Probabilistic synthesis against GR(1) winning condition

Reactive synthesis is a technique for automatic generation of a reactive system from a high level specification. The system is reactive in the sense that it reacts to the inputs from the environment. The specification is in general given as a linear temporal logic (LTL) formula. The behaviour of the system interacting with the environment can be represented as a game in which the system plays against the environment. Thus, a problem of reactive synthesis is commonly treated as solving such a game with the specification as the winning condition. Reactive synthesis has been thoroughly investigated for more two decades. A well-known challenge is to deal with the complex uncertainty of the environment. We understand that a major issue is due to the lack of a sufficient treatment of probabilistic properties in the traditional models. For example, a two-player game defined by a standard Kriple structure does not consider probabilistic transitions in reaction to the uncertain physical environment; and a Markov Decision Process (MDP) in general does not explicitly separate the system from its environment and it does not describe the interaction between system and the environment. In this paper, we propose a new and more general model which combines the two-player game and the MDP. Furthermore, we study probabilistic reactive synthesis for the games of General Reactivity of Rank 1 (i.e., GR(1)) defined in this model. More specifically, we present an algorithm, which for given model M, a location s and a GR(1) specification P, determines the strategy for each player how to maximize/minimize the probabilities of the satisfaction of P at location s. We use an example to describe the model of probabilistic games and demonstrate our algorithm.     

A primal-dual approximation algorithm for the k-prize-collecting minimum vertex cover problem with submodular penalties

In this paper, we consider the k-prize-collecting minimum vertex cover problem with submodular penalties, which generalizes the well-known minimum vertex cover problem, minimum partial vertex cover problem and minimum vertex cover problem with submodular penalties. We are given a cost graph G=(V,E;c) and an integer k. This problem determines a vertex set S\subseteq V such that S covers at least k edges. The objective is to minimize the total cost of the vertices in S plus the penalty of the uncovered edge set, where the penalty is determined by a submodular function. We design a two-phase combinatorial algorithm based on the guessing technique and the primal-dual framework to address the problem. When the submodular penalty cost function is normalized and nondecreasing, the proposed algorithm has an approximation factor of 3. When the submodular penalty cost function is linear, the approximation factor of the proposed algorithm is reduced to 2, which is the best factor if the unique game conjecture holds.     

Zero-correlation linear attack on reduced-round SKINNY

At ToSC 2019, Ankele et al. proposed a novel idea for constructing zero-correlation linear distinguishers in a related-tweakey model. This paper further clarifies this principle and gives a search model for zero-correlation distinguishers. As a result, for the first time, the authors construct 15-round and 17-round zero-correlation linear distinguishers for SKINNY-n-2n and SKINNY-n-3n, respectively, which are both two rounds longer than Anekele et al.’s. Based on these distinguishers, the paper presents related-tweakey zero-correlation linear attacks on 22-round SKINNY-n-2n and 26-round SKINNY-n-3n, respectively.     

Indexing dynamic encrypted database in cloud for efficient secure k-nearest neighbor query

Secure k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) query aims to find k nearest data of a given query from an encrypted database in a cloud server without revealing privacy to the untrusted cloud and has wide applications in many areas, such as privacy-preserving machine learning and secure biometric identification. Several solutions have been put forward to solve this challenging problem. However, the existing schemes still suffer from various limitations in terms of efficiency and flexibility. In this paper, we propose a new encrypt-then-index strategy for the secure k-NN query, which can simultaneously achieve sub-linear search complexity (efficiency) and support dynamical update over the encrypted database (flexibility). Specifically, we propose a novel algorithm to transform the encrypted database and encrypted query points in the cloud. By indexing the transformed database using spatial data structures such as the R-tree index, our strategy enables sub-linear complexity for secure k-NN queries and allows users to dynamically update the encrypted database. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed strategy is the first to simultaneously provide these two properties. Through theoretical analysis and extensive experiments, we formally prove the security and demonstrate the efficiency of our scheme.     

Meta-BN Net for few-shot learning

In this paper, we propose a lightweight network with an adaptive batch normalization module, called Meta-BN Net, for few-shot classification. Unlike existing few-shot learning methods, which consist of complex models or algorithms, our approach extends batch normalization, an essential part of current deep neural network training, whose potential has not been fully explored. In particular, a meta-module is introduced to learn to generate more powerful affine transformation parameters, known as \gamma and \beta, in the batch normalization layer adaptively so that the representation ability of batch normalization can be activated. The experimental results on miniImageNet demonstrate that Meta-BN Net not only outperforms the baseline methods at a large margin but also is competitive with recent state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods. We also conduct experiments on Fewshot-CIFAR100 and CUB datasets, and the results show that our approach is effective to boost the performance of weak baseline networks. We believe our findings can motivate to explore the undiscovered capacity of base components in a neural network as well as more efficient few-shot learning methods.     

ReCSA: a dedicated sort accelerator using ReRAM-based content addressable memory

With the increasing amount of data, there is an urgent need for efficient sorting algorithms to process large data sets. Hardware sorting algorithms have attracted much attention because they can take advantage of different hardware’s parallelism. But the traditional hardware sort accelerators suffer “memory wall” problems since their multiple rounds of data transmission between the memory and the processor. In this paper, we utilize the in-situ processing ability of the ReRAM crossbar to design a new ReCAM array that can process the matrix-vector multiplication operation and the vector-scalar comparison in the same array simultaneously. Using this designed ReCAM array, we present ReCSA, which is the first dedicated ReCAM-based sort accelerator. Besides hardware designs, we also develop algorithms to maximize memory utilization and minimize memory exchanges to improve sorting performance. The sorting algorithm in ReCSA can process various data types, such as integer, float, double, and strings. We also present experiments to evaluate the performance and energy efficiency against the state-of-the-art sort accelerators. The experimental results show that ReCSA has 90.92\times, 46.13\times, 27.38\times, 84.57\times, and 3.36\times speedups against CPU-, GPU-, FPGA-, NDP-, and PIM-based platforms when processing numeric data sets. ReCSA also has 24.82\times, 32.94\times, and 18.22\times performance improvement when processing string data sets compared with CPU-, GPU-, and FPGA-based platforms.     

基于Sentinel-1数据的黑河中游土壤水分反演

基于Sentinel-1合成孔径雷达 (SAR) 数据及相同时段的中分辨率成像光谱仪（MODIS）和Landsat 8两种归一化植被指数（NDVI）,构建变化检测模型以估算黑河中游的高分辨率土壤水分,并探讨模型中具体参数设置对估算精度的影响。结果表明：①在对后向散射系数时间序列的差值 ( \mathrm{\Delta } \sigma ) 和植被指数 ( \mathrm{V} \mathrm{I} ) 进行线性建模过程中,MODIS NDVI和Landsat 8 NDVI这两种植被产品所构建的模型在 \mathrm{\Delta } \sigma - \mathrm{V} \mathrm{I} 空间中所选取的采样点比例分别为2%和4%时,各自取得最优精度; ②以土壤水分反演为目标,使用Landsat 8 NDVI构建的变化检测模型略优于使用MODIS NDVI构建的变化检测模型,两种模型的均方根误差RMSE分别为0.040 m³/m³和0.044 m³/m³,相关系数R分别为0.86和0.83; ③对于变化检测方法的关键参数,若使用低分辨率的SMAP/Sentinel-1 L2_SM_SP土壤水分数据分别代替站点观测的土壤水分初始值和缩放因子 (即两个连续时相土壤水分变化的最大值 \mathrm{\Delta } M s_{max} ) 这两个参数,则土壤水分RMSE将分别增加0.01 m³/m³和0.04 m³/m³。即土壤水分缩放因子这一参数的误差对反演结果的影响大于土壤水分初始值误差对反演结果的影响,故采用高精度的缩放因子进行变化检测估算。研究结论对于利用新兴的Sentinel-1 SAR数据,通过变化检测算法准确获取高分辨率土壤水分信息具有实际参考价值。     

Sentinel-1 based Soil Moisture Estimation in Middle Reaches of Heihe River Basin

In this study, a change detection model, constructed using the Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data and the simultaneous Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) products from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Landsat 8 sensors, is applied to estimate soil moisture in middle reaches of the Heihe River Basin, and the effects of two key parameters on retrieval accuracy are comprehensively investigated. The results show that: (1) when constructing the empirical relationship between backscattering coefficient difference ( \mathrm{\Delta } \sigma ) and Vegetation Index (VI) required by change detection model, the optimal sampling ratios in the ( \mathrm{\Delta } \sigma - V I ) space are approximately 2% and 4% for MODIS NDVI and Landsat 8 NDVI, respectively; (2) the Landsat 8 NDVI-based change detection model slightly outperforms the MODIS NDVI-based model in soil moisture retrieval accuracy, with Root Mean Square Error(RMSE) of 0.040 m³/m³ and 0.044 m³/m³respectively; (3) for the key parameters of the change detection method, replacing the ground-based initial soil moisture and scaling factor (maximum soil moisture difference between two adjacent dates \mathrm{\Delta } M s_{max} ) by the low-resolution SMAP/Sentinel-1 L2_SM_SP data will increase the RMSE by 0.01 m³/m³ and 0.04 m³/m³ respectively. Comparing to the parameter of initial soil moisture, the error in soil moisture scaling factor will lead to more significant degradation in the performance of the change detection method, thus it is recommended to use the high precision scaling factor for soil moisture estimation. This study confirms the promising potential of Sentinel-1 data for retrieving high-resolution soil moisture via change detection method and provides practical insight into its application.     

Local holographic transformations: tractability and hardness

Local holographic transformations were introduced by Cai et al., and local affine functions, an extra tractable class, were derived by it in #CSP². In the present paper, we not only generalize local affine functions to #CSP^d for general d, but also give new tractable classes by combining local holographic transformations with global holographic transformations. Moreover, we show how to use local holographic transformations to prove hardness. This is of independent interests in the complexity classification of counting problems.     

IXT: Improved searchable encryption for multi-word queries based on PSI

Oblivious Cross-Tags (OXT) [1] is the first efficient searchable encryption (SE) protocol for conjunctive queries in a single-writer single-reader framework. However, it also has a trade-off between security and efficiency by leaking partial database information to the server. Recent attacks on these SE schemes show that the leakages from these SE schemes can be used to recover the content of queried keywords. To solve this problem, Lai et al. [2] propose Hidden Cross-Tags (HXT), which reduces the access pattern leakage from Keyword Pair Result Pattern (KPRP) to Whole Result Pattern (WRP). However, the WRP leakage can also be used to recover some additional contents of queried keywords. This paper proposes Improved Cross-Tags (IXT), an efficient searchable encryption protocol that achieves access and searches pattern hiding based on the labeled private set intersection. We also prove the proposed labeled private set intersection (PSI) protocol is secure against semi-honest adversaries, and IXT is L^{\prime }-semi-honest secure (L^{\prime } is leakage function). Finally, we do experiments to compare IXT with HXT. The experimental results show that the storage overhead and computation overhead of the search phase at the client-side in IXT is much lower than those in HXT. Meanwhile, the experimental results also show that IXT is scalable and can be applied to various sizes of datasets.     

Scalable and adaptive log manager in distributed systems

On-line transaction processing (OLTP) systems rely on transaction logging and quorum-based consensus protocol to guarantee durability, high availability and strong consistency. This makes the log manager a key component of distributed database management systems (DDBMSs). The leader of DDBMSs commonly adopts a centralized logging method to writing log entries into a stable storage device and uses a constant log replication strategy to periodically synchronize its state to followers. With the advent of new hardware and high parallelism of transaction processing, the traditional centralized design of logging limits scalability, and the constant trigger condition of replication can not always maintain optimal performance under dynamic workloads. In this paper, we propose a new log manager named Salmo with scalable logging and adaptive replication for distributed database systems. The scalable logging eliminates centralized contention by utilizing a highly concurrent data structure and speedy log hole tracking. The kernel of adaptive replication is an adaptive log shipping method, which dynamically adjusts the number of log entries transmitted between leader and followers based on the real-time workload. We implemented and evaluated Salmo in the open-sourced transaction processing systems Cedar and DBx1000. Experimental results show that Salmo scales well by increasing the number of working threads, improves peak throughput by 1.56\times and reduces latency by more than 4\times over log replication of Raft, and maintains efficient and stable performance under dynamic workloads all the time.     

基于L-Metric重叠子图发现的B细胞表位预测模型

针对现有表位预测方法对抗原中存在的重叠表位预测能力不佳的问题,提出了将基于局部度量（L-Metric）的重叠子图发现算法用于表位预测的模型。首先,利用抗原上的表面原子构建原子图并升级为氨基酸残基图;然后,利用基于信息流的图划分算法将氨基酸残基图划分为互不重叠的种子子图,并使用基于L-Metric的重叠子图发现算法对种子子图进行扩展以得到重叠子图;最后,利用由图卷积网络（GCN）和全连接网络（FCN）构建的分类模型将扩展后的子图分类为抗原表位和非抗原表位。实验结果表明,所提出的模型在相同数据集上的F_{\mathrm{1}}值与现有表位预测模型DiscoTope 2、ElliPro、EpiPred和Glep相比分别提高了267.3%、57.0%、65.4%和3.5%。同时,消融实验结果表明,所提出的重叠子图发现算法能够有效改善预测能力,使用该算法的模型相较于未使用该算法的模型的F_{\mathrm{1}}值提高了19.2%。     

Gauze: enabling communication-friendly block synchronization with cuckoo filter

Block synchronization is an essential component of blockchain systems. Traditionally, blockchain systems tend to send all the transactions from one node to another for synchronization. However, such a method may lead to an extremely high network bandwidth overhead and significant transmission latency. It is crucial to speed up such a block synchronization process and save bandwidth consumption. A feasible solution is to reduce the amount of data transmission in the block synchronization process between any pair of peers. However, existing methods based on the Bloom filter or its variants still suffer from multiple roundtrips of communications and significant synchronization delay. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol named Gauze for fast block synchronization. It utilizes the Cuckoo filter (CF) to discern the transactions in the receiver’s mempool and the block to verify, providing an efficient solution to the problem of set reconciliation in the P2P (Peer-to-Peer Network) network. By up to two rounds of exchanging and querying the CFs, the sending node can acknowledge whether the transactions in a block are contained by the receiver’s mempool or not. Based on this message, the sender only needs to transfer the missed transactions to the receiver, which speeds up the block synchronization and saves precious bandwidth resources. The evaluation results show that Gauze outperforms existing methods in terms of the average processing latency (about 10\times lower than Graphene) and the total synchronization space cost (about 10\times lower than Compact Blocks) in different scenarios.     

Differential privacy histogram publishing method based on dynamic sliding window

Differential privacy has recently become a widely recognized strict privacy protection model of data release. Differential privacy histogram publishing can directly show the statistical data distribution under the premise of ensuring user privacy for data query, sharing, and analysis. The dynamic data release is a study with a wide range of current industry needs. However, the amount of data varies considerably over different periods. Unreasonable data processing will result in the risk of users’ information leakage and unavailability of the data. Therefore, we designed a differential privacy histogram publishing method based on the dynamic sliding window of LSTM (DPHP-DL), which can improve data availability on the premise of guaranteeing data privacy. DPHP-DL is integrated by DSW-LSTM and DPHK+. DSW-LSTM updates the size of sliding windows based on data value prediction via long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, which evenly divides the data stream into several windows. DPHK+ heuristically publishes non-isometric histograms based on k-mean++ clustering of automatically obtaining the optimal K, so as to achieve differential privacy histogram publishing of dynamic data. Extensive experiments on real-world dynamic datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the DPHP-DL.     

基于阵列处理器的最小均方误差检测算法并行设计与实现

针对大规模多输入多输出（MIMO）系统中,最小均方误差（MMSE）检测算法在可重构阵列结构上适应性差、计算复杂度高和运算效率低的问题,基于项目组开发的可重构阵列处理器,提出了一种基于MMSE算法的并行映射方法。首先,利用Gram矩阵计算时较为简单的数据依赖关系,设计时间上和空间上可以高度并行的流水线加速方案;其次,根据MMSE算法中Gram矩阵计算和匹配滤波计算模块相对独立的特点,设计模块化并行映射方案;最后,基于Xilinx Virtex-6开发板对映射方案进行实现并统计其性能。实验结果表明,该方法在MIMO规模为\mathrm{128}\times \mathrm{4}、\mathrm{128}\times \mathrm{8}和\mathrm{128}\times \mathrm{16}的正交相移键控（QPSK）上行链路中,加速比分别2.80、4.04和5.57;在\mathrm{128}\times \mathrm{16}的大规模MIMO系统中,可重构阵列处理器比专用硬件减少了42.6%的资源消耗。     

基于区块链的轻量化移动自组网认证方案

为了解决现有认证方式无法追踪恶意节点、集中式认证中心易受攻击的问题,基于区块链技术的去中心化、防篡改、可追溯特点,提出了一种分布式轻量化移动自组网认证方案。该方案包括对等网络建立、认证账本设计和共识机制选择,并分析讨论了智能合约的作用。在所提方案中,当给定对等节点之间最大传输时延τmax时,节点认证时间δ和网络规模Nt^all间的关系满足(Nt^all/3+1)τmax≤δ≤3(Nt^all+1)τmax.     

基于神经正切核的多核学习方法

多核学习方法是一类重要的核学习方法,但大多数多核学习方法存在如下问题：多核学习方法中的基核函数大多选择传统的具有浅层结构的核函数,在处理数据规模大且分布不平坦的问题时表示能力较弱;现有的多核学习方法的泛化误差收敛率大多为O\left(\mathrm{1}/\sqrt[]{n}\right),收敛速度较慢。为此,提出了一种基于神经正切核（NTK）的多核学习方法。首先,将具有深层次结构的NTK作为多核学习方法的基核函数,从而增强多核学习方法的表示能力。然后,根据主特征值比例度量证明了一种收敛速率可达O\left(\mathrm{1}/n\right)的泛化误差界;在此基础上,结合核对齐度量设计了一种全新的多核学习算法。最后,在多个数据集上进行了实验,实验结果表明,相比Adaboost和K近邻（KNN）等分类算法,新提出的多核学习算法具有更高的准确率和更好的表示能力,也验证了所提方法的可行性与有效性。     

Towards optimized tensor code generation for deep learning on sunway many-core processor

The flourish of deep learning frameworks and hardware platforms has been demanding an efficient compiler that can shield the diversity in both software and hardware in order to provide application portability. Among the existing deep learning compilers, TVM is well known for its efficiency in code generation and optimization across diverse hardware devices. In the meanwhile, the Sunway many-core processor renders itself as a competitive candidate for its attractive computational power in both scientific computing and deep learning workloads. This paper combines the trends in these two directions. Specifically, we propose swTVM that extends the original TVM to support ahead-of-time compilation for architecture requiring cross-compilation such as Sunway. In addition, we leverage the architecture features during the compilation such as core group for massive parallelism, DMA for high bandwidth memory transfer and local device memory for data locality, in order to generate efficient codes for deep learning workloads on Sunway. The experiment results show that the codes generated by swTVM achieve 1.79\times improvement of inference latency on average compared to the state-of-the-art deep learning framework on Sunway, across eight representative benchmarks. This work is the first attempt from the compiler perspective to bridge the gap of deep learning and Sunway processor particularly with productivity and efficiency in mind. We believe this work will encourage more people to embrace the power of deep learning and Sunway many-core processor.     

Properties of the satisfiability threshold of the strictly d-regular random (3, 2s)-SAT problem

A k-CNF (conjunctive normal form) formula is a regular (k, s)-CNF one if every variable occurs s times in the formula, where k≥2 and s>0 are integers. Regular (3, s)- CNF formulas have some good structural properties, so carrying out a probability analysis of the structure for random formulas of this type is easier than conducting such an analysis for random 3-CNF formulas. Some subclasses of the regular (3, s)-CNF formula have also characteristics of intractability that differ from random 3-CNF formulas. For this purpose, we propose strictly d-regular (k, 2s)-CNF formula, which is a regular (k, 2s)-CNF formula for which d≥0 is an even number and each literal occurs s-\frac{d}{2} or s+\frac{d}{2} times (the literals from a variable x are x and \neg x, where x is positive and \neg x is negative). In this paper, we present a new model to generate strictly d-regular random (k, 2s)-CNF formulas, and focus on the strictly d-regular random (3, 2s)-CNF formulas. Let F be a strictly d-regular random (3, 2s)-CNF formula such that 2s>d. We show that there exists a real number s₀ such that the formula F is unsatisfiable with high probability when s>s₀, and present a numerical solution for the real number s₀. The result is supported by simulated experiments, and is consistent with the existing conclusion for the case of d= 0. Furthermore, we have a conjecture: for a given d, the strictly d-regular random (3, 2s)-SAT problem has an SAT-UNSAT (satisfiable-unsatisfiable) phase transition. Our experiments support this conjecture. Finally, our experiments also show that the parameter d is correlated with the intractability of the 3-SAT problem. Therefore, our research maybe helpful for generating random hard instances of the 3-CNF formula.     

基于广义最大Versoria准则的稀疏自适应滤波算法

针对脉冲噪声干扰环境下传统稀疏自适应滤波稳态性能差,甚至无法收敛等问题,同时为提高稀疏参数辨识的精度的同时不增加过多计算代价,提出了一种基于广义最大Versoria准则（GMVC）的稀疏自适应滤波算法——带有CIM约束的GMVC（CIMGMVC）。首先,利用广义Versoria函数作为学习准则,其包含误差p阶矩的倒数形式,当脉冲干扰出现导致误差非常大时,GMVC将趋近于0,从而达到抑制脉冲噪声的目的。其次,将互相关熵诱导维度（CIM）作为稀疏惩罚约束和GMVC相结合来构建新代价函数,其中的CIM以高斯概率密度函数为基础,当选择合适核宽度时,可无限逼近于l_{\mathrm{0}}-范数。最后,应用梯度法推导出CIMGMVC算法,并分析了所提算法的均方收敛性。在Matlab平台上采用\alpha-stable分布模型产生脉冲噪声进行仿真,实验结果表明所提出的CIMGMVC算法能有效地抑制非高斯脉冲噪声的干扰,在稳健性方面优于传统稀疏自适应滤波,且稳态误差低于GMVC算法。