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Peng Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Peng Liu.

At least 217 records · Page 12Linked to original sources

Zero-shot High-fidelity and Pose-controllable Character Animation

Image-to-video (I2V) generation aims to create a video sequence from a single image, which requires high temporal coherence and visual fidelity. However, existing approaches suffer from inconsistency of character appearances and poor preservation of fine details. Moreover, they require a large amount of video data for training, which can be computationally demanding. To address these limitations, we propose PoseAnimate, a novel zero-shot I2V framework for character animation. PoseAnimate contains three key components: 1) a Pose-Aware Control Module (PACM) that incorporates diverse pose signals into text embeddings, to preserve character-independent content and maintain precise alignment of actions. 2) a Dual Consistency Attention Module (DCAM) that enhances temporal consistency and retains character identity and intricate background details. 3) a Mask-Guided Decoupling Module (MGDM) that refines distinct feature perception abilities, improving animation fidelity by decoupling the character and background. We also propose a Pose Alignment Transition Algorithm (PATA) to ensure smooth action transition. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art training-based methods in terms of character consistency and detail fidelity. Moreover, it maintains a high level of temporal coherence throughout the generated animations.

cs.CV↗

Preference Optimization for Molecule Synthesis with Conditional Residual Energy-based Models

Molecule synthesis through machine learning is one of the fundamental problems in drug discovery. Current data-driven strategies employ one-step retrosynthesis models and search algorithms to predict synthetic routes in a top-bottom manner. Despite their effective performance, these strategies face limitations in the molecule synthetic route generation due to a greedy selection of the next molecule set without any lookahead. Furthermore, existing strategies cannot control the generation of synthetic routes based on possible criteria such as material costs, yields, and step count. In this work, we propose a general and principled framework via conditional residual energy-based models (EBMs), that focus on the quality of the entire synthetic route based on the specific criteria. By incorporating an additional energy-based function into our probabilistic model, our proposed algorithm can enhance the quality of the most probable synthetic routes (with higher probabilities) generated by various strategies in a plug-and-play fashion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework can consistently boost performance across various strategies and outperforms previous state-of-the-art top-1 accuracy by a margin of 2.5%. Code is available at https://github.com/SongtaoLiu0823/CREBM.

cs.LG↗

A Study of the Latest Updates of the Readout System for the Hybird-Pixel Detector at HEPS

The High Energy Photon Source (HEPS) represents a fourth-generation light source. This facility has made unprecedented advancements in accelerator technology, necessitating the development of new detectors to satisfy physical requirements such as single-photon resolution, large dynamic range, and high frame rates. Since 2016, the Institute of High Energy Physics has introduced the first user-experimental hybrid pixel detector, progressing to the fourth-generation million-pixel detector designed for challenging conditions, with the dual-threshold single-photon detector HEPS-Beijing PIXel (HEPS-BPIX) set as the next-generation target. HEPS-BPIX will employ the entirely new Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) BP40 for pixel information readout. Data flow will be managed and controlled through readout electronics based on a two-tier Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) system: the Front-End Electronics (FEE) and the Input-Output Board (IOB) handle the fan-out for 12 ASICs, and the u4FCP is tasked with processing serial data on high-speed links, transferring pixel-level data to the back-end RTM and uTCA chassis, or independently outputting through a network port, enabling remote control of the entire detector. The new HEPS-BPIX firmware has undergone a comprehensive redesign and update to meet the electronic characteristics of the new chip and to improve the overall performance of the detector. We provide an overview of the core subunits of HEPS-BPIX, emphasizing the readout system, evaluating the new hardware and firmware, and highlighting some of its innovative features and characteristics.

physics.ins-det↗

PentestGPT: An LLM-empowered Automatic Penetration Testing Tool

Penetration testing, a crucial industrial practice for ensuring system security, has traditionally resisted automation due to the extensive expertise required by human professionals. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant advancements in various domains, and their emergent abilities suggest their potential to revolutionize industries. In this research, we evaluate the performance of LLMs on real-world penetration testing tasks using a robust benchmark created from test machines with platforms. Our findings reveal that while LLMs demonstrate proficiency in specific sub-tasks within the penetration testing process, such as using testing tools, interpreting outputs, and proposing subsequent actions, they also encounter difficulties maintaining an integrated understanding of the overall testing scenario. In response to these insights, we introduce PentestGPT, an LLM-empowered automatic penetration testing tool that leverages the abundant domain knowledge inherent in LLMs. PentestGPT is meticulously designed with three self-interacting modules, each addressing individual sub-tasks of penetration testing, to mitigate the challenges related to context loss. Our evaluation shows that PentestGPT not only outperforms LLMs with a task-completion increase of 228.6\% compared to the \gptthree model among the benchmark targets but also proves effective in tackling real-world penetration testing challenges. Having been open-sourced on GitHub, PentestGPT has garnered over 4,700 stars and fostered active community engagement, attesting to its value and impact in both the academic and industrial spheres.

cs.SE↗

GANcrop: A Contrastive Defense Against Backdoor Attacks in Federated Learning

With heightened awareness of data privacy protection, Federated Learning (FL) has attracted widespread attention as a privacy-preserving distributed machine learning method. However, the distributed nature of federated learning also provides opportunities for backdoor attacks, where attackers can guide the model to produce incorrect predictions without affecting the global model training process. This paper introduces a novel defense mechanism against backdoor attacks in federated learning, named GANcrop. This approach leverages contrastive learning to deeply explore the disparities between malicious and benign models for attack identification, followed by the utilization of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to recover backdoor triggers and implement targeted mitigation strategies. Experimental findings demonstrate that GANcrop effectively safeguards against backdoor attacks, particularly in non-IID scenarios, while maintaining satisfactory model accuracy, showcasing its remarkable defensive efficacy and practical utility.

cs.CR↗

Game Theory in Distributed Systems Security: Foundations, Challenges, and Future Directions

Many of our critical infrastructure systems and personal computing systems have a distributed computing systems structure. The incentives to attack them have been growing rapidly as has their attack surface due to increasing levels of connectedness. Therefore, we feel it is time to bring in rigorous reasoning to secure such systems. The distributed system security and the game theory technical communities can come together to effectively address this challenge. In this article, we lay out the foundations from each that we can build upon to achieve our goals. Next, we describe a set of research challenges for the community, organized into three categories -- analytical, systems, and integration challenges, each with "short term" time horizon (2-3 years) and "long term" (5-10 years) items. This article was conceived of through a community discussion at the 2022 NSF SaTC PI meeting.

cs.CR↗

Identifying Non-Control Security-Critical Data through Program Dependence Learning

As control-flow protection gets widely deployed, it is difficult for attackers to corrupt control-data and achieve control-flow hijacking. Instead, data-oriented attacks, which manipulate non-control data, have been demonstrated to be feasible and powerful. In data-oriented attacks, a fundamental step is to identify non-control, security-critical data. However, critical data identification processes are not scalable in previous works, because they mainly rely on tedious human efforts to identify critical data. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach that combines traditional program analysis with deep learning. At a higher level, by examining how analysts identify critical data, we first propose dynamic analysis algorithms to identify the program semantics (and features) that are correlated with the impact of a critical data. Then, motivated by the unique challenges in the critical data identification task, we formalize the distinguishing features and use customized program dependence graphs (PDG) to embed the features. Different from previous works using deep learning to learn basic program semantics, this paper adopts a special neural network architecture that can capture the long dependency paths (in the PDG), through which a critical variable propagates its impact. We have implemented a fully-automatic toolchain and conducted comprehensive evaluations. According to the evaluations, our model can achieve 90% accuracy. The toolchain uncovers 80 potential critical variables in Google FuzzBench. In addition, we demonstrate the harmfulness of the exploits using the identified critical variables by simulating 7 data-oriented attacks through GDB.

cs.CR↗

Hidden You Malicious Goal Into Benign Narratives: Jailbreak Large Language Models through Logic Chain Injection

Jailbreak attacks on Language Model Models (LLMs) entail crafting prompts aimed at exploiting the models to generate malicious content. Existing jailbreak attacks can successfully deceive the LLMs, however they cannot deceive the human. This paper proposes a new type of jailbreak attacks which can deceive both the LLMs and human (i.e., security analyst). The key insight of our idea is borrowed from the social psychology - that is human are easily deceived if the lie is hidden in truth. Based on this insight, we proposed the logic-chain injection attacks to inject malicious intention into benign truth. Logic-chain injection attack firstly dissembles its malicious target into a chain of benign narrations, and then distribute narrations into a related benign article, with undoubted facts. In this way, newly generate prompt cannot only deceive the LLMs, but also deceive human.

cs.CR↗

LoopAnimate: Loopable Salient Object Animation

Research on diffusion model-based video generation has advanced rapidly. However, limitations in object fidelity and generation length hinder its practical applications. Additionally, specific domains like animated wallpapers require seamless looping, where the first and last frames of the video match seamlessly. To address these challenges, this paper proposes LoopAnimate, a novel method for generating videos with consistent start and end frames. To enhance object fidelity, we introduce a framework that decouples multi-level image appearance and textual semantic information. Building upon an image-to-image diffusion model, our approach incorporates both pixel-level and feature-level information from the input image, injecting image appearance and textual semantic embeddings at different positions of the diffusion model. Existing UNet-based video generation models require to input the entire videos during training to encode temporal and positional information at once. However, due to limitations in GPU memory, the number of frames is typically restricted to 16. To address this, this paper proposes a three-stage training strategy with progressively increasing frame numbers and reducing fine-tuning modules. Additionally, we introduce the Temporal E nhanced Motion Module(TEMM) to extend the capacity for encoding temporal and positional information up to 36 frames. The proposed LoopAnimate, which for the first time extends the single-pass generation length of UNet-based video generation models to 35 frames while maintaining high-quality video generation. Experiments demonstrate that LoopAnimate achieves state-of-the-art performance in both objective metrics, such as fidelity and temporal consistency, and subjective evaluation results.

cs.CV↗

Factor risk measures

This paper introduces and studies factor risk measures. While risk measures only rely on the distribution of a loss random variable, in many cases risk needs to be measured relative to some major factors. In this paper, we introduce a double-argument mapping as a risk measure to assess the risk relative to a vector of factors, called factor risk measure. The factor risk measure only depends on the joint distribution of the risk and the factors. A set of natural axioms are discussed, and particularly distortion, quantile, linear and coherent factor risk measures are introduced and characterized. Moreover, we introduce a large set of concrete factor risk measures and many of them are new to the literature, which are interpreted in the context of regulatory capital requirement. Finally, the distortion factor risk measures are applied in the risk-sharing problem and some numerical examples are presented to show the difference between the Value-at-Risk and the quantile factor risk measures.

q-fin.MF↗

AUEditNet: Dual-Branch Facial Action Unit Intensity Manipulation with Implicit Disentanglement

Facial action unit (AU) intensity plays a pivotal role in quantifying fine-grained expression behaviors, which is an effective condition for facial expression manipulation. However, publicly available datasets containing intensity annotations for multiple AUs remain severely limited, often featuring a restricted number of subjects. This limitation places challenges to the AU intensity manipulation in images due to disentanglement issues, leading researchers to resort to other large datasets with pretrained AU intensity estimators for pseudo labels. In addressing this constraint and fully leveraging manual annotations of AU intensities for precise manipulation, we introduce AUEditNet. Our proposed model achieves impressive intensity manipulation across 12 AUs, trained effectively with only 18 subjects. Utilizing a dual-branch architecture, our approach achieves comprehensive disentanglement of facial attributes and identity without necessitating additional loss functions or implementing with large batch sizes. This approach offers a potential solution to achieve desired facial attribute editing despite the dataset's limited subject count. Our experiments demonstrate AUEditNet's superior accuracy in editing AU intensities, affirming its capability in disentangling facial attributes and identity within a limited subject pool. AUEditNet allows conditioning by either intensity values or target images, eliminating the need for constructing AU combinations for specific facial expression synthesis. Moreover, AU intensity estimation, as a downstream task, validates the consistency between real and edited images, confirming the effectiveness of our proposed AU intensity manipulation method.

cs.CV↗

Probing Berry phase effect in topological surface states

We have observed the Berry phase effect associated with interband coherence in topological surface states (TSSs) using two-color high-harmonic spectroscopy. This Berry phase accumulates along the evolution path of strong field-driven election-hole quasiparticles in electronic bands with strong spin-orbit coupling. By introducing a secondary weak field, we perturb the evolution of Dirac fermions in TSSs and thus provide access to the Berry phase. We observe a significant shift in the oscillation phase of the even-order harmonics from the spectral interferogram. We reveal that such a modulation feature is linked to the geometric phase acquired in the nonperturbative dynamics of TSSs. Furthermore, we show that the overwhelming Berry phase effect can significantly deform the quantum paths of electron-hole pairs, thus enhancing the ability to harness electron spin using lightwaves in quantum materials with strong spin-orbit interactions.

physics.optics↗

Modern Statistical Models and Methods for Estimating Fatigue-Life and Fatigue-Strength Distributions from Experimental Data

Engineers and scientists have been collecting and analyzing fatigue data since the 1800s to ensure the reliability of life-critical structures. Applications include (but are not limited to) bridges, building structures, aircraft and spacecraft components, ships, ground-based vehicles, and medical devices. Engineers need to estimate S-N relationships (Stress or Strain versus Number of cycles to failure), typically with a focus on estimating small quantiles of the fatigue-life distribution. Estimates from this kind of model are used as input to models (e.g., cumulative damage models) that predict failure-time distributions under varying stress patterns. Also, design engineers need to estimate lower-tail quantiles of the closely related fatigue-strength distribution. The history of applying incorrect statistical methods is nearly as long and such practices continue to the present. Examples include treating the applied stress (or strain) as the response and the number of cycles to failure as the explanatory variable in regression analyses (because of the need to estimate strength distributions) and ignoring or otherwise mishandling censored observations (known as runouts in the fatigue literature). The first part of the paper reviews the traditional modeling approach where a fatigue-life model is specified. We then show how this specification induces a corresponding fatigue-strength model. The second part of the paper presents a novel alternative modeling approach where a fatigue-strength model is specified and a corresponding fatigue-life model is induced. We explain and illustrate the important advantages of this new modeling approach.

stat.ME↗

Variational Dynamic for Self-Supervised Exploration in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks where extrinsic rewards from environments are sparse or even totally disregarded. Significant advances based on intrinsic motivation show promising results in simple environments but often get stuck in environments with multimodal and stochastic dynamics. In this work, we propose a variational dynamic model based on the conditional variational inference to model the multimodality and stochasticity. We consider the environmental state-action transition as a conditional generative process by generating the next-state prediction under the condition of the current state, action, and latent variable, which provides a better understanding of the dynamics and leads a better performance in exploration. We derive an upper bound of the negative log-likelihood of the environmental transition and use such an upper bound as the intrinsic reward for exploration, which allows the agent to learn skills by self-supervised exploration without observing extrinsic rewards. We evaluate the proposed method on several image-based simulation tasks and a real robotic manipulating task. Our method outperforms several state-of-the-art environment model-based exploration approaches.

cs.LG↗

A duality between utility transforms and probability distortions

In this paper, we establish a mathematical duality between utility transforms and probability distortions. These transforms play a central role in decision under risk by forming the foundation for the classic theories of expected utility, dual utility, and rank-dependent utility. Our main results establish that probability distortions are characterized by commutation with utility transforms, and utility transforms are characterized by commutation with probability distortions. These results require no additional conditions, and hence each class can be axiomatized with only one property. Moreover, under monotonicity, rank-dependent utility transforms can be characterized by set commutation with either utility transforms or probability distortions.

econ.TH↗

On Equivalence of Likelihood-Based Confidence Bands for Fatigue-Life and Fatigue-Strength Distributions

Fatigue data arise in many research and applied areas and there have been statistical methods developed to model and analyze such data. The distributions of fatigue life and fatigue strength are often of interest to engineers designing products that might fail due to fatigue from cyclic-stress loading. Based on a specified statistical model and the maximum likelihood method, the cumulative distribution function (cdf) and quantile function (qf) can be estimated for the fatigue-life and fatigue-strength distributions. Likelihood-based confidence bands then can be obtained for the cdf and qf. This paper provides equivalence results for confidence bands for fatigue-life and fatigue-strength models. These results are useful for data analysis and computing implementation. We show (a) the equivalence of the confidence bands for the fatigue-life cdf and the fatigue-life qf, (b) the equivalence of confidence bands for the fatigue-strength cdf and the fatigue-strength qf, and (c) the equivalence of confidence bands for the fatigue-life qf and the fatigue-strength qf. Then we illustrate the usefulness of those equivalence results with two examples using experimental fatigue data.

stat.ME↗

Robust Numerical Methods for Nonlinear Regression

Many scientific and engineering applications require fitting regression models that are nonlinear in the parameters. Advances in computer hardware and software in recent decades have made it easier to fit such models. Relative to fitting regression models that are linear in the parameters, however, fitting nonlinear regression models is more complicated. In particular, software like the $\texttt{nls}$ R function requires care in how the model is parameterized and how initial values are chosen for the maximum likelihood iterations. Often special diagnostics are needed to detect and suggest approaches for dealing with identifiability problems that can arise with such model fitting. When using Bayesian inference, there is the added complication of having to specify (often noninformative or weakly informative) prior distributions. Generally, the details for these tasks must be determined for each new nonlinear regression model. This paper provides a step-by-step procedure for specifying these details for any appropriate nonlinear regression model. Following the procedure will result in a numerically robust algorithm for fitting the nonlinear regression model. We illustrate the methods with three different nonlinear models that are used in the analysis of experimental fatigue data and we include two detailed numerical examples.

stat.ME↗

DeepCRE: Transforming Drug R&D via AI-Driven Cross-drug Response Evaluation

The fields of therapeutic application and drug research and development (R&D) both face substantial challenges, i.e., the therapeutic domain calls for more treatment alternatives, while numerous promising pre-clinical drugs have failed in clinical trials. One of the reasons is the inadequacy of Cross-drug Response Evaluation (CRE) during the late stages of drug R&D. Although in-silico CRE models bring a promising solution, existing methodologies are restricted to early stages of drug R&D, such as target and cell-line levels, offering limited improvement to clinical success rates. Herein, we introduce DeepCRE, a pioneering AI model designed to predict CRE effectively in the late stages of drug R&D. DeepCRE outperforms the existing best models by achieving an average performance improvement of 17.7% in patient-level CRE, and a 5-fold increase in indication-level CRE, facilitating more accurate personalized treatment predictions and better pharmaceutical value assessment for indications, respectively. Furthermore, DeepCRE has identified a set of six drug candidates that show significantly greater effectiveness than a comparator set of two approved drugs in 5/8 colorectal cancer organoids. This demonstrates the capability of DeepCRE to systematically uncover a spectrum of drug candidates with enhanced therapeutic effects, highlighting its potential to transform drug R&D.

cs.AI↗