Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Over-parameterized Adversarial Training: An Analysis Overcoming the Curse of Dimensionality

Adversarial training is a popular method to give neural nets robustness against adversarial perturbations. In practice adversarial training leads to low robust training loss. However, a rigorous explanation for why this happens under natural conditions is still missing. Recently a convergence theory for standard (non-adversarial) supervised training was developed by various groups for {\em very overparametrized} nets. It is unclear how to extend these results to adversarial training because of the min-max objective. Recently, a first step towards this direction was made by Gao et al. using tools from online learning, but they require the width of the net to be \emph{exponential} in input dimension $d$, and with an unnatural activation function. Our work proves convergence to low robust training loss for \emph{polynomial} width instead of exponential, under natural assumptions and with the ReLU activation. Key element of our proof is showing that ReLU networks near initialization can approximate the step function, which may be of independent interest.
Towards Maximizing the Representation Gap between In-Domain & Out-of-Distribution Examples

Among existing uncertainty estimation approaches, Dirichlet Prior Network (DPN) distinctly models different predictive uncertainty types. However, for in-domain examples with high data uncertainties among multiple classes, even a DPN model often produces indistinguishable representations from the out-of-distribution (OOD) examples, compromising their OOD detection performance. We address this shortcoming by proposing a novel loss function for DPN to maximize the \textit{representation gap} between in-domain and OOD examples. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach consistently improves OOD detection performance.
ICT solutions to support local food supply chains during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted food supply chains operations across the globe. Due to health safety practices like social distancing, local food supply chains such as farmers markets and food hubs are unable to conduct normal operations. This paper describes two low-cost information and communica¬tion technology (ICT) solutions developed for a farmers market and a food hub in Iowa to enable them to continue their operations during the pandemic while ensuring the safety of vulnerable consumers and essential workers. Other benefits of ICT for the long-term sustainability of local food systems are also discussed.
An Improved Robust Watermarking Scheme using Flexible Scaling Factor

Digital watermarking is needed to avoid piracy, forgery and illegal distribution from unauthorized people. The watermarking scheme is used to protect the ownership and copyright information in the multimedia data. A scaling factor plays an important role for balancing between invisibility and robustness for embedding watermark. However, the usage of a scaling factor may not be suitable for different selected blocks and image inputs. Flexible scaling factor is an alternative solution to obtain high robustness and invisibility in image watermarking. This research proposed a flexible scaling factor for DCT coefficients based on the image content itself. This research analyses the selected DCT coefficients against average coefficients on its block to obtain flexible scaling factor. The proposed scheme produced high invisibility with SSIM and PSNR values of 0.991 and 45dB, respectively. The proposed watermarking scheme also achieved strong resistant against noised image, filtered image and compressed image.
Best Practices for Crowd-based Evaluation of German Summarization: Comparing Crowd, Expert and Automatic Evaluation

One of the main challenges in the development of summarization tools is summarization quality evaluation.On the one hand, the human assessment of summarization quality conducted by linguistic experts is slow, expensive, and still not a standardized procedure.On the other hand, the automatic assessment metrics are reported not to correlate high enough with human quality ratings.As a solution, we propose crowdsourcing as a fast, scalable, and costeffective alternative to expert evaluations to assess the intrinsic and extrinsic quality of summarization by comparing crowd ratings with expert ratings and automatic metrics such as ROUGE, BLEU, or BertScore on a German summarization data set.Our results provide a basis for best practices for crowd-based summarization evaluation regarding major influential factors such as the best annotation aggregation method, the influence of readability and reading effort on summarization evaluation, and the optimal number of crowd workers to achieve comparable results to experts, especially when determining factors such as overall quality, grammaticality, referential clarity, focus, structure & coherence, summary usefulness, and summary informativeness.
SOM-based aggregation for graph convolutional neural networks

Abstract Graph property prediction is becoming more and more popular due to the increasing availability of scientific and social data naturally represented in a graph form. Because of that, many researchers are focusing on the development of improved graph neural network models. One of the main components of a graph neural network is the aggregation operator, needed to generate a graph-level representation from a set of node-level embeddings. The aggregation operator is critical since it should, in principle, provide a representation of the graph that is isomorphism invariant, i.e. the graph representation should be a function of graph nodes treated as a set. DeepSets (in: Advances in neural information processing systems, pp 3391–3401, 2017) provides a framework to construct a set-aggregation operator with universal approximation properties. In this paper, we propose a DeepSets aggregation operator, based on Self-Organizing Maps (SOM), to transform a set of node-level representations into a single graph-level one. The adoption of SOMs allows to compute node representations that embed the information about their mutual similarity. Experimental results on several real-world datasets show that our proposed approach achieves improved predictive performance compared to the commonly adopted sum aggregation and many state-of-the-art graph neural network architectures in the literature.
Fabric-Chain &amp; Chain: A Blockchain-Based Electronic Document System for Supply Chain Finance

During the development of supply chain finance, the imperfection of credit system and financial service platform has been a major problem, which needs to be improved and improved through new technical means. The existing supply chain financial platform can not manage and store the financing information data with high credibility and reliability, and it is difficult to share data efficiently among multiple asset ends and fund parties, and also can not carry out automatic trial calculation and settlement of funds. This paper proposes a storage method based on blockchain and bloom filter, which is used as the storage model of electronic document data in the process of supply chain finance business. The simulation experiments show that the model proposed in this paper has greater improvement in both access efficiency and retrieval efficiency than the existing model.
The Convex Relaxation Barrier, Revisited: Tightened Single-Neuron Relaxations for Neural Network Verification

We improve the effectiveness of propagation- and linear-optimization-based neural network verification algorithms with a new tightened convex relaxation for ReLU neurons. Unlike previous single-neuron relaxations which focus only on the univariate input space of the ReLU, our method considers the multivariate input space of the affine pre-activation function preceding the ReLU. Using results from submodularity and convex geometry, we derive an explicit description of the tightest possible convex relaxation when this multivariate input is over a box domain. We show that our convex relaxation is significantly stronger than the commonly used univariate-input relaxation which has been proposed as a natural convex relaxation barrier for verification. While our description of the relaxation may require an exponential number of inequalities, we show that they can be separated in linear time and hence can be efficiently incorporated into optimization algorithms on an as-needed basis. Based on this novel relaxation, we design two polynomial-time algorithms for neural network verification: a linear-programming-based algorithm that leverages the full power of our relaxation, and a fast propagation algorithm that generalizes existing approaches. In both cases, we show that for a modest increase in computational effort, our strengthened relaxation enables us to verify a significantly larger number of instances compared to similar algorithms.
Pointer Graph Networks

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are typically applied to static graphs that are assumed to be known upfront. This static input structure is often informed purely by insight of the machine learning practitioner, and might not be optimal for the actual task the GNN is solving. In absence of reliable domain expertise, one might resort to inferring the latent graph structure, which is often difficult due to the vast search space of possible graphs. Here we introduce Pointer Graph Networks (PGNs) which augment sets or graphs with additional inferred edges for improved model generalisation ability. PGNs allow each node to dynamically point to another node, followed by message passing over these pointers. The sparsity of this adaptable graph structure makes learning tractable while still being sufficiently expressive to simulate complex algorithms. Critically, the pointing mechanism is directly supervised to model long-term sequences of operations on classical data structures, incorporating useful structural inductive biases from theoretical computer science. Qualitatively, we demonstrate that PGNs can learn parallelisable variants of pointer-based data structures, namely disjoint set unions and link/cut trees. PGNs generalise out-of-distribution to 5x larger test inputs on dynamic graph connectivity tasks, outperforming unrestricted GNNs and Deep Sets.
Fourier Spectrum Discrepancies in Deep Network Generated Images

Advancements in deep generative models such as generative adversarial networks and variational autoencoders have resulted in the ability to generate realistic images that are visually indistinguishable from real images, which raises concerns about their potential malicious usage. In this paper, we present an analysis of the high-frequency Fourier modes of real and deep network generated images and show that deep network generated images share an observable, systematic shortcoming in replicating the attributes of these high-frequency modes. Using this, we propose a detection method based on the frequency spectrum of the images which is able to achieve an accuracy of up to 99.2% in classifying real and deep network generated images from various GAN and VAE architectures on a dataset of 5000 images with as few as 8 training examples. Furthermore, we show the impact of image transformations such as compression, cropping, and resolution reduction on the classification accuracy and suggest a method for modifying the high-frequency attributes of deep network generated images to mimic real images.
Tracking Counterfeit Cryptocurrency End-to-end

With the growth of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, there is expanding evidence that counterfeit cryptocurrency has also appeared. In this paper, we empirically explore the presence of counterfeit cryptocurrencies on Ethereum and measure their impact. By analyzing over 190K ERC-20 tokens (or cryptocurrencies) on Ethereum, we have identified 2,117 counterfeit tokens that target 94 of the 100 most popular cryptocurrencies. We perform an end-to-end characterization of the counterfeit token ecosystem, including their popularity, creators and holders, fraudulent behaviors and advertising channels. Through this, we have identified two types of scams related to counterfeit tokens and devised techniques to identify such scams. We observe that over 7,104 victims were deceived in these scams, and the overall financial loss sums to a minimum of $17 million (74,271.7 ETH). Our findings demonstrate the urgency to identify counterfeit cryptocurrencies and mitigate this threat.
An SMVQ compressed data hiding scheme based on multiple linear regression prediction

In this paper, we propose a side matching vector quantisation (SMVQ) data hiding scheme for image using multiple linear regression prediction. For each pixel block, the proposed scheme combines the multiple linear regression algorithm and the SMVQ algorithm, so that it can more accurately match the codeword or directly obtain the predicted value closer to the real pixel. Our experimental results show that when the VQ codebook sizes are 128, 256, 512, and 1024, and the SCB size is 16, this scheme obtains a better compression rate and information embedding ability. It can be concluded from the experimental results that this scheme is superior to existing algorithms in terms of compression and embedding capacity.
Gradual verification of recursive heap data structures

Current static verification techniques do not provide good support for incrementality, making it difficult for developers to focus on specifying and verifying the properties and components that are most important. Dynamic verification approaches support incrementality, but cannot provide static guarantees. To bridge this gap, prior work proposed gradual verification, which supports incrementality by allowing every assertion to be complete, partial, or omitted, and provides sound verification that smoothly scales from dynamic to static checking. The prior approach to gradual verification, however, was limited to programs without recursive data structures. This paper extends gradual verification to programs that manipulate recursive, mutable data structures on the heap. We address several technical challenges, such as semantically connecting iso- and equi-recursive interpretations of abstract predicates, and supporting gradual verification of heap ownership. This work thus lays the foundation for future tools that work on realistic programs and support verification within an engineering process in which cost-benefit trade-offs can be made.
Expert Detection and Recommendation Model With User-Generated Tags in Collaborative Tagging Systems

Tags generated in collaborative tagging systems (CTSs) may help users describe, categorize, search, discover, and navigate content, whereas the difficulty is how to go beyond the information explosion and obtain experts and the required information quickly and accurately. This paper proposes an expert detection and recommendation (EDAR) model based on semantics of tags; the framework consists of community detection and EDAR. Specifically, this paper firstly mines communities based on an improved agglomerative hierarchical clustering (I-AHC) to cluster tags and then presents a community expert detection (CED) algorithm for identifying community experts, and finally, an expert recommendation algorithm is proposed based the improved collaborative filtering (CF) algorithm to recommend relevant experts for the target user. Experiments are carried out on real world datasets, and the results from data experiments and user evaluations have shown that the proposed model can provide excellent performance compared to the benchmark method.
Assertion-based optimization of Quantum programs

Quantum computers promise to perform certain computations exponentially faster than any classical device. Precise control over their physical implementation and proper shielding from unwanted interactions with the environment become more difficult as the space/time volume of the computation grows. Code optimization is thus crucial in order to reduce resource requirements to the greatest extent possible. Besides manual optimization, previous work has adapted classical methods such as constant-folding and common subexpression elimination to the quantum domain. However, such classically-inspired methods fail to exploit certain optimization opportunities across subroutine boundaries, limiting the effectiveness of software reuse. To address this insufficiency, we introduce an optimization methodology which employs annotations that describe how subsystems are entangled in order to exploit these optimization opportunities. We formalize our approach, prove its correctness, and present benchmarks: Without any prior manual optimization, our methodology is able to reduce, e.g., the qubit requirements of a 64-bit floating-point subroutine by 34×.
JDGAN: Enhancing generator on extremely limited data via joint distribution

Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is a thriving generative model and considerable efforts have been made to enhance the generation capabilities via designing a different adversarial framework of GAN (e.g., the discriminator and the generator) or redesigning the penalty function. Although existing models have been demonstrated to be very effective, their generation capabilities have limitations. Existing GAN variants either result in identical generated instances or generate simulation data with low quality when the training data are diverse and extremely limited (a dataset consists of a set of classes but each class holds several or even one single sample) or extremely imbalanced (a category holds a set of samples and other categories hold one single sample). In this paper, we present an innovative approach to tackle this issue, which jointly employs joint distribution and reparameterization method to reparameterize the randomized space as a mixture model and learn the parameters of this mixture model along with that of GAN. In this way, we term our approach Joint Distribution GAN (JDGAN). In our work, we show that the JDGAN can not only generate high quality simulation data with diversity, but also increase the overlapping area between the generating distribution and the raw data distribution. We proceed to conduct extensive experiments, utilizing MNIST, CIFAR10 and Mass Spectrometry datasets, all using extremely limited amounts of data, to demonstrate the significant performance of JDGAN in both achieving the smallest Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) score and producing diverse generated data.
Low-Gate Quantum Golden Collision Finding

The golden collision problem asks us to find a single, special collision among the outputs of a pseudorandom function. This generalizes meet-in-the-middle problems, and is thus applicable in many contexts, such as cryptanalysis of the NIST post-quantum candidate SIKE. The main quantum algorithms for this problem are memory-intensive, and the costs of quantum memory may be very high. The quantum circuit model implies a linear cost for random access, which annihilates the exponential advantage of the previous quantum collision-finding algorithms over Grover’s algorithm or classical van Oorschot-Wiener. Assuming that quantum memory is costly to access but free to maintain, we provide new quantum algorithms for the golden collision problem with high memory requirements but low gate costs. Under the assumption of a two-dimensional connectivity layout, we provide better quantum parallelization methods for generic and golden collision finding. This lowers the quantum security of the golden collision and meet-in-the-middle problems, including SIKE.
A Real-Time Modulation Recognition System Based on Software-Defined Radio and Multi-Skip Residual Neural Network

Communication signal modulation recognition has important research value in the fields of cognitive electronic warfare, communication countermeasures and non-collaborative communication. However, traditional signal recognition methods usually suffer some drawbacks, such as low accuracy, poor scalability, dependence on expert characteristics, and poor applicability to real-world environments. Therefore, in this article, a real-time modulation recognition system based on deep learning and software-defined radio (SDR) technology is designed. In the first step, an improved residual neural network is designed. A multi-skip residual stack (MRS) is designed to preserve more initial residuals information on the multi-scale feature map, which can simultaneously learn the deep and shallow characteristics of the signal. Then, a multi-skip residual network is designed with the MRS as the basic unit, and the network is trained using an adaptive moment estimation optimization algorithm. Finally, the network is tested on public datasets. In the second step, the network is embedded in a SDR platform composed of a GNU Radio and an universal software radio peripheral to realize real-time recognition of the input signal. Experiments show that this system has strong real-time capabilities, high recognition accuracy and considerable robustness.
Blockchain Based e-Invoicing Platform for Global Trade

Transportation of shipper's goods across country borders by loading into containers is known as global container shipping, and this is part and parcel of international or global trade. Multiple carriers, third and fourth party logistics companies are typically involved in a global container shipping journey. These organizations charge base service fees, unplanned, and value-added service fees through freight invoices based on pre-agreed contract rates with the shippers. The existence of multiple en route handoffs of the goods between the different carrier organizations involved in the shipment of the goods increases the complexity of the invoice generation process. Any discrepancy in invoices leads to disputes between the shippers and carriers that may take many months and person-hours to reconcile. This paper presents a blockchain-based e-invoice generation system for the goods carriers where one or more goods carriers are involved in the shipper's goods movement from origin location in one country to a destination location in another country. The generation of an invoice for a carrier primarily uses real-time shipment tracking information and pre-agreed service contract rates between the shipper and the carrier. Our system enhances e-invoicing process efficiency and lower costs for the shippers and carriers participating in global trade. The primary motivations for the organizations to adopt blockchain-based e-invoicing systems are to reduce the number of disputes on invoices, reduce dispute resolution time, and provide real-time auditing.
Distributed data hiding in multi-cloud storage environment

Abstract Classical or traditional steganography aims at hiding a secret in cover media such as text, image, audio, video or even in network protocols. Recent research has improved this approach called distributed steganography by fragmenting the secret message and embedding each secret piece into a distinct cover media. The major interest of this approach is to make the secret message detection extremely difficult. However, these file modifications leave fingerprints which can reveal a secret channel to an attacker. Our contribution is a new steganography paradigm transparent to any attacker and resistant to the detection and the secret extraction. Two properties contribute to achieve these goals: the files do not undergo any modification while the distribution of the secret in the multi-cloud storage environment allows us to hide the existence of the covert channel between the communicating parties. Information’s are usually hidden inside the cover media. In this work, the covert media is a pointer to information. Therefore the file carries the information without being modified and the only way to access it is to have the key. Experiments show interesting comparison results with remarkable security contributions. The work can be seen as a new open direction for further research in the field.