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Published work

40 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

ARA: Agentic Reproducibility Assessment For Scalable Support Of Scientific Peer-Review

Scientific peer review increasingly struggles to assess reproducibility at the scale and complexity of modern research output. Evaluating reproducibility requires reconstructing experimental dependencies, methodological choices, data flows, and result-generating procedures, which often exceeds what human reviewers can provide. Agentic Reproducibility Assessment (ARA) formalizes reproducibility assessment as a structured reasoning task over scientific documents. Given a paper, ARA extracts a directed workflow graph linking sources, methods, experiments, and outputs, then evaluates its reconstructability using structural and content-based scores for reproducibility assessments. Experiments on 213 ReScience C articles - the largest cross-domain benchmark of human-validated computational reproducibility studies considered to date - demonstrate ARA's generalizability and consistent workflow reconstruction and assessment across LLMs, model temperatures, and scientific domains. ARA achieves ~61% accuracy on three benchmarks, and the highest accuracy reported on ReproBench (60.71% vs. 36.84%) and GoldStandardDB (61.68% vs. 43.56%), highlighting its potential to complement human review at scale and enabling next-generation peer review. Code and Data available: https://github.com/AndresLaverdeMarin/agentic_reproducibility_assessment.

preprint2023arXiv

Exceptional entanglement phenomena: non-Hermiticity meeting non-classicality

Non-Hermitian (NH) extension of quantum-mechanical Hamiltonians represents one of the most significant advancements in physics. During the past two decades, numerous captivating NH phenomena have been revealed and demonstrated, but all of which can appear in both quantum and classical systems. This leads to the fundamental question: what NH signature presents a radical departure from classical physics? The solution of this problem is indispensable for exploring genuine NH quantum mechanics, but remains experimentally untouched so far. Here, we resolve this basic issue by unveiling distinct exceptional entanglement phenomena, exemplified by an entanglement transition, occurring at the exceptional point of NH interacting quantum systems. We illustrate and demonstrate such purely quantum-mechanical NH effects with a naturally dissipative light-matter system, engineered in a circuit quantum electrodynamics architecture. Our results lay the foundation for studies of genuinely quantum-mechanical NH physics, signified by exceptional-point-enabled entanglement behaviors.

preprint2022arXiv

A Cooperative-Competitive Multi-Agent Framework for Auto-bidding in Online Advertising

In online advertising, auto-bidding has become an essential tool for advertisers to optimize their preferred ad performance metrics by simply expressing high-level campaign objectives and constraints. Previous works designed auto-bidding tools from the view of single-agent, without modeling the mutual influence between agents. In this paper, we instead consider this problem from a distributed multi-agent perspective, and propose a general $\underline{M}$ulti-$\underline{A}$gent reinforcement learning framework for $\underline{A}$uto-$\underline{B}$idding, namely MAAB, to learn the auto-bidding strategies. First, we investigate the competition and cooperation relation among auto-bidding agents, and propose a temperature-regularized credit assignment to establish a mixed cooperative-competitive paradigm. By carefully making a competition and cooperation trade-off among agents, we can reach an equilibrium state that guarantees not only individual advertiser's utility but also the system performance (i.e., social welfare). Second, to avoid the potential collusion behaviors of bidding low prices underlying the cooperation, we further propose bar agents to set a personalized bidding bar for each agent, and then alleviate the revenue degradation due to the cooperation. Third, to deploy MAAB in the large-scale advertising system with millions of advertisers, we propose a mean-field approach. By grouping advertisers with the same objective as a mean auto-bidding agent, the interactions among the large-scale advertisers are greatly simplified, making it practical to train MAAB efficiently. Extensive experiments on the offline industrial dataset and Alibaba advertising platform demonstrate that our approach outperforms several baseline methods in terms of social welfare and revenue.

preprint2022arXiv

Ambiguity Tube MPC

This paper is about a class of distributionally robust model predictive controllers (MPC) for nonlinear stochastic processes that evaluate risk and control performance measures by propagating ambiguity sets in the space of state probability measures. A framework for formulating such ambiguity tube MPC controllers is presented, which is based on modern measure-theoretic methods from the field of optimal transport theory. Moreover, a supermartingale based analysis technique is proposed, leading to stochastic stability results for a large class of distributionally robust controllers for linear and nonlinear systems. In this context, we also discuss how to construct terminal cost functions for stochastic and distributionally robust MPC that ensure closed-loop stability and asymptotic convergence to robust invariant sets. The corresponding theoretical developments are illustrated by tutorial-style examples and a numerical case study.

preprint2022arXiv

Angular topological superfluid and topological vortex in an ultracold Fermi gas

We show that pairing in an ultracold Fermi gas under spin-orbital-angular-momentum coupling (SOAMC) can acquire topological characters encoded in the quantized angular degrees of freedom. The resulting topological superfluid is the angular analog of its counterpart in a one-dimensional Fermi gas with spin-orbit coupling, but characterized by a Zak phase defined in the angular-momentum space. Upon tuning the SOAMC parameters, a topological phase transition occurs, which is accompanied by the closing of the quasiparticle excitation gap. Remarkably, a topological vortex state can also be stabilized by deforming the Fermi surface, which is topologically non-trivial in both the coordinate and angular-momentum space, offering interesting potentials for applications in quantum information and quantum control. We discuss how the topological phase transition and the exotic vortex state can be detected experimentally.

preprint2022arXiv

BSA -- Bi-Stiffness Actuation for optimally exploiting intrinsic compliance and inertial coupling effects in elastic joint robots

Compliance in actuation has been exploited to generate highly dynamic maneuvers such as throwing that take advantage of the potential energy stored in joint springs. However, the energy storage and release could not be well-timed yet. On the contrary, for multi-link systems, the natural system dynamics might even work against the actual goal. With the introduction of variable stiffness actuators, this problem has been partially addressed. With a suitable optimal control strategy, the approximate decoupling of the motor from the link can be achieved to maximize the energy transfer into the distal link prior to launch. However, such continuous stiffness variation is complex and typically leads to oscillatory swing-up motions instead of clear launch sequences. To circumvent this issue, we investigate decoupling for speed maximization with a dedicated novel actuator concept denoted Bi-Stiffness Actuation. With this, it is possible to fully decouple the link from the joint mechanism by a switch-and-hold clutch and simultaneously keep the elastic energy stored. We show that with this novel paradigm, it is not only possible to reach the same optimal performance as with power-equivalent variable stiffness actuation, but even directly control the energy transfer timing. This is a major step forward compared to previous optimal control approaches, which rely on optimizing the full time-series control input.

preprint2022arXiv

Clone Detection on Large Scala Codebases

Code clones are identical or similar code segments. The wide existence of code clones can increase the cost of maintenance and jeopardise the quality of software. The research community has developed many techniques to detect code clones, however, there is little evidence of how these techniques may perform in industrial use cases. In this paper, we aim to uncover the differences when such techniques are applied in industrial use cases. We conducted large scale experimental research on the performance of two state-of-the-art code clone detection techniques, SourcererCC and AutoenCODE, on both open source projects and an industrial project written in the Scala language. Our results reveal that both algorithms perform differently on the industrial project, with the largest drop in precision being 30.7\%, and the largest increase in recall being 32.4\%. By manually labelling samples of the industrial project by its developers, we discovered that there are substantially less Type-3 clones in the aforementioned project than that in the open source projects.

preprint2022arXiv

COPA: Certifying Robust Policies for Offline Reinforcement Learning against Poisoning Attacks

As reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved near human-level performance in a variety of tasks, its robustness has raised great attention. While a vast body of research has explored test-time (evasion) attacks in RL and corresponding defenses, its robustness against training-time (poisoning) attacks remains largely unanswered. In this work, we focus on certifying the robustness of offline RL in the presence of poisoning attacks, where a subset of training trajectories could be arbitrarily manipulated. We propose the first certification framework, COPA, to certify the number of poisoning trajectories that can be tolerated regarding different certification criteria. Given the complex structure of RL, we propose two certification criteria: per-state action stability and cumulative reward bound. To further improve the certification, we propose new partition and aggregation protocols to train robust policies. We further prove that some of the proposed certification methods are theoretically tight and some are NP-Complete problems. We leverage COPA to certify three RL environments trained with different algorithms and conclude: (1) The proposed robust aggregation protocols such as temporal aggregation can significantly improve the certifications; (2) Our certification for both per-state action stability and cumulative reward bound are efficient and tight; (3) The certification for different training algorithms and environments are different, implying their intrinsic robustness properties. All experimental results are available at https://copa-leaderboard.github.io.

preprint2022arXiv

CROP: Certifying Robust Policies for Reinforcement Learning through Functional Smoothing

As reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved great success and been even adopted in safety-critical domains such as autonomous vehicles, a range of empirical studies have been conducted to improve its robustness against adversarial attacks. However, how to certify its robustness with theoretical guarantees still remains challenging. In this paper, we present the first unified framework CROP (Certifying Robust Policies for RL) to provide robustness certification on both action and reward levels. In particular, we propose two robustness certification criteria: robustness of per-state actions and lower bound of cumulative rewards. We then develop a local smoothing algorithm for policies derived from Q-functions to guarantee the robustness of actions taken along the trajectory; we also develop a global smoothing algorithm for certifying the lower bound of a finite-horizon cumulative reward, as well as a novel local smoothing algorithm to perform adaptive search in order to obtain tighter reward certification. Empirically, we apply CROP to evaluate several existing empirically robust RL algorithms, including adversarial training and different robust regularization, in four environments (two representative Atari games, Highway, and CartPole). Furthermore, by evaluating these algorithms against adversarial attacks, we demonstrate that our certification are often tight. All experiment results are available at website https://crop-leaderboard.github.io.

preprint2022arXiv

Cryptocurrency Trading: A Comprehensive Survey

In recent years, the tendency of the number of financial institutions including cryptocurrencies in their portfolios has accelerated. Cryptocurrencies are the first pure digital assets to be included by asset managers. Although they have some commonalities with more traditional assets, they have their own separate nature and their behaviour as an asset is still in the process of being understood. It is therefore important to summarise existing research papers and results on cryptocurrency trading, including available trading platforms, trading signals, trading strategy research and risk management. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of cryptocurrency trading research, by covering 146 research papers on various aspects of cryptocurrency trading (e.g., cryptocurrency trading systems, bubble and extreme conditions, prediction of volatility and return, crypto-assets portfolio construction and crypto-assets, technical trading and others). This paper also analyses datasets, research trends and distribution among research objects(contents/properties) and technologies, concluding with some promising opportunities that remain open in cryptocurrency trading.

preprint2022arXiv

DataLens: Scalable Privacy Preserving Training via Gradient Compression and Aggregation

Recent success of deep neural networks (DNNs) hinges on the availability of large-scale dataset; however, training on such dataset often poses privacy risks for sensitive training information. In this paper, we aim to explore the power of generative models and gradient sparsity, and propose a scalable privacy-preserving generative model DATALENS. Comparing with the standard PATE privacy-preserving framework which allows teachers to vote on one-dimensional predictions, voting on the high dimensional gradient vectors is challenging in terms of privacy preservation. As dimension reduction techniques are required, we need to navigate a delicate tradeoff space between (1) the improvement of privacy preservation and (2) the slowdown of SGD convergence. To tackle this, we take advantage of communication efficient learning and propose a novel noise compression and aggregation approach TOPAGG by combining top-k compression for dimension reduction with a corresponding noise injection mechanism. We theoretically prove that the DATALENS framework guarantees differential privacy for its generated data, and provide analysis on its convergence. To demonstrate the practical usage of DATALENS, we conduct extensive experiments on diverse datasets including MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and high dimensional CelebA, and we show that, DATALENS significantly outperforms other baseline DP generative models. In addition, we adapt the proposed TOPAGG approach, which is one of the key building blocks in DATALENS, to DP SGD training, and show that it is able to achieve higher utility than the state-of-the-art DP SGD approach in most cases. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/AI-secure/DataLens.

preprint2022arXiv

Deep learning-based identification of sub-nuclear structures in FIB-SEM images

Three-dimensional volumetric imaging of cells allows for in situ visualization, thus preserving contextual insights into cellular processes. Despite recent advances in machine learning methods, morphological analysis of sub-nuclear structures have proven challenging due to both the shallow contrast profile and the technical limitation in feature detection. Here, we present a convolutional neural network, supervised deep learning-based approach which can identify sub-nuclear structures with 90% accuracy. We develop and apply this model to C. elegans gonads imaged using focused ion beam milling combined with scanning electron microscopy resulting in the accurate identification and segmentation of all sub-nuclear structures including entire chromosomes. We discuss in depth the architecture, parameterization, and optimization of the deep learning model, as well as provide evaluation metrics to assess the quality of the network prediction. Lastly, we highlight specific aspects of the model that can be optimized for its broad application to other volumetric imaging data as well as in situ cryo-electron tomography.

preprint2022arXiv

Direct Observation of Thermalization to a Rayleigh-Jeans Distribution in Multimode Optical Fibers

Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in nonlinear multimode optical systems where a host of intriguing effects have been observed that are impossible in single-mode settings. While nonlinearity can provide a rich environment where the chaotic power exchange among thousands of modes can lead to novel behaviors, at the same time, it poses a major challenge in terms of understanding and harnessing these processes to advantage. Over the years, statistical models have been developed to macroscopically describe the response of these complex systems. One of the cornerstones of these theoretical formalisms is the prediction of a photon-photon mediated thermalization process that leads to a Rayleigh-Jeans distribution of mode occupations. Here we report the use of mode-resolved measurement techniques to make the first direct observations of thermalization to a Rayleigh-Jeans power distribution in a multimode optical fiber. We experimentally demonstrate that the underlying system Hamiltonian remains invariant during propagation while power equipartition takes place among degenerate groups of modes - all in full accord with theoretical predictions. Our results may pave the way toward a new generation of high-power optical sources whose brightness and modal content can be controlled using principles from thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.

preprint2022arXiv

Energy conservation for the non-resistive MHD equations with physical boundaries

In this paper, we study the energy equality for weak solutions to the non-resistive MHD equations with physical boundaries. Although the equations of magnetic field $b$ are of hyperbolic type, and the boundary effects are considered, we still prove the global energy equality provided that $ u \in L^{q}_{loc}\left(0, T ; L^{p}(Ω)\right) \text { for any } \frac{1}{q}+\frac{1}{p} \leq \frac{1}{2}, \text { with } p \geq 4,\text{ and } b \in L^{r}_{loc}\left(0, T ; L^{s}(Ω)\right) \text { for any } \frac{1}{r}+\frac{1}{s} \leq \frac{1}{2}, \text { with } s \geq 4 $. In particular, compared with the existed results, we do not require any boundary layer assumptions and additional conditions on the pressure $P$. Our result requires the regularity of boundary $\partialΩ$ is only Lipschitz which is the minimum requirement to make the boundary condition $b\cdot n$ sense. The proof is based on the important properties of weak solutions of the nonstationary Stokes system and the separate mollification of weak solutions from the boundary effect by considering a non-standard local energy equality and transform the boundary effects into the estimates of the gradient of cut-off functions.

preprint2022arXiv

Hadronic molecule interpretation of $T^+_{cc}$ and its beauty-partners

Motivated by the latest discovery of a new tetraquark $T_{cc}^+$ with two charm quarks and two light antiquarks by LHCb Collaboration, we investigated the $DD^*$ hadronic molecule interpretation of $T_{cc}^+$. By calculation, the mass and the decay width of this new structure $T_{cc}^+$ can be understood in one-meson exchange potential model. The binding energies for these $DD^*$ hadronic molecules with $J^P=1^+$ are around $1MeV$. Besides, we also studied the possible beauty-partners $T_{bb}(10598)$ of hadronic molecule $T^+_{cc}$, which may be feasible in future LHCb experiments.

preprint2022arXiv

Malware Detection and Prevention using Artificial Intelligence Techniques

With the rapid technological advancement, security has become a major issue due to the increase in malware activity that poses a serious threat to the security and safety of both computer systems and stakeholders. To maintain stakeholders, particularly, end users security, protecting the data from fraudulent efforts is one of the most pressing concerns. A set of malicious programming code, scripts, active content, or intrusive software that is designed to destroy intended computer systems and programs or mobile and web applications is referred to as malware. According to a study, naive users are unable to distinguish between malicious and benign applications. Thus, computer systems and mobile applications should be designed to detect malicious activities towards protecting the stakeholders. A number of algorithms are available to detect malware activities by utilizing novel concepts including Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning. In this study, we emphasize Artificial Intelligence (AI) based techniques for detecting and preventing malware activity. We present a detailed review of current malware detection technologies, their shortcomings, and ways to improve efficiency. Our study shows that adopting futuristic approaches for the development of malware detection applications shall provide significant advantages. The comprehension of this synthesis shall help researchers for further research on malware detection and prevention using AI.

preprint2022arXiv

On the energy equality for the 3D incompressible viscoelastic flows

In this paper, we study the problem of energy conservation for the solutions to the incompressible viscoelastic flows. First, we consider Leray-Hopf weak solutions in the bounded Lipschitz domain $Ω$ in $\mathbb{R}^d\,\, (d\geq 2)$. We prove that under the Shinbrot type conditions $ u \in L^{q}_{loc}\left(0, T ; L^{p}(Ω)\right) \text { for any } \frac{1}{q}+\frac{1}{p} \leq \frac{1}{2}, \text { with } p \geq 4,\text{ and } {\bf F} \in L^{r}_{loc}\left(0, T ; L^{s}(Ω)\right) \text { for any } \frac{1}{r}+\frac{1}{s} \leq \frac{1}{2}, \text { with } s \geq 4 $, the boundary conditions $u|_{\partialΩ}=0,\,\,{\bf F}\cdot n|_{\partialΩ}=0$ can inhibit the boundary effect and guarantee the validity of energy equality. Next, we apply this idea to deal with the case $Ω= \mathbb{R}^d\,\,(d=2, 3, 4)$, and showed that the energy is conserved for $u\in L_{loc}^{q}\left(0,T;L_{loc}^{p}\left(\mathbb{R}^{d}\right)\right)$ with $ \frac{2}{q}+\frac{2}{p}\leq1, p\geq 4 $ and $ {\bf F}\in L_{loc}^{r}\left(0,T;L_{loc}^{s}\left(\mathbb{R}^{d}\right)\right)\cap L^{\frac{4d+8}{d+4}}\left(0,T;L^{\frac{4d+8}{d+4}}\left(\mathbb{R}^{d}\right)\right)$ with $\frac{2}{r}+\frac{2}{s}\leq1, s\geq 4 $. This result shows that the behavior of solutions in the finite regions and the behavior at infinite play different roles in the energy conservation. Finally, we consider the problem of energy conservation for distributional solutions and show energy equality for the distributional solutions belonging to the so-called Lions class $L^4L^4$.

preprint2022arXiv

On-Device Learning with Cloud-Coordinated Data Augmentation for Extreme Model Personalization in Recommender Systems

Data heterogeneity is an intrinsic property of recommender systems, making models trained over the global data on the cloud, which is the mainstream in industry, non-optimal to each individual user's local data distribution. To deal with data heterogeneity, model personalization with on-device learning is a potential solution. However, on-device training using a user's small size of local samples will incur severe overfitting and undermine the model's generalization ability. In this work, we propose a new device-cloud collaborative learning framework, called CoDA, to break the dilemmas of purely cloud-based learning and on-device learning. The key principle of CoDA is to retrieve similar samples from the cloud's global pool to augment each user's local dataset to train the recommendation model. Specifically, after a coarse-grained sample matching on the cloud, a personalized sample classifier is further trained on each device for a fine-grained sample filtering, which can learn the boundary between the local data distribution and the outside data distribution. We also build an end-to-end pipeline to support the flows of data, model, computation, and control between the cloud and each device. We have deployed CoDA in a recommendation scenario of Mobile Taobao. Online A/B testing results show the remarkable performance improvement of CoDA over both cloud-based learning without model personalization and on-device training without data augmentation. Overhead testing on a real device demonstrates the computation, storage, and communication efficiency of the on-device tasks in CoDA.

preprint2022arXiv

Quasi 1D electronic transport in a 2D magnetic semiconductor

We investigate electronic transport through exfoliated multilayers of CrSBr, a 2D semiconductor that is attracting attention because of its magnetic properties. We find an extremely pronounced anisotropy that manifests itself in qualitative and quantitative differences of all quantities measured along the in-plane \textit{a} and \textit{b} crystallographic directions. In particular, we observe a qualitatively different dependence of the conductivities $σ_a$ and $σ_b$ on temperature and gate voltage, accompanied by orders of magnitude differences in their values ($σ_b$/$σ_a \approx 3\cdot10^2-10^5$ at low temperature and large negative gate voltage). We also find a different behavior of the longitudinal magnetoresistance in the two directions, and the complete absence of the Hall effect in transverse resistance measurements. These observations appear not to be compatible with a description in terms of conventional band transport of a 2D doped semiconductor. The observed phenomenology -- together with unambiguous signatures of a 1D van Hove singularity that we detect in energy resolved photocurrent measurements -- indicate that electronic transport through CrSBr multilayers is better interpreted by considering the system as formed by weakly and incoherently coupled 1D wires, than by conventional 2D band transport. We conclude that CrSBr is the first 2D semiconductor to show distinctly quasi 1D electronic transport properties.

preprint2022arXiv

SecretGen: Privacy Recovery on Pre-Trained Models via Distribution Discrimination

Transfer learning through the use of pre-trained models has become a growing trend for the machine learning community. Consequently, numerous pre-trained models are released online to facilitate further research. However, it raises extensive concerns on whether these pre-trained models would leak privacy-sensitive information of their training data. Thus, in this work, we aim to answer the following questions: "Can we effectively recover private information from these pre-trained models? What are the sufficient conditions to retrieve such sensitive information?" We first explore different statistical information which can discriminate the private training distribution from other distributions. Based on our observations, we propose a novel private data reconstruction framework, SecretGen, to effectively recover private information. Compared with previous methods which can recover private data with the ground true prediction of the targeted recovery instance, SecretGen does not require such prior knowledge, making it more practical. We conduct extensive experiments on different datasets under diverse scenarios to compare SecretGen with other baselines and provide a systematic benchmark to better understand the impact of different auxiliary information and optimization operations. We show that without prior knowledge about true class prediction, SecretGen is able to recover private data with similar performance compared with the ones that leverage such prior knowledge. If the prior knowledge is given, SecretGen will significantly outperform baseline methods. We also propose several quantitative metrics to further quantify the privacy vulnerability of pre-trained models, which will help the model selection for privacy-sensitive applications. Our code is available at: https://github.com/AI-secure/SecretGen.

preprint2022arXiv

Walle: An End-to-End, General-Purpose, and Large-Scale Production System for Device-Cloud Collaborative Machine Learning

To break the bottlenecks of mainstream cloud-based machine learning (ML) paradigm, we adopt device-cloud collaborative ML and build the first end-to-end and general-purpose system, called Walle, as the foundation. Walle consists of a deployment platform, distributing ML tasks to billion-scale devices in time; a data pipeline, efficiently preparing task input; and a compute container, providing a cross-platform and high-performance execution environment, while facilitating daily task iteration. Specifically, the compute container is based on Mobile Neural Network (MNN), a tensor compute engine along with the data processing and model execution libraries, which are exposed through a refined Python thread-level virtual machine (VM) to support diverse ML tasks and concurrent task execution. The core of MNN is the novel mechanisms of operator decomposition and semi-auto search, sharply reducing the workload in manually optimizing hundreds of operators for tens of hardware backends and further quickly identifying the best backend with runtime optimization for a computation graph. The data pipeline introduces an on-device stream processing framework to enable processing user behavior data at source. The deployment platform releases ML tasks with an efficient push-then-pull method and supports multi-granularity deployment policies. We evaluate Walle in practical e-commerce application scenarios to demonstrate its effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability. Extensive micro-benchmarks also highlight the superior performance of MNN and the Python thread-level VM. Walle has been in large-scale production use in Alibaba, while MNN has been open source with a broad impact in the community.

preprint2021arXiv

FamDroid: Learning-Based Android Malware Family Classification Using Static Analysis

Android is currently the most extensively used smartphone platform in the world. Due to its popularity and open source nature, Android malware has been rapidly growing in recent years, and bringing great risks to users' privacy. The malware applications in a malware family may have common features and similar behaviors, which are beneficial for malware detection and inspection. Thus, classifying Android malware into their corresponding families is an important task in malware analysis. At present, the main problem of existing research works on Android malware family classification lies in that the extracted features are inadequate to represent the common behavior characteristics of the malware in malicious families, and leveraging a single classifier or a static ensemble classifier is restricted to further improve the accuracy of classification. In this paper, we propose FamDroid, a learning-based Android malware family classification scheme using static analysis technology. In FamDroid, the explicit features including permissions, hardware components, app components, intent filters are extracted from the apk files of a malware application. Besides, a hidden feature generated from the extracted APIs is used to represents the API call relationship in the application. Then, we design an adaptive weighted ensemble classifier, which considers the adaptability of the sample to each base classifier, to carry out accurate malware family classification. We conducted experiments on the Drebin dataset which contains 5560 Android malicious applications. The superiority of FamDroid is demonstrated through comparing it with 5 traditional machine learning models and 4 state-of-the-art reference schemes. FamDroid can correctly classify 98.92% of malware samples into their families and achieve 99.12% F1-Score.

preprint2021arXiv

Game-based Pricing and Task Offloading in Mobile Edge Computing Enabled Edge-Cloud Systems

As a momentous enabling of the Internet of things (IoT), mobile edge computing (MEC) provides IoT mobile devices (MD) with powerful external computing and storage resources. However, a mechanism addressing distributed task offloading and price competition for the open exchange marketplace has not been established properly, which has become a huge obstacle to MEC's application in the IoT market. In this paper, we formulate a distributed mechanism to analyze the interaction between OSPs and IoT MDs in the MEC enabled edge-cloud system by appling multi-leader multi-follower two-tier Stackelberg game theory. We first prove the existence of the Stackelberg equilibrium, and then we propose two distributed algorithms, namely iterative proximal offloading algorithm (IPOA) and iterative Stackelberg game pricing algorithm (ISPA). The IPOA solves the follower non-cooperative game among IoT MDs and ISPA uses backward induction to deal with the price competition among OSPs. Experimental results show that IPOA can markedly reduce the disutility of IoT MDs compared with other traditional task offloading schemes and the price of anarchy is always less than 150\%. Besides, results also demonstrate that ISPA is reliable in boosting the revenue of OSPs.

preprint2021arXiv

Generating Giant Vortex in a Fermi Superfluid via Spin-Orbital-Angular-Momentum Coupling

Spin-orbital-angular-momentum (SOAM) coupling has been realized in recent experiments of Bose-Einstein condensates [Chen et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 113204 (2018) and Zhang et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 110402 (2019)], where the orbital angular momentum imprinted upon bosons leads to quantized vortices. For fermions, such an exotic synthetic gauge field can provide fertile ground for fascinating pairing schemes and rich superfluid phases, which are yet to be explored. Here we demonstrate how SOAM coupling stabilizes vortices in Fermi superfluids through a unique mechanism that can be viewed as the angular analog to that of the spin-orbit-coupling-induced Fulde-Ferrell state under a Fermi surface deformation. Remarkably, the vortex size is comparable with the beam waist of Raman lasers generating the SOAM coupling, which is typically much larger than previously observed vortices in Fermi superfluids. With tunable size and core structure, these giant vortex states provide unprecedented experimental access to topological defects in Fermi superfluids.

preprint2021arXiv

Hadamard Wirtinger Flow for Sparse Phase Retrieval

We consider the problem of reconstructing an $n$-dimensional $k$-sparse signal from a set of noiseless magnitude-only measurements. Formulating the problem as an unregularized empirical risk minimization task, we study the sample complexity performance of gradient descent with Hadamard parametrization, which we call Hadamard Wirtinger flow (HWF). Provided knowledge of the signal sparsity $k$, we prove that a single step of HWF is able to recover the support from $k(x^*_{max})^{-2}$ (modulo logarithmic term) samples, where $x^*_{max}$ is the largest component of the signal in magnitude. This support recovery procedure can be used to initialize existing reconstruction methods and yields algorithms with total runtime proportional to the cost of reading the data and improved sample complexity, which is linear in $k$ when the signal contains at least one large component. We numerically investigate the performance of HWF at convergence and show that, while not requiring any explicit form of regularization nor knowledge of $k$, HWF adapts to the signal sparsity and reconstructs sparse signals with fewer measurements than existing gradient based methods.

preprint2021arXiv

Optimizing Multiple Performance Metrics with Deep GSP Auctions for E-commerce Advertising

In e-commerce advertising, the ad platform usually relies on auction mechanisms to optimize different performance metrics, such as user experience, advertiser utility, and platform revenue. However, most of the state-of-the-art auction mechanisms only focus on optimizing a single performance metric, e.g., either social welfare or revenue, and are not suitable for e-commerce advertising with various, dynamic, difficult to estimate, and even conflicting performance metrics. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism called Deep GSP auction, which leverages deep learning to design new rank score functions within the celebrated GSP auction framework. These new rank score functions are implemented via deep neural network models under the constraints of monotone allocation and smooth transition. The requirement of monotone allocation ensures Deep GSP auction nice game theoretical properties, while the requirement of smooth transition guarantees the advertiser utilities would not fluctuate too much when the auction mechanism switches among candidate mechanisms to achieve different optimization objectives. We deployed the proposed mechanisms in a leading e-commerce ad platform and conducted comprehensive experimental evaluations with both offline simulations and online A/B tests. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of the Deep GSP auction compared to the state-of-the-art auction mechanisms.

preprint2021arXiv

The Twelvefold Way of Non-Sequential Lossless Compression

Many information sources are not just sequences of distinguishable symbols but rather have invariances governed by alternative counting paradigms such as permutations, combinations, and partitions. We consider an entire classification of these invariances called the twelvefold way in enumerative combinatorics and develop a method to characterize lossless compression limits. Explicit computations for all twelve settings are carried out for i.i.d. uniform and Bernoulli distributions. Comparisons among settings provide quantitative insight.

preprint2020arXiv

A Deep Prediction Network for Understanding Advertiser Intent and Satisfaction

For e-commerce platforms such as Taobao and Amazon, advertisers play an important role in the entire digital ecosystem: their behaviors explicitly influence users' browsing and shopping experience; more importantly, advertiser's expenditure on advertising constitutes a primary source of platform revenue. Therefore, providing better services for advertisers is essential for the long-term prosperity for e-commerce platforms. To achieve this goal, the ad platform needs to have an in-depth understanding of advertisers in terms of both their marketing intents and satisfaction over the advertising performance, based on which further optimization could be carried out to service the advertisers in the correct direction. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Satisfaction Prediction Network (DSPN), which models advertiser intent and satisfaction simultaneously. It employs a two-stage network structure where advertiser intent vector and satisfaction are jointly learned by considering the features of advertiser's action information and advertising performance indicators. Experiments on an Alibaba advertisement dataset and online evaluations show that our proposed DSPN outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and has stable performance in terms of AUC in the online environment. Further analyses show that DSPN not only predicts advertisers' satisfaction accurately but also learns an explainable advertiser intent, revealing the opportunities to optimize the advertising performance further.

preprint2020arXiv

A regularity criterion for three-dimensional micropolar fluid equations in Besov spaces of negative regular indices

In this article, we study regularity criteria for the 3D micropolar fluid equations in terms of one partial derivative of the velocity. It is proved that if \begin{equation*} \int^{T}_{0}\|\partial_{3}u\|^{\frac{2}{1-r}}_{\dot{B}^{-r}_{\infty,\infty}} dt<\infty \quad \text{with} \quad 0< r<1, \end{equation*} then, the solutions of the micropolar fluid equations actually are smooth on $(0, T)$. This improves and extends many previous results.

preprint2020arXiv

Ascertaining price formation in cryptocurrency markets with DeepLearning

The cryptocurrency market is amongst the fastest-growing of all the financial markets in the world. Unlike traditional markets, such as equities, foreign exchange and commodities, cryptocurrency market is considered to have larger volatility and illiquidity. This paper is inspired by the recent success of using deep learning for stock market prediction. In this work, we analyze and present the characteristics of the cryptocurrency market in a high-frequency setting. In particular, we applied a deep learning approach to predict the direction of the mid-price changes on the upcoming tick. We monitored live tick-level data from $8$ cryptocurrency pairs and applied both statistical and machine learning techniques to provide a live prediction. We reveal that promising results are possible for cryptocurrencies, and in particular, we achieve a consistent $78\%$ accuracy on the prediction of the mid-price movement on live exchange rate of Bitcoins vs US dollars.

preprint2020arXiv

Better Model Selection with a new Definition of Feature Importance

Feature importance aims at measuring how crucial each input feature is for model prediction. It is widely used in feature engineering, model selection and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). In this paper, we propose a new tree-model explanation approach for model selection. Our novel concept leverages the Coefficient of Variation of a feature weight (measured in terms of the contribution of the feature to the prediction) to capture the dispersion of importance over samples. Extensive experimental results show that our novel feature explanation performs better than general cross validation method in model selection both in terms of time efficiency and accuracy performance.

preprint2020arXiv

DeGNN: Characterizing and Improving Graph Neural Networks with Graph Decomposition

Despite the wide application of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), one major limitation is that it does not benefit from the increasing depth and suffers from the oversmoothing problem. In this work, we first characterize this phenomenon from the information-theoretic perspective and show that under certain conditions, the mutual information between the output after $l$ layers and the input of GCN converges to 0 exponentially with respect to $l$. We also show that, on the other hand, graph decomposition can potentially weaken the condition of such convergence rate, which enabled our analysis for GraphCNN. While different graph structures can only benefit from the corresponding decomposition, in practice, we propose an automatic connectivity-aware graph decomposition algorithm, DeGNN, to improve the performance of general graph neural networks. Extensive experiments on widely adopted benchmark datasets demonstrate that DeGNN can not only significantly boost the performance of corresponding GNNs, but also achieves the state-of-the-art performances.

preprint2020arXiv

Distributed Optimization over Block-Cyclic Data

We consider practical data characteristics underlying federated learning, where unbalanced and non-i.i.d. data from clients have a block-cyclic structure: each cycle contains several blocks, and each client&#39;s training data follow block-specific and non-i.i.d. distributions. Such a data structure would introduce client and block biases during the collaborative training: the single global model would be biased towards the client or block specific data. To overcome the biases, we propose two new distributed optimization algorithms called multi-model parallel SGD (MM-PSGD) and multi-chain parallel SGD (MC-PSGD) with a convergence rate of $O(1/\sqrt{NT})$, achieving a linear speedup with respect to the total number of clients. In particular, MM-PSGD adopts the block-mixed training strategy, while MC-PSGD further adds the block-separate training strategy. Both algorithms create a specific predictor for each block by averaging and comparing the historical global models generated in this block from different cycles. We extensively evaluate our algorithms over the CIFAR-10 dataset. Evaluation results demonstrate that our algorithms significantly outperform the conventional federated averaging algorithm in terms of test accuracy, and also preserve robustness for the variance of critical parameters.

preprint2020arXiv

Effective theory for ultracold strongly interacting fermionic atoms in two dimensions

We propose a minimal theoretical model for the description of a two-dimensional (2D) strongly interacting Fermi gas confined transversely in a tight harmonic potential, and present accurate predictions for its equation of state and breathing mode frequency. We show that the minimal model Hamiltonian needs at least two independent interaction parameters, the 2D scattering length and effective range of interactions, in order to quantitatively explain recent experimental measurements at nonzero filling factor $N/N_{2D}$, where $N$ is the total number of atoms and $N_{2D}$ is the threshold number to reach the 2D limit. We therefore resolve in a satisfactory way the puzzling experimental observations of reduced equations of state and reduced quantum anomaly in breathing mode frequency, due to small yet non-negligible $N/N_{2D}$. We argue that a conclusive demonstration of the much-anticipated quantum anomaly is possible at a filling factor of a few percent. Our establishment of the minimal model for 2D ultracold atoms could be crucial to understanding the fermionic Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition in the strongly correlated regime.

preprint2020arXiv

Ground-state phase diagram and excitation spectrum of a Bose-Einstein condensate with spin-orbital-angular-momentum coupling

We investigate the ground-state phase diagram and excitation spectrum of an interacting spinor Bose-Einstein condensate with spin-orbital-angular-momentum (SOAM) coupling realized in recent experiments by introducing atomic Raman transition with a pair of copropagating Laguerre-Gaussian laser beams that carry different orbital angular momenta (OAM) [Chen et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 113204 (2018) and Zhang et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 122, 110402 (2019)]. Because of the ground-state degeneracy of the single-particle Hamiltonian at vanishing detuning, several angular-stripe phases, which are superposition of states with different angular quantum numbers, appear in the phase diagram. However, these phases normally exist at small detuning, which makes them hard to be probed in experiments. We show that for a large OAM difference of the laser beams, an asymmetric kind of angular-stripe phase can exist even at large detuning. The excitation spectra in different phases exhibit distinct features: In the angular-stripe phase there exist two gapless bands corresponding to the broken U(1) and rotational symmetries, while in the half-skyrmion phase the gapless band exhibits a roton-like structure. Our predictions of the angular-stripe phases and the low-energy excitations can be examined in recently realized BECs with SOAM coupling.

preprint2020arXiv

IEO: Intelligent Evolutionary Optimisation for Hyperparameter Tuning

Hyperparameter optimisation is a crucial process in searching the optimal machine learning model. The efficiency of finding the optimal hyperparameter settings has been a big concern in recent researches since the optimisation process could be time-consuming, especially when the objective functions are highly expensive to evaluate. In this paper, we introduce an intelligent evolutionary optimisation algorithm which applies machine learning technique to the traditional evolutionary algorithm to accelerate the overall optimisation process of tuning machine learning models in classification problems. We demonstrate our Intelligent Evolutionary Optimisation (IEO)in a series of controlled experiments, comparing with traditional evolutionary optimisation in hyperparameter tuning. The empirical study shows that our approach accelerates the optimisation speed by 30.40% on average and up to 77.06% in the best scenarios.

preprint2020arXiv

Retrieve Synonymous keywords for Frequent Queries in Sponsored Search in a Data Augmentation Way

In sponsored search, retrieving synonymous keywords is of great importance for accurately targeted advertising. The semantic gap between queries and keywords and the extremely high precision requirements (>= 95\%) are two major challenges to this task. To the best of our knowledge, the problem has not been openly discussed. In an industrial sponsored search system, the retrieved keywords for frequent queries are usually done ahead of time and stored in a lookup table. Considering these results as a seed dataset, we propose a data-augmentation-like framework to improve the synonymous retrieval performance for these frequent queries. This framework comprises two steps: translation-based retrieval and discriminant-based filtering. Firstly, we devise a Trie-based translation model to make a data increment. In this phase, a Bag-of-Core-Words trick is conducted, which increased the data increment&#39;s volume 4.2 times while keeping the original precision. Then we use a BERT-based discriminant model to filter out nonsynonymous pairs, which exceeds the traditional feature-driven GBDT model with 11\% absolute AUC improvement. This method has been successfully applied to Baidu&#39;s sponsored search system, which has yielded a significant improvement in revenue. In addition, a commercial Chinese dataset containing 500K synonymous pairs with a precision of 95\% is released to the public for paraphrase study (http://ai.baidu.com/broad/subordinate?dataset=paraphrasing).

preprint2020arXiv

Theory of strongly paired fermions with arbitrary short-range interactions

We develop an effective field theory to describe the superfluid pairing in strongly interacting fermions with arbitrary short-range attractions, by extending Kaplan&#39;s idea of coupling fermions to a fictitious boson state in Nucl. Phys. B \textbf{494}, 471 (1997). This boson field is assigned with unconventional kinetic term to recover the exact scattering phase shift obtained either from scattering data or model calculations. The theory works even if the explicit form of the interaction potential has not been constructed from scattering data. The contact boson-fermion coupling allows us to go beyond mean-field to include Gaussian pair fluctuations, yielding reliable predictions on equations of state. As an application, we use our theory to address the non-univerisal ground-state energy of strongly paired fermions, due to the non-trivial momentum dependence of the phase shift characterized, for example, by effective range. We find a good agreement between our predictions and recent quantum Monte Carlo simulations on the effective-range dependence in both three and two spatial dimensions. We propose that in cold-atom experiments, the non-universal dependence in thermodynamics can be probed using dark-state optical control of Feshbach resonances.

preprint2020arXiv

UAVs as a Service: Boosting Edge Intelligence for Air-Ground Integrated Networks

The air-ground integrated network is a key component of future sixth generation (6G) networks to support seamless and near-instant super-connectivity. There is a pressing need to intelligently provision various services in 6G networks, which however is challenging. To meet this need, in this article, we propose a novel architecture called UaaS (UAVs as a Service) for the air-ground integrated network, featuring UAV as a key enabler to boost edge intelligence with the help of machine learning (ML) techniques. We envision that the proposed UaaS architecture could intelligently provision wireless communication service, edge computing service, and edge caching service by a network of UAVs, making full use of UAVs&#39; flexible deployment and diverse ML techniques. We also conduct a case study where UAVs participate in the model training of distributed ML among multiple terrestrial users, whose result shows that the model training is efficient with a negligible energy consumption of UAVs, compared to the flight energy consumption. Finally, we discuss the challenges and open research issues in the UaaS.

preprint2017arXiv

Characterizing departure delays of flights in passenger aviation network of United States

Flight delay happens every day in airports all over the world. However, systemic investigation in large scales remains a challenge. We collect primary data of domestic departure records from Bureau of Transportation Statistics of United States, and do empirical statistics with them in form of complementary cumulative distributions functions (CCDFs) and transmission function of the delays. Fourteen main airlines are characterized by two types of CCDFs: shifted power-law and exponentially truncated shifted power-law. By setting up two phenomenological models based on mean-field approximation in temporal regime, we convert effect from other delay factors into a propagation one. Three parameters meaningful in measuring airlines emerge as universal metrics. Moreover, method used here could become a novel approach to revealing practical meanings hidden in temporal big data in wide fields.