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Semantic communication, emerging as a breakthrough beyond the classical Shannon paradigm, aims to convey the essential meaning of source data rather than merely focusing on precise yet content-agnostic bit transmission. By interconnecting diverse intelligent agents (e.g., autonomous vehicles and VR devices) via semantic communications, the semantic communication networks (SemComNet) supports semantic-oriented transmission, efficient spectrum utilization, and flexible networking among collaborative agents. Consequently, SemComNet stands out for enabling ever-increasing intelligent applications, such as autonomous driving and Metaverse. However, being built on a variety of cutting-edge technologies including AI and knowledge graphs, SemComNet introduces diverse brand-new and unexpected threats, which pose obstacles to its widespread development. Besides, due to the intrinsic characteristics of SemComNet in terms of heterogeneous components, autonomous intelligence, and large-scale structure, a series of critical challenges emerge in securing SemComNet. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of SemComNet from its fundamentals, security, and privacy aspects. Specifically, we first introduce a novel three-layer architecture of SemComNet for multi-agent interaction, which comprises the control layer, semantic transmission layer, and cognitive sensing layer. Then, we discuss its working modes and enabling technologies. Afterward, based on the layered architecture of SemComNet, we outline a taxonomy of security and privacy threats, while discussing state-of-the-art defense approaches. Finally, we present future research directions, clarifying the path toward building intelligent, robust, and green SemComNet. To our knowledge, this survey is the first to comprehensively cover the fundamentals of SemComNet, alongside a detailed analysis of its security and privacy issues.

This paper studies the directed graph clustering problem through the lens of statistics, where we formulate clustering as estimating underlying communities in the directed stochastic block model (DSBM). We conduct the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) on the DSBM and thereby ascertain the most probable community assignment given the observed graph structure. In addition to the statistical point of view, we further establish the equivalence between this MLE formulation and a novel flow optimization heuristic, which jointly considers two important directed graph statistics: edge density and edge orientation. Building on this new formulation of directed clustering, we introduce two efficient and interpretable directed clustering algorithms, a spectral clustering algorithm and a semidefinite programming based clustering algorithm. We provide a theoretical upper bound on the number of misclustered vertices of the spectral clustering algorithm using tools from matrix perturbation theory. We compare, both quantitatively and qualitatively, our proposed algorithms with existing directed clustering methods on both synthetic and real-world data, thus providing further ground to our theoretical contributions.

Recent advancements in generative AI have enabled ubiquitous access to large language models (LLMs). Empowered by their exceptional capabilities to understand and generate human-like text, these models are being increasingly integrated into our society. At the same time, there are also concerns on the potential misuse of this powerful technology, prompting defensive measures from service providers. To overcome such protection, jailbreaking prompts have recently emerged as one of the most effective mechanisms to circumvent security restrictions and elicit harmful content originally designed to be prohibited. Due to the rapid development of LLMs and their ease of access via natural languages, the frontline of jailbreak prompts is largely seen in online forums and among hobbyists. To gain a better understanding of the threat landscape of semantically meaningful jailbreak prompts, we systemized existing prompts and measured their jailbreak effectiveness empirically. Further, we conducted a user study involving 92 participants with diverse backgrounds to unveil the process of manually creating jailbreak prompts. We observed that users often succeeded in jailbreak prompts generation regardless of their expertise in LLMs. Building on the insights from the user study, we also developed a system using AI as the assistant to automate the process of jailbreak prompt generation., Comment: Accepted by USENIX Security 2024

Thermometric techniques with high accuracy, fast response speed and ease of implementation are desirable for the study of dynamic combustion environments, transient reacting flows, and non-equilibrium plasmas. Herein, single-shot single-beam coherent Raman scattering (SS-CRS) thermometry is developed, for the first time to our knowledge, by using air lasing as a probe. It's proved that the air-lasing-assisted CRS signal has a high signal-to-noise ratio enabling single-shot measurements at a 1 kHz repetition rate. The SS-CRS thermometry consistently exhibits precision better than 2% at different temperatures, but the inaccuracy grows with the increase in temperature. The high detection precision, 1 kHz acquisition rate and easy-to-implement single-beam scheme are achieved thanks to the unique temporal, spectral and spatial characteristics of air lasing. This work opens a novel avenue for high-speed CRS thermometry, holding tremendous potential for fast diagnostics of transient reacting flows and plasmas., Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures

Large language models (LLMs) extended as systems, such as ChatGPT, have begun supporting third-party applications. These LLM apps leverage the de facto natural language-based automated execution paradigm of LLMs: that is, apps and their interactions are defined in natural language, provided access to user data, and allowed to freely interact with each other and the system. These LLM app ecosystems resemble the settings of earlier computing platforms, where there was insufficient isolation between apps and the system. Because third-party apps may not be trustworthy, and exacerbated by the imprecision of the natural language interfaces, the current designs pose security and privacy risks for users. In this paper, we propose SecGPT, an architecture for LLM-based systems that aims to mitigate the security and privacy issues that arise with the execution of third-party apps. SecGPT's key idea is to isolate the execution of apps and more precisely mediate their interactions outside of their isolated environments. We evaluate SecGPT against a number of case study attacks and demonstrate that it protects against many security, privacy, and safety issues that exist in non-isolated LLM-based systems. The performance overhead incurred by SecGPT to improve security is under 0.3x for three-quarters of the tested queries. To foster follow-up research, we release SecGPT's source code at https://github.com/llm-platform-security/SecGPT.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in processing and generating human language, powered by their ability to interpret and follow instructions. However, their capabilities can be exploited through prompt injection attacks. These attacks manipulate LLM-integrated applications into producing responses aligned with the attacker's injected content, deviating from the user's actual requests. The substantial risks posed by these attacks underscore the need for a thorough understanding of the threats. Yet, research in this area faces challenges due to the lack of a unified goal for such attacks and their reliance on manually crafted prompts, complicating comprehensive assessments of prompt injection robustness. We introduce a unified framework for understanding the objectives of prompt injection attacks and present an automated gradient-based method for generating highly effective and universal prompt injection data, even in the face of defensive measures. With only five training samples (0.3% relative to the test data), our attack can achieve superior performance compared with baselines. Our findings emphasize the importance of gradient-based testing, which can avoid overestimation of robustness, especially for defense mechanisms., Comment: Pre-print, code is available at https://github.com/SheltonLiu-N/Universal-Prompt-Injection

The prevalence of 3D printing poses a significant risk to public safety, as any individual with internet access and a commodity printer is able to produce untraceable firearms, keys, counterfeit products, etc. To aid government authorities in combating these new security threats, several approaches have been taken to tag 3D-prints with identifying information. Known as fingerprints, this information is written into the object using various bit embedding techniques; examples include varying the height of the molten thermoplastic layers, and depositing metallic powder with different magnetic properties. Yet, the practicality of theses techniques in real-world forensic settings is hindered by the adversarial nature of this problem. That is, the 3D-printing process is out of reach of any law enforcement agencies; it is the adversary who controls all aspects of printing and possesses the printed object. To combat these threats, law enforcement agencies can regulate the manufacturing of 3D printers, on which they may enforce a fingerprinting scheme, and collect adversarially tampered remains (e.g., fragments of a broken 3D-printed firearm) during forensic investigation. Therefore, it is important to devise fingerprinting techniques so that the fingerprint could be extracted even if printing is carried out by the adversary. To this end, we present SIDE (Secure Information Embedding and Extraction), a fingerprinting framework that tackles the adversarial nature of forensic fingerprinting in 3D prints by offering both secure information embedding and secure information extraction.

In Multiple Object Tracking, objects often exhibit non-linear motion of acceleration and deceleration, with irregular direction changes. Tacking-by-detection (TBD) trackers with Kalman Filter motion prediction work well in pedestrian-dominant scenarios but fall short in complex situations when multiple objects perform non-linear and diverse motion simultaneously. To tackle the complex non-linear motion, we propose a real-time diffusion-based MOT approach named DiffMOT. Specifically, for the motion predictor component, we propose a novel Decoupled Diffusion-based Motion Predictor (D$^2$MP). It models the entire distribution of various motion presented by the data as a whole. It also predicts an individual object's motion conditioning on an individual's historical motion information. Furthermore, it optimizes the diffusion process with much fewer sampling steps. As a MOT tracker, the DiffMOT is real-time at 22.7FPS, and also outperforms the state-of-the-art on DanceTrack and SportsMOT datasets with $62.3\%$ and $76.2\%$ in HOTA metrics, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, DiffMOT is the first to introduce a diffusion probabilistic model into the MOT to tackle non-linear motion prediction., Comment: CVPR2024

Large Language Model (LLM) systems are inherently compositional, with individual LLM serving as the core foundation with additional layers of objects such as plugins, sandbox, and so on. Along with the great potential, there are also increasing concerns over the security of such probabilistic intelligent systems. However, existing studies on LLM security often focus on individual LLM, but without examining the ecosystem through the lens of LLM systems with other objects (e.g., Frontend, Webtool, Sandbox, and so on). In this paper, we systematically analyze the security of LLM systems, instead of focusing on the individual LLMs. To do so, we build on top of the information flow and formulate the security of LLM systems as constraints on the alignment of the information flow within LLM and between LLM and other objects. Based on this construction and the unique probabilistic nature of LLM, the attack surface of the LLM system can be decomposed into three key components: (1) multi-layer security analysis, (2) analysis of the existence of constraints, and (3) analysis of the robustness of these constraints. To ground this new attack surface, we propose a multi-layer and multi-step approach and apply it to the state-of-art LLM system, OpenAI GPT4. Our investigation exposes several security issues, not just within the LLM model itself but also in its integration with other components. We found that although the OpenAI GPT4 has designed numerous safety constraints to improve its safety features, these safety constraints are still vulnerable to attackers. To further demonstrate the real-world threats of our discovered vulnerabilities, we construct an end-to-end attack where an adversary can illicitly acquire the user's chat history, all without the need to manipulate the user's input or gain direct access to OpenAI GPT4. Our demo is in the link: https://fzwark.github.io/LLM-System-Attack-Demo/

In this paper, combining the covolume, we study the Minkowski theory for the non-compact convex set with an asymptotic boundary condition. In particular, the mixed covolume of two non-compact convex sets is introduced and its geometric interpretation is obtained by the Hadamard variational formula. The Brunn-Minkowski and Minkowski inequalities for covolume are established, and the equivalence of these two inequalities are discussed as well. The Minkowski problem for non-compact convex set is proposed and solved under the asymptotic conditions. In the end, we give a solution to the Minkowski problem for $\sigma$-finite measure on the conic domain $\Omega_C$., Comment: 20 pages

Dance serves as a powerful medium for expressing human emotions, but the lifelike generation of dance is still a considerable challenge. Recently, diffusion models have showcased remarkable generative abilities across various domains. They hold promise for human motion generation due to their adaptable many-to-many nature. Nonetheless, current diffusion-based motion generation models often create entire motion sequences directly and unidirectionally, lacking focus on the motion with local and bidirectional enhancement. When choreographing high-quality dance movements, people need to take into account not only the musical context but also the nearby music-aligned dance motions. To authentically capture human behavior, we propose a Bidirectional Autoregressive Diffusion Model (BADM) for music-to-dance generation, where a bidirectional encoder is built to enforce that the generated dance is harmonious in both the forward and backward directions. To make the generated dance motion smoother, a local information decoder is built for local motion enhancement. The proposed framework is able to generate new motions based on the input conditions and nearby motions, which foresees individual motion slices iteratively and consolidates all predictions. To further refine the synchronicity between the generated dance and the beat, the beat information is incorporated as an input to generate better music-aligned dance movements. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing unidirectional approaches on the prominent benchmark for music-to-dance generation.

We investigate the properties of the two-dimensional model with Rashba-type spin-orbit coupling cubic in electron momentum. In the normal phase, edge states emerge on open boundaries. In the superconducting phase, edge states could evolve into gapped fermionic edge states. Applications to realistic materials of interface superconductors are also discussed., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, 1 table

Learning utility, or reward, models from pairwise comparisons is a fundamental component in a number of application domains. These approaches inherently entail collecting preference information from people, with feedback often provided anonymously. Since preferences are subjective, there is no gold standard to compare against; yet, reliance of high-impact systems on preference learning creates a strong motivation for malicious actors to skew data collected in this fashion to their ends. We investigate the nature and extent of this vulnerability systematically by considering a threat model in which an attacker can flip a small subset of preference comparisons with the goal of either promoting or demoting a target outcome. First, we propose two classes of algorithmic approaches for these attacks: a principled gradient-based framework, and several variants of rank-by-distance methods. Next, we demonstrate the efficacy of best attacks in both these classes in successfully achieving malicious goals on datasets from three diverse domains: autonomous control, recommendation system, and textual prompt-response preference learning. We find that the best attacks are often highly successful, achieving in the most extreme case 100% success rate with only 0.3% of the data poisoned. However, which attack is best can vary significantly across domains, demonstrating the value of our comprehensive vulnerability analysis that involves several classes of attack algorithms. In addition, we observe that the simpler and more scalable rank-by-distance approaches are often competitive with the best, and on occasion significantly outperform gradient-based methods. Finally, we show that several state-of-the-art defenses against other classes of poisoning attacks exhibit, at best, limited efficacy in our setting.

Arm Cortex-M processors are the most widely used 32-bit microcontrollers among embedded and Internet-of-Things devices. Despite the widespread usage, there has been little effort in summarizing their hardware security features, characterizing the limitations and vulnerabilities of their hardware and software stack, and systematizing the research on securing these systems. The goals and contributions of this paper are multi-fold. First, we analyze the hardware security limitations and issues of Cortex-M systems. Second, we conducted a deep study of the software stack designed for Cortex-M and revealed its limitations, which is accompanied by an empirical analysis of 1,797 real-world firmware. Third, we categorize the reported bugs in Cortex-M software systems. Finally, we systematize the efforts that aim at securing Cortex-M systems and evaluate them in terms of the protections they offer, runtime performance, required hardware features, etc. Based on the insights, we develop a set of recommendations for the research community and MCU software developers., Comment: To Appear in the 18th USENIX WOOT Conference on Offensive Technologies, August 12-13, 2024

Coherent optics has profoundly impacted diverse applications ranging from communications, LiDAR to quantum computations. However, building coherent systems in integrated photonics previously came at great expense in hardware integration and energy efficiency: the lack of a power-efficient way to generate highly coherent light necessitates bulky lasers and amplifiers, while frequency and phase recovery schemes require huge digital signal processing resources. In this work, we demonstrate a high-coherence parallelization strategy that facilitates advanced integrated coherent systems at a minimum price. Using a self-injection locked microcomb to injection lock a distributed feedback laser array, we boost the microcomb power by a record high gain of up to 60 dB on chip with no degradation in coherence. This strategy enables tens of highly coherent channels with an intrinsic linewidth down to the 10 Hz level and power of more than 20 dBm. The overall electrical to optical wall-plug efficiency reaches 19%, comparable with that of the state-of-the-art semiconductor lasers. Driven by this parallel source, we demonstrate a silicon photonic communication link with an unprecedented data rate beyond 60 Tbit/s. Importantly, the high coherence we achieve reduces the coherent-related DSP consumption by 99.999% compared with the traditional III-V laser pump scheme. This work paves a way to realizing scalable, high-performance coherent integrated photonic systems, potentially benefiting numerous applications.

Large language models (LLMs) have undergone rapid evolution and achieved remarkable results in recent times. OpenAI's ChatGPT, backed by GPT-3.5 or GPT-4, has gained instant popularity due to its strong capability across a wide range of tasks, including natural language tasks, coding, mathematics, and engaging conversations. However, the impacts and limits of such LLMs in system security domain are less explored. In this paper, we delve into the limits of LLMs (i.e., ChatGPT) in seven software security applications including vulnerability detection/repair, debugging, debloating, decompilation, patching, root cause analysis, symbolic execution, and fuzzing. Our exploration reveals that ChatGPT not only excels at generating code, which is the conventional application of language models, but also demonstrates strong capability in understanding user-provided commands in natural languages, reasoning about control and data flows within programs, generating complex data structures, and even decompiling assembly code. Notably, GPT-4 showcases significant improvements over GPT-3.5 in most security tasks. Also, certain limitations of ChatGPT in security-related tasks are identified, such as its constrained ability to process long code contexts.

LiNiO$_2$ shows poor Li transport kinetics at the ends of charge and discharge in the first cycle, which significantly reduces its available capacity in practice. The atomistic origins of these kinetic limits have not been fully understood. Here, we examine Li transport in LiNiO$_2$ by first-principles-based kinetic Monte Carlo simulations where both long time scale and large length scale are achieved, enabling direct comparison with experiments. Our results reveal the rate-limiting steps at both ends of the voltage scan and distinguish the differences between charge and discharge at the same Li content. The asymmetric effects of excess Ni in the Li layer (Ni$_\textrm{Li}$) are also captured in our unified modelling framework. In the low voltage region, the first cycle capacity loss due to high overpotential at the end of discharge is reproduced without empirical input. While the Li concentration gradient is found responsible for the low overpotential during charge at this state of charge. Ni$_\textrm{Li}$ increases the overpotential of discharge but not charge because it only impedes Li diffusion in a particular range of Li concentration and does not change the equilibrium voltage profile. The trends from varying the amount of Ni$_\textrm{Li}$ and temperature agree with experiments. In the high voltage region, charge becomes the slower process. The bottleneck becomes moving a Li from the Li-rich phase (H2) into the Li-poor phase (H3), while the Li hopping barriers in both phases are relatively low. The roles of preexisting nucleation sites and Ni$_\textrm{Li}$ are discussed. These results provide new atomistic insights of the kinetic hindrances, paving the road to unleash the full potential of high-Ni layered oxide cathodes.

In this paper, we study a digital twin (DT)-empowered integrated sensing, communication, and computation network. Specifically, the users perform radar sensing and computation offloading on the same spectrum, while unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are deployed to provide edge computing service. We first formulate a multi-objective optimization problem to minimize the beampattern performance of multi-input multi-output (MIMO) radars and the computation offloading energy consumption simultaneously. Then, we explore the prediction capability of DT to provide intelligent offloading decision, where the DT estimation deviation is considered. To track this challenge, we reformulate the original problem as a multi-agent Markov decision process and design a multi-agent proximal policy optimization (MAPPO) framework to achieve a flexible learning policy. Furthermore, the Beta-policy and attention mechanism are used to improve the training performance. Numerical results show that the proposed method is able to balance the performance tradeoff between sensing and computation functions, while reducing the energy consumption compared with the existing studies., Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures

We investigate the resource theory for temperature estimation. We demonstrate that it is the fluctuation of heat that fundamentally determines temperature precision through the temperature-heat uncertainty relation. Specifically, we find that heat is divided into trajectory heat and correlation heat, which are associated with the heat exchange along thermometer's evolution path and the correlation between the thermometer and the sample, respectively. Based on two type of thermometers, we show that both of these heat terms are resources for enhancing temperature precision. Additionally, we demonstrate that the temperature-heat uncertainty relation is consistent with the well known temperature-energy uncertainty relation in thermodynamics. By clearly distinguishing the resources for enhancing estimation precision, our findings not only explain why various quantum features are crucial for accurate temperature sensing but also provide valuable insights for designing ultrahigh-sensitive quantum thermometers., Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure

Driven by the intelligent applications of sixth-generation (6G) mobile communication systems such as smart city and autonomous driving, which connect the physical and cyber space, the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) brings a revolutionary change to the base stations (BSs) of 6G by integrating radar sensing and communication in the same hardware and wireless resource. However, with the requirements of long-range and accurate sensing in the applications of smart city and autonomous driving, the ISAC enabled single BS still has a limitation in the sensing range and accuracy. With the networked infrastructures of mobile communication systems, multi-BS cooperative sensing is a natural choice satisfying the requirement of long-range and accurate sensing. In this article, the framework of multi-BS cooperative sensing is proposed, breaking through the limitation of single-BS sensing. The enabling technologies, including unified ISAC performance metrics, ISAC signal design and optimization, interference management, cooperative sensing algorithms, are introduced in details. The performance evaluation results are provided to verify the effectiveness of multi-BS cooperative sensing schemes. With ISAC enabled multi-BS cooperative sensing (ISAC-MCS), the intelligent infrastructures connecting physical and cyber space can be established, ushering the era of 6G promoting the intelligence of everything., Comment: 11 pages 6 figures

To accommodate Machine-type Communication (MTC) service, the wireless network needs to support low-delay and low-jitter data transmission, realizing delay deterministic wireless network. This paper analyzes the delay and jitter of the wireless network with and without spectrum sharing. When sharing the spectrum of the licensed network, the spectrum band of wireless network can be expanded, such that the delay and jitter of data transmission are reduced. The challenge of this research is to model the relation between the delay/jitter and the parameters such as node distribution, transmit power, and bandwidth, etc. To this end, this paper applies stochastic geometry and queueing theory to analyze the outage probability of the licensed network and the delay performance of the wireless network with and without spectrum sharing. By establishing the M/G/1 queueing model for the queueing of the Base Station (BS) in the wireless network, the downlink delay and jitter are derived. Monte Carlo simulation results show that the spectrum sharing reduces the delay and jitter without causing serious interference to the licensed network, which can lay a foundation for the application of spectrum sharing in delay deterministic wireless network supporting MTC service., Comment: 15 pages, 14 figures

High precision, lightweight, and real-time responsiveness are three essential requirements for implementing autonomous driving. In this study, we incorporate A-YOLOM, an adaptive, real-time, and lightweight multi-task model designed to concurrently address object detection, drivable area segmentation, and lane line segmentation tasks. Specifically, we develop an end-to-end multi-task model with a unified and streamlined segmentation structure. We introduce a learnable parameter that adaptively concatenates features between necks and backbone in segmentation tasks, using the same loss function for all segmentation tasks. This eliminates the need for customizations and enhances the model's generalization capabilities. We also introduce a segmentation head composed only of a series of convolutional layers, which reduces the number of parameters and inference time. We achieve competitive results on the BDD100k dataset, particularly in visualization outcomes. The performance results show a mAP50 of 81.1% for object detection, a mIoU of 91.0% for drivable area segmentation, and an IoU of 28.8% for lane line segmentation. Additionally, we introduce real-world scenarios to evaluate our model's performance in a real scene, which significantly outperforms competitors. This demonstrates that our model not only exhibits competitive performance but is also more flexible and faster than existing multi-task models. The source codes and pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/JiayuanWang-JW/YOLOv8-multi-task

In this paper a new optical-computational method is introduced to unveil images of targets whose visibility is severely obscured by light scattering in dense, turbid media. The targets of interest are taken to be dynamic in that their optical properties are time-varying whether stationary in space or moving. The scheme, to our knowledge the first of its kind, is human vision inspired whereby diffuse photons collected from the turbid medium are first transformed to spike trains by a dynamic vision sensor as in the retina, and image reconstruction is then performed by a neuromorphic computing approach mimicking the brain. We combine benchtop experimental data in both reflection (backscattering) and transmission geometries with support from physics-based simulations to develop a neuromorphic computational model and then apply this for image reconstruction of different MNIST characters and image sets by a dedicated deep spiking neural network algorithm. Image reconstruction is achieved under conditions of turbidity where an original image is unintelligible to the human eye or a digital video camera, yet clearly and quantifiable identifiable when using the new neuromorphic computational approach.

In this paper, we investigate resource allocation problem in the context of multiple virtual reality (VR) video flows sharing a certain link, considering specific deadline of each video frame and the impact of different frames on video quality. Firstly, we establish a queuing delay bound estimation model, enabling link node to proactively discard frames that will exceed the deadline. Secondly, we model the importance of different frames based on viewport feature of VR video and encoding method. Accordingly, the frames of each flow are sorted. Then we formulate a problem of minimizing long-term quality loss caused by frame dropping subject to per-flow quality guarantee and bandwidth constraints. Since the frequency of frame dropping and network fluctuation are not on the same time scale, we propose a two-timescale resource allocation scheme. On the long timescale, a queuing theory based resource allocation method is proposed to satisfy quality requirement, utilizing frame queuing delay bound to obtain minimum resource demand for each flow. On the short timescale, in order to quickly fine-tune allocation results to cope with the unstable network state, we propose a low-complexity heuristic algorithm, scheduling available resources based on the importance of frames in each flow. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can efficiently improve quality and fairness of VR video flows under various network conditions.

In this paper, we investigate video analytics in low-light environments, and propose an end-edge coordinated system with joint video encoding and enhancement. It adaptively transmits low-light videos from cameras and performs enhancement and inference tasks at the edge. Firstly, according to our observations, both encoding and enhancement for low-light videos have a significant impact on inference accuracy, which directly influences bandwidth and computation overhead. Secondly, due to the limitation of built-in computation resources, cameras perform encoding and transmitting frames to the edge. The edge executes neural enhancement to process low contrast, detail loss, and color distortion on low-light videos before inference. Finally, an adaptive controller is designed at the edge to select quantization parameters and scales of neural enhancement networks, aiming to improve the inference accuracy and meet the latency requirements. Extensive real-world experiments demon-strate that, the proposed system can achieve a better trade-off between communication and computation resources and optimize the inference accuracy.

To enhance on-road environmental perception for autonomous driving, accurate and real-time analytics on high-resolution video frames generated from on-board cameras be-comes crucial. In this paper, we design a lightweight object location method based on class activation mapping (CAM) to rapidly capture the region of interest (RoI) boxes that contain driving safety related objects from on-board cameras, which can not only improve the inference accuracy of vision tasks, but also reduce the amount of transmitted data. Considering the limited on-board computation resources, the RoI boxes extracted from the raw image are offloaded to the edge for further processing. Considering both the dynamics of vehicle-to-edge communications and the limited edge resources, we propose an adaptive RoI box offloading algorithm to ensure prompt and accurate inference by adjusting the down-sampling rate of each box. Extensive experimental results on four high-resolution video streams demonstrate that our approach can effectively improve the overall accuracy by up to 16% and reduce the transmission demand by up to 49%, compared with other benchmarks.

For multiple Unmanned-Aerial-Vehicles (UAVs) assisted Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) networks, we study the problem of combined computation and communication for user equipments deployed with multi-type tasks. Specifically, we consider that the MEC network encompasses both communication and computation uncertainties, where the partial channel state information and the inaccurate estimation of task complexity are only available. We introduce a robust design accounting for these uncertainties and minimize the total weighted energy consumption by jointly optimizing UAV trajectory, task partition, as well as the computation and communication resource allocation in the multi-UAV scenario. The formulated problem is challenging to solve with the coupled optimization variables and the high uncertainties. To overcome this issue, we reformulate a multi-agent Markov decision process and propose a multi-agent proximal policy optimization with Beta distribution framework to achieve a flexible learning policy. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm for the multi-UAV-assisted MEC network, which outperforms the representative benchmarks of the deep reinforcement learning and heuristic algorithms., Comment: 12 pages, 10 figures

In this paper, we propose a robust aggregation method for federated learning (FL) that can effectively tackle malicious Byzantine attacks. At each user, model parameter is firstly updated by multiple steps, which is adjustable over iterations, and then pushed to the aggregation center directly. This decreases the number of interactions between the aggregation center and users, allows each user to set training parameter in a flexible way, and reduces computation burden compared with existing works that need to combine multiple historical model parameters. At the aggregation center, geometric median is leveraged to combine the received model parameters from each user. Rigorous proof shows that zero optimality gap is achieved by our proposed method with linear convergence, as long as the fraction of Byzantine attackers is below half. Numerical results verify the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as an appealing machine learning approach to deal with massive raw data generated at multiple mobile devices, {which needs to aggregate the training model parameter of every mobile device at one base station (BS) iteratively}. For parameter aggregating in FL, over-the-air computation is a spectrum-efficient solution, which allows all mobile devices to transmit their parameter-mapped signals concurrently to a BS. Due to heterogeneous channel fading and noise, there exists difference between the BS's received signal and its desired signal, measured as the mean-squared error (MSE). To minimize the MSE, we propose to jointly optimize the signal amplification factors at the BS and the mobile devices as well as the data size (the number of data samples involved in local training) at every mobile device. The formulated problem is challenging to solve due to its non-convexity. To find the optimal solution, with some simplification on cost function and variable replacement, which still preserves equivalence, we transform the changed problem to be a bi-level problem equivalently. For the lower-level problem, optimal solution is found by enumerating every candidate solution from the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) condition. For the upper-level problem, the optimal solution is found by exploring its piecewise convexity. Numerical results show that our proposed method can greatly reduce the MSE and can help to improve the training performance of FL compared with benchmark methods.

With the support of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technology, mobile communication system will integrate the function of wireless sensing, thereby facilitating new intelligent applications such as smart city and intelligent transportation. Due to the limited sensing accuracy and sensing range of single base station (BS), multi-BS cooperative sensing can be applied to realize high-accurate, long-range and continuous sensing, exploiting the specific advantages of large-scale networked mobile communication system. This paper proposes a cooperative sensing method suitable to mobile communication systems, which applies symbol-level sensing information fusion to estimate the location and velocity of target. With the demodulation symbols obtained from the echo signals of multiple BSs, the phase features contained in the demodulation symbols are used in the fusion procedure, which realizes cooperative sensing with the synchronization level of mobile communication system. Compared with the signal-level fusion in the area of distributed aperture coherence-synthetic radars, the requirement of synchronization is much lower. When signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is -5 dB, it is evaluated that symbol-level multi-BS cooperative sensing effectively improves the accuracy of distance and velocity estimation of target. Compared with single-BS sensing, the accuracy of distance and velocity estimation is improved by 40% and 72%, respectively. Compared with data-level multi-BS cooperative sensing based on maximum likelihood (ML) estimation, the accuracy of location and velocity estimation is improved by 12% and 63%, respectively. This work may provide a guideline for the design of multi-BS cooperative sensing system to exploit the widely deployed networked mobile communication system., Comment: 15 pages, 17 figures, 2 tables

It has recently been shown that the SOiCI approach [J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 34 (2022) 224007], in conjunction with the spin-separated exact two-component relativistic Hamiltonian, can provide very accurate fine structures of systems containing heavy elements by treating electron correlation and spin-orbit coupling (SOC) on an equal footing. Nonetheless, orbital relaxations/polarizations induced by SOC are not yet fully accounted for, due to the use of scalar relativistic orbitals. This issue can be resolved by further optimizing the still real-valued orbitals self-consistently in the presence of SOC, as done in the spin-orbit coupled CASSCF approach [J. Chem. Phys. 138 (2013) 104113] but with the iCISCF algorithm [J. Chem. Theory Comput. 17 (2021) 7545] for large active spaces. The resulting SOiCISCF employs both double group and time reversal symmetries for computational efficiency and assignment of target states. The fine structures of $p$-block elements are taken as showcases to reveal the efficacy of SOiCISCF., Comment: 51 pages, 6 figures

Authentication is the first defence mechanism in many electronic systems, including Internet of Things (IoT) applications, as it is essential for other security services such as intrusion detection. As existing authentication solutions proposed for IoT environments do not provide multi-level authentication assurance, particularly for device-to-device authentication scenarios, we recently proposed the M2I (Multi-Factor Multi-Level and Interaction based Authentication) framework to facilitate multi-factor authentication of devices in device-to-device and device-to-multiDevice interactions. In this paper, we extend the framework to address group authentication. Two Many-to-One (M2O) protocols are proposed, the Hybrid Group Authentication and Key Acquisition (HGAKA) protocol and the Hybrid Group Access (HGA) protocol. The protocols use a combination of symmetric and asymmetric cryptographic primitives to facilitate multifactor group authentication. The informal analysis and formal security verification show that the protocols satisfy the desirable security requirements and are secure against authentication attacks.

We study population distributions and lasing actions of N_2^+ driven by femtosecond lasers with various wavelengths, and uncover an efficient ionic excitation mechanism induced by synchronized ionization and multiphoton resonance. Our results show that the strongest N_2^+ lasing appears around 1000 nm pump wavelength. At the optimal wavelength, the pump-energy threshold for air lasing generation is reduced by five folds compared with that required by the previous 800 nm pump laser. Simulations based on the ionization-coupling model indicate that although the Stark-assisted three-photon resonance can be satisfied within a broad pump wavelength range, the optimal pump wavelength arises when the dynamic three-photon resonance temporally synchronizes with the ionization injection. In this case, the ionic dipoles created at each half optical cycle have the same phase. The dipole phase locking promotes the continuous population transfer from ionic ground state to the excited state, giving rise to a dramatic increase of excited-state population. This work provides new insight on the photoexcitation mechanism of ions in strong laser fields, and opens up a route for optimizing ionic radiations.

As radar systems will be equipped with thousands of antenna elements and wide bandwidth, the associated costs and power consumption become exceedingly high, primarily attributed to the high-precision (e.g., 10-12 bits) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). To address this challenge, a potential solution is to adopt low-resolution quantization technology, which not only reduces data storage needs but also lowers power and hardware costs. In this context, the focus is on studying line spectral estimation and detection (LSE\&D) with few-bit ADCs, typically using 1-4 bits. This paper investigates the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) loss, establishing a framework to understand the impact of intersinusoidal interference, the bit-depth of the quantizer, and the noise variance on weak signal detection in scenarios involving multiple sinusoids under low-resolution quantization. Additionally, a low-complexity, super-resolution, and constant false alarm rate (CFAR) algorithm, named generalized Newtonized orthogonal matching pursuit (GNOMP), is proposed. Extensive numerical simulations are conducted to validate the theoretical findings, particularly in terms of the detection probability bound. The effectiveness of GNOMP is demonstrated through comparisons with state-of-the-art algorithms, the Cram\'{e}r Rao bound, and the detection probability bound. Real data acquired by mmWave radar further substantiates the effectiveness of GNOMP in practical applications.

Brain network analysis is a useful approach to studying human brain disorders because it can distinguish patients from healthy people by detecting abnormal connections. Due to the complementary information from multiple modal neuroimages, multimodal fusion technology has a lot of potential for improving prediction performance. However, effective fusion of multimodal medical images to achieve complementarity is still a challenging problem. In this paper, a novel hierarchical structural-functional connectivity fusing (HSCF) model is proposed to construct brain structural-functional connectivity matrices and predict abnormal brain connections based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI). Specifically, the prior knowledge is incorporated into the separators for disentangling each modality of information by the graph convolutional networks (GCN). And a disentangled cosine distance loss is devised to ensure the disentanglement's effectiveness. Moreover, the hierarchical representation fusion module is designed to effectively maximize the combination of relevant and effective features between modalities, which makes the generated structural-functional connectivity more robust and discriminative in the cognitive disease analysis. Results from a wide range of tests performed on the public Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database show that the proposed model performs better than competing approaches in terms of classification evaluation. In general, the proposed HSCF model is a promising model for generating brain structural-functional connectivities and identifying abnormal brain connections as cognitive disease progresses., Comment: 4 figures

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) hold great potential to support a wide range of applications due to the high maneuverability and flexibility. Compared with single UAV, UAV swarm carries out tasks efficiently in harsh environment, where the network resilience is of vital importance to UAV swarm. The network topology has a fundamental impact on the resilience of UAV network. It is discovered that scale-free network topology, as a topology that exists widely in nature, has the ability to enhance the network resilience. Besides, increasing network throughput can enhance the efficiency of information interaction, improving the network resilience. Facing these facts, this paper studies the throughput of UAV Network with scale-free topology. Introducing the hybrid network structure combining both ad hoc transmission mode and cellular transmission mode into UAV Network, the throughput of UAV Network is improved compared with that of pure ad hoc UAV network. Furthermore, this work also investigates the optimal setting of the hop threshold for the selection of ad hoc or cellular transmission mode. It is discovered that the optimal hop threshold is related with the number of UAVs and the parameters of scale-free topology. This paper may motivate the application of hybrid network structure into UAV Network., Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures

Achieving seamless global coverage is one of the ultimate goals of space-air-ground integrated network, as a part of which High Altitude Platform (HAP) network can provide wide-area coverage. However, deploying a large number of HAPs will lead to severe congestion of existing frequency bands. Spectrum sharing improves spectrum utilization. The coverage performance improvement and interference caused by spectrum sharing need to be investigated. To this end, this paper analyzes the performance of spectrum sharing between HAP network and terrestrial network. We firstly generalize the Poisson Point Process (PPP) to curves, surfaces and manifolds to model the distribution of terrestrial Base Stations (BSs) and HAPs. Then, the closed-form expressions for coverage probability of HAP network and terrestrial network are derived based on differential geometry and stochastic geometry. We verify the accuracy of closed-form expressions by Monte Carlo simulation. The results show that HAP network has less interference to terrestrial network. Low height and suitable deployment density can improve the coverage probability and transmission capacity of HAP network.