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Researcher profile

Xiaoyuan Liu

Xiaoyuan Liu contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Computation and LanguageCryptography and Securityquant-phDatabasesMachine LearningArtificial Intelligencecs.CYData Structures and Algorithmseess.ASEmerging TechnologiesMultimediaq-fin.CPSound

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Published work

14 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

CO-MAP: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to the Qubit Allocation Problem

A quantum compiler is a critical piece in the quantum computing pipeline since it allows an abstract quantum circuit to be run on a physical quantum computer. One extremely important subproblem in quantum compilation is the generation of a logical to physical qubit mapping. Typically in quantum compilers this step is either implemented as a random or a heuristic based assignment that aims to minimize additional (SWAP) gate overhead in the quantum circuit. In this paper, we present an alternative approach to solving the qubit mapping problem. Specifically, we formulate the qubit mapping problem with a combinatorial optimization (CO) objective. We then present a method to find a solution to the CO problem by training a reinforcement learning (RL) policy. We also propose a local search based post-processing algorithm to further reduce the overhead. Our results show a dramatic improvement over conventional techniques in reducing the number of SWAPs. On different real world datasets like MQTBench and Queko circuits, our trained policy achieves a \textbf{65-85\%} reduction in SWAP overhead when compared to existing quantum compilers.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

IO-RAE: Information-Obfuscation Reversible Adversarial Example for Audio Privacy Protection

The rapid advancements in artificial intelligence have significantly accelerated the adoption of speech recognition technology, leading to its widespread integration across various applications. However, this surge in usage also highlights a critical issue: audio data is highly vulnerable to unauthorized exposure and analysis, posing significant privacy risks for businesses and individuals. This paper introduces an Information-Obfuscation Reversible Adversarial Example (IO-RAE) framework, the pioneering method designed to safeguard audio privacy using reversible adversarial examples. IO-RAE leverages large language models to generate misleading yet contextually coherent content, effectively preventing unauthorized eavesdropping by humans and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. Additionally, we propose the Cumulative Signal Attack technique, which mitigates high-frequency noise and enhances attack efficacy by targeting low-frequency signals. Our approach ensures the protection of audio data without degrading its quality or our ability. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the superiority of our method, achieving a targeted misguidance rate of 96.5% and a remarkable 100% untargeted misguidance rate in obfuscating target keywords across multiple ASR models, including a commercial black-box system from Google. Furthermore, the quality of the recovered audio, measured by the Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality score, reached 4.45, comparable to high-quality original recordings. Notably, the recovered audio processed by ASR systems exhibited an error rate of 0%, indicating nearly lossless recovery. These results highlight the practical applicability and effectiveness of our IO-RAE framework in protecting sensitive audio privacy.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

QAP-Router: Tackling Qubit Routing as Dynamic Quadratic Assignment with Reinforcement Learning

Qubit routing is a fundamental problem in quantum compilation, known to be NP-hard. Its dynamic nature makes local routing decisions propagate and compound over time, making global efficient solutions challenging. Existing heuristic methods rely on local rules with limited lookahead, while recent learning-based approaches often treat routing as a generic sequential decision problem without fully exploiting its underlying structure. In this paper, we introduce QAP-Router, framing qubit routing based on a dynamic Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) formulation. By modeling logical interactions, or quantum gates, as flow matrices and hardware topology as a distance matrix, our approach captures the interaction-distance coupling in a unified objective, which defines the reward in the reinforcement learning environment. To further exploit this structure, the policy network employs a solution-aware Transformer backbone that encodes the interaction between the flow matrix and the distance matrix into the attention mechanism. We also integrate a lookahead mechanism that blends naturally into the QAP framework, preventing myopic decisions. Extensive experiments on 1,831 real-world quantum circuits from the MQTBench, AgentQ and QUEKO datasets show that our method substantially reduces the CNOT gate count of routed circuits by 15.7%, 30.4% and 12.1%, respectively, relative to existing industry compilers.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2023arXiv

UniFed: All-In-One Federated Learning Platform to Unify Open-Source Frameworks

Federated Learning (FL) has become a practical and widely adopted distributed learning paradigm. However, the lack of a comprehensive and standardized solution covering diverse use cases makes it challenging to use in practice. In addition, selecting an appropriate FL framework for a specific use case can be a daunting task. In this work, we present UniFed, the first unified platform for standardizing existing open-source FL frameworks. The platform streamlines the end-to-end workflow for distributed experimentation and deployment, encompassing 11 popular open-source FL frameworks. In particular, to address the substantial variations in workflows and data formats, UniFed introduces a configuration-based schema-enforced task specification, offering 20 editable fields. UniFed also provides functionalities such as distributed execution management, logging, and data analysis. With UniFed, we evaluate and compare 11 popular FL frameworks from the perspectives of functionality, privacy protection, and performance, through conducting developer surveys and code-level investigation. We collect 15 diverse FL scenario setups (e.g., horizontal and vertical settings) for FL framework evaluation. This comprehensive evaluation allows us to analyze both model and system performance, providing detailed comparisons and offering recommendations for framework selection. UniFed simplifies the process of selecting and utilizing the appropriate FL framework for specific use cases, while enabling standardized distributed experimentation and deployment. Our results and analysis based on experiments with up to 178 distributed nodes provide valuable system design and deployment insights, aiming to empower practitioners in their pursuit of effective FL solutions.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

A Survey of Quantum Computing for Finance

Quantum computers are expected to surpass the computational capabilities of classical computers during this decade and have transformative impact on numerous industry sectors, particularly finance. In fact, finance is estimated to be the first industry sector to benefit from quantum computing, not only in the medium and long terms, but even in the short term. This survey paper presents a comprehensive summary of the state of the art of quantum computing for financial applications, with particular emphasis on stochastic modeling, optimization, and machine learning, describing how these solutions, adapted to work on a quantum computer, can potentially help to solve financial problems, such as derivative pricing, risk modeling, portfolio optimization, natural language processing, and fraud detection, more efficiently and accurately. We also discuss the feasibility of these algorithms on near-term quantum computers with various hardware implementations and demonstrate how they relate to a wide range of use cases in finance. We hope this article will not only serve as a reference for academic researchers and industry practitioners but also inspire new ideas for future research.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Layer VQE: A Variational Approach for Combinatorial Optimization on Noisy Quantum Computers

Combinatorial optimization on near-term quantum devices is a promising path to demonstrating quantum advantage. However, the capabilities of these devices are constrained by high noise or error rates. In this paper, we propose an iterative Layer VQE (L-VQE) approach, inspired by the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE). We present a large-scale numerical study, simulating circuits with up to 40 qubits and 352 parameters, that demonstrates the potential of the proposed approach. We evaluate quantum optimization heuristics on the problem of detecting multiple communities in networks, for which we introduce a novel qubit-frugal formulation. We numerically compare L-VQE with Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) and demonstrate that QAOA achieves lower approximation ratios while requiring significantly deeper circuits. We show that L-VQE is more robust to finite sampling errors and has a higher chance of finding the solution as compared with standard VQE approaches. Our simulation results show that L-VQE performs well under realistic hardware noise.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Partitioning Dense Graphs with Hardware Accelerators

Graph partitioning is a fundamental combinatorial optimization problem that attracts a lot of attention from theoreticians and practitioners due to its broad applications. From multilevel graph partitioning to more general-purpose optimization solvers such as Gurobi and CPLEX, a wide range of approaches have been developed. Limitations of these approaches are important to study in order to break the computational optimization barriers of this problem. As we approach the limits of Moore's law, there is now a need to explore ways of solving such problems with special-purpose hardware such as quantum computers or quantum-inspired accelerators. In this work, we experiment with solving the graph partitioning on the Fujitsu Digital Annealer (a special-purpose hardware designed for solving combinatorial optimization problems) and compare it with the existing top solvers. We demonstrate limitations of existing solvers on many dense graphs as well as those of the Digital Annealer on sparse graphs which opens an avenue to hybridize these approaches.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

A System for Automated Open-Source Threat Intelligence Gathering and Management

To remain aware of the fast-evolving cyber threat landscape, open-source Cyber Threat Intelligence (OSCTI) has received growing attention from the community. Commonly, knowledge about threats is presented in a vast number of OSCTI reports. Despite the pressing need for high-quality OSCTI, existing OSCTI gathering and management platforms, however, have primarily focused on isolated, low-level Indicators of Compromise. On the other hand, higher-level concepts (e.g., adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures) and their relationships have been overlooked, which contain essential knowledge about threat behaviors that is critical to uncovering the complete threat scenario. To bridge the gap, we propose SecurityKG, a system for automated OSCTI gathering and management. SecurityKG collects OSCTI reports from various sources, uses a combination of AI and NLP techniques to extract high-fidelity knowledge about threat behaviors, and constructs a security knowledge graph. SecurityKG also provides a UI that supports various types of interactivity to facilitate knowledge graph exploration.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

A System for Efficiently Hunting for Cyber Threats in Computer Systems Using Threat Intelligence

Log-based cyber threat hunting has emerged as an important solution to counter sophisticated cyber attacks. However, existing approaches require non-trivial efforts of manual query construction and have overlooked the rich external knowledge about threat behaviors provided by open-source Cyber Threat Intelligence (OSCTI). To bridge the gap, we build ThreatRaptor, a system that facilitates cyber threat hunting in computer systems using OSCTI. Built upon mature system auditing frameworks, ThreatRaptor provides (1) an unsupervised, light-weight, and accurate NLP pipeline that extracts structured threat behaviors from unstructured OSCTI text, (2) a concise and expressive domain-specific query language, TBQL, to hunt for malicious system activities, (3) a query synthesis mechanism that automatically synthesizes a TBQL query from the extracted threat behaviors, and (4) an efficient query execution engine to search the big system audit logging data.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2021arXiv

Enabling Efficient Cyber Threat Hunting With Cyber Threat Intelligence

Log-based cyber threat hunting has emerged as an important solution to counter sophisticated attacks. However, existing approaches require non-trivial efforts of manual query construction and have overlooked the rich external threat knowledge provided by open-source Cyber Threat Intelligence (OSCTI). To bridge the gap, we propose ThreatRaptor, a system that facilitates threat hunting in computer systems using OSCTI. Built upon system auditing frameworks, ThreatRaptor provides (1) an unsupervised, light-weight, and accurate NLP pipeline that extracts structured threat behaviors from unstructured OSCTI text, (2) a concise and expressive domain-specific query language, TBQL, to hunt for malicious system activities, (3) a query synthesis mechanism that automatically synthesizes a TBQL query for hunting, and (4) an efficient query execution engine to search the big audit logging data. Evaluations on a broad set of attack cases demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of ThreatRaptor in practical threat hunting.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

BeeTrace: A Unified Platform for Secure Contact Tracing that Breaks Data Silos

Contact tracing is an important method to control the spread of an infectious disease such as COVID-19. However, existing contact tracing methods alone cannot provide sufficient coverage and do not successfully address privacy concerns of the participating entities. Current solutions do not utilize the huge volume of data stored in business databases and individual digital devices. This information is typically stored in data silos and cannot be used due to regulations in place. To successfully unlock the potential of contact tracing, we need to consider both data utilization from multiple sources and the privacy of the participating parties. To this end, we propose BeeTrace, a unified platform that breaks data silos and deploys state-of-the-art cryptographic protocols to guarantee privacy goals.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Distributed Structured Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning for Universal Dialogue Management

The task-oriented spoken dialogue system (SDS) aims to assist a human user in accomplishing a specific task (e.g., hotel booking). The dialogue management is a core part of SDS. There are two main missions in dialogue management: dialogue belief state tracking (summarising conversation history) and dialogue decision-making (deciding how to reply to the user). In this work, we only focus on devising a policy that chooses which dialogue action to respond to the user. The sequential system decision-making process can be abstracted into a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). Under this framework, reinforcement learning approaches can be used for automated policy optimization. In the past few years, there are many deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms, which use neural networks (NN) as function approximators, investigated for dialogue policy.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Pretrained Transformers Improve Out-of-Distribution Robustness

Although pretrained Transformers such as BERT achieve high accuracy on in-distribution examples, do they generalize to new distributions? We systematically measure out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization for seven NLP datasets by constructing a new robustness benchmark with realistic distribution shifts. We measure the generalization of previous models including bag-of-words models, ConvNets, and LSTMs, and we show that pretrained Transformers' performance declines are substantially smaller. Pretrained transformers are also more effective at detecting anomalous or OOD examples, while many previous models are frequently worse than chance. We examine which factors affect robustness, finding that larger models are not necessarily more robust, distillation can be harmful, and more diverse pretraining data can enhance robustness. Finally, we show where future work can improve OOD robustness.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Structured Hierarchical Dialogue Policy with Graph Neural Networks

Dialogue policy training for composite tasks, such as restaurant reservation in multiple places, is a practically important and challenging problem. Recently, hierarchical deep reinforcement learning (HDRL) methods have achieved good performance in composite tasks. However, in vanilla HDRL, both top-level and low-level policies are all represented by multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) which take the concatenation of all observations from the environment as the input for predicting actions. Thus, traditional HDRL approach often suffers from low sampling efficiency and poor transferability. In this paper, we address these problems by utilizing the flexibility of graph neural networks (GNNs). A novel ComNet is proposed to model the structure of a hierarchical agent. The performance of ComNet is tested on composited tasks of the PyDial benchmark. Experiments show that ComNet outperforms vanilla HDRL systems with performance close to the upper bound. It not only achieves sample efficiency but also is more robust to noise while maintaining the transferability to other composite tasks.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access