 2800 object-attribute pairs, providing the foundation for generating infinite-scale assessment templates. The NEWTON benchmark consists of 160K QA questions, curated using the NEWTON repository to investigate the physical reasoning capabilities of several mainstream language models across foundational, explicit, and implicit reasoning tasks. Through extensive empirical analysis, our results highlight the capabilities of LLMs for physical reasoning. We find that LLMs like GPT-4 demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities in scenario-based tasks but exhibit less consistency in object-attribute reasoning compared to humans (50% vs. 84%). Furthermore, the NEWTON platform demonstrates its potential for evaluating and enhancing language models, paving the way for their integration into physically grounded settings, such as robotic manipulation. Project site: https://newtonreasoning.github.io
A predict-and-optimize approach to profit-driven churn prevention
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper, we introduce a novel predict-and-optimize method for profit-driven churn prevention. We frame the task of targeting customers for a retention campaign as a regret minimization problem. The main objective is to leverage individual customer lifetime values (CLVs) to ensure that only the most valuable customers are targeted. In contrast, many profit-driven strategies focus on churn probabilities while considering average CLVs. This often results in significant information loss due to data aggregation. Our proposed model aligns with the guidelines of Predict-and-Optimize (PnO) frameworks and can be efficiently solved using stochastic gradient descent methods. Results from 12 churn prediction datasets underscore the effectiveness of our approach, which achieves the best average performance compared to other well-established strategies in terms of average profit.
GraphCloak: Safeguarding Task-specific Knowledge within Graph-structured Data from Unauthorized Exploitation
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

As Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) become increasingly prevalent in a variety of fields, from social network analysis to protein-protein interaction studies, growing concerns have emerged regarding the unauthorized utilization of personal data. Recent studies have shown that imperceptible poisoning attacks are an effective method of protecting image data from such misuse. However, the efficacy of this approach in the graph domain remains unexplored. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces GraphCloak to safeguard against the unauthorized usage of graph data. Compared with prior work, GraphCloak offers unique significant innovations: (1) graph-oriented, the perturbations are applied to both topological structures and descriptive features of the graph; (2) effective and stealthy, our cloaking method can bypass various inspections while causing a significant performance drop in GNNs trained on the cloaked graphs; and (3) stable across settings, our methods consistently perform effectively under a range of practical settings with limited knowledge. To address the intractable bi-level optimization problem, we propose two error-minimizing-based poisoning methods that target perturbations on the structural and feature space, along with a subgraph injection poisoning method. Our comprehensive evaluation of these methods underscores their effectiveness, stealthiness, and stability. We also delve into potential countermeasures and provide analytical justification for their effectiveness, paving the way for intriguing future research.
Spectrum Sharing Towards Delay Deterministic Wireless Network: Delay Performance Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.PF 2023
Year: 2023

To accommodate Machine-type Communication (MTC) service, the wireless network needs to support low-delay and low-jitter data transmission, realizing delay deterministic wireless network. This paper analyzes the delay and jitter of the wireless network with and without spectrum sharing. When sharing the spectrum of the licensed network, the spectrum band of wireless network can be expanded, such that the delay and jitter of data transmission are reduced. The challenge of this research is to model the relation between the delay/jitter and the parameters such as node distribution, transmit power, and bandwidth, etc. To this end, this paper applies stochastic geometry and queueing theory to analyze the outage probability of the licensed network and the delay performance of the wireless network with and without spectrum sharing. By establishing the M/G/1 queueing model for the queueing of the Base Station (BS) in the wireless network, the downlink delay and jitter are derived. Monte Carlo simulation results show that the spectrum sharing reduces the delay and jitter without causing serious interference to the licensed network, which can lay a foundation for the application of spectrum sharing in delay deterministic wireless network supporting MTC service.
CrashTranslator: Automatically Reproducing Mobile Application Crashes Directly from Stack Trace
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Crash reports are vital for software maintenance since they allow the developers to be informed of the problems encountered in the mobile application. Before fixing, developers need to reproduce the crash, which is an extremely time-consuming and tedious task. Existing studies conducted the automatic crash reproduction with the natural language described reproducing steps. Yet we find a non-neglectable portion of crash reports only contain the stack trace when the crash occurs. Such stack-trace-only crashes merely reveal the last GUI page when the crash occurs, and lack step-by-step guidance. Developers tend to spend more effort in understanding the problem and reproducing the crash, and existing techniques cannot work on this, thus calling for a greater need for automatic support. This paper proposes an approach named CrashTranslator to automatically reproduce mobile application crashes directly from the stack trace. It accomplishes this by leveraging a pre-trained Large Language Model to predict the exploration steps for triggering the crash, and designing a reinforcement learning based technique to mitigate the inaccurate prediction and guide the search holistically. We evaluate CrashTranslator on 75 crash reports involving 58 popular Android apps, and it successfully reproduces 61.3% of the crashes, outperforming the state-of-the-art baselines by 109% to 206%. Besides, the average reproducing time is 68.7 seconds, outperforming the baselines by 302% to 1611%. We also evaluate the usefulness of CrashTranslator with promising results.
Time and Frequency Offset Estimation and Intercarrier Interference Cancellation for AFDM Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

Affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) is an emerging multicarrier waveform that offers a potential solution for achieving reliable communications over time-varying channels. This paper proposes two maximum-likelihood (ML) estimators of symbol time offset and carrier frequency offset for AFDM systems. One is called joint ML estimator, which evaluates the arrival time and carrier frequency offset by comparing the correlations of samples. Moreover, we propose the other so-called stepwise ML estimator to reduce the complexity. Both proposed estimators exploit the redundant information contained within the chirp-periodic prefix inherent in AFDM symbols, thus dispensing with any additional pilots. To further mitigate the intercarrier interference resulting from the residual frequency offset, we design a mirror-mapping-based scheme for AFDM systems. Numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed time and carrier frequency offset estimation criteria and the mirror-mapping-based modulation for AFDM systems.
rpcPRF: Generalizable MPI Neural Radiance Field for Satellite Camera
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Novel view synthesis of satellite images holds a wide range of practical applications. While recent advances in the Neural Radiance Field have predominantly targeted pin-hole cameras, and models for satellite cameras often demand sufficient input views. This paper presents rpcPRF, a Multiplane Images (MPI) based Planar neural Radiance Field for Rational Polynomial Camera (RPC). Unlike coordinate-based neural radiance fields in need of sufficient views of one scene, our model is applicable to single or few inputs and performs well on images from unseen scenes. To enable generalization across scenes, we propose to use reprojection supervision to induce the predicted MPI to learn the correct geometry between the 3D coordinates and the images. Moreover, we remove the stringent requirement of dense depth supervision from deep multiview-stereo-based methods by introducing rendering techniques of radiance fields. rpcPRF combines the superiority of implicit representations and the advantages of the RPC model, to capture the continuous altitude space while learning the 3D structure. Given an RGB image and its corresponding RPC, the end-to-end model learns to synthesize the novel view with a new RPC and reconstruct the altitude of the scene. When multiple views are provided as inputs, rpcPRF exerts extra supervision provided by the extra views. On the TLC dataset from ZY-3, and the SatMVS3D dataset with urban scenes from WV-3, rpcPRF outperforms state-of-the-art nerf-based methods by a significant margin in terms of image fidelity, reconstruction accuracy, and efficiency, for both single-view and multiview task.
Multi-task Explainable Skin Lesion Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Skin cancer is one of the deadliest diseases and has a high mortality rate if left untreated. The diagnosis generally starts with visual screening and is followed by a biopsy or histopathological examination. Early detection can aid in lowering mortality rates. Visual screening can be limited by the experience of the doctor. Due to the long tail distribution of dermatological datasets and significant intra-variability between classes, automatic classification utilizing computer-aided methods becomes challenging. In this work, we propose a multitask few-shot-based approach for skin lesions that generalizes well with few labelled data to address the small sample space challenge. The proposed approach comprises a fusion of a segmentation network that acts as an attention module and classification network. The output of the segmentation network helps to focus on the most discriminatory features while making a decision by the classification network. To further enhance the classification performance, we have combined segmentation and classification loss in a weighted manner. We have also included the visualization results that explain the decisions made by the algorithm. Three dermatological datasets are used to evaluate the proposed method thoroughly. We also conducted cross-database experiments to ensure that the proposed approach is generalizable across similar datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed work.