Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Rethink before Releasing Your Model

Machine learning (ML)-based techniques for electronic design automation (EDA) have boosted the performance of modern integrated circuits (ICs). Such achievement makes ML model to be of importance for the EDA industry. In addition, ML models for EDA are widely considered having high development cost because of the time-consuming and complicated training data generation process. Thus, confidentiality protection for EDA models is a critical issue. However, an adversary could apply model extraction attacks to steal the model in the sense of achieving the comparable performance to the victim's model. As model extraction attacks have posed great threats to other application domains, e.g., computer vision and natural language process, in this paper, we study model extraction attacks for EDA models under two real-world scenarios. It is the first work that (1) introduces model extraction attacks on EDA models and (2) proposes two attack methods against the unlimited and limited query budget scenarios. Our results show that our approach can achieve competitive performance with the well-trained victim model without any performance degradation. Based on the results, we demonstrate that model extraction attacks truly threaten the EDA model privacy and hope to raise concerns about ML security issues in EDA.
Reusing GEMM Hardware for Efficient Execution of Depthwise Separable Convolution on ASIC-Based DNN Accelerators

Deep learning (DL) accelerators are optimized for standard convolution. However, lightweight convolutional neural networks (CNNs) use depthwise convolution (DwC) in key layers, and the structural difference between DwC and standard convolution leads to significant performance bottleneck in executing lightweight CNNs on such platforms. This work reuses the fast general matrix-vector multiplication (GEMM) core of DL accelerators by mapping DwC to channel-wise parallel matrix-vector multiplications. An analytical framework is developed to guide pre-RTL hardware choices, and new hardware modules and software support are developed for end-to-end evaluation of the solution. This GEMM-based DwC execution strategy offers substantial performance gains for lightweight CNNs: 7× speedup and 1.8× lower off-chip communication for MobileNet-v1 over a conventional DL accelerator, and 74× speedup over a CPU, and even 1.4× speedup over a power-hungry GPU.
SHarPen

As modern SoC architectures incorporate many complex/heterogeneous intellectual properties (IPs), the protection of security assets has become imperative, and the number of vulnerabilities revealed is rising due to the increased number of attacks. Over the last few years, penetration testing (PT) has become an increasingly effective means of detecting software (SW) vulnerabilities. As of yet, no such technique has been applied to the detection of hardware vulnerabilities. This paper proposes a PT framework, SHarPen, for detecting hardware vulnerabilities, which facilitates the development of a SoC-level security verification framework. SHarPen proposes a formalism for performing gray-box hardware (HW) penetration testing instead of relying on coverage-based testing and provides an automation for mapping hardware vulnerabilities to logical/mathematical cost functions. SHarPen supports both simulation and FPGA-based prototyping, allowing us to automate security testing at different stages of the design process with high capabilities for identifying vulnerabilities in the targeted SoC.
LSEC: Large-scale spectral ensemble clustering

A fundamental problem in machine learning is ensemble clustering, that is, combining multiple base clusterings to obtain improved clustering result. However, most of the existing methods are unsuitable for large-scale ensemble clustering tasks owing to efficiency bottlenecks. In this paper, we propose a large-scale spectral ensemble clustering (LSEC) method to balance efficiency and effectiveness. In LSEC, a large-scale spectral clustering-based efficient ensemble generation framework is designed to generate various base clusterings with low computational complexity. Thereafter, all the base clusterings are combined using a bipartite graph partition-based consensus function to obtain improved consensus clustering results. The LSEC method achieves a lower computational complexity than most existing ensemble clustering methods. Experiments conducted on ten large-scale datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the LSEC method. The MATLAB code of the proposed method and experimental datasets are available at https://github.com/Li-Hongmin/MyPaperWithCode.
Spatial-temporal trajectory anomaly detection based on an improved spectral clustering algorithm

With the development of wireless communication technology, when users use wireless networks to meet various needs, wireless networks also record a large number of users’ spatial-temporal trajectory data. In order to better pay attention to the healthy development of students and promote the information construction on campus, a spectral clustering algorithm based on the multi-scale threshold and density combined with shared nearest neighbors (MSTDSNN-SC) is proposed. Firstly, it improves the affinity distance function based on the shortest time dis-tance-shortest time distance sub-sequence (STD-STDSS) by adding location popularity and uses this model to construct the initial adjacency matrix. Then it introduces the covariance scale threshold and spatial scale threshold to perform 0–1 processing on the adjacency matrix to obtain more accurate sample similarity. Next, it constructs an eigenvector space by eigenvalue decom-position of the adjacency matrix. Finally, it uses DBSCAN clustering algorithm with shared nearest neighbors to avoid to manually determine the number of clusters. Taking Internet usage data on campus as an example, multiple clustering algorithms are used for anomaly detection and four evaluation metrics are applied to estimate the clustering results. MSTDSNN-SC algorithm reflects better clustering performance. Furthermore, the abnormal trajectories list is verified to be effective and credible.
<i>FairShare</i>: Blockchain Enabled Fair, Accountable and Secure Data Sharing for Industrial IoT

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) opens up a challenging research area towards improving secure data sharing which currently has several limitations. Primarily, the lack of inbuilt guarantees of honest behavior of participating, such as end-users or cloud behaving maliciously may result in disputes. Given such challenges, we propose a fair, accountable, and secure data sharing scheme, $\textit{FairShare}$ for IIoT. In this scheme, data collected from IoT devices are processed and stored in cloud servers with intermediate fog nodes facilitating computation. Authorized clients can access this data against some fee to make strategic decisions for improving the operational services of the IIoT system. By enabling blockchain, $\textit{FairShare}$ prevents fraudulent activities and thereby achieves fairness such that each party gets their rightful outcome in terms of data or penalty/rewards while simultaneously ensuring accountability of the services provided by the parties. Additionally, smart contracts are designed to act as a mediator during any dispute by enforcing payment settlement. Further, security and privacy of data are ensured by suitably applying cryptographic techniques like proxy re-encryption. We prove $\textit{FairShare}$ to be secure as long as at least one of the parties is honest. We validate $\textit{FairShare}$ with a theoretical overhead analysis. We also build a prototype in Ethereum to estimate performance and justify comparable results with a state-of-the-art scheme both via simulation and a realistic testbed setup. We observe an additional communication overhead of 256 bytes and a cost of deployment of 1.01 USD in Ethereum which are constant irrespective of file size.
Coverless image steganography using morphed face recognition based on convolutional neural network

Abstract In recent years, information security has become a prime issue of worldwide concern. To improve the validity and proficiency of the image data hiding approach, a piece of state-of-the-art secret information hiding transmission scheme based on morphed face recognition is proposed. In our proposed data hiding approach, a group of morphed face images is produced from an arranged small-scale face image dataset. Then, a morphed face image which is encoded with a secret message is sent to the receiver. The receiver uses powerful and robust deep learning models to recover the secret message by recognizing the parents of the morphed face images. Furthermore, we design two novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures (e.g. MFR-Net V1 and MFR-Net V2) to perform morphed face recognition and achieved the highest accuracy compared with existing networks. Additionally, the experimental results show that the proposed schema has higher retrieval capacity and accuracy and it provides better robustness.
Optimal training of integer-valued neural networks with mixed integer programming

Recent work has shown potential in using Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) solvers to optimize certain aspects of neural networks (NNs). However the intriguing approach of training NNs with MIP solvers is under-explored. State-of-the-art-methods to train NNs are typically gradient-based and require significant data, computation on GPUs, and extensive hyper-parameter tuning. In contrast, training with MIP solvers does not require GPUs or heavy hyper-parameter tuning, but currently cannot handle anything but small amounts of data. This article builds on recent advances that train binarized NNs using MIP solvers. We go beyond current work by formulating new MIP models which improve training efficiency and which can train the important class of integer-valued neural networks (INNs). We provide two novel methods to further the potential significance of using MIP to train NNs. The first method optimizes the number of neurons in the NN while training. This reduces the need for deciding on network architecture before training. The second method addresses the amount of training data which MIP can feasibly handle: we provide a batch training method that dramatically increases the amount of data that MIP solvers can use to train. We thus provide a promising step towards using much more data than before when training NNs using MIP models. Experimental results on two real-world data-limited datasets demonstrate that our approach strongly outperforms the previous state of the art in training NN with MIP, in terms of accuracy, training time and amount of data. Our methodology is proficient at training NNs when minimal training data is available, and at training with minimal memory requirements-which is potentially valuable for deploying to low-memory devices.
SEMDA: Secure and Efficient Multidimensional Data Aggregation in Smart Grid without a Trusted Third Party

Smart grids are a combination of traditional power system engineering as well as information and communications technology. Smart grid terminals provide convenient services to users by aggregating their data in real time. However, terminals can derive user privacy information from real-time data on smart devices. Therefore, security data aggregation has been widely studied in the field of smart grid. Most existing schemes are one-dimensional data aggregation or rely on a trusted third party. In reality, multidimensional data (such as a user’s electricity consumption or user’s main usage time, etc.) makes sense for terminals to flexibly adjust supply and demand strategies. In this paper, we propose an efficient and secure multidimensional data aggregation scheme that supports batch validation without a trusted third party. Firstly, we apply the Chinese remainder theorem to encode the user’s multidimensional data and realize the independence of each dimension in terminal decryption. Secondly, we adopt a secure key negotiation protocol that does not require a trusted third party. Finally, based on paillier homomorphic encryption and bilinear pairing, we construct an encryption scheme that can reuse the key and blind factor and support batch verification. The analysis results show that our scheme is secure for users’ privacy protection. Experimental results show that, compared with existing 1 dimensional aggregation schemes, our scheme has almost no growth in computational overhead for terminal decryption.
Counterfactual Generation Framework for Few-Shot Learning

Few-shot learning (FSL) that aims to recognize novel classes with few labeled samples is troubled by its data scarcity. Though recent works tackle FSL with data augmentation-based methods, these models fail to maintain the discrimination and diversity of the generated samples due to the distribution shift and intra-class bias caused by the data scarcity, therefore greatly undermining the performance. To this end, we use causal mechanisms, which are constant among independent variables across data distribution, to alleviate such effects. In this sense, we decompose the image information into two independent components: sample-specific and class-agnostic information, and further propose a novel Counterfactual Generation Framework (CGF) to learn the underlying causal mechanisms to synthesize faithful samples for FSL. Specifically, based on the counterfactual inference, we design a class-agnostic feature extractor to capture the sample-specific information, together with a counterfactual generation network to simulate the data generation process from a causal perspective. Moreover, to leverage the power of CGF in counterfactual inference, we further develop a novel classifier that classifies samples based on their distributions of counterfactual generations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CGF on four FSL benchmarks, e.g., 80.12/86.13% accuracy on 5-way 1/5-shot miniImageNet FSL tasks, significantly improving the performance. Our codes and models are available at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://github.com/eric-hang/CGF</uri> .
RL-Based Federated Learning Framework Over Blockchain (RL-FL-BC)

Federated learning (FL) paradigms aim to amalgamate diverse data properties stored locally at each user, while preserving data privacy through sharing users’ learning experiences and iteratively aggregating their local learning models into a global one. However, the majority of FL architectures with centralized cloud do not guarantee the trust in sharing users’ models, and hence, open the door for slowing and/or contaminating the global learning experience. In this paper, we propose a decentralized Blockchain (BC)-based framework and define a comprehensive protocol for exchanging local models, in order to guarantee users’ mutual trust while sharing their local learning experiences. We then propose a technique to optimize the global learning experience using Reinforcement Learning (RL), namely RL-FL-BC, to tackle the trade-off between information age of the learning parameters, data skewness (i.e., non-iid), and BC transaction cost (i.e., Ether price). We implement the proposed framework in a realistic containerized environment to facilitate the comparative study of the RL-FL-BC technique with baselines techniques. Our results show the efficacy of the BC-based protocol to facilitate the exchange of both the models’ and the optimization parameters to guarantee users’ mutual trust, while improving global learning performance compared to baselines techniques.
CenterTube: Tracking Multiple 3D Objects with 4D Tubelets in Dynamic Point Clouds

3D Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) in dynamic point cloud sequences is a fundamental research problem for several downstream tasks such as motion planning and action recognition. Existing methods usually rely on the traditional tracking-by-detection (TBD) paradigm, which performs the tracking based on the results achieved by dedicated detectors. However, this two-stage framework usually cannot sufficiently exploit spatial-temporal information and end-to-end optimization, leading to sub-optimal tracking performance, especially when the object is partially or completely occluded. In this paper, we propose a joint detection and tracking framework named <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CenterTube</i> for dynamic point cloud sequences. The key to our approach is to formulate the problem of multiple object trajectory predictions as 4D tubelet detections. In particular, the proposed CenterTube is composed of three head branches, including a center branch, a regression branch, and a movement branch for the estimation of object center, object size, instance movement, and frame interval, respectively. Additionally, a Tube BEV-IoU (TB-IoU) is also presented to link the generated clip-level tubelets and form the final tracks. Extensive experiments conducted on the KITTI-MOT and nuScenes datasets demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performances even if no ready-made detection results is adopted.
3D Point Cloud Stitching for Object Detection with Wide FoV Using Roadside LiDAR

Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) is widely used in the perception of physical environment to complete object detection and tracking tasks. The current methods and datasets are mainly developed for autonomous vehicles, which could not be directly used for roadside perception. This paper presents a 3D point cloud stitching method for object detection with wide horizontal field of view (FoV) using roadside LiDAR. Firstly, the base detection model is trained by KITTI dataset and has achieved detection accuracy of 88.94. Then, a new detection range of 180° can be inferred to break the limitation of camera’s FoV. Finally, multiple sets of detection results from a single LiDAR are stitched to build a 360° detection range and solve the problem of overlapping objects. The effectiveness of the proposed approach has been evaluated using KITTI dataset and collected point clouds. The experimental results show that the point cloud stitching method offers a cost-effective solution to achieve a larger FoV, and the number of output objects has increased by 77.15% more than the base model, which improves the detection performance of roadside LiDAR.
Exploration of Applying Pose Estimation Techniques in Table Tennis

The newly developed computer vision pose estimation technique in artificial intelligence (AI) is an emerging technology with potential advantages, such as high efficiency and contactless detection, for improving competitive advantage in the sports industry. The related literature is currently lacking an integrated and comprehensive discussion about the applications and limitations of using the pose estimation technique. The purpose of this study was to apply AI pose estimation techniques, and to discuss the concepts, possible applications, and limitations of these techniques in table tennis. This study implemented the OpenPose pose algorithm in a real-world video of a table tennis game. The research results show that the pose estimation algorithm performs well in estimating table tennis players’ poses from the video in a graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated environment. This study proposes an innovative two-stage AI pose estimation method for effectively addressing the current difficulties in applying AI to table tennis players’ pose estimation. Finally, this study provides several recommendations, benefits, and various perspectives (training vs. tactics) of table tennis and pose estimation limitations for the sports industry.
Egyptian Hieroglyphs Segmentation with Convolutional Neural Networks

The objective of this work is to show the application of a Deep Learning algorithm able to operate the segmentation of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs present in an image, with the ambition to be as versatile as possible despite the variability of the image source. The problem is quite complex, the main obstacles being the considerable amount of different classes of existing hieroglyphs, the differences related to the hand of the scribe as well as the great differences among the various supports, such as papyri, stone or wood, where they are written. Furthermore, as in all archaeological finds, damage to the supports are frequent, with the consequence that hieroglyphs can be partially corrupted. In order to face this challenging problem, we leverage on the well-known Detectron2 platform, developed by the Facebook AI Research Group, focusing on the Mask R-CNN architecture to perform segmentation of image instances. Likewise, for several machine learning studies, one of the hardest challenges is the creation of a suitable dataset. In this paper, we will describe a hieroglyph dataset that has been created for the purpose of segmentation, highlighting its pros and cons, and the impact of different hyperparameters on the final results. Tests on the segmentation of images taken from public databases will also be presented and discussed along with the limitations of our study.
An Efficient Quantum Secret Sharing Scheme Based on Restricted Threshold Access Structure

Quantum secret sharing is an important branch of quantum cryptography, and secure multi-party quantum key distribution protocols can be constructed using quantum secret sharing. In this paper, we construct a quantum secret sharing scheme built on a constrained (t, n ) threshold access structure, where n is the number of participants and t is the threshold number of participants and the distributor. Participants from two different sets perform the corresponding phase shift operations on two particles in the GHZ state passed to them, and then t-1 participants with the distributor can recover the key, where the participant recovering the key measures the particles received by himself and finally obtains the key through the collaboration of the distributors. Security analysis shows that this protocol can be resistant to direct measurement attacks, interception retransmission attacks, and entanglement measurement attacks. This protocol is more secure, flexible, and efficient compared with similar existing protocols, which can save more quantum resources.
Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning via Time-Distributed Representation Learning

Temporal knowledge graph (TKG) reasoning has attracted significant attention. Recent approaches for modeling historical information have led to great advances. However, the problems of time variability and unseen entities have become two major obstacles preventing further development. The time variability problem means that different historical timestamps play different roles in the inference process. Furthermore, in the context of time variability, the unseen entity problem means that a query cannot obtain a predicted entity that is unseen in the scale-varying history rather than in a fixed set, thus turning from static to dynamic. In this paper, we propose a novel method named DHU-NET for addressing the time variability challenge and the dynamic unseen entity challenge derived from it. With regard to the former concern, we propose a time-distributed representation learning method based on a graph convolutional network(GCN) and a self-attention mechanism, which learns the distributed representations of facts at different historical timestamps and comprehensively pays different levels of attention to the different timestamps. With regard to the latter issue, we extract the unseen entities from a global static KG based on a copy mechanism and bring them into consideration during the final prediction step. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate the substantial improvements achieved by DHUNET in terms of multiple evaluation metrics. Our released codes are available at https://github.com/CGCL-codes/DHUNET.