arXiv subjects

Peng Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Peng Liu.

At least 199 records · Page 11Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Instant Resonance: Dual Strategy Enhances the Data Consensus Success Rate of Blockchain Threshold Signature Oracles

With the rapid development of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Real-World Assets (RWA), the importance of blockchain oracles in real-time data acquisition has become increasingly prominent. Using cryptographic techniques, threshold signature oracles can achieve consensus on data from multiple nodes and provide corresponding proofs to ensure the credibility and security of the information. However, in real-time data acquisition, threshold signature methods face challenges such as data inconsistency and low success rates in heterogeneous environments, which limit their practical application potential. To address these issues, this paper proposes an innovative dual-strategy approach to enhance the success rate of data consensus in blockchain threshold signature oracles. Firstly, we introduce a Representative Enhanced Aggregation Strategy (REP-AG) that improves the representativeness of data submitted by nodes, ensuring consistency with data from other nodes, and thereby enhancing the usability of threshold signatures. Additionally, we present a Timing Optimization Strategy (TIM-OPT) that dynamically adjusts the timing of nodes' access to data sources to maximize consensus success rates. Experimental results indicate that REP-AG improves the aggregation success rate by approximately 56.6\% compared to the optimal baseline, while the implementation of TIM-OPT leads to an average increase of approximately 32.9\% in consensus success rates across all scenarios.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

SPF-EMPC Planner: A real-time multi-robot trajectory planner for complex environments with uncertainties

In practical applications, the unpredictable movement of obstacles and the imprecise state observation of robots introduce significant uncertainties for the swarm of robots, especially in cluster environments. However, existing methods are difficult to realize safe navigation, considering uncertainties, complex environmental structures, and robot swarms. This paper introduces an extended state model predictive control planner with a safe probability field to address the multi-robot navigation problem in complex, dynamic, and uncertain environments. Initially, the safe probability field offers an innovative approach to model the uncertainty of external dynamic obstacles, combining it with an unconstrained optimization method to generate safe trajectories for multi-robot online. Subsequently, the extended state model predictive controller can accurately track these generated trajectories while considering the robots' inherent model constraints and state uncertainty, thus ensuring the practical feasibility of the planned trajectories. Simulation experiments show a success rate four times higher than that of state-of-the-art algorithms. Physical experiments demonstrate the method's ability to operate in real-time, enabling safe navigation for multi-robot in uncertain environments.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Towards Robust Blockchain Price Oracle: A Study on Human-Centric Node Selection Strategy and Incentive Mechanism

As a trusted middleware connecting the blockchain and the real world, the blockchain oracle can obtain trusted real-time price information for financial applications such as payment and settlement, and asset valuation on the blockchain. However, the current oracle schemes face the dilemma of security and service quality in the process of node selection, and the implicit interest relationship in financial applications leads to a significant conflict of interest between the task publisher and the executor, which reduces the participation enthusiasm of both parties and system security. Therefore, this paper proposes an anonymous node selection scheme that anonymously selects nodes with high reputations to participate in tasks to ensure the security and service quality of nodes. Then, this paper also details the interest requirements and behavioral motives of all parties in the payment settlement and asset valuation scenarios. Under the hypothesis of rational man, an incentive mechanism based on the Stackelberg game is proposed. It can achieve equilibrium under the pursuit of the revenue of task publishers and executors, thereby ensuring the revenue of all types of users and improving the enthusiasm for participation. Finally, we verify the security of the proposed scheme through security analysis. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can reduce the variance of obtaining price data by about 55\% while ensuring security, and meeting the revenue of all parties.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

SEMSO: A Secure and Efficient Multi-Data Source Blockchain Oracle

In recent years, blockchain oracle, as the key link between blockchain and real-world data interaction, has greatly expanded the application scope of blockchain. In particular, the emergence of the Multi-Data Source (MDS) oracle has greatly improved the reliability of the oracle in the case of untrustworthy data sources. However, the current MDS oracle scheme requires nodes to obtain data redundantly from multiple data sources to guarantee data reliability, which greatly increases the resource overhead and response time of the system. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Secure and Efficient Multi-data Source Oracle framework (SEMSO), which nodes only need to access one data source to ensure the reliability of final data. First, we design a new off-chain data aggregation protocol TBLS, to guarantee data source diversity and reliability at low cost. Second, according to the rational man assumption, the data source selection task of nodes is modeled and solved based on the Bayesian game under incomplete information to maximize the node's revenue while improving the success rate of TBLS aggregation and system response speed. Security analysis verifies the reliability of the proposed scheme, and experiments show that under the same environmental assumptions, SEMSO takes into account data diversity while reducing the response time by 23.5\%.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

RFWave: Multi-band Rectified Flow for Audio Waveform Reconstruction

Recent advancements in generative modeling have significantly enhanced the reconstruction of audio waveforms from various representations. While diffusion models are adept at this task, they are hindered by latency issues due to their operation at the individual sample point level and the need for numerous sampling steps. In this study, we introduce RFWave, a cutting-edge multi-band Rectified Flow approach designed to reconstruct high-fidelity audio waveforms from Mel-spectrograms or discrete acoustic tokens. RFWave uniquely generates complex spectrograms and operates at the frame level, processing all subbands simultaneously to boost efficiency. Leveraging Rectified Flow, which targets a straight transport trajectory, RFWave achieves reconstruction with just 10 sampling steps. Our empirical evaluations show that RFWave not only provides outstanding reconstruction quality but also offers vastly superior computational efficiency, enabling audio generation at speeds up to 160 times faster than real-time on a GPU. An online demonstration is available at: https://rfwave-demo.github.io/rfwave/.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2024

PersonalSum: A User-Subjective Guided Personalized Summarization Dataset for Large Language Models

With the rapid advancement of Natural Language Processing in recent years, numerous studies have shown that generic summaries generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) can sometimes surpass those annotated by experts, such as journalists, according to human evaluations. However, there is limited research on whether these generic summaries meet the individual needs of ordinary people. The biggest obstacle is the lack of human-annotated datasets from the general public. Existing work on personalized summarization often relies on pseudo datasets created from generic summarization datasets or controllable tasks that focus on specific named entities or other aspects, such as the length and specificity of generated summaries, collected from hypothetical tasks without the annotators' initiative. To bridge this gap, we propose a high-quality, personalized, manually annotated abstractive summarization dataset called PersonalSum. This dataset is the first to investigate whether the focus of public readers differs from the generic summaries generated by LLMs. It includes user profiles, personalized summaries accompanied by source sentences from given articles, and machine-generated generic summaries along with their sources. We investigate several personal signals - entities/topics, plot, and structure of articles - that may affect the generation of personalized summaries using LLMs in a few-shot in-context learning scenario. Our preliminary results and analysis indicate that entities/topics are merely one of the key factors that impact the diverse preferences of users, and personalized summarization remains a significant challenge for existing LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

NLEBench+NorGLM: A Comprehensive Empirical Analysis and Benchmark Dataset for Generative Language Models in Norwegian

Norwegian, spoken by only 5 million population, is under-representative within the most impressive breakthroughs in NLP tasks. To the best of our knowledge, there has not yet been a comprehensive evaluation of the existing language models (LMs) on Norwegian generation tasks during the article writing process. To fill this gap, we 1) compiled the existing Norwegian dataset and pre-trained 4 Norwegian Open Language Models varied from parameter scales and architectures, collectively called NorGLM; 2) introduced a comprehensive benchmark, NLEBench, for evaluating natural language generation capabilities in Norwegian, encompassing translation and human annotation. Based on the investigation, we find that: 1) the mainstream, English-dominated LM GPT-3.5 has limited capability in understanding the Norwegian context; 2) the increase in model parameter scales demonstrates limited impact on the performance of downstream tasks when the pre-training dataset is constrained in size; 3) smaller models also demonstrate the reasoning capability through Chain-of-Thought; 4) a multi-task dataset that includes synergy tasks can be used to verify the generalizability of LLMs on natural language understanding and, meanwhile, test the interconnectedness of these NLP tasks. We share our resources and code for reproducibility under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

BitQ: Tailoring Block Floating Point Precision for Improved DNN Efficiency on Resource-Constrained Devices

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are powerful for cognitive tasks such as image classification, object detection, and scene segmentation. One drawback however is the significant high computational complexity and memory consumption, which makes them unfeasible to run real-time on embedded platforms because of the limited hardware resources. Block floating point (BFP) quantization is one of the representative compression approaches for reducing the memory and computational burden owing to their capability to effectively capture the broad data distribution of DNN models. Unfortunately, prior works on BFP-based quantization empirically choose the block size and the precision that preserve accuracy. In this paper, we develop a BFP-based bitwidth-aware analytical modeling framework (called ``BitQ'') for the best BFP implementation of DNN inference on embedded platforms. We formulate and resolve an optimization problem to identify the optimal BFP block size and bitwidth distribution by the trade-off of both accuracy and performance loss. Experimental results show that compared with an equal bitwidth setting, the BFP DNNs with optimized bitwidth allocation provide efficient computation, preserving accuracy on famous benchmarks. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/Cheliosoops/BitQ.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Joint Offloading and Beamforming Design in Integrating Sensing, Communication, and Computing Systems: A Distributed Approach

When applying integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) in future mobile networks, many sensing tasks have low latency requirements, preferably being implemented at terminals. However, terminals often have limited computing capabilities and energy supply. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of leveraging the advanced computing capabilities of mobile edge computing (MEC) servers and the cloud server to address the sensing tasks of ISAC terminals. Specifically, we propose a novel three-tier integrated sensing, communication, and computing (ISCC) framework composed of one cloud server, multiple MEC servers, and multiple terminals, where the terminals can optionally offload sensing data to the MEC server or the cloud server. The offload message is sent via the ISAC waveform, whose echo is used for sensing. We jointly optimize the computation offloading and beamforming strategies to minimize the average execution latency while satisfying sensing requirements. In particular, we propose a low-complexity distributed algorithm to solve the problem. Firstly, we use the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and derive the closed-form solution for offloading decision variables. Subsequently, we convert the beamforming optimization sub-problem into a weighted minimum mean-square error (WMMSE) problem and propose a fractional programming based algorithm. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed ISCC framework and distributed algorithm significantly reduce the execution latency and the energy consumption of sensing tasks at a lower computational complexity compared to existing schemes.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

How Does Naming Affect LLMs on Code Analysis Tasks?

The Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT and BERT, were proposed for natural language processing (NLP) and have shown promising results as general-purpose language models. An increasing number of industry professionals and researchers are adopting LLMs for program analysis tasks. However, one significant difference between programming languages and natural languages is that a programmer has the flexibility to assign any names to variables, methods, and functions in the program, whereas a natural language writer does not. Intuitively, the quality of naming in a program affects the performance of LLMs in program analysis tasks. This paper investigates how naming affects LLMs on code analysis tasks. Specifically, we create a set of datasets with code containing nonsense or misleading names for variables, methods, and functions, respectively. We then use well-trained models (CodeBERT) to perform code analysis tasks on these datasets. The experimental results show that naming has a significant impact on the performance of code analysis tasks based on LLMs, indicating that code representation learning based on LLMs heavily relies on well-defined names in code. Additionally, we conduct a case study on some special code analysis tasks using GPT, providing further insights.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Using LLMs to Automate Threat Intelligence Analysis Workflows in Security Operation Centers

SIEM systems are prevalent and play a critical role in a variety of analyst workflows in Security Operation Centers. However, modern SIEMs face a big challenge: they still cannot relieve analysts from the repetitive tasks involved in analyzing CTI (Cyber Threat Intelligence) reports written in natural languages. This project aims to develop an AI agent to replace the labor intensive repetitive tasks involved in analyzing CTI reports. The agent exploits the revolutionary capabilities of LLMs (e.g., GPT-4), but it does not require any human intervention.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

A hybrid LLM workflow can help identify user privilege related variables in programs of any size

Many programs involves operations and logic manipulating user privileges, which is essential for the security of an organization. Therefore, one common malicious goal of attackers is to obtain or escalate the privileges, causing privilege leakage. To protect the program and the organization against privilege leakage attacks, it is important to eliminate the vulnerabilities which can be exploited to achieve such attacks. Unfortunately, while memory vulnerabilities are less challenging to find, logic vulnerabilities are much more imminent, harmful and difficult to identify. Accordingly, many analysts choose to find user privilege related (UPR) variables first as start points to investigate the code where the UPR variables may be used to see if there exists any vulnerabilities, especially the logic ones. In this paper, we introduce a large language model (LLM) workflow that can assist analysts in identifying such UPR variables, which is considered to be a very time-consuming task. Specifically, our tool will audit all the variables in a program and output a UPR score, which is the degree of relationship (closeness) between the variable and user privileges, for each variable. The proposed approach avoids the drawbacks introduced by directly prompting a LLM to find UPR variables by focusing on leverage the LLM at statement level instead of supplying LLM with very long code snippets. Those variables with high UPR scores are essentially potential UPR variables, which should be manually investigated. Our experiments show that using a typical UPR score threshold (i.e., UPR score >0.8), the false positive rate (FPR) is only 13.49%, while UPR variable found is significantly more than that of the heuristic based method.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Diagnosing Emergent Isotropy in Anisotropic Holographic Systems using Quantum Information Measures

This study presents a comprehensive investigation of anisotropy in a holographic p-wave superconductor model, revealing novel insights into the behavior of quantum information measures in strongly coupled systems. Through rigorous semi-analytical methods, we uncover the existence of an isotropic point emerging at a critical temperature $T_{II}$, marking a significant transition in the system's anisotropic properties. We offer a systematic analysis of the mechanisms driving anisotropy and isotropy transitions, finding that this phenomenon is unique to the p-wave model and absent in other anisotropic systems like anisotropic axion models with metal-insulator transitions. We propose that the explicit component dependence of the vector field manifesting anisotropy is the key driver of the emergent isotropy. Our analysis of holographic entanglement entropy (HEE), entanglement wedge cross-section (EWCS), and butterfly velocity demonstrates their distinct sensitivities to bulk anisotropy, with EWCS and butterfly velocity emerging as superior probes for detecting the isotropic point.

hep-th↗

arXiv2024

OmChat: A Recipe to Train Multimodal Language Models with Strong Long Context and Video Understanding

We introduce OmChat, a model designed to excel in handling long contexts and video understanding tasks. OmChat's new architecture standardizes how different visual inputs are processed, making it more efficient and adaptable. It uses a dynamic vision encoding process to effectively handle images of various resolutions, capturing fine details across a range of image qualities. OmChat utilizes an active progressive multimodal pretraining strategy, which gradually increases the model's capacity for long contexts and enhances its overall abilities. By selecting high-quality data during training, OmChat learns from the most relevant and informative data points. With support for a context length of up to 512K, OmChat demonstrates promising performance in tasks involving multiple images and videos, outperforming most open-source models in these benchmarks. Additionally, OmChat proposes a prompting strategy for unifying complex multimodal inputs including single image text, multi-image text and videos, and achieving competitive performance on single-image benchmarks. To further evaluate the model's capabilities, we proposed a benchmark dataset named Temporal Visual Needle in a Haystack. This dataset assesses OmChat's ability to comprehend temporal visual details within long videos. Our analysis highlights several key factors contributing to OmChat's success: support for any-aspect high image resolution, the active progressive pretraining strategy, and high-quality supervised fine-tuning datasets. This report provides a detailed overview of OmChat's capabilities and the strategies that enhance its performance in visual understanding.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Understanding Language Modeling Paradigm Adaptations in Recommender Systems: Lessons Learned and Open Challenges

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has achieved tremendous success in the field of Natural Language Processing owing to diverse training paradigms that empower LLMs to effectively capture intricate linguistic patterns and semantic representations. In particular, the recent "pre-train, prompt and predict" training paradigm has attracted significant attention as an approach for learning generalizable models with limited labeled data. In line with this advancement, these training paradigms have recently been adapted to the recommendation domain and are seen as a promising direction in both academia and industry. This half-day tutorial aims to provide a thorough understanding of extracting and transferring knowledge from pre-trained models learned through different training paradigms to improve recommender systems from various perspectives, such as generality, sparsity, effectiveness and trustworthiness. In this tutorial, we first introduce the basic concepts and a generic architecture of the language modeling paradigm for recommendation purposes. Then, we focus on recent advancements in adapting LLM-related training strategies and optimization objectives for different recommendation tasks. After that, we will systematically introduce ethical issues in LLM-based recommender systems and discuss possible approaches to assessing and mitigating them. We will also summarize the relevant datasets, evaluation metrics, and an empirical study on the recommendation performance of training paradigms. Finally, we will conclude the tutorial with a discussion of open challenges and future directions.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Joint State and Parameter Estimation Using the Partial Errors-in-Variables Principle

This letter proposes a new method for joint state and parameter estimation in uncertain dynamical systems. We exploit the partial errors-in-variables (PEIV) principle and formulate a regression problem in the sense of weighted total least squares, where the uncertainty in the parameter prior is explicitly considered. Based thereon, the PEIV regression can be solved iteratively through the Kalman smoothing and the regularized least squares for estimating the state and the parameter, respectively. The simulations demonstrate improved accuracy of the proposed method compared to existing approaches, including the joint maximum a posterior-maximum likelihood, the expectation maximisation, and the augmented state extended Kalman smoother.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

Protecting the 'Stop Using My Data' Right through Blockchain-assisted Evidence Generation

In order to provide personalized services to users, Internet-based platforms collect and utilize user-generated behavioral data. Although the 'stop using my data' right should be a fundamental data right, which allows individuals to request their personal data to be no longer utilized by online platforms, the existing preventive data protection measures (e.g., cryptographic data elimination, differential privacy) are unfortunately not applicable. This work aims to develop the first Evidence Generation Framework for deterring post-acquisition data right violations. We formulated the 'stop using my data' problem, which captures a vantage facet of the multi-faceted notion of 'right to be forgotten'. We designed and implemented the first blockchain-assisted system to generate evidence for deterring the violations of the 'stop using my data' right. Our system employs a novel two-stage evidence generation protocol whose efficacy is ensured by a newly proposed Lemma. To validate our framework, we conducted a case study on recommendation systems with systematic evaluation experiments using two real-world datasets: the measured success rate exceeds 99%.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Image Restoration Using Deep Regulated Convolutional Networks

While the depth of convolutional neural networks has attracted substantial attention in the deep learning research, the width of these networks has recently received greater interest. The width of networks, defined as the size of the receptive fields and the density of the channels, has demonstrated crucial importance in low-level vision tasks such as image denoising and restoration. However, the limited generalization ability, due to the increased width of networks, creates a bottleneck in designing wider networks. In this paper, we propose the Deep Regulated Convolutional Network (RC-Net), a deep network composed of regulated sub-network blocks cascaded by skip-connections, to overcome this bottleneck. Specifically, the Regulated Convolution block (RC-block), featured by a combination of large and small convolution filters, balances the effectiveness of prominent feature extraction and the generalization ability of the network. RC-Nets have several compelling advantages: they embrace diversified features through large-small filter combinations, alleviate the hazy boundary and blurred details in image denoising and super-resolution problems, and stabilize the learning process. Our proposed RC-Nets outperform state-of-the-art approaches with significant performance gains in various image restoration tasks while demonstrating promising generalization ability. The code is available at https://github.com/cswin/RC-Nets.

cs.CV↗