Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
An Intrinsic Approach to Scalar-Curvature Estimation for Point Clouds

We introduce an intrinsic estimator for the scalar curvature of a data set presented as a finite metric space. Our estimator depends only on the metric structure of the data and not on an embedding in $\mathbb{R}^n$. We show that the estimator is consistent in the sense that for points sampled from a probability measure on a compact Riemannian manifold, the estimator converges to the scalar curvature as the number of points increases. To justify its use in applications, we show that the estimator is stable with respect to perturbations of the metric structure, e.g., noise in the sample or error estimating the intrinsic metric. We validate our estimator experimentally on synthetic data that is sampled from manifolds with specified curvature.
Solving Witness-type Triangle Puzzles Faster with an Automatically Learned Human-Explainable Predicate

Automatically solving puzzle instances in the game The Witness can guide players toward solutions and help puzzle designers generate better puzzles. In the latter case such an Artificial Intelligence puzzle solver can inform a human puzzle designer and procedural puzzle generator to produce better instances. The puzzles, however, are combinatorially difficult and search-based solvers can require large amounts of time and memory. We accelerate such search by automatically learning a human-explainable predicate that predicts whether a partial path to a Witness-type puzzle is not completable to a solution path. We prove a key property of the learned predicate which allows us to use it for pruning successor states in search thereby accelerating search by an average of six times while maintaining completeness of the underlying search. Conversely given a fixed search time budget per puzzle our predicate-accelerated search can solve more puzzle instances of larger sizes than the baseline search.
Fluid Viscosity Prediction Leveraging Computer Vision and Robot Interaction

Accurately determining fluid viscosity is crucial for various industrial and scientific applications. Traditional methods of viscosity measurement, though reliable, often require manual intervention and cannot easily adapt to real-time monitoring. With advancements in machine learning and computer vision, this work explores the feasibility of predicting fluid viscosity by analyzing fluid oscillations captured in video data. The pipeline employs a 3D convolutional autoencoder pretrained in a self-supervised manner to extract and learn features from semantic segmentation masks of oscillating fluids. Then, the latent representations of the input data, produced from the pretrained autoencoder, is processed with a distinct inference head to infer either the fluid category (classification) or the fluid viscosity (regression) in a time-resolved manner. When the latent representations generated by the pretrained autoencoder are used for classification, the system achieves a 97.1% accuracy across a total of 4,140 test datapoints. Similarly, for regression tasks, employing an additional fully-connected network as a regression head allows the pipeline to achieve a mean absolute error of 0.258 over 4,416 test datapoints. This study represents an innovative contribution to both fluid characterization and the evolving landscape of Artificial Intelligence, demonstrating the potential of deep learning in achieving near real-time viscosity estimation and addressing practical challenges in fluid dynamics through the analysis of video data capturing oscillating fluid dynamics.
Neural Collapse in the Intermediate Hidden Layers of Classification Neural Networks

Neural Collapse (NC) gives a precise description of the representations of classes in the final hidden layer of classification neural networks. This description provides insights into how these networks learn features and generalize well when trained past zero training error. However, to date, (NC) has only been studied in the final layer of these networks. In the present paper, we provide the first comprehensive empirical analysis of the emergence of (NC) in the intermediate hidden layers of these classifiers. We examine a variety of network architectures, activations, and datasets, and demonstrate that some degree of (NC) emerges in most of the intermediate hidden layers of the network, where the degree of collapse in any given layer is typically positively correlated with the depth of that layer in the neural network. Moreover, we remark that: (1) almost all of the reduction in intra-class variance in the samples occurs in the shallower layers of the networks, (2) the angular separation between class means increases consistently with hidden layer depth, and (3) simple datasets require only the shallower layers of the networks to fully learn them, whereas more difficult ones require the entire network. Ultimately, these results provide granular insights into the structural propagation of features through classification neural networks.
Understanding the RSA algorithm

With the emerging importance of cybersecurity, it will be beneficial for a wide community to understand some of the fundamental security mechanisms. The RSA algorithm is one of the essential algorithms used in public-key cryptosystems. Understanding the RSA algorithm requires knowledge regarding number theory, modular arithmetic, etc., which is often beyond the knowledge pool of many beginners in cybersecurity. In this work, we provide an intuitive and onion-peeling style introduction to the RSA algorithm, in which we assume that readers will only have a basic background in mathematics and cybersecurity. Started from three essential goals of public-key cryptosystems, we explained step-by-step how the RSA algorithm achieved these goals. We also used a toy example to further help readers to understand the algorithm from a practical perspective.
feather -- a Python SDK to share and deploy models

At its core, feather was a tool that allowed model developers to build shareable user interfaces for their models in under 20 lines of code. Using the Python SDK, developers specified visual components that users would interact with. (e.g. a FileUpload component to allow users to upload a file). Our service then provided 1) a URL that allowed others to access and use the model visually via a user interface; 2) an API endpoint to allow programmatic requests to a model. In this paper, we discuss feather's motivations and the value we intended to offer AI researchers and developers. For example, the SDK can support multi-step models and can be extended to run automatic evaluation against held out datasets. We additionally provide comprehensive technical and implementation details. N.B. feather is presently a dormant project. We have open sourced our code for research purposes: https://github.com/feather-ai/
A Symbolic Character-Aware Model for Solving Geometry Problems

AI has made significant progress in solving math problems, but geometry problems remain challenging due to their reliance on both text and diagrams. In the text description, symbolic characters such as "$\triangle$ABC" often serve as a bridge to connect the corresponding diagram. However, by simply tokenizing symbolic characters into individual letters (e.g., 'A', 'B' and 'C'), existing works fail to study them explicitly and thus lose the semantic relationship with the diagram. In this paper, we develop a symbolic character-aware model to fully explore the role of these characters in both text and diagram understanding and optimize the model under a multi-modal reasoning framework. In the text encoder, we propose merging individual symbolic characters to form one semantic unit along with geometric information from the corresponding diagram. For the diagram encoder, we pre-train it under a multi-label classification framework with the symbolic characters as labels. In addition, we enhance the geometry diagram understanding ability via a self-supervised learning method under the masked image modeling auxiliary task. By integrating the proposed model into a general encoder-decoder pipeline for solving geometry problems, we demonstrate its superiority on two benchmark datasets, including GeoQA and Geometry3K, with extensive experiments. Specifically, on GeoQA, the question-solving accuracy is increased from 60.0\% to 64.1\%, achieving a new state-of-the-art accuracy; on Geometry3K, we reduce the question average solving steps from 6.9 down to 6.0 with marginally higher solving accuracy.
Private Federated Learning with Dynamic Power Control via Non-Coherent Over-the-Air Computation

To further preserve model weight privacy and improve model performance in Federated Learning (FL), FL via Over-the-Air Computation (AirComp) scheme based on dynamic power control is proposed. The edge devices (EDs) transmit the signs of local stochastic gradients by activating two adjacent orthogonal frequency division multi-plexing (OFDM) subcarriers, and majority votes (MVs) at the edge server (ES) are obtained by exploiting the energy accumulation on the subcarriers. Then, we propose a dynamic power control algorithm to further offset the biased aggregation of the MV aggregation values. We show that the whole scheme can mitigate the impact of the time synchronization error, channel fading and noise. The theoretical convergence proof of the scheme is re-derived.
Observing ghost entanglement beyond scattering amplitudes in quantum electrodynamics

A fully local quantum account of the interactions experienced between charges requires us to use all the four modes of the electromagnetic vector potential, in the Lorenz gauge. However, it is frequently stated that only the two transverse modes of the vector potential are ``real" in that they contain photons that can actually be detected. The photons present in the other two modes, the scalar and the longitudinal, are considered unobservable, and are referred to as ``virtual particles" or ``ghosts". Here we argue that this view is erroneous and that even these modes can, in fact, be observed. We present an experiment which is designed to measure the entanglement generated between a charge and the scalar modes. This entanglement is a direct function of the number of photons present in the scalar field. Our conclusion therefore is that the scalar quantum variables are as ``real" as the transverse ones, where reality is defined by their ability to affect the charge. A striking consequence of this is that we cannot detect by local means a superposition of a charge bigger than that containing 137 electrons.
Solving a Random Asymmetric TSP Exactly in Quasi-Polynomial Time w.h.p

Let the costs $C(i,j)$ for an instance of the Asymmetric Traveling Salesperson Problem (ATSP) be independent copies of an random variable $C$ that (i) satisfies $\Pr(C\geq x)=1-x+O(x^2)$ as $x\to 0$ and (ii) has an exponential tail. We describe an algorithm that solves ATSP exactly in time $e^{\log^{2+o(1)}n}$, w.h.p.
Multi-Source (Pre-)Training for Cross-Domain Measurement, Unit and Context Extraction

We present a cross-domain approach for automated measurement and context extraction based on pre-trained language models. We construct a multi-source, multi-domain corpus and train an end-to-end extraction pipeline. We then apply multi-source task-adaptive pre-training and fine-tuning to benchmark the cross-domain generalization capability of our model. Further, we conceptualize and apply a task-specific error analysis and derive insights for future work. Our results suggest that multi-source training leads to the best overall results, while single-source training yields the best results for the respective individual domain. While our setup is successful at extracting quantity values and units, more research is needed to improve the extraction of contextual entities. We make the cross-domain corpus used in this work available online.
Blind Motion Deblurring with Pixel-Wise Kernel Estimation via Kernel Prediction Networks

In recent years, the removal of motion blur in photographs has seen impressive progress in the hands of deep learning-based methods, trained to map directly from blurry to sharp images. For this reason, approaches that explicitly use a forward degradation model received significantly less attention. However, a well-defined specification of the blur genesis, as an intermediate step, promotes the generalization and explainability of the method. Towards this goal, we propose a learning-based motion deblurring method based on dense non-uniform motion blur estimation followed by a non-blind deconvolution approach. Specifically, given a blurry image, a first network estimates the dense per-pixel motion blur kernels using a lightweight representation composed of a set of image-adaptive basis motion kernels and the corresponding mixing coefficients. Then, a second network trained jointly with the first one, unrolls a non-blind deconvolution method using the motion kernel field estimated by the first network. The model-driven aspect is further promoted by training the networks on sharp/blurry pairs synthesized according to a convolution-based, non-uniform motion blur degradation model. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation shows that the kernel prediction network produces accurate motion blur estimates, and that the deblurring pipeline leads to restorations of real blurred images that are competitive or superior to those obtained with existing end-to-end deep learning-based methods. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/GuillermoCarbajal/J-MKPD/.
Focus the Discrepancy: Intra- and Inter-Correlation Learning for Image Anomaly Detection

Humans recognize anomalies through two aspects: larger patch-wise representation discrepancies and weaker patch-to-normal-patch correlations. However, the previous AD methods didn't sufficiently combine the two complementary aspects to design AD models. To this end, we find that Transformer can ideally satisfy the two aspects as its great power in the unified modeling of patch-wise representations and patch-to-patch correlations. In this paper, we propose a novel AD framework: FOcus-the-Discrepancy (FOD), which can simultaneously spot the patch-wise, intra- and inter-discrepancies of anomalies. The major characteristic of our method is that we renovate the self-attention maps in transformers to Intra-Inter-Correlation (I2Correlation). The I2Correlation contains a two-branch structure to first explicitly establish intra- and inter-image correlations, and then fuses the features of two-branch to spotlight the abnormal patterns. To learn the intra- and inter-correlations adaptively, we propose the RBF-kernel-based target-correlations as learning targets for self-supervised learning. Besides, we introduce an entropy constraint strategy to solve the mode collapse issue in optimization and further amplify the normal-abnormal distinguishability. Extensive experiments on three unsupervised real-world AD benchmarks show the superior performance of our approach. Code will be available at https://github.com/xcyao00/FOD.
A Security and Usability Analysis of Local Attacks Against FIDO2

The FIDO2 protocol aims to strengthen or replace password authentication using public-key cryptography. FIDO2 has primarily focused on defending against attacks from afar by remote attackers that compromise a password or attempt to phish the user. In this paper, we explore threats from local attacks on FIDO2 that have received less attention -- a browser extension compromise and attackers gaining physical access to an HSK. Our systematic analysis of current implementations of FIDO2 reveals four underlying flaws, and we demonstrate the feasibility of seven attacks that exploit those flaws. The flaws include (1) Lack of confidentiality/integrity of FIDO2 messages accessible to browser extensions, (2) Broken clone detection algorithm, (3) Potential for user misunderstanding from social engineering and notification/error messages, and (4) Cookie life cycle. We build malicious browser extensions and demonstrate the attacks on ten popular web servers that use FIDO2. We also show that many browser extensions have sufficient permissions to conduct the attacks if they were compromised. A static and dynamic analysis of current browser extensions finds no evidence of the attacks in the wild. We conducted two user studies confirming that participants do not detect the attacks with current error messages, email notifications, and UX responses to the attacks. We provide an improved clone detection algorithm and recommendations for relying part
Multipartite Two-partite Quantum Correlation and Its Three Types of Measures

Multipartite quantum correlation (MQC) not only explains many novel microscopic and macroscopic quantum phenomena, but also holds promise for specific quantum technologies with superiorities. MQCs descriptions and measures have been an open topic, due to their rich and complex organization and structure. Here reconsidering MQC descriptions and their practical applications in some quantum technologies, we propose a novel description called multipartite two-partite QC, which provides an intuitive and clear physical picture. Specifically, we present three types of measures: one class based on minimal entropy-like difference of local measurement fore-and-aft multipartite two-partite density matrix such as multipartite two-partite quantum discord (QD), another class based on minimal trace-like geometric distance such as multipartite two-partite Hilbert-Schmidt Distance (HSD), and a third class based on decoherence such as multipartite two-partite Local Measurement-Induced Minimal Decoherence (LMIMD) and Local Eigen-Measurement-Induced Decoherence (LEMID). Their computations required for these measures are relatively easy. All of the advantages make them promising candidates for specific potential applications in various quantum technologies. Finally, we employ these three types of measures to explore the organization and structure of some typical genuine MQCs, and analyze their relative characteristics based on their physical implications and mathematical structures.
Multi-scale Alternated Attention Transformer for Generalized Stereo Matching

Recent stereo matching networks achieves dramatic performance by introducing epipolar line constraint to limit the matching range of dual-view. However, in complicated real-world scenarios, the feature information based on intra-epipolar line alone is too weak to facilitate stereo matching. In this paper, we present a simple but highly effective network called Alternated Attention U-shaped Transformer (AAUformer) to balance the impact of epipolar line in dual and single view respectively for excellent generalization performance. Compared to other models, our model has several main designs: 1) to better liberate the local semantic features of the single-view at pixel level, we introduce window self-attention to break the limits of intra-row self-attention and completely replace the convolutional network for denser features before cross-matching; 2) the multi-scale alternated attention backbone network was designed to extract invariant features in order to achieves the coarse-to-fine matching process for hard-to-discriminate regions. We performed a series of both comparative studies and ablation studies on several mainstream stereo matching datasets. The results demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art on the Scene Flow dataset, and the fine-tuning performance is competitive on the KITTI 2015 dataset. In addition, for cross generalization experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, our model outperforms several state-of-the-art works.
Control-aware echo state networks (Ca-ESN) for the suppression of extreme events

Extreme event are sudden large-amplitude changes in the state or observables of chaotic nonlinear systems, which characterize many scientific phenomena. Because of their violent nature, extreme events typically have adverse consequences, which call for methods to prevent the events from happening. In this work, we introduce the control-aware echo state network (Ca-ESN) to seamlessly combine ESNs and control strategies, such as proportional-integral-derivative and model predictive control, to suppress extreme events. The methodology is showcased on a chaotic-turbulent flow, in which we reduce the occurrence of extreme events with respect to traditional methods by two orders of magnitude. This works opens up new possibilities for the efficient control of nonlinear systems with neural networks.
Learning-Rate-Free Learning: Dissecting D-Adaptation and Probabilistic Line Search

This paper explores two recent methods for learning rate optimisation in stochastic gradient descent: D-Adaptation (arXiv:2301.07733) and probabilistic line search (arXiv:1502.02846). These approaches aim to alleviate the burden of selecting an initial learning rate by incorporating distance metrics and Gaussian process posterior estimates, respectively. In this report, I provide an intuitive overview of both methods, discuss their shared design goals, and devise scope for merging the two algorithms.
LARCH: Large Language Model-based Automatic Readme Creation with Heuristics

Writing a readme is a crucial aspect of software development as it plays a vital role in managing and reusing program code. Though it is a pain point for many developers, automatically creating one remains a challenge even with the recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), because it requires generating an abstract description from thousands of lines of code. In this demo paper, we show that LLMs are capable of generating a coherent and factually correct readmes if we can identify a code fragment that is representative of the repository. Building upon this finding, we developed LARCH (LLM-based Automatic Readme Creation with Heuristics) which leverages representative code identification with heuristics and weak supervision. Through human and automated evaluations, we illustrate that LARCH can generate coherent and factually correct readmes in the majority of cases, outperforming a baseline that does not rely on representative code identification. We have made LARCH open-source and provided a cross-platform Visual Studio Code interface and command-line interface, accessible at https://github.com/hitachi-nlp/larch. A demo video showcasing LARCH's capabilities is available at https://youtu.be/ZUKkh5ED-O4.
Switching Time Optimization for Binary Quantum Optimal Control

Quantum optimal control is a technique for controlling the evolution of a quantum system and has been applied to a wide range of problems in quantum physics. We study a binary quantum control optimization problem, where control decisions are binary-valued and the problem is solved in diverse quantum algorithms. In this paper, we utilize classical optimization and computing techniques to develop an algorithmic framework that sequentially optimizes the number of control switches and the duration of each control interval on a continuous time horizon. Specifically, we first solve the continuous relaxation of the binary control problem based on time discretization and then use a heuristic to obtain a controller sequence with a penalty on the number of switches. Then, we formulate a switching time optimization model and apply sequential least-squares programming with accelerated time-evolution simulation to solve the model. We demonstrate that our computational framework can obtain binary controls with high-quality performance and also reduce computational time via solving a family of quantum control instances in various quantum physics applications.