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We study the problem of fitting the high dimensional sparse linear regression model with sub-Gaussian covariates and responses, where the data are provided by strategic or self-interested agents (individuals) who prioritize their privacy of data disclosure. In contrast to the classical setting, our focus is on designing mechanisms that can effectively incentivize most agents to truthfully report their data while preserving the privacy of individual reports. Simultaneously, we seek an estimator which should be close to the underlying parameter. We attempt to solve the problem by deriving a novel private estimator that has a closed-form expression. Based on the estimator, we propose a mechanism which has the following properties via some appropriate design of the computation and payment scheme: (1) the mechanism is $(o(1), O(n^{-\Omega({1})}))$-jointly differentially private, where $n$ is the number of agents; (2) it is an $o(\frac{1}{n})$-approximate Bayes Nash equilibrium for a $(1-o(1))$-fraction of agents to truthfully report their data; (3) the output could achieve an error of $o(1)$ to the underlying parameter; (4) it is individually rational for a $(1-o(1))$ fraction of agents in the mechanism; (5) the payment budget required from the analyst to run the mechanism is $o(1)$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on designing truthful (and privacy-preserving) mechanisms for high dimensional sparse linear regression.

The $\mathcal{A}$-theory takes U-duality symmetry as a guiding principle, with the SL(5) U-duality symmetry being described as the world-volume theory of a 5-brane. Furthermore, by unifying the 6-dimensional world-volume Lorentz symmetry with the SL(5) spacetime symmetry, it extends to SL(6) U-duality symmetry. The SL(5) spacetime vielbein fields and the 5-brane world-volume vielbein fields are mixed under the SL(6) U-duality transformation. We demonstrate that consistent sectionings of the SL(6) $\mathcal{A}$5-brane world-volume Lagrangian yield Lagrangians of the $\mathcal{T}$-string with O(D,D) T-duality symmetry, the conventional string, the ${\cal M}$5-brane with GL(4) duality symmetry, and the non-perturbative M2-brane in supergravity theory. The GL(4) covariant Lagrangian of the ${\cal M}$5-brane derived in this manner is a new, perturbatively quantizable theory., Comment: 41 pages

The first FASER search for a light, long-lived particle decaying into a pair of photons is reported. The search uses LHC proton-proton collision data at $\sqrt{s}=13.6~\text{TeV}$ collected in 2022 and 2023, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $57.7\text{fb}^{-1}$. A model with axion-like particles (ALPs) dominantly coupled to weak gauge bosons is the primary target. Signal events are characterised by high-energy deposits in the electromagnetic calorimeter and no signal in the veto scintillators. One event is observed, compared to a background expectation of $0.44 \pm 0.39$ events, which is entirely dominated by neutrino interactions. World-leading constraints on ALPs are obtained for masses up to $300~\text{MeV}$ and couplings to the Standard Model W gauge boson, $g_{aWW}$, around $10^{-4}$ GeV$^{-1}$, testing a previously unexplored region of parameter space. Other new particle models that lead to the same experimental signature, including ALPs coupled to gluons or photons, U(1)$_B$ gauge bosons, up-philic scalars, and a Type-I two-Higgs doublet model, are also considered for interpretation, and new constraints on previously viable parameter space are presented in this paper., Comment: 37 pages, 22 figures

Deep learning models for NLP tasks are prone to variants of privacy attacks. To prevent privacy leakage, researchers have investigated word-level perturbations, relying on the formal guarantees of differential privacy (DP) in the embedding space. However, many existing approaches either achieve unsatisfactory performance in the high privacy regime when using the Laplacian or Gaussian mechanism, or resort to weaker relaxations of DP that are inferior to the canonical DP in terms of privacy strength. This raises the question of whether a new method for private word embedding can be designed to overcome these limitations. In this paper, we propose a novel private embedding method called the high dimensional truncated Laplacian mechanism. Specifically, we introduce a non-trivial extension of the truncated Laplacian mechanism, which was previously only investigated in one-dimensional space cases. Theoretically, we show that our method has a lower variance compared to the previous private word embedding methods. To further validate its effectiveness, we conduct comprehensive experiments on private embedding and downstream tasks using three datasets. Remarkably, even in the high privacy regime, our approach only incurs a slight decrease in utility compared to the non-private scenario., Comment: Accepted by EMNLP 2024, Main Track

Fine-tuning-based unlearning methods prevail for preventing targeted harmful, sensitive, or copyrighted information within large language models while preserving overall capabilities. However, the true effectiveness of these methods is unclear. In this work, we delve into the limitations of fine-tuning-based unlearning through activation patching and parameter restoration experiments. Our findings reveal that these methods alter the model's knowledge retrieval process, providing further evidence that they do not genuinely erase the problematic knowledge embedded in the model parameters. Instead, the coefficients generated by the MLP components in the model's final layer are the primary contributors to these seemingly positive unlearning effects, playing a crucial role in controlling the model's behaviors. Furthermore, behavioral tests demonstrate that this unlearning mechanism inevitably impacts the global behavior of the models, affecting unrelated knowledge or capabilities. The code is released at https://github.com/yihuaihong/Dissecting-FT-Unlearning., Comment: Accepted in EMNLP 2024 Main (Short paper)

Currently, attention mechanisms have garnered increasing attention in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), such as Graph Attention Networks (GATs) and Graph Transformers (GTs). It is not only due to the commendable boost in performance they offer but also its capacity to provide a more lucid rationale for model behaviors, which are often viewed as inscrutable. However, Attention-based GNNs have demonstrated instability in interpretability when subjected to various sources of perturbations during both training and testing phases, including factors like additional edges or nodes. In this paper, we propose a solution to this problem by introducing a novel notion called Faithful Graph Attention-based Interpretation (FGAI). In particular, FGAI has four crucial properties regarding stability and sensitivity to interpretation and final output distribution. Built upon this notion, we propose an efficient methodology for obtaining FGAI, which can be viewed as an ad hoc modification to the canonical Attention-based GNNs. To validate our proposed solution, we introduce two novel metrics tailored for graph interpretation assessment. Experimental results demonstrate that FGAI exhibits superior stability and preserves the interpretability of attention under various forms of perturbations and randomness, which makes FGAI a more faithful and reliable explanation tool., Comment: 18 pages

The locate-then-edit paradigm has shown significant promise for knowledge editing (KE) in Large Language Models (LLMs). While previous methods perform well on single-hop fact recall tasks, they consistently struggle with multi-hop factual recall tasks involving newly edited knowledge. In this paper, leveraging tools in mechanistic interpretability, we first identify that in multi-hop tasks, LLMs tend to retrieve implicit subject knowledge from deeper MLP layers, unlike single-hop tasks, which rely on earlier layers. This distinction explains the poor performance of current methods in multi-hop queries, as they primarily focus on editing shallow layers, leaving deeper layers unchanged. To address this, we propose IFMET, a novel locate-then-edit KE approach designed to edit both shallow and deep MLP layers. IFMET employs multi-hop editing prompts and supplementary sets to locate and modify knowledge across different reasoning stages. Experimental results demonstrate that IFMET significantly improves performance on multi-hop factual recall tasks, effectively overcoming the limitations of previous locate-then-edit methods., Comment: 21 pages

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating human-like text and exhibiting personality traits similar to those in humans. However, the mechanisms by which LLMs encode and express traits such as agreeableness and impulsiveness remain poorly understood. Drawing on the theory of social determinism, we investigate how long-term background factors, such as family environment and cultural norms, interact with short-term pressures like external instructions, shaping and influencing LLMs' personality traits. By steering the output of LLMs through the utilization of interpretable features within the model, we explore how these background and pressure factors lead to changes in the model's traits without the need for further fine-tuning. Additionally, we suggest the potential impact of these factors on model safety from the perspective of personality., Comment: under review

Large Language Models have demonstrated remarkable abilities across various tasks, with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting emerging as a key technique to enhance reasoning capabilities. However, existing research primarily focuses on improving performance, lacking a comprehensive framework to explain and understand the fundamental factors behind CoT's success. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel perspective grounded in the Hopfieldian view of cognition in cognitive neuroscience. We establish a connection between CoT reasoning and key cognitive elements such as stimuli, actions, neural populations, and representation spaces. From our view, we can understand the reasoning process as the movement between these representation spaces. Building on this insight, we develop a method for localizing reasoning errors in the response of CoTs. Moreover, we propose the Representation-of-Thought (RoT) framework, which leverages the robustness of low-dimensional representation spaces to enhance the robustness of the reasoning process in CoTs. Experimental results demonstrate that RoT improves the robustness and interpretability of CoT reasoning while offering fine-grained control over the reasoning process., Comment: 28 pages, a new version of "A Hopfieldian View-based Interpretation for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning"

Early detection of chronic diseases is beneficial to healthcare by providing a golden opportunity for timely interventions. Although numerous prior studies have successfully used machine learning (ML) models for disease diagnoses, they highly rely on medical data, which are scarce for most patients in the early stage of the chronic diseases. In this paper, we aim to diagnose hyperglycemia (diabetes), hyperlipidemia, and hypertension (collectively known as 3H) using own collected behavioral data, thus, enable the early detection of 3H without using medical data collected in clinical settings. Specifically, we collected daily behavioral data from 629 participants over a 3-month study period, and trained various ML models after data preprocessing. Experimental results show that only using the participants' uploaded behavioral data, we can achieve accurate 3H diagnoses: 80.2\%, 71.3\%, and 81.2\% for diabetes, hyperlipidemia, and hypertension, respectively. Furthermore, we conduct Shapley analysis on the trained models to identify the most influential features for each type of diseases. The identified influential features are consistent with those reported in the literature.

Transformer has achieved satisfactory results in the field of hyperspectral image (HSI) classification. However, existing Transformer models face two key challenges when dealing with HSI scenes characterized by diverse land cover types and rich spectral information: (1) fixed receptive field representation overlooks effective contextual information; (2) redundant self-attention feature representation. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Selective Transformer (SFormer) for HSI classification. The SFormer is designed to dynamically select receptive fields for capturing both spatial and spectral contextual information, while mitigating the impact of redundant data by prioritizing the most relevant features. This enables a highly accurate classification of the land covers of the HSI. Specifically, a Kernel Selective Transformer Block (KSTB) is first utilized to dynamically select an appropriate receptive field range to effectively extract spatial-spectral features. Furthermore, to capture the most crucial tokens, a Token Selective Transformer Block (TSTB) is introduced, which selects the most relevant tokens based on the ranking of attention scores for each query. Extensive experiments on four benchmark HSI datasets demonstrate that the proposed SFormer outperforms the state-of-the-art HSI classification models. The codes will be released.

We consider the problem of a designer who wants to allocate resources to representatives, that then distribute the resources they receive among the individuals they represent. Motivated by the way Feeding America, one of the largest U.S. charities, allocates donations to food banks, which then further distribute the donations to food-insecure individuals, we focus on mechanisms that use artificial currencies. We compare auctions through the lens of the Price of Anarchy, with respect to three canonical welfare objectives: utilitarian social welfare (sum of individuals' utilities), Nash social welfare (product of individuals' utilities), and egalitarian social welfare (minimum of individuals' utilities). We prove strong lower bounds on the Price of Anarchy of all auctions that allocate each item to the highest bidder, subject to a mild technical constraint; this includes Feeding America's current auction, the First-Price auction. In sharp contrast, our main result shows that adapting the classic Trading Post mechanism of Shapley and Shubik to this setting, and coupled with Feeding America's choice of budget rule (each representative gets an amount of artificial currency equal to the number of individuals it represents), achieves a small Price of Anarchy for all generalized $p$-mean objectives simultaneously. Our bound on the Price of Anarchy of the Trading Post mechanism depends on $\ell$: the product of the rank and the ``incoherence'' of the underlying valuation matrix, which together capture a notion of how ``spread out'' the values of a matrix are. This notion has been extremely influential in the matrix completion literature, and, to the best of our knowledge, has never been used in auction theory prior to our work. Perhaps surprisingly, we prove that the dependence on $\ell$ is necessary: the Price of Anarchy of the Trading Post mechanism is $\Omega(\sqrt{\ell})$., Comment: The 20th Conference on Web and Internet Economics (WINE 2024)

Deep learning has made profound impacts in the domains of data mining and AI, distinguished by the groundbreaking achievements in numerous real-world applications and the innovative algorithm design philosophy. However, it suffers from the inconsistency issue between optimization and generalization, as achieving good generalization, guided by the bias-variance trade-off principle, favors under-parameterized networks, whereas ensuring effective convergence of gradient-based algorithms demands over-parameterized networks. To address this issue, we develop a novel sketching scheme based on deep net components for various tasks. Specifically, we use deep net components with specific efficacy to build a sketching basis that embodies the advantages of deep networks. Subsequently, we transform deep net training into a linear empirical risk minimization problem based on the constructed basis, successfully avoiding the complicated convergence analysis of iterative algorithms. The efficacy of the proposed component-based sketching is validated through both theoretical analysis and numerical experiments. Theoretically, we show that the proposed component-based sketching provides almost optimal rates in approximating saturated functions for shallow nets and also achieves almost optimal generalization error bounds. Numerically, we demonstrate that, compared with the existing gradient-based training methods, component-based sketching possesses superior generalization performance with reduced training costs.

Semantic segmentation of large-scale point clouds is of significant importance in environment perception and scene understanding. However, point clouds collected from real-world environments are usually imbalanced and small-sized objects are prone to be under-sampled or misclassified due to their low occurrence frequency, thereby reducing the overall accuracy of semantic segmentation. In this study, we propose the Multilateral Cascading Network (MCNet) for large-scale and sample-imbalanced point cloud scenes. To increase the frequency of small-sized objects, we introduce the semantic-weighted sampling module, which incorporates a probability parameter into the collected data group. To facilitate feature learning, we propose a Multilateral Cascading Attention Enhancement (MCAE) module to learn complex local features through multilateral cascading operations and attention mechanisms. To promote feature fusion, we propose a Point Cross Stage Partial (P-CSP) module to combine global and local features, optimizing the integration of valuable feature information across multiple scales. Finally, we introduce the neighborhood voting module to integrate results at the output layer. Our proposed method demonstrates either competitive or superior performance relative to state-of-the-art approaches across three widely recognized benchmark datasets: S3DIS, Toronto3D, and SensatUrban with mIoU scores of 74.0\%, 82.9\% and 64.5\%, respectively. Notably, our work yielded consistent optimal results on the under-sampled semantic categories, thereby demonstrating exceptional performance in the recognition of small-sized objects.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant capabilities across numerous application domains. A key challenge is to keep these models updated with latest available information, which limits the true potential of these models for the end-applications. Although, there have been numerous attempts for LLMs Knowledge Editing (KE), i.e., to edit the LLMs prior knowledge and in turn test it via Multi-hop Question Answering (MQA), yet so far these studies are primarily focused on English language. To bridge this gap, in this paper we propose: Multi-hop Questioning Answering under Knowledge Editing for Arabic Language (MQA-KEAL). MQA-KEAL stores knowledge edits as structured knowledge units in the external memory. In order to solve multi-hop question, it first uses task-decomposition to decompose the question into smaller sub-problems. Later for each sub-problem, it iteratively queries the external memory and/or target LLM in order to generate the final response. In addition, we also contribute MQUAKE-AR (Arabic translation of English benchmark MQUAKE), as well as a new benchmark MQA-AEVAL for rigorous performance evaluation of MQA under KE for Arabic language. Experimentation evaluation reveals MQA-KEAL outperforms the baseline models by a significant margin.

Multiple rotation averaging plays a crucial role in computer vision and robotics domains. The conventional optimization-based methods optimize a nonlinear cost function based on certain noise assumptions, while most previous learning-based methods require ground truth labels in the supervised training process. Recognizing the handcrafted noise assumption may not be reasonable in all real-world scenarios, this paper proposes an effective rotation averaging method for mining data patterns in a learning manner while avoiding the requirement of labels. Specifically, we apply deep matrix factorization to directly solve the multiple rotation averaging problem in unconstrained linear space. For deep matrix factorization, we design a neural network model, which is explicitly low-rank and symmetric to better suit the background of multiple rotation averaging. Meanwhile, we utilize a spanning tree-based edge filtering to suppress the influence of rotation outliers. What's more, we also adopt a reweighting scheme and dynamic depth selection strategy to further improve the robustness. Our method synthesizes the merit of both optimization-based and learning-based methods. Experimental results on various datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Expanding the receptive field in a deep learning model for large-scale 3D point cloud segmentation is an effective technique for capturing rich contextual information, which consequently enhances the network's ability to learn meaningful features. However, this often leads to increased computational complexity and risk of overfitting, challenging the efficiency and effectiveness of the learning paradigm. To address these limitations, we propose the Local Split Attention Pooling (LSAP) mechanism to effectively expand the receptive field through a series of local split operations, thus facilitating the acquisition of broader contextual knowledge. Concurrently, it optimizes the computational workload associated with attention-pooling layers to ensure a more streamlined processing workflow. Based on LSAP, a Parallel Aggregation Enhancement (PAE) module is introduced to enable parallel processing of data using both 2D and 3D neighboring information to further enhance contextual representations within the network. In light of the aforementioned designs, we put forth a novel framework, designated as LSNet, for large-scale point cloud semantic segmentation. Extensive evaluations demonstrated the efficacy of seamlessly integrating the proposed PAE module into existing frameworks, yielding significant improvements in mean intersection over union (mIoU) metrics, with a notable increase of up to 11%. Furthermore, LSNet demonstrated superior performance compared to state-of-the-art semantic segmentation networks on three benchmark datasets, including S3DIS, Toronto3D, and SensatUrban. It is noteworthy that our method achieved a substantial speedup of approximately 38.8% compared to those employing similar-sized receptive fields, which serves to highlight both its computational efficiency and practical utility in real-world large-scale scenes.

We measure the ionised gas velocity dispersions of star-forming galaxies in the MAGPI survey ($z\sim0.3$) and compare them with galaxies in the SAMI ($z\sim0.05$) and KROSS ($z\sim1$) surveys to investigate how the ionised gas velocity dispersion evolves. For the first time, we use a consistent method that forward models galaxy kinematics from $z=0$ to $z=1$. This method accounts for spatial substructure in emission line flux and beam smearing. We investigate the correlation between gas velocity dispersion and galaxy properties to understand the mechanisms that drive gas turbulence. We find that in both MAGPI and SAMI galaxies, the gas velocity dispersion more strongly correlates with the star-formation rate surface density ($\Sigma_{\rm SFR}$) than with a variety of other physical properties, and the average gas velocity dispersion is similar, at the same $\Sigma_{\rm SFR}$, for SAMI, MAGPI and KROSS galaxies. The results indicate that mechanisms related to $\Sigma_{\rm SFR}$ could be the dominant driver of gas turbulence from $z\sim1$ to $z\sim0$, for example, stellar feedback and/or gravitational instability. The gas velocity dispersion of MAGPI galaxies is also correlated with the non-rotational motion of the gas, illustrating that in addition to star-formation feedback, gas transportation and accretion may also contribute to the gas velocity dispersion for galaxies at $z\sim 0.3$. KROSS galaxies only have a moderate correlation between gas velocity dispersion and $\Sigma_{\rm SFR}$ and a higher scatter of gas velocity dispersion with respect to $\Sigma_{\rm SFR}$, in agreement with the suggestion that other mechanisms, such as gas transportation and accretion, are relatively more important at higher redshift galaxies., Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

Mixture of Experts (MoE) offers remarkable performance and computational efficiency by selectively activating subsets of model parameters. Traditionally, MoE models use homogeneous experts, each with identical capacity. However, varying complexity in input data necessitates experts with diverse capabilities, while homogeneous MoE hinders effective expert specialization and efficient parameter utilization. In this study, we propose a novel Heterogeneous Mixture of Experts (HMoE), where experts differ in size and thus possess diverse capacities. This heterogeneity allows for more specialized experts to handle varying token complexities more effectively. To address the imbalance in expert activation, we propose a novel training objective that encourages the frequent activation of smaller experts, enhancing computational efficiency and parameter utilization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HMoE achieves lower loss with fewer activated parameters and outperforms conventional homogeneous MoE models on various pre-training evaluation benchmarks. Codes will be released upon acceptance.

Gaussian Processes (GPs) provide a powerful framework for making predictions and understanding uncertainty for classification with kernels and Bayesian non-parametric learning. Building such models typically requires strong prior knowledge to define preselect kernels, which could be ineffective for online applications of classification that sequentially process data because features of data may shift during the process. To alleviate the requirement of prior knowledge used in GPs and learn new features from data that arrive successively, this paper presents a novel method to automatically discover models of classification on complex data with little prior knowledge. Our method adapts a recently proposed technique for GP-based time-series structure discovery, which integrates GPs and Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC). We extend the technique to handle extra latent variables in GP classification, such that our method can effectively and adaptively learn a-priori unknown structures of classification from continuous input. In addition, our method adapts new batch of data with updated structures of models. Our experiments show that our method is able to automatically incorporate various features of kernels on synthesized data and real-world data for classification. In the experiments of real-world data, our method outperforms various classification methods on both online and offline setting achieving a 10\% accuracy improvement on one benchmark.

In this survey, we summarize recent developments in research fueled by the growing adoption of automated bidding strategies in online advertising. We explore the challenges and opportunities that have arisen as markets embrace this autobidding and cover a range of topics in this area, including bidding algorithms, equilibrium analysis and efficiency of common auction formats, and optimal auction design.

Though pre-trained encoders can be easily accessed online to build downstream machine learning (ML) services quickly, various attacks have been designed to compromise the security and privacy of these encoders. While most attacks target encoders on the upstream side, it remains unknown how an encoder could be threatened when deployed in a downstream ML service. This paper unveils a new vulnerability: the Pre-trained Encoder Inference (PEI) attack, which posts privacy threats toward encoders hidden behind downstream ML services. By only providing API accesses to a targeted downstream service and a set of candidate encoders, the PEI attack can infer which encoder is secretly used by the targeted service based on candidate ones. We evaluate the attack performance of PEI against real-world encoders on three downstream tasks: image classification, text classification, and text-to-image generation. Experiments show that the PEI attack succeeds in revealing the hidden encoder in most cases and seldom makes mistakes even when the hidden encoder is not in the candidate set. We also conducted a case study on one of the most recent vision-language models, LLaVA, to illustrate that the PEI attack is useful in assisting other ML attacks such as adversarial attacks. The code is available at https://github.com/fshp971/encoder-inference.

Charm baryon decay plays an important role in studying non-perturbative baryonic transitions. Compared to other hadron multiplets, the flavor symmetry of baryon decuplet is more simple and attractive. In this work, we study the topological amplitudes of charmed baryon decays into decuplet baryon in the flavor symmetry and the linear $SU(3)_F$ breaking. It is found most of topological diagrams are suppressed by the K\"orner-Pati-Woo theorem in the $SU(3)_F$ limit. Only two independent amplitudes contributing to the $\mathcal{B}_{c\overline 3}\to \mathcal{B}_{10}M$ decays, with one dominating the branching fractions. The Lee-Yang parameters of all $\mathcal{B}_{c\overline 3}\to \mathcal{B}_{10}M$ modes are the same in the $SU(3)_F$ limit, and there are only four possible values for the CP asymmetries. After including the first-order $SU(3)_F$ breaking effects, the $\Xi^+_c\to \Sigma^{* +}\overline K^0$ and $\Xi^+_c\to \Xi^{* 0}\pi^+$ decays have non-zero branching fractions. The number of free parameter contributing to the $\mathcal{B}_{c\overline 3}\to \mathcal{B}_{10}M$ decays in the linear $SU(3)_F$ breaking is smaller than the available data. The $SU(3)_F$ breaking part of the quark loop diagram can be extracted by global fitting of branching fractions, which could help us understand the CP violation in charm sector. Additionally, some new isospin equations are proposed to test the K\"orner-Pati-Woo theorem., Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures

Long-separated research has been conducted on two highly correlated tracks: traffic and incidents. Traffic track witnesses complicating deep learning models, e.g., to push the prediction a few percent more accurate, and the incident track only studies the incidents alone, e.g., to infer the incident risk. We, for the first time, spatiotemporally aligned the two tracks in a large-scale region (16,972 traffic nodes) over the whole year of 2023: our XTraffic dataset includes traffic, i.e., time-series indexes on traffic flow, lane occupancy, and average vehicle speed, and incidents, whose records are spatiotemporally-aligned with traffic data, with seven different incident classes. Additionally, each node includes detailed physical and policy-level meta-attributes of lanes. Our data can revolutionalize traditional traffic-related tasks towards higher interpretability and practice: instead of traditional prediction or classification tasks, we conduct: (1) post-incident traffic forecasting to quantify the impact of different incidents on traffic indexes; (2) incident classification using traffic indexes to determine the incidents types for precautions measures; (3) global causal analysis among the traffic indexes, meta-attributes, and incidents to give high-level guidance of the interrelations of various factors; (4) local causal analysis within road nodes to examine how different incidents affect the road segments' relations. The dataset is available at http://xaitraffic.github.io.

We are witnessing a surge in the use of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware for cost-effective in-orbit computing, such as deep neural network (DNN) based on-satellite sensor data processing, Earth object detection, and task decision.However, once exposed to harsh space environments, COTS hardware is vulnerable to cosmic radiation and suffers from exhaustive single-event upsets (SEUs) and multi-unit upsets (MCUs), both threatening the functionality and correctness of in-orbit computing.Existing hardware and system software protections against radiation are expensive for resource-constrained COTS nanosatellites and overwhelming for upper-layer applications due to their requirement for heavy resource redundancy and frequent reboots. Instead, we make a case for cost-effective space radiation tolerance using application domain knowledge. Our solution for the on-satellite DNN tasks, \name, exploits the uneven SEU/MCU sensitivity across DNN layers and MCUs' spatial correlation for lightweight radiation-tolerant in-orbit AI computing. Our extensive experiments using Chaohu-1 SAR satellite payloads and a hardware-in-the-loop, real data-driven space radiation emulator validate that RedNet can suppress the influence of radiation errors to $\approx$ 0 and accelerate the on-satellite DNN inference speed by 8.4%-33.0% at negligible extra costs.

We initiate the study of centralized algorithms for welfare-maximizing allocation of goods to buyers subject to average-value constraints. We show that this problem is NP-hard to approximate beyond a factor of $\frac{e}{e-1}$, and provide a $\frac{4e}{e-1}$-approximate offline algorithm. For the online setting, we show that no non-trivial approximations are achievable under adversarial arrivals. Under i.i.d. arrivals, we present a polytime online algorithm that provides a constant approximation of the optimal (computationally-unbounded) online algorithm. In contrast, we show that no constant approximation of the ex-post optimum is achievable by an online algorithm.

Revenue-optimal auction design is a challenging problem with significant theoretical and practical implications. Sequential auction mechanisms, known for their simplicity and strong strategyproofness guarantees, are often limited by theoretical results that are largely existential, except for certain restrictive settings. Although traditional reinforcement learning methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) are applicable in this domain, they struggle with computational demands and convergence issues when dealing with large and continuous action spaces. In light of this and recognizing that we can model transitions differentiable for our settings, we propose using a new reinforcement learning framework tailored for sequential combinatorial auctions that leverages first-order gradients. Our extensive evaluations show that our approach achieves significant improvement in revenue over both analytical baselines and standard reinforcement learning algorithms. Furthermore, we scale our approach to scenarios involving up to 50 agents and 50 items, demonstrating its applicability in complex, real-world auction settings. As such, this work advances the computational tools available for auction design and contributes to bridging the gap between theoretical results and practical implementations in sequential auction design.

Machine learning models trained on vast amounts of real or synthetic data often achieve outstanding predictive performance across various domains. However, this utility comes with increasing concerns about privacy, as the training data may include sensitive information. To address these concerns, machine unlearning has been proposed to erase specific data samples from models. While some unlearning techniques efficiently remove data at low costs, recent research highlights vulnerabilities where malicious users could request unlearning on manipulated data to compromise the model. Despite these attacks' effectiveness, perturbed data differs from original training data, failing hash verification. Existing attacks on machine unlearning also suffer from practical limitations and require substantial additional knowledge and resources. To fill the gaps in current unlearning attacks, we introduce the Unlearning Usability Attack. This model-agnostic, unlearning-agnostic, and budget-friendly attack distills data distribution information into a small set of benign data. These data are identified as benign by automatic poisoning detection tools due to their positive impact on model training. While benign for machine learning, unlearning these data significantly degrades model information. Our evaluation demonstrates that unlearning this benign data, comprising no more than 1% of the total training data, can reduce model accuracy by up to 50%. Furthermore, our findings show that well-prepared benign data poses challenges for recent unlearning techniques, as erasing these synthetic instances demands higher resources than regular data. These insights underscore the need for future research to reconsider "data poisoning" in the context of machine unlearning.

We develop a novel algorithm to construct a congestion-approximator with polylogarithmic quality on a capacitated, undirected graph in nearly-linear time. Our approach is the first *bottom-up* hierarchical construction, in contrast to previous *top-down* approaches including that of Racke, Shah, and Taubig (SODA 2014), the only other construction achieving polylogarithmic quality that is implementable in nearly-linear time (Peng, SODA 2016). Similar to Racke, Shah, and Taubig, our construction at each hierarchical level requires calls to an approximate max-flow/min-cut subroutine. However, the main advantage to our bottom-up approach is that these max-flow calls can be implemented directly *without recursion*. More precisely, the previously computed levels of the hierarchy can be converted into a *pseudo-congestion-approximator*, which then translates to a max-flow algorithm that is sufficient for the particular max-flow calls used in the construction of the next hierarchical level. As a result, we obtain the first non-recursive algorithms for congestion-approximator and approximate max-flow that run in nearly-linear time, a conceptual improvement to the aforementioned algorithms that recursively alternate between the two problems., Comment: 46 pages

Robotic weed flaming is a new and environmentally friendly approach to weed removal in the agricultural field. Using a mobile manipulator equipped with a flamethrower, we design a new system and algorithm to enable effective weed flaming, which requires robotic manipulation with a soft and deformable end effector, as the thermal coverage of the flame is affected by dynamic or unknown environmental factors such as gravity, wind, atmospheric pressure, fuel tank pressure, and pose of the nozzle. System development includes overall design, hardware integration, and software pipeline. To enable precise weed removal, the greatest challenge is to detect and predict dynamic flame coverage in real time before motion planning, which is quite different from a conventional rigid gripper in grasping or a spray gun in painting. Based on the images from two onboard infrared cameras and the pose information of the flamethrower nozzle on a mobile manipulator, we propose a new dynamic flame coverage model. The flame model uses a center-arc curve with a Gaussian cross-section model to describe the flame coverage in real time. The experiments have demonstrated the working system and shown that our model and algorithm can achieve a mean average precision (mAP) of more than 76\% in the reprojected images during online prediction., Comment: IROS 2024

Quantum teleportation is a fundamental ingredient for quantum information science and technology. In particular, the ability to perform quantum teleportation between quantum systems of different natures and encoding types is crucial for building complex systems, such as distributed quantum internet. Here we propose a scheme to teleport a continuous variable optical qubit, encoded in an optical qumode by means of a superposed coherent state, onto a discrete variable solid-state qubit, associated with a single nitrogen-vacancy center spin in diamond, via a hybrid entanglement. By using a newly developed method for Bell-state measurement, which relies only on light homodyne detection and spin polarization measurement, near-deterministic and -perfect quantum teleportation can be achieved for large coherent-state amplitude input. Taking noise effects into account, we find that the average teleportation fidelity can still exceed the classical limit, enabling substantial teleportation distances under realistic experimental conditions.

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) have garnered increasing attention due to their ability to provide concept-based explanations for black-box deep learning models while achieving high final prediction accuracy using human-like concepts. However, the training of current CBMs heavily relies on the accuracy and richness of annotated concepts in the dataset. These concept labels are typically provided by experts, which can be costly and require significant resources and effort. Additionally, concept saliency maps frequently misalign with input saliency maps, causing concept predictions to correspond to irrelevant input features - an issue related to annotation alignment. To address these limitations, we propose a new framework called SSCBM (Semi-supervised Concept Bottleneck Model). Our SSCBM is suitable for practical situations where annotated data is scarce. By leveraging joint training on both labeled and unlabeled data and aligning the unlabeled data at the concept level, we effectively solve these issues. We proposed a strategy to generate pseudo labels and an alignment loss. Experiments demonstrate that our SSCBM is both effective and efficient. With only 20% labeled data, we achieved 93.19% (96.39% in a fully supervised setting) concept accuracy and 75.51% (79.82% in a fully supervised setting) prediction accuracy., Comment: 17 pages

In data-driven applications, preserving user privacy while enabling valuable computations remains a critical challenge. Technologies like Differential Privacy (DP) have been pivotal in addressing these concerns. The shuffle model of DP requires no trusted curators and can achieve high utility by leveraging the privacy amplification effect yielded from shuffling. These benefits have led to significant interest in the shuffle model. However, the computation tasks in the shuffle model are limited to statistical estimation, making the shuffle model inapplicable to real-world scenarios in which each user requires a personalized output. This paper introduces a novel paradigm termed Private Individual Computation (PIC), expanding the shuffle model to support a broader range of permutation-equivariant computations. PIC enables personalized outputs while preserving privacy, and enjoys privacy amplification through shuffling. We propose a concrete protocol that realizes PIC. By using one-time public keys, our protocol enables users to receive their outputs without compromising anonymity, which is essential for privacy amplification. Additionally, we present an optimal randomizer, the Minkowski Response, designed for the PIC model to enhance utility. We formally prove the security and privacy properties of the PIC protocol. Theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations demonstrate PIC's capability in handling non-statistical computation tasks, and the efficacy of PIC and the Minkowski randomizer in achieving superior utility compared to existing solutions.