Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Radio Frequency Fingerprint Collaborative Intelligent Blind Identification for Green Radios

Radio frequency fingerprint identification (RFFI) technology identifies the emitter by extracting one or more unintentional features of the signal from the emitter. To solve the problem that the traditional deep learning network is not highly adaptable for the contour features extracted from the signal, this paper proposes a novel RFFI method based on a deformable convolutional network. This network makes the convolution operation more biased towards the useful information content in the feature map with higher energy, and ignores part of the background noise information. Moreover, a distributed federated learning system is used to solve the problem of insufficient number of local training samples for a multi-party joint training model without exchanging the original data of the samples. The federated learning center receives the network parameters uploaded by all local models for aggregation, and feeds the aggregated parameters back to each local model for a global update. The proposed blind identification method requires less information and no training sequences and pilots. Thus, it achieves energy-efficiency and spectrum-efficiency. Simulation verifies that the proposed method can achieve better recognition performance and is beneficial for green radios.
Open Domain Question Answering with A Unified Knowledge Interface

The retriever-reader framework is popular for open-domain question answering (ODQA) due to its ability to use explicit knowledge.Although prior work has sought to increase the knowledge coverage by incorporating structured knowledge beyond text, accessing heterogeneous knowledge sources through a unified interface remains an open question.While data-to-text generation has the potential to serve as a universal interface for data and text, its feasibility for downstream tasks remains largely unknown.In this work, we bridge this gap and use the data-to-text method as a means for encoding structured knowledge for ODQA.Specifically, we propose a verbalizer-retrieverreader framework for ODQA over data and text where verbalized tables from Wikipedia and graphs from Wikidata are used as augmented knowledge sources.We show that our Unified Data and Text QA, UDT-QA, can effectively benefit from the expanded knowledge index, leading to large gains over textonly baselines.Notably, our approach sets the single-model state-of-the-art on Natural Questions.Furthermore, our analyses indicate that verbalized knowledge is preferred for answer reasoning for both adapted and hot-swap settings.
Summary of DNS Over HTTPS Abuse

The Internet Engineering Task Force adopted the DNS over HTTPS protocol in 2018 to remediate privacy issues regarding the plain text transmission of the DNS protocol. According to our observations and the analysis described in this paper, protecting DNS queries using HTTPS entails security threats. This paper surveys DoH related research works and analyzes malicious and unwanted activities that leverage DNS over HTTPS and can be currently observed in the wild. Additionally, we describe three real-world abuse scenarios observed in the web environment that reveal how service providers intentionally use DNS over HTTPS to violate policies. Last but not least, we identified several research challenges that we consider important for future security research.
Robustness Verification of Swish Neural Networks Embedded in Autonomous Driving Systems

With the applications of deep learning in safety-critical domains such as autonomous driving systems gaining ground, it demands rigorous verification to guarantee the safety and reliability of corresponding systems. As the intelligent component in such systems, neural networks (NNs) must be robust in that their outputs are not affected by minor perturbation to inputs. Many research studies have shown that formal methods are effective ways to the robustness verification of NNs. However, most of the existing approaches are focused on NNs that contain monotonic activation functions, such as ReLU, Tanh, and Sigmoid. In this work, we propose an approach to verify the robustness of NNs with the nonmonotonic activation function called Swish. Such networks have been proved to have a better performance on image classification than other NNs. In our approach, we turn the robustness verification problem into a constraint-solving problem using the linear approximation technique. We first model the affine function of an NN into a linear constraint model. Then, for nonlinear activation functions, we leverage an efficient approximation strategy to linearly approximate them. Finally, we utilize the constraint solver gurobi to solve the model, which reveals that the model satisfies the robustness property. We develop a prototype tool and evaluate it with open-sourced NNs. Experimental results showed the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.
Video Saliency Forecasting Transformer

Video saliency prediction (VSP) aims to imitate eye fixations of humans. However, the potential of this task has not been fully exploited since existing VSP methods only focus on modeling visual saliency of the input previous frames. In this paper, we present the first attempt to extend this task to video saliency forecasting (VSF) by forecasting attention regions of consecutive future frames. To tackle this problem, we propose a video saliency forecasting transformer (VSFT) network built on a new encoder-decoder architecture. Different from existing VSP methods, our VSFT is the first pure-transformer based architecture in the VSP field and is freed from the dependency of the pretrained S3D model. In VSFT, the attention mechanism is exploited to capture spatial-temporal dependencies between the input past frames and the target future frame. We propose cross-attention guidance blocks (CAGB) to aggregate multi-level representation features to provide sufficient guidance for forecasting. We conduct comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, DHF1K and Hollywoods-2. We investigate the saliency forecasting and predicting abilities of existing VSP methods by modifying the supervision signals. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance on both VSF and VSP tasks.
Subversion-Resistant and Consistent Attribute-Based Keyword Search for Secure Cloud Storage

Secure cloud search service allows resource-constrained clients to effectively search over encrypted cloud storage. Towards enabling owner-enforced search authorization, the notion of attribute-based keyword search (ABKS) has been introduced and widely deployed in practice. To enhance traditional security of ABKS, two state-of-the-art solutions are presented to address keyword guessing attacks or setup inconsistency for secret key. Nevertheless, they have not simultaneously considered the following threats to a data user: (i) inconsistent secret key/cipher-index caused by outside dishonest authority and/or data owner; (ii) algorithm substitution attacks (ASA) launched by inside adversarial eavesdropping. These attacks may unfortunately lead to cloud data breach and user information exposure. To tackle such outside and inside threats, we introduce subversion-resistance and consistency for secure and fine-grained cloud document search services. In particular, we propose a consistent ABKS system with cryptographic reverse firewalls (CRF). Technically, we refer to verifiable functional encryption and employ non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs of discrete logarithm equality to ensure strong input consistency for ABKS. In addition, we build a trusted CRF zone for sanitizing algorithm outputs against ASA attacks. Moreover, we formalize the security model and formally prove security of our system. To clarify practical performance, we implement state-of-the-art solutions and our system in real cloud environment based on Enron dataset. The results show that our system achieves more enhanced security properties without obviously sacrificing performance. In particular, our system achieves comparable time and storage cost for document-index encryption and document search, as compared to state-of-the-art solutions.
Surrogate Sample-Assisted Particle Swarm Optimization for Feature Selection on High-Dimensional Data

With the increase of the number of features and the sample size, existing feature selection (FS) methods based on evolutionary optimization still face challenges such as the “curse of dimensionality” and the high computational cost. In view of this, dividing or clustering the sample and feature spaces at the same time, this article proposes a hybrid FS algorithm using surrogate sample-assisted particle swarm optimization (SS-PSO). First, a nonrepetitive uniform sampling strategy is employed to divide the whole sample set into several small-size sample subsets. Regarding each sample subset as a surrogate unit, next, a collaborative feature clustering mechanism is proposed to divide the feature space, with the purpose of reducing both the computational cost of clustering feature and the search space of PSO. Following that, an ensemble surrogate-assisted integer PSO is proposed. To ensure the prediction accuracy of ensemble surrogate when evaluating particles, an ensemble surrogate construction and management strategy is designed. Since the whole sample set is replaced by a small number of surrogate units, SS-PSO significantly reduces the cost of evaluating particles in PSO. Finally, the proposed algorithm is applied to some typical datasets, and compared with six typical evolutionary FS algorithms, as well as its several variant algorithms. The experimental results show that SS-PSO can obtain good feature subsets at the smallest computational cost on most of datasets. All verify that SS-PSO is a highly competitive method for high-dimensional FS.
A Systematic Literature Review Toward a Blockchain Benchmarking Framework

Blockchain is a disruptive technology that focuses on the safe exchange of data between several distributed applications. Despite its widespread adoption, there are areas that require further research towards the understanding of their performance characteristics. In addition, consensus algorithms, a vital part of blockchain, require a more comprehensive understanding of their technical principles and characteristics. Along with the design of different types of consensus algorithms, several challenges, such as system scalability and power consumption, have been raised. Therefore, more comprehensive research is needed to investigate the degree to which consensus algorithms are built and how they perform. To this end, this study extends the body of knowledge and contributes towards the assessment of blockchain protocol performance. We present a comprehensive taxonomy of selected studies on blockchain performance, identifying similarities and differences while attempting to identify existing work on simulators and benchmarking frameworks that aim to explore the performance of blockchain-enabled consensus algorithms.
CALVIN: A Benchmark for Language-Conditioned Policy Learning for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation Tasks

General-purpose robots coexisting with humans in their environment must learn to relate human language to their perceptions and actions to be useful in a range of daily tasks. Moreover, they need to acquire a diverse repertoire of general-purpose skills that allow composing long-horizon tasks by following unconstrained language instructions. In this letter, we present Composing Actions from Language and Vision (CALVIN) ( <underline xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">C</u> omposing <underline xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">A</u> ctions from <underline xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">L</u> anguage and <underline xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Vi</u> sio <underline xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">n</u> ), an open-source simulated benchmark to learn long-horizon language-conditioned tasks. Our aim is to make it possible to develop agents that can solve many robotic manipulation tasks over a long horizon, from onboard sensors, and specified only via human language. CALVIN tasks are more complex in terms of sequence length, action space, and language than existing vision-and-language task datasets and supports flexible specification of sensor suites. We evaluate the agents in zero-shot to novel language instructions and to novel environments. We show that a baseline model based on multi-context imitation learning performs poorly on CALVIN, suggesting that there is significant room for developing innovative agents that learn to relate human language to their world models with this benchmark.
Anonymous and Efficient Authentication Scheme for Privacy-Preserving Distributed Learning

Distributed learning is proposed as a promising technique to reduce heavy data transmissions in centralized machine learning. By allowing the participants training the model locally, raw data is unnecessarily uploaded to the centralized cloud server, reducing the risks of privacy leakage as well. However, the existing studies have shown that an adversary is able to derive the raw data by analyzing the obtained machine learning models. To tackle this challenge, the state-of-the-art solutions mainly depend on differential privacy and encryption techniques (e.g., homomorphic encryption). Whereas, differential privacy degrades data utility and leads to inaccurate learning, while encryption based approaches are not effective to all machine learning algorithms due to the limited operations and excessive computation cost. In this work, we propose a novel scheme to resolve the privacy issues from the anonymous authentication approach. Different from the two types of existing solutions, this approach is generalized to all machine learning algorithms without reducing data utility, while guaranteeing privacy preservation. In addition, it can be integrated with detection schemes against data poisoning attacks and free-rider attacks, being more practical for distributed learning. To this end, we first design a pairing-based certificateless signature scheme. Based on the signature scheme, we further propose an anonymous and efficient authentication protocol which supports dynamic batch verification. The proposed protocol guarantees the desired security properties while being computationally efficient. Formal security proof and analysis have been provided to demonstrate the achieved security properties, including confidentiality, anonymity, mutual authentication, unlinkability, unforgeability, forward security, backward security, and non-repudiation. In addition, the performance analysis reveals that our proposed protocol significantly reduces the time consumption in batch verification, achieving high computational efficiency.
Adversarial Training Lattice LSTM for Named Entity Recognition of Rail Fault Texts

Learning and identifying key concepts from past fault records are essential for us to understand the causes of these faults, which lay the foundation for the fault diagnosis and prognosis. At present, faults in many fields (e.g., rail, automobile, and smart grid) are recorded in textual form. Due to the lack of effective mining and analysis tools, latent information in the massive textual data (text records) has not been fully unearthed. In this paper, a novel Adversarial Training-based Lattice LSTM model called AT-Lattice is proposed to address this problem. In this model, the Named Entity Recognition (NER) is achieved by Lattice LSTM and Conditional Random Field (CRF), where the Lattice LSTM is used to provide sequence information between words, and the CRF is used to get the final entity prediction result. In addition, the Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) task is introduced to conduct the adversarial training with the NER task. The framework of the adversarial training is able to make full use of the boundary information and filter out the noise caused by the introduced CWS task. More importantly, extensive experiments are conducted on five different train fault datasets collected by a rail transit company. The results demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.
μDFL: A Secure Microchained Decentralized Federated Learning Fabric Atop IoT Networks

Federated Learning (FL) has been recognized as a privacy-preserving machine learning (ML) technology that enables collaborative training and learning of a global ML model based on the aggregation of distributed local model updates. However, security and privacy guarantees could be compromised due to malicious participants and the centralized aggregation manner. Possessing attractive features like decentralization, immutability and auditability, Blockchain is promising to enable a tamper-proof and trust-free framework to enhance performance and security in IoT based FL systems. However, directly integrating blockchains into the large scale IoT-based FL scenarios still faces many limitations, such as high computation and storage demands, low transactions throughput, poor scalability and challenges in privacy preservation. This paper proposes <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu $ </tex-math></inline-formula> DFL, a novel hierarchical IoT network fabric for decentralized federated learning (DFL) atop of a lightweight blockchain called microchain. Following the hierarchical infrastructure of FL, participants in <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu $ </tex-math></inline-formula> DFL are fragmented into multiple small scale microchains. Each microchain network relies on a hybrid Proof of Credit (PoC) block generation and Voting-based Chain Finality (VCF) consensus protocol to ensure efficiency and privacy-preservation at the network of edge. Meanwhile, microchains are federated vie a high-level inter-chain network, which adopts an efficient Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocol to achieve scalability and security. A proof-of-concept prototype is implemented, and the experimental results verify the feasibility of the proposed <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu $ </tex-math></inline-formula> DFL solution in cross-devices FL settings with efficiency, security and privacy guarantees.
Hierarchical Feature Selection Based on Label Distribution Learning

Hierarchical classification learning, which organizes data categories into a hierarchical structure, is an effective approach for large-scale classification tasks. The high dimensionality of data feature space, represented in hierarchical class structures, is one of the main research challenges. In addition, the class hierarchy often introduces imbalanced class distributions and causes overfitting. In this paper, we propose a feature selection method based on label distribution learning to address the above challenges. The crux is to alleviate the class imbalance problem and learn a discriminative feature subset for hierarchical classification process. Due to correlation between different class categories in the hierarchical tree structure, sibling categories can provide additional supervisory information for each learning sub tasks, which, in turn, alleviates the problem of under-sampling of minority categories. Therefore, we transform hierarchical labels to a hierarchical label distribution to represent this correlation. After that, a discriminative feature subset is selected recursively, by the common features and label-specific feature constraints, to ensure that downstream classification tasks can achieve the best performance. Experiments and comparisons, using seven well-established feature selection algorithms on six real data sets with different degrees of imbalance, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.
Privacy-Preserving Deep Learning With Learnable Image Encryption on Medical Images

The need for cloud servers for training deep neural network (DNN) models is increasing as more complex architecture designs of DNN models are developed.Nevertheless, cloud servers are considered semi-honest.With great attention to the privacy issues of medical diagnoses using a DNN, previous studies have proposed the idea of learnable image encryption.Though some methods have been presented to partially attack previous encryption schemes, there is still some space for improvement.We proposed a learnable image encryption scheme that is an enhanced version of previous methods and can be used to train a great DNN model and simultaneously keep the privacy of training images.We conducted an experiment on medical datasets from open sources and the result demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method in performance and privacy-preserving.
Ship Detection in High-Resolution Optical Remote Sensing Images Aided by Saliency Information

Ship detection is a crucial but challenging task in optical remote sensing images. Recently, thanks to the emergence of deep neural networks, significant progress has been made in ship detection. However, there are still two significant issues that must be addressed: 1) The high-resolution optical images may confuse the background with the ship, leading to more false alarms during detection; 2) The detector receives fewer positive samples due to the sparse and uneven distribution of ships in the optical remote sensing images. In this paper, we innovatively propose employing the saliency information to aid the ship detection task to tackle these two issues. To achieve this goal, we devise two novel modules, Feature-Enhanced Structure (FES) and Saliency Prediction Branch (SPB), to boost the capacity of ship detection in complex environments, and propose a new sampling strategy named Salient Screening Mechanism (SSM) to increase the number of positive samples. More specifically, SSM is adopted during the training phase to mine more positive samples from the ignored set. Then, in an end-to-end learning fashion, a neural network that incorporates our carefully designed FES and SPB is trained to gain more discriminative information for distinguishing the foreground and the background. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposal, two new datasets HRSC-SO and DOTA-isaid-ship are constructed, which possesses the annotation information for both object detection and saliency detection. We conduct extensive experiments on the constructed dataset, and the results demonstrate that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art approaches.
A parameter-changing zeroing neural network for solving linear equations with superior fixed-time convergence

Linear equations (LEs) play an essential role in mathematics. Nevertheless, the vast majority of fixed-parameter zeroing neural network (ZNN) models are not fast enough to solve LEs. So, a novel parameter-changing ZNN (PCZNN) is proposed and studied in the quest for resolving LEs more efficiently. In contrast to the conventional ZNN and finite-time ZNN (FTZNN), the tuning parameter of the presented PCZNN is time-varying, resulting in three advantages of the PCZNN model: (1) less time for parameter adjustment, (2) faster convergence rate, and (3) less conservative upper bound on the convergence time. Furthermore, the upper bound of convergence time is derived through analysis, which is independent of its initial value. Simulation comparisons conclude that the PCZNN model is more efficient than the ZNN and FTZNN models in solving LEs. Finally, the synchronization control experiments of chaotic systems by two ZNN models with time-varying parameters are offered to verify the superiority of the PCZNN model.