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Ensemble methods enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by combining multiple models but suffer from high computational costs. In this paper, we introduce Speculative Ensemble, a novel framework that accelerates LLM ensembles without sacrificing performance, inspired by Speculative Decoding-where a small proposal model generates tokens sequentially, and a larger target model verifies them in parallel. Our approach builds on two key insights: (1) the verification distribution can be the ensemble distribution of both the proposal and target models, and (2) alternating each model as the proposer and verifier can further enhance efficiency. We generalize this method to ensembles with n models and theoretically prove that SE is never slower than a standard ensemble, typically achieving faster speed. Extensive experiments demonstrate speed improvements of 1.11x-2.23x over standard ensemble techniques without compromising generation quality. Our code is available at https://github.com/Kamichanw/Speculative-Ensemble/

The rapid adoption of deep learning in sensitive domains has brought tremendous benefits. However, this widespread adoption has also given rise to serious vulnerabilities, particularly model inversion (MI) attacks, posing a significant threat to the privacy and integrity of personal data. The increasing prevalence of these attacks in applications such as biometrics, healthcare, and finance has created an urgent need to understand their mechanisms, impacts, and defense methods. This survey aims to fill the gap in the literature by providing a structured and in-depth review of MI attacks and defense strategies. Our contributions include a systematic taxonomy of MI attacks, extensive research on attack techniques and defense mechanisms, and a discussion about the challenges and future research directions in this evolving field. By exploring the technical and ethical implications of MI attacks, this survey aims to offer insights into the impact of AI-powered systems on privacy, security, and trust. In conjunction with this survey, we have developed a comprehensive repository to support research on MI attacks and defenses. The repository includes state-of-the-art research papers, datasets, evaluation metrics, and other resources to meet the needs of both novice and experienced researchers interested in MI attacks and defenses, as well as the broader field of AI security and privacy. The repository will be continuously maintained to ensure its relevance and utility. It is accessible at https://github.com/overgter/Deep-Learning-Model-Inversion-Attacks-and-Defenses., Comment: 2 figures, 56 pages

Deep Learning-based Vulnerability Detection (DLVD) techniques have garnered significant interest due to their ability to automatically learn vulnerability patterns from previously compromised code. Despite the notable accuracy demonstrated by pioneering tools, the broader application of DLVD methods in real-world scenarios is hindered by significant challenges. A primary issue is the "one-for-all" design, where a single model is trained to handle all types of vulnerabilities. This approach fails to capture the patterns of different vulnerability types, resulting in suboptimal performance, particularly for less common vulnerabilities that are often underrepresented in training datasets. To address these challenges, we propose MoEVD, which adopts the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework for vulnerability detection. MoEVD decomposes vulnerability detection into two tasks, CWE type classification and CWE-specific vulnerability detection. By splitting the task, in vulnerability detection, MoEVD allows specific experts to handle distinct types of vulnerabilities instead of handling all vulnerabilities within one model. Our results show that MoEVD achieves an F1-score of 0.44, significantly outperforming all studied state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines by at least 12.8%. MoEVD excels across almost all CWE types, improving recall over the best SOTA baseline by 9% to 77.8%. Notably, MoEVD does not sacrifice performance on long-tailed CWE types; instead, its MoE design enhances performance (F1-score) on these by at least 7.3%, addressing long-tailed issues effectively., Comment: Accepted in FSE 2025

As a valuable digital resource, graph data is an important data asset, which has been widely utilized across various fields to optimize decision-making and enable smarter solutions. To manage data assets, blockchain is widely used to enable data sharing and trading, but it cannot supply complex analytical queries. vChain was proposed to achieve verifiable boolean queries over blockchain by designing an embedded authenticated data structure (ADS). However, for generating (non-)existence proofs, vChain suffers from expensive storage and computation costs in ADS construction, along with high communication and verification costs. In this paper, we propose a novel NetChain framework that enables efficient top-k queries over on-chain graph data with verifiability. Specifically, we design a novel authenticated two-layer index that supports (non-)existence proof generation in block-level and built-in verifiability for matched objects. To further alleviate the computation and verification overhead, an optimized variant NetChain+ is derived. The authenticity of our frameworks is validated through security analysis. Evaluations show that NetChain and NetChain+ outperform vChain, respectively achieving up to 85X and 31X improvements on ADS construction. Moreover, compared with vChain, NetChain+ reduces the communication and verification costs by 87% and 96% respectively.

Detecting vulnerability fix commits in open-source software is crucial for maintaining software security. To help OSS identify vulnerability fix commits, several automated approaches are developed. However, existing approaches like VulFixMiner and CoLeFunDa, focus solely on code changes, neglecting essential context from development artifacts. Tools like Vulcurator, which integrates issue reports, fail to leverage semantic associations between different development artifacts (e.g., pull requests and history vulnerability fixes). Moreover, they miss vulnerability fixes in tangled commits and lack explanations, limiting practical use. Hence to address those limitations, we propose LLM4VFD, a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) enhanced with Chain-of-Thought reasoning and In-Context Learning to improve the accuracy of vulnerability fix detection. LLM4VFD comprises three components: (1) Code Change Intention, which analyzes commit summaries, purposes, and implications using Chain-of-Thought reasoning; (2) Development Artifact, which incorporates context from related issue reports and pull requests; (3) Historical Vulnerability, which retrieves similar past vulnerability fixes to enrich context. More importantly, on top of the prediction, LLM4VFD also provides a detailed analysis and explanation to help security experts understand the rationale behind the decision. We evaluated LLM4VFD against state-of-the-art techniques, including Pre-trained Language Model-based approaches and vanilla LLMs, using a newly collected dataset, BigVulFixes. Experimental results demonstrate that LLM4VFD significantly outperforms the best-performed existing approach by 68.1%--145.4%. Furthermore, We conducted a user study with security experts, showing that the analysis generated by LLM4VFD improves the efficiency of vulnerability fix identification., Comment: Accepted in FSE 2025

Differential evolution (DE) algorithm is recognized as one of the most effective evolutionary algorithms, demonstrating remarkable efficacy in black-box optimization due to its derivative-free nature. Numerous enhancements to the fundamental DE have been proposed, incorporating innovative mutation strategies and sophisticated parameter tuning techniques to improve performance. However, no single variant has proven universally superior across all problems. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel framework that employs reinforcement learning (RL) to automatically design DE for black-box optimization through meta-learning. RL acts as an advanced meta-optimizer, generating a customized DE configuration that includes an optimal initialization strategy, update rule, and hyperparameters tailored to a specific black-box optimization problem. This process is informed by a detailed analysis of the problem characteristics. In this proof-of-concept study, we utilize a double deep Q-network for implementation, considering a subset of 40 possible strategy combinations and parameter optimizations simultaneously. The framework's performance is evaluated against black-box optimization benchmarks and compared with state-of-the-art algorithms. The experimental results highlight the promising potential of our proposed framework.

Federated learning is a new framework that protects data privacy and allows multiple devices to cooperate in training machine learning models. Previous studies have proposed multiple approaches to eliminate the challenges posed by non-iid data and inter-domain heterogeneity issues. However, they ignore the \textbf{spatio-temporal} heterogeneity formed by different data distributions of increasing task data in the intra-domain. Moreover, the global data is generally a long-tailed distribution rather than assuming the global data is balanced in practical applications. To tackle the \textbf{spatio-temporal} dilemma, we propose a novel setting named \textbf{Spatio-Temporal Heterogeneity} Federated Learning (STHFL). Specially, the Global-Local Dynamic Prototype (GLDP) framework is designed for STHFL. In GLDP, the model in each client contains personalized layers which can dynamically adapt to different data distributions. For long-tailed data distribution, global prototypes are served as complementary knowledge for the training on classes with few samples in clients without leaking privacy. As tasks increase in clients, the knowledge of local prototypes generated in previous tasks guides for training in the current task to solve catastrophic forgetting. Meanwhile, the global-local prototypes are updated through the moving average method after training local prototypes in clients. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of GLDP, which achieves remarkable results compared to state-of-the-art methods in STHFL scenarios.

This paper addresses the scarcity of large-scale datasets for accurate object-in-hand pose estimation, which is crucial for robotic in-hand manipulation within the ``Perception-Planning-Control" paradigm. Specifically, we introduce VinT-6D, the first extensive multi-modal dataset integrating vision, touch, and proprioception, to enhance robotic manipulation. VinT-6D comprises 2 million VinT-Sim and 0.1 million VinT-Real splits, collected via simulations in MuJoCo and Blender and a custom-designed real-world platform. This dataset is tailored for robotic hands, offering models with whole-hand tactile perception and high-quality, well-aligned data. To the best of our knowledge, the VinT-Real is the largest considering the collection difficulties in the real-world environment so that it can bridge the gap of simulation to real compared to the previous works. Built upon VinT-6D, we present a benchmark method that shows significant improvements in performance by fusing multi-modal information. The project is available at https://VinT-6D.github.io/.

The demand for producing short-form videos for sharing on social media platforms has experienced significant growth in recent times. Despite notable advancements in the fields of video summarization and highlight detection, which can create partially usable short films from raw videos, these approaches are often domain-specific and require an in-depth understanding of real-world video content. To tackle this predicament, we propose Repurpose-10K, an extensive dataset comprising over 10,000 videos with more than 120,000 annotated clips aimed at resolving the video long-to-short task. Recognizing the inherent constraints posed by untrained human annotators, which can result in inaccurate annotations for repurposed videos, we propose a two-stage solution to obtain annotations from real-world user-generated content. Furthermore, we offer a baseline model to address this challenging task by integrating audio, visual, and caption aspects through a cross-modal fusion and alignment framework. We aspire for our work to ignite groundbreaking research in the lesser-explored realms of video repurposing., Comment: AAAI2025

Performing complex tasks in open environments remains challenging for robots, even when using large language models (LLMs) as the core planner. Many LLM-based planners are inefficient due to their large number of parameters and prone to inaccuracies because they operate in open-loop systems. We think the reason is that only applying LLMs as planners is insufficient. In this work, we propose DaDu-E, a robust closed-loop planning framework for embodied AI robots. Specifically, DaDu-E is equipped with a relatively lightweight LLM, a set of encapsulated robot skill instructions, a robust feedback system, and memory augmentation. Together, these components enable DaDu-E to (i) actively perceive and adapt to dynamic environments, (ii) optimize computational costs while maintaining high performance, and (iii) recover from execution failures using its memory and feedback mechanisms. Extensive experiments on real-world and simulated tasks show that DaDu-E achieves task success rates comparable to embodied AI robots with larger models as planners like COME-Robot, while reducing computational requirements by $6.6 \times$. Users are encouraged to explore our system at: \url{https://rlc-lab.github.io/dadu-e/}., Comment: 27 pages, 5 figures, submitted to JFR

As large-scale distributed energy resources are integrated into the active distribution networks (ADNs), effective energy management in ADNs becomes increasingly prominent compared to traditional distribution networks. Although advanced reinforcement learning (RL) methods, which alleviate the burden of complicated modelling and optimization, have greatly improved the efficiency of energy management in ADNs, safety becomes a critical concern for RL applications in real-world problems. Since the design and adjustment of penalty functions, which correspond to operational safety constraints, requires extensive domain knowledge in RL and power system operation, the emerging ADN operators call for a more flexible and customized approach to address the penalty functions so that the operational safety and efficiency can be further enhanced. Empowered with strong comprehension, reasoning, and in-context learning capabilities, large language models (LLMs) provide a promising way to assist safe RL for energy management in ADNs. In this paper, we introduce the LLM to comprehend operational safety requirements in ADNs and generate corresponding penalty functions. In addition, we propose an RL2 mechanism to refine the generated functions iteratively and adaptively through multi-round dialogues, in which the LLM agent adjusts the functions' pattern and parameters based on training and test performance of the downstream RL agent. The proposed method significantly reduces the intervention of the ADN operators. Comprehensive test results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

We consider a system of two stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with negative two-way interactions driven by Brownian motions and spectrally positive $\alpha$-stable random measures. Such a SDE system can be identified as a Lotka-Volterra type population model. We find close to sharp conditions for one of the population to go extinct or extinguishing.

Data-driven decision-making processes increasingly utilize end-to-end learnable deep neural networks to render final decisions. Sometimes, the output of the forward functions in certain layers is determined by the solutions to mathematical optimization problems, leading to the emergence of differentiable optimization layers that permit gradient back-propagation. However, real-world scenarios often involve large-scale datasets and numerous constraints, presenting significant challenges. Current methods for differentiating optimization problems typically rely on implicit differentiation, which necessitates costly computations on the Jacobian matrices, resulting in low efficiency. In this paper, we introduce BPQP, a differentiable convex optimization framework designed for efficient end-to-end learning. To enhance efficiency, we reformulate the backward pass as a simplified and decoupled quadratic programming problem by leveraging the structural properties of the KKT matrix. This reformulation enables the use of first-order optimization algorithms in calculating the backward pass gradients, allowing our framework to potentially utilize any state-of-the-art solver. As solver technologies evolve, BPQP can continuously adapt and improve its efficiency. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate that BPQP achieves a significant improvement in efficiency--typically an order of magnitude faster in overall execution time compared to other differentiable optimization layers. Our results not only highlight the efficiency gains of BPQP but also underscore its superiority over differentiable optimization layer baselines., Comment: NeurIPS 2024 Spotlight

Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) significantly undermine their reliability, motivating researchers to explore the causes of hallucination. However, most studies primarily focus on the language aspect rather than the visual. In this paper, we address how LVLMs process visual information and whether this process causes hallucination. Firstly, we use the attention lens to identify the stages at which LVLMs handle visual data, discovering that the middle layers are crucial. Moreover, we find that these layers can be further divided into two stages: "visual information enrichment" and "semantic refinement" which respectively propagate visual data to object tokens and interpret it through text. By analyzing attention patterns during the visual information enrichment stage, we find that real tokens consistently receive higher attention weights than hallucinated ones, serving as a strong indicator of hallucination. Further examination of multi-head attention maps reveals that hallucination tokens often result from heads interacting with inconsistent objects. Based on these insights, we propose a simple inference-time method that adjusts visual attention by integrating information across various heads. Extensive experiments demonstrate that this approach effectively mitigates hallucinations in mainstream LVLMs without additional training costs.

Video Large Language Models (Vid-LLMs) have made remarkable advancements in comprehending video content for QA dialogue. However, they struggle to extend this visual understanding to tasks requiring precise temporal localization, known as Video Temporal Grounding (VTG). To address this gap, we introduce Number-Prompt (NumPro), a novel method that empowers Vid-LLMs to bridge visual comprehension with temporal grounding by adding unique numerical identifiers to each video frame. Treating a video as a sequence of numbered frame images, NumPro transforms VTG into an intuitive process: flipping through manga panels in sequence. This allows Vid-LLMs to "read" event timelines, accurately linking visual content with corresponding temporal information. Our experiments demonstrate that NumPro significantly boosts VTG performance of top-tier Vid-LLMs without additional computational cost. Furthermore, fine-tuning on a NumPro-enhanced dataset defines a new state-of-the-art for VTG, surpassing previous top-performing methods by up to 6.9\% in mIoU for moment retrieval and 8.5\% in mAP for highlight detection. The code will be available at https://github.com/yongliang-wu/NumPro., Comment: v2: update appendix part

In the domain of deep learning, the challenge of protecting sensitive data while maintaining model utility is significant. Traditional Differential Privacy (DP) techniques such as Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) typically employ strategies like direct or per-sample adaptive gradient clipping. These methods, however, compromise model accuracy due to their critical influence on gradient handling, particularly neglecting the significant contribution of small gradients during later training stages. In this paper, we introduce an enhanced version of DP-SGD, named Differentially Private Per-sample Adaptive Scaling Clipping (DP-PSASC). This approach replaces traditional clipping with non-monotonous adaptive gradient scaling, which alleviates the need for intensive threshold setting and rectifies the disproportionate weighting of smaller gradients. Our contribution is twofold. First, we develop a novel gradient scaling technique that effectively assigns proper weights to gradients, particularly small ones, thus improving learning under differential privacy. Second, we integrate a momentum-based method into DP-PSASC to reduce bias from stochastic sampling, enhancing convergence rates. Our theoretical and empirical analyses confirm that DP-PSASC preserves privacy and delivers superior performance across diverse datasets, setting new standards for privacy-sensitive applications.

We investigate the construction of gradient-guided conditional diffusion models for reconstructing private images, focusing on the adversarial interplay between differential privacy noise and the denoising capabilities of diffusion models. While current gradient-based reconstruction methods struggle with high-resolution images due to computational complexity and prior knowledge requirements, we propose two novel methods that require minimal modifications to the diffusion model's generation process and eliminate the need for prior knowledge. Our approach leverages the strong image generation capabilities of diffusion models to reconstruct private images starting from randomly generated noise, even when a small amount of differentially private noise has been added to the gradients. We also conduct a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the impact of differential privacy noise on the quality of reconstructed images, revealing the relationship among noise magnitude, the architecture of attacked models, and the attacker's reconstruction capability. Additionally, extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods and the accuracy of our theoretical findings, suggesting new directions for privacy risk auditing using conditional diffusion models.

``Creative'' remains an inherently abstract concept for both humans and diffusion models. While text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models can easily generate out-of-domain concepts like ``a blue banana'', they struggle with generating combinatorial objects such as ``a creative mixture that resembles a lettuce and a mantis'', due to difficulties in understanding the semantic depth of ``creative''. Current methods rely heavily on synthesizing reference prompts or images to achieve a creative effect, typically requiring retraining for each unique creative output -- a process that is computationally intensive and limits practical applications. To address this, we introduce CreTok, which brings meta-creativity to diffusion models by redefining ``creative'' as a new token, \texttt{}, thus enhancing models' semantic understanding for combinatorial creativity. CreTok achieves such redefinition by iteratively sampling diverse text pairs from our proposed CangJie dataset to form adaptive prompts and restrictive prompts, and then optimizing the similarity between their respective text embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \texttt{} enables the universal and direct generation of combinatorial creativity across diverse concepts without additional training (4s vs. BASS's 2400s per image), achieving state-of-the-art performance with improved text-image alignment ($\uparrow$0.03 in VQAScore) and higher human preference ratings ($\uparrow$0.009 in PickScore and $\uparrow$0.169 in ImageReward). Further evaluations with GPT-4o and user studies underscore CreTok's strengths in advancing creative generation.

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized user interactions with knowledge-based systems, enabling chatbots to synthesize vast amounts of information and assist with complex, exploratory tasks. However, LLM-based chatbots often struggle to provide personalized support, particularly when users start with vague queries or lack sufficient contextual information. This paper introduces the Collaborative Assistant for Personalized Exploration (CARE), a system designed to enhance personalization in exploratory tasks by combining a multi-agent LLM framework with a structured user interface. CARE's interface consists of a Chat Panel, Solution Panel, and Needs Panel, enabling iterative query refinement and dynamic solution generation. The multi-agent framework collaborates to identify both explicit and implicit user needs, delivering tailored, actionable solutions. In a within-subject user study with 22 participants, CARE was consistently preferred over a baseline LLM chatbot, with users praising its ability to reduce cognitive load, inspire creativity, and provide more tailored solutions. Our findings highlight CARE's potential to transform LLM-based systems from passive information retrievers to proactive partners in personalized problem-solving and exploration.

Defense hardening can effectively enhance the resilience of distribution networks against extreme weather disasters. Currently, most existing hardening strategies focus on reducing load shedding. However, for electricity-hydrogen distribution networks (EHDNs), the leakage risk of hydrogen should be controlled to avoid severe incidents such as explosions. To this end, this paper proposes an optimal hardening strategy for EHDNs under extreme weather, aiming to minimize load shedding while limiting the leakage risk of hydrogen pipelines. Specifically, modified failure uncertainty models for power lines and hydrogen pipelines are developed. These models characterize not only the effect of hardening, referred to as decision-dependent uncertainties (DDUs), but also the influence of disaster intensity correlations on failure probability distributions. Subsequently, a hardening decision framework is established, based on the two-stage distributionally robust optimization incorporating a hydrogen leakage chance constraint (HLCC). To enhance the computational efficiency of HLCC under discrete DDUs, an efficient second-order-cone transformation is introduced. Moreover, to address the intractable inverse of the second-order moment under DDUs, lifted variables are adopted to refine the main-cross moments. These reformulate the hardening problem as a two-stage mixed-integer second-order-cone programming, and finally solved by the column-and-constraint generation algorithm. Case studies demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.

The growing popularity of online sports and exercise necessitates effective methods for evaluating the quality of online exercise executions. Previous action quality assessment methods, which relied on labeled scores from motion videos, exhibited slightly lower accuracy and discriminability. This limitation hindered their rapid application to newly added exercises. To address this problem, this paper presents an unlabeled Multi-Dimensional Exercise Distance Adaptive Constrained Dynamic Time Warping (MED-ACDTW) method for action quality assessment. Our approach uses an athletic version of DTW to compare features from template and test videos, eliminating the need for score labels during training. The result shows that utilizing both 2D and 3D spatial dimensions, along with multiple human body features, improves the accuracy by 2-3% compared to using either 2D or 3D pose estimation alone. Additionally, employing MED for score calculation enhances the precision of frame distance matching, which significantly boosts overall discriminability. The adaptive constraint scheme enhances the discriminability of action quality assessment by approximately 30%. Furthermore, to address the absence of a standardized perspective in sports class evaluations, we introduce a new dataset called BGym.

The distributed telescope array offers promise for conducting large-sky-area, high-frequency time domain surveys. Multiple telescopes can be deployed at each observation site, so intra-site observation task scheduling is crucial for enhancing observation efficiency and quality. Efficient use of observable time and rapid response to special situations are critical to maximize scientific discovery in time domain surveys. Besides, the competing scientific priorities, time-varying observation conditions, and capabilities of observation equipment, lead to a vast search space of the scheduling. So with the increasing number of telescopes and observation fields, balancing computational time with solution quality in observation scheduling poses a significant challenge. Informed by the seminal contributions of earlier studies on a multilevel scheduling model and global scheduler for time domain telescope array, this study is devoted to further exploring the site scheduler. Formulating the observation scheduling of multiple telescopes at the site as a cooperative decision-making problem, this paper proposes GRRIS, a real-time intra-site observation scheduling scheme for telescope array using graph and reinforcement learning. It employs a graph neural network to learn node features that can embed the spatial structure of the observation scheduling. An algorithm based on multi-agent reinforcement learning is designed to efficiently learn the optimum allocation policy of telescope agents to field nodes. Through numerical simulations with real-world scenarios, GRRIS can achieve up to a 22% solution improvement over the most competitive scheme. It offers better scalability and sub-second decision speed, meeting the needs of observation scheduling control for future distributed telescope arrays., Comment: Astronomical Journal

Hydrogen-enriched compressed natural gas (HCNG) is a promising way to utilize surplus renewable energy through hydrogen electrolysis and blending it into natural gas. However, the optimal hydrogen volume fraction (HVF) of HCNG varies following the daily fluctuations of renewable energy. Besides, facing the rapid volatility of renewable energy, ensuring rapid and reliable real-time adjustments is challenging for electricity-HCNG (E-HCNG) coupling networks. To this end, this paper proposes a flexible operation framework for electricity-HCNG (E-HCNG) networks against the fluctuations and volatility of renewable energy. Based on operations with variable HVF, the framework developed an E-HCNG system-level affine policy, which allows real-time re-dispatch of operations according to the volatility. Meanwhile, to guarantee the operational reliability of the affine policy, a distributionally robust joint chance constraint (DRJCC) is introduced, which limits the violation probability of operational constraints under the uncertainties of renewable energy volatility. Furthermore, in the solving process, to mitigate the over-conservation in DRJCC decomposition, an improved risk allocation method is proposed, utilizing the correlations among violations under the affine policy. Moreover, to tackle the non-convexities arising from the variable HVF, customized approximations for HCNG flow formulations are developed. The problem is finally reformulated into a mix-integer second-order cone programming problem. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated both in small-scale and large-scale experiments.

Open-vocabulary object detection is the task of accurately detecting objects from a candidate vocabulary list that includes both base and novel categories. Currently, numerous open-vocabulary detectors have achieved success by leveraging the impressive zero-shot capabilities of CLIP. However, we observe that CLIP models struggle to effectively handle background images (i.e. images without corresponding labels) due to their language-image learning methodology. This limitation results in suboptimal performance for open-vocabulary detectors that rely on CLIP when processing background samples. In this paper, we propose Background Information Representation for open-vocabulary Detector (BIRDet), a novel approach to address the limitations of CLIP in handling background samples. Specifically, we design Background Information Modeling (BIM) to replace the single, fixed background embedding in mainstream open-vocabulary detectors with dynamic scene information, and prompt it into image-related background representations. This method effectively enhances the ability to classify oversized regions as background. Besides, we introduce Partial Object Suppression (POS), an algorithm that utilizes the ratio of overlap area to address the issue of misclassifying partial regions as foreground. Experiments on OV-COCO and OV-LVIS benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed model is capable of achieving performance enhancements across various open-vocabulary detectors., Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, Accepted to ICONIP 2024

In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to generalize to new tasks by incorporating a few in-context examples (ICEs) directly in the input, without updating parameters. However, the effectiveness of ICL heavily relies on the selection of ICEs, and conventional text-based embedding methods are often inadequate for tasks that require multi-step reasoning, such as mathematical and logical problem solving. This is due to the bias introduced by shallow semantic similarities that fail to capture the deeper reasoning structures required for these tasks. We present GraphIC, a novel approach that leverages graph-based representations of reasoning processes, coupled with Bayesian Networks (BNs) to select ICEs. Graph structures inherently filter out shallow semantics while preserving the core reasoning structure. Importantly, BNs capture the dependency of a node's attributes on its parent nodes, closely mirroring the hierarchical nature of human cognition-where each thought is shaped by preceding ones. This makes BNs particularly well-suited for multi-step reasoning tasks, aligning the process more closely with human-like reasoning. Extensive experiments across three types of reasoning tasks (mathematical reasoning, code generation, and logical reasoning) demonstrate that GraphIC outperforms both training-free and training-based models in selecting ICEs, excelling in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency. We show that GraphIC enhances ICL's performance and interoperability, significantly advancing ICE selection for multi-step reasoning tasks.

Vulnerability fixes in open source software (OSS) usually follow the coordinated vulnerability disclosure model and are silently fixed. This delay can expose OSS users to risks as malicious parties might exploit the software before fixes are publicly known. Therefore, it is important to identify vulnerability fixes early and automatically. Existing methods classify vulnerability fixes by learning code change representations from commits, typically by concatenating code changes, which does not effectively highlight nuanced differences. Additionally, previous approaches fine-tune code embedding models and classification models separately, which limits overall effectiveness. We propose VFDelta, a lightweight yet effective framework that embeds code before and after changes using independent models with surrounding code as context. By performing element-wise subtraction on these embeddings, we capture fine-grain changes. Our architecture allows joint training of embedding and classification models, optimizing overall performance. Experiments demonstrate that VFDelta achieves up to 0.33 F1 score and 0.63 CostEffort@5, improving over state-of-the-art methods by 77.4% and 7.1%, respectively. Ablation analysis confirms the importance of our code change representation in capturing small changes. We also expanded the dataset and introduced a temporal split to simulate real-world scenarios; VFDelta significantly outperforms baselines VulFixMiner and MiDas across all metrics in this setting., Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures

In this report, we present our first-place solution to the Multiple-choice Video Question Answering (QA) track of The Second Perception Test Challenge. This competition posed a complex video understanding task, requiring models to accurately comprehend and answer questions about video content. To address this challenge, we leveraged the powerful QwenVL2 (7B) model and fine-tune it on the provided training set. Additionally, we employed model ensemble strategies and Test Time Augmentation to boost performance. Through continuous optimization, our approach achieved a Top-1 Accuracy of 0.7647 on the leaderboard.

The 23-24 April 2023 double-peak (SYM-H intensities of -179 and -233 nT) intense geomagnetic storm was caused by interplanetary magnetic field southward component Bs associated with an interplanetary fast-forward shock-preceded sheath (Bs of 25 nT), followed by a magnetic cloud (MC) (Bs of 33 nT), respectively. At the center of the MC, the plasma density exhibited an order of magnitude decrease, leading to a sub-Alfvenic solar wind interval for ~2.1 hr. Ionospheric Joule heating accounted for a significant part (~81%) of the magnetospheric energy dissipation during the storm main phase. Equal amount of Joule heating in the dayside and nightside ionosphere is consistent with the observed intense and global-scale DP2 (disturbance polar) currents during the storm main phase. The sub-Alfvenic solar wind is associated with disappearance of substorms, a sharp decrease in Joule heating dissipation, and reduction in electromagnetic ion cyclotron wave amplitude. The shock/sheath compression of the magnetosphere led to relativistic electron flux losses in the outer radiation belt between L* = 3.5 and 5.5. Relativistic electron flux enhancements were detected in the lower L* < 3.5 region during the storm main and recovery phases. Equatorial ionospheric plasma anomaly structures are found to be modulated by the prompt penetration electric fields. Around the anomaly crests, plasma density at ~470 km altitude and altitude-integrated ionospheric total electron content are found to increase by ~60% and ~80%, with ~33% and ~67% increases in their latitudinal extents compared to their quiet-time values, respectively., Comment: manuscript accepted for publication through JGR: Space Physics

Detecting vulnerabilities is vital for software security, yet deep learning-based vulnerability detectors (DLVD) face a data shortage, which limits their effectiveness. Data augmentation can potentially alleviate the data shortage, but augmenting vulnerable code is challenging and requires a generative solution that maintains vulnerability. Previous works have only focused on generating samples that contain single statements or specific types of vulnerabilities. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been used to solve various code generation and comprehension tasks with inspiring results, especially when fused with retrieval augmented generation (RAG). Therefore, we propose VulScribeR, a novel LLM-based solution that leverages carefully curated prompt templates to augment vulnerable datasets. More specifically, we explore three strategies to augment both single and multi-statement vulnerabilities, with LLMs, namely Mutation, Injection, and Extension. Our extensive evaluation across three vulnerability datasets and DLVD models, using two LLMs, show that our approach beats two SOTA methods Vulgen and VGX, and Random Oversampling (ROS) by 27.48%, 27.93%, and 15.41% in f1-score with 5K generated vulnerable samples on average, and 53.84%, 54.10%, 69.90%, and 40.93% with 15K generated vulnerable samples. Our approach demonstrates its feasibility for large-scale data augmentation by generating 1K samples at as cheap as US$ 1.88., Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables, 3 prompt templates, 1 algorithm

Artificial Intelligence (AI) significantly influences many fields, largely thanks to the vast amounts of high-quality data for machine learning models. The emphasis is now on a data-centric AI strategy, prioritizing data development over model design progress. Automating this process is crucial. In this paper, we serve as the first work to introduce the automatic data-centric development (AD^2) task and outline its core challenges, which require domain-experts-like task scheduling and implementation capability, largely unexplored by previous work. By leveraging the strong complex problem-solving capabilities of large language models (LLMs), we propose an LLM-based autonomous agent, equipped with a strategy named Collaborative Knowledge-STudying-Enhanced Evolution by Retrieval (Co-STEER), to simultaneously address all the challenges. Specifically, our proposed Co-STEER agent enriches its domain knowledge through our proposed evolving strategy and develops both its scheduling and implementation skills by accumulating and retrieving domain-specific practical experience. With an improved schedule, the capability for implementation accelerates. Simultaneously, as implementation feedback becomes more thorough, the scheduling accuracy increases. These two capabilities evolve together through practical feedback, enabling a collaborative evolution process. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our Co-STEER agent breaks new ground in AD^2 research, possesses strong evolvable schedule and implementation ability, and demonstrates the significant effectiveness of its components. Our Co-STEER paves the way for AD^2 advancements., Comment: 23 pages, 7 figures

Motivated by the recent successful application of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to solve Boltzmann-type equations [S. Jin, Z. Ma, and K. Wu, J. Sci. Comput., 94 (2023), pp. 57], we provide a rigorous error analysis for PINNs in approximating the solution of the Boltzmann equation near a global Maxwellian. The challenge arises from the nonlocal quadratic interaction term defined in the unbounded domain of velocity space. Analyzing this term on an unbounded domain requires the inclusion of a truncation function, which demands delicate analysis techniques. As a generalization of this analysis, we also provide proof of the asymptotic preserving property when using micro-macro decomposition-based neural networks.

Modeling power electronic converters at frequencies close to or above half the switching frequency has been difficult due to the time-variant and discontinuous switching actions. This paper uses the properties of moving Fourier coefficients to develop the generalized averaging method, breaking though the limit of half the switching frequency. The paper also proposes the generalized average model for various switching signals, including pulse-width modulation (PWM), phase-shift modulation, pulse-frequency modulation (PFM), and state-dependent switching signals, so that circuits and modulators/controllers can be modeled separately and combined flexibly. Using the Laplace transform of moving Fourier coefficients, the coupling of signals and their sidebands at different frequencies is clearly described as the coupling of moving Fourier coefficients at the same frequency in a linear time-invariant system framework. The modeling method is applied to a PWM controlled boost converter, a V2 constant on-time controlled buck converter, and a PFM controlled LLC converter, for demonstration and validation. Experimental results of the converters in different operating modes show that the proposed models have higher accuracy than exiting models, especially in the frequency range close to or above half the switching frequency. The developed method can be applied to almost all types of power electronic converters.

The Long-form Video Question-Answering task requires the comprehension and analysis of extended video content to respond accurately to questions by utilizing both temporal and contextual information. In this paper, we present MM-Screenplayer, an advanced video understanding system with multi-modal perception capabilities that can convert any video into textual screenplay representations. Unlike previous storytelling methods, we organize video content into scenes as the basic unit, rather than just visually continuous shots. Additionally, we developed a ``Look Back'' strategy to reassess and validate uncertain information, particularly targeting breakpoint mode. MM-Screenplayer achieved highest score in the CVPR'2024 LOng-form VidEo Understanding (LOVEU) Track 1 Challenge, with a global accuracy of 87.5% and a breakpoint accuracy of 68.8%., Comment: Highest Score Award to the CVPR'2024 LOVEU Track 1 Challenge

Data clones are defined as multiple copies of the same data among datasets. Presence of data clones between datasets can cause issues such as difficulties in managing data assets and data license violations when using datasets with clones to build AI software. However, detecting data clones is not trivial. Majority of the prior studies in this area rely on structural information to detect data clones (e.g., font size, column header). However, tabular datasets used to build AI software are typically stored without any structural information. In this paper, we propose a novel method called SimClone for data clone detection in tabular datasets without relying on structural information. SimClone method utilizes value similarities for data clone detection. We also propose a visualization approach as a part of our SimClone method to help locate the exact position of the cloned data between a dataset pair. Our results show that our SimClone outperforms the current state-of-the-art method by at least 20\% in terms of both F1-score and AUC. In addition, SimClone's visualization component helps identify the exact location of the data clone in a dataset with a Precision@10 value of 0.80 in the top 20 true positive predictions., Comment: 24 pages, 9 figures

In the context of machine unlearning, the primary challenge lies in effectively removing traces of private data from trained models while maintaining model performance and security against privacy attacks like membership inference attacks. Traditional gradient-based unlearning methods often rely on extensive historical gradients, which becomes impractical with high unlearning ratios and may reduce the effectiveness of unlearning. Addressing these limitations, we introduce Mini-Unlearning, a novel approach that capitalizes on a critical observation: unlearned parameters correlate with retrained parameters through contraction mapping. Our method, Mini-Unlearning, utilizes a minimal subset of historical gradients and leverages this contraction mapping to facilitate scalable, efficient unlearning. This lightweight, scalable method significantly enhances model accuracy and strengthens resistance to membership inference attacks. Our experiments demonstrate that Mini-Unlearning not only works under higher unlearning ratios but also outperforms existing techniques in both accuracy and security, offering a promising solution for applications requiring robust unlearning capabilities.

We derive selection rules in optical absorption and Raman scattering spectra, that can determine the parity of pairing order parameters under inversion symmetry in two classes of \emph{clean} superconductors: (i) chiral superconductors with strong spin-orbit couplings, (ii) singlet superconductors with negligible spin-orbit couplings. Experimentally, the inversion parity of pair wave functions can be determined by comparing the "optical gap" $\Delta_\text{op}$ in Raman and optical spectroscopy and the "thermodynamic gap" $2\Delta$ in specific heat measurements, and the selection rules apply when $\Delta_\text{op}>2\Delta$. We demonstrate the selection rules in superconductivity in models of (i) doped Weyl semimetals and (ii) doped graphene. Our derivation is based on the relation between pairing symmetry and fermion projective symmetry group of a superconductor. We further derive similar selection rules for two-dimensional superconductors with 2-fold rotational symmetry, and discuss how they apply to the superconducting state in magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene., Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures

As language models continue to scale, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited emerging capabilities in In-Context Learning (ICL), enabling them to solve language tasks by prefixing a few in-context demonstrations (ICDs) as context. Inspired by these advancements, researchers have extended these techniques to develop Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) with ICL capabilities. However, applying ICL usually faces two major challenges: 1) using more ICDs will largely increase the inference time and 2) the performance is sensitive to the selection of ICDs. These challenges are further exacerbated in LMMs due to the integration of multiple data types and the combinational complexity of multimodal ICDs. Recently, to address these challenges, some NLP studies introduce non-learnable In-Context Vectors (ICVs) which extract useful task information from ICDs into a single vector and then insert it into the LLM to help solve the corresponding task. However, although useful in simple NLP tasks, these non-learnable methods fail to handle complex multimodal tasks like Visual Question Answering (VQA). In this study, we propose Learnable In-Context VEctor (LIVE) to distill essential task information from demonstrations, improving ICL performance in LMMs. Experiments show that LIVE can significantly reduce computational costs while enhancing accuracy in VQA tasks compared to traditional ICL and other non-learnable ICV methods. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/ForJadeForest/LIVE-Learnable-In-Context-Vector}.

In this paper, we fully resolve two major conjectures on odd edge-colorings and odd edge-coverings of graphs, proposed by Petru{\v{s}}evski and {\v{S}}krekovski ({\it European Journal of Combinatorics,} 91:103225, 2021). The first conjecture states that for any loopless and connected graph $G$ with $\chi_{\text{odd}}'(G)=4$, there exists an edge $e$ such that $G\backslash \{e\}$ is odd $3$-edge-colorable. The second conjecture states that any simple graph $G$ with $\chi_{\text{odd}}'(G)=4$ admits an odd $3$-edge-covering in which only one edge receives two or three colors. In addition, we strongly confirm the second conjecture by demonstrating that there exists an odd $3$-edge-covering in which only one edge receives two colors., Comment: 15 pages

This work presents a compact, cumulative and coalescible probabilistic voxel mapping method to enhance performance, accuracy and memory efficiency in LiDAR odometry. Probabilistic voxel mapping requires storing past point clouds and re-iterating on them to update the uncertainty every iteration, which consumes large memory space and CPU cycles. To solve this problem, we propose a two-folded strategy. First, we introduce a compact point-free representation for probabilistic voxels and derive a cumulative update of the planar uncertainty without caching original point clouds. Our voxel structure only keeps track of a predetermined set of statistics for points that lie inside it. This method reduces the runtime complexity from $O(MN)$ to $O(N)$ and the space complexity from $O(N)$ to $O(1)$ where $M$ is the number of iterations and $N$ is the number of points. Second, to further minimize memory usage and enhance mapping accuracy, we provide a strategy to dynamically merge voxels associated with the same physical planes by taking advantage of the geometric features in the real world. Rather than scanning for these coalescible voxels constantly at every iteration, our merging strategy accumulates voxels in a locality-sensitive hash and triggers merging lazily. On-demand merging not only reduces memory footprint with minimal computational overhead but also improves localization accuracy thanks to cross-voxel denoising. Experiments exhibit 20% higher accuracy, 20% faster performance and 70% lower memory consumption than the state-of-the-art.

Multi-label image classification datasets are often partially labeled where many labels are missing, posing a significant challenge to training accurate deep classifiers. However, the powerful Mixup sample-mixing data augmentation cannot be well utilized to address this challenge, as it cannot perform linear interpolation on the unknown labels to construct augmented samples. In this paper, we propose LogicMix, a Mixup variant designed for such partially labeled datasets. LogicMix mixes the sample labels by logical OR so that the unknown labels can be correctly mixed by utilizing OR's logical equivalences, including the domination and identity laws. Unlike Mixup, which mixes exactly two samples, LogicMix can mix multiple ($\geq2$) partially labeled samples, constructing visually more confused augmented samples to regularize training. LogicMix is more general and effective than other compared Mixup variants in the experiments on various partially labeled dataset scenarios. Moreover, it is plug-and-play and only requires minimal computation, hence it can be easily inserted into existing frameworks to collaborate with other methods to improve model performance with a negligible impact on training time, as demonstrated through extensive experiments. In particular, through the collaboration of LogicMix, RandAugment, Curriculum Labeling, and Category-wise Fine-Tuning, we attain state-of-the-art performance on MS-COCO, VG-200, and Pascal VOC 2007 benchmarking datasets. The remarkable generality, effectiveness, collaboration, and simplicity suggest that LogicMix promises to be a popular and vital data augmentation method.

Text-to-image diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generating photorealistic images. However, the inclusion of sensitive information during pre-training poses significant risks. Machine Unlearning (MU) offers a promising solution to eliminate sensitive concepts from these models. Despite its potential, existing MU methods face two main challenges: 1) limited generalization, where concept erasure is effective only within the unlearned set, failing to prevent sensitive concept generation from out-of-set prompts; and 2) utility degradation, where removing target concepts significantly impacts the model's overall performance. To address these issues, we propose a novel concept domain correction framework named \textbf{DoCo} (\textbf{Do}main \textbf{Co}rrection). By aligning the output domains of sensitive and anchor concepts through adversarial training, our approach ensures comprehensive unlearning of target concepts. Additionally, we introduce a concept-preserving gradient surgery technique that mitigates conflicting gradient components, thereby preserving the model's utility while unlearning specific concepts. Extensive experiments across various instances, styles, and offensive concepts demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in unlearning targeted concepts with minimal impact on related concepts, outperforming previous approaches even for out-of-distribution prompts., Comment: AAAI 2025

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are gaining traction for their remarkable ability to process and integrate visual and textual data. Despite their popularity, the capacity of LVLMs to generate precise, fine-grained textual descriptions has not been fully explored. This study addresses this gap by focusing on \textit{distinctiveness} and \textit{fidelity}, assessing how models like Open-Flamingo, IDEFICS, and MiniGPT-4 can distinguish between similar objects and accurately describe visual features. We proposed the Textual Retrieval-Augmented Classification (TRAC) framework, which, by leveraging its generative capabilities, allows us to delve deeper into analyzing fine-grained visual description generation. This research provides valuable insights into the generation quality of LVLMs, enhancing the understanding of multimodal language models. Notably, MiniGPT-4 stands out for its better ability to generate fine-grained descriptions, outperforming the other two models in this aspect. The code is provided at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Explore_FGVDs-E277}., Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, 6 tables. For associated code, see https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Explore_FGVDs-E277

In practice, we usually need to build variable-sized models adapting for diverse resource constraints in different application scenarios, where weight initialization is an important step prior to training. The Learngene framework, introduced recently, firstly learns one compact part termed as learngene from a large well-trained model, after which learngene is expanded to initialize variable-sized models. In this paper, we start from analysing the importance of guidance for the expansion of well-trained learngene layers, inspiring the design of a simple but highly effective Learngene approach termed SWS (Stage-wise Weight Sharing), where both learngene layers and their learning process critically contribute to providing knowledge and guidance for initializing models at varying scales. Specifically, to learn learngene layers, we build an auxiliary model comprising multiple stages where the layer weights in each stage are shared, after which we train it through distillation. Subsequently, we expand these learngene layers containing stage information at their corresponding stage to initialize models of variable depths. Extensive experiments on ImageNet-1K demonstrate that SWS achieves consistent better performance compared to many models trained from scratch, while reducing around 6.6x total training costs. In some cases, SWS performs better only after 1 epoch tuning. When initializing variable-sized models adapting for different resource constraints, SWS achieves better results while reducing around 20x parameters stored to initialize these models and around 10x pre-training costs, in contrast to the pre-training and fine-tuning approach.

In federated learning, particularly in cross-device scenarios, secure aggregation has recently gained popularity as it effectively defends against inference attacks by malicious aggregators. However, secure aggregation often requires additional communication overhead and can impede the convergence rate of the global model, which is particularly challenging in wireless network environments with extremely limited bandwidth. Therefore, achieving efficient communication compression under the premise of secure aggregation presents a highly challenging and valuable problem. In this work, we propose a novel uplink communication compression method for federated learning, named FedMPQ, which is based on multi shared codebook product quantization.Specifically, we utilize updates from the previous round to generate sufficiently robust codebooks. Secure aggregation is then achieved through trusted execution environments (TEE) or a trusted third party (TTP).In contrast to previous works, our approach exhibits greater robustness in scenarios where data is not independently and identically distributed (non-IID) and there is a lack of sufficient public data. The experiments conducted on the LEAF dataset demonstrate that our proposed method achieves 99% of the baseline's final accuracy, while reducing uplink communications by 90-95%

This paper focuses on multi-agent stochastic differential games for jump-diffusion systems. On one hand, we study the multi-agent game for optimal investment in a jump-diffusion market. We derive constant Nash equilibria and provide sufficient conditions for their existence and uniqueness for exponential, power, and logarithmic utilities, respectively. On the other hand, we introduce a computational framework based on the actor-critic method in deep reinforcement learning to solve the stochastic control problem with jumps. We extend this algorithm to address the multi-agent game with jumps and utilize parallel computing to enhance computational efficiency. We present numerical examples of the Merton problem with jumps, linear quadratic regulators, and the optimal investment game under various settings to demonstrate the accuracy, efficiency, and robustness of the proposed method. In particular, neural network solutions numerically converge to the derived constant Nash equilibrium for the multi-agent game.

The progress of humanity is driven by those successful discoveries accompanied by countless failed experiments. Researchers often seek the potential research directions by reading and then verifying them through experiments. The process imposes a significant burden on researchers. In the past decade, the data-driven black-box deep learning method has demonstrated its effectiveness in a wide range of real-world scenarios, which exacerbates the experimental burden of researchers and thus renders the potential successful discoveries veiled. Therefore, automating such a research and development (R&D) process is an urgent need. In this paper, we serve as the first effort to formalize the goal by proposing a Real-world Data-centric automatic R&D Benchmark, namely RD2Bench. RD2Bench benchmarks all the operations in data-centric automatic R&D (D-CARD) as a whole to navigate future work toward our goal directly. We focus on evaluating the interaction and synergistic effects of various model capabilities and aiding in selecting well-performing trustworthy models. Although RD2Bench is very challenging to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) large language model (LLM) named GPT-4, indicating ample research opportunities and more research efforts, LLMs possess promising potential to bring more significant development to D-CARD: They are able to implement some simple methods without adopting any additional techniques. We appeal to future work to take developing techniques for tackling automatic R&D into consideration, thus bringing the opportunities of the potential revolutionary upgrade to human productivity., Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures

Image-based virtual try-on is an increasingly important task for online shopping. It aims to synthesize images of a specific person wearing a specified garment. Diffusion model-based approaches have recently become popular, as they are excellent at image synthesis tasks. However, these approaches usually employ additional image encoders and rely on the cross-attention mechanism for texture transfer from the garment to the person image, which affects the try-on's efficiency and fidelity. To address these issues, we propose an Texture-Preserving Diffusion (TPD) model for virtual try-on, which enhances the fidelity of the results and introduces no additional image encoders. Accordingly, we make contributions from two aspects. First, we propose to concatenate the masked person and reference garment images along the spatial dimension and utilize the resulting image as the input for the diffusion model's denoising UNet. This enables the original self-attention layers contained in the diffusion model to achieve efficient and accurate texture transfer. Second, we propose a novel diffusion-based method that predicts a precise inpainting mask based on the person and reference garment images, further enhancing the reliability of the try-on results. In addition, we integrate mask prediction and image synthesis into a single compact model. The experimental results show that our approach can be applied to various try-on tasks, e.g., garment-to-person and person-to-person try-ons, and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on popular VITON, VITON-HD databases., Comment: CVPR 2024

Graphs have more expressive power and are widely researched in various search demand scenarios, compared with traditional relational and XML models. Today, many graph search services have been deployed on a third-party server, which can alleviate users from the burdens of maintaining large-scale graphs and huge computation costs. Nevertheless, outsourcing graph search services to the third-party server may invade users' privacy. PeGraph was recently proposed to achieve the encrypted search over the social graph. The main idea of PeGraph is to maintain two data structures XSet and TSet motivated by the OXT technology to support encrypted conductive search. However, PeGraph still has some limitations. First, PeGraph suffers from high communication and computation costs in search operations. Second, PeGraph cannot support encrypted search over dynamic graphs. In this paper, we propose an SGX-based efficient and confidentiality-preserving graph search scheme SecGraph that can support insertion and deletion operations. We first design a new proxy-token generation method to reduce the communication cost. Then, we design an LDCF-encoded XSet based on the Logarithmic Dynamic Cuckoo Filter to reduce the computation cost. Finally, we design a new dynamic version of TSet named Twin-TSet to enable encrypted search over dynamic graphs. We have demonstrated the confidentiality preservation property of SecGraph through rigorous security analysis. Experiment results show that SecGraph yields up to 208x improvement in search time compared with PeGraph and the communication cost in PeGraph is up to 540x larger than that in SecGraph., Comment: This paper has been accepted by DASFAA 2024

We develop the frozen Gaussian approximation (FGA) for the fractional Schr\"odinger equation in the semi-classical regime, where the solution is highly oscillatory when the scaled Planck constant $\varepsilon$ is small. This method approximates the solution to the Schr\"odinger equation by an integral representation based on asymptotic analysis and provides a highly efficient computational method for high-frequency wave function evolution. In particular, we revise the standard FGA formula to address the singularities arising in the higher-order derivatives of coefficients of the associated Hamiltonian flow that are second-order continuously differentiable or smooth in conventional FGA analysis. We then establish its convergence to the true solution. Additionally, we provide some numerical examples to verify the accuracy and convergence behavior of the frozen Gaussian approximation method.

Personalized federated learning becomes a hot research topic that can learn a personalized learning model for each client. Existing personalized federated learning models prefer to aggregate similar clients with similar data distribution to improve the performance of learning models. However, similaritybased personalized federated learning methods may exacerbate the class imbalanced problem. In this paper, we propose a novel Dynamic Affinity-based Personalized Federated Learning model (DA-PFL) to alleviate the class imbalanced problem during federated learning. Specifically, we build an affinity metric from a complementary perspective to guide which clients should be aggregated. Then we design a dynamic aggregation strategy to dynamically aggregate clients based on the affinity metric in each round to reduce the class imbalanced risk. Extensive experiments show that the proposed DA-PFL model can significantly improve the accuracy of each client in three real-world datasets with state-of-the-art comparison methods.