arXiv subjects

Bo Jiang

Publications and source records attributed to Bo Jiang.

At least 289 records · Page 16Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Simultaneous ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared continuous-wave lasing in a rare-earth-doped microcavity

Microlaser with multiple lasing bands is critical in various applications, such as full-colour display, optical communications and computing. Here, we propose a simple and efficient method for homogeneously doping rare earth elements into a silica whispering-gallery-mode microcavity. By this method, we demonstrate simultaneous and stable lasing covering ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared bands in an ultrahigh-Q (exceeding 108) Er-Yb co-doped silica microsphere under room temperature and continuous-wave pump for the first time. The lasing thresholds of the 380, 410, 450, 560, 660, 800, 1080 and 1550 nm-bands are estimated to be 380, 150, 2.5, 12, 0.17, 1.7, 10 and 38 μW, respectively, where the lasing in the 380, 410 and 450 nm-bands by Er element have not been separately demonstrated under room temperature and continuous-wave pump until this work. This ultrahigh-Q doped microcavity is an excellent platform for high-performance multi-band microlasers, ultrahigh-precise sensors, optical memories and cavity-enhanced light-matter interaction studies.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2021

Feature importance recap and stacking models for forex price prediction

Forex trading is the largest market in terms of qutantitative trading. Traditionally, traders refer to technical analysis based on the historical data to make decisions and trade. With the development of artificial intelligent, deep learning plays a more and more important role in forex forecasting. How to use deep learning models to predict future price is the primary purpose of most researchers. Such prediction not only helps investors and traders make decisions, but also can be used for auto-trading system. In this article, we have proposed a novel approach of feature selection called 'feature importance recap' which combines the feature importance score from tree-based model with the performance of deep learning model. A stacking model is also developed to further improve the performance. Our results shows that proper feature selection approach could significantly improve the model performance, and for financial data, some features have high importance score in many models. The results of stacking model indicate that combining the predictions of some models and feed into a neural network can further improve the performance.

q-fin.ST↗

arXiv2021

A proximal-proximal majorization-minimization algorithm for nonconvex tuning-free robust regression problems

In this paper, we introduce a proximal-proximal majorization-minimization (PPMM) algorithm for nonconvex tuning-free robust regression problems. The basic idea is to apply the proximal majorization-minimization algorithm to solve the nonconvex problem with the inner subproblems solved by a sparse semismooth Newton (SSN) method based proximal point algorithm (PPA). We must emphasize that the main difficulty in the design of the algorithm lies in how to overcome the singular difficulty of the inner subproblem. Furthermore, we also prove that the PPMM algorithm converges to a d-stationary point. Due to the Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz (KL) property of the problem, we present the convergence rate of the PPMM algorithm. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms the existing state-of-the-art algorithms.

math.OC↗

arXiv2021

Incomplete Graph Representation and Learning via Partial Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are gaining increasing attention on graph data learning tasks in recent years. However, in many applications, graph may be coming in an incomplete form where attributes of graph nodes are partially unknown/missing. Existing GNNs are generally designed on complete graphs which can not deal with attribute-incomplete graph data directly. To address this problem, we develop a novel partial aggregation based GNNs, named Partial Graph Neural Networks (PaGNNs), for attribute-incomplete graph representation and learning. Our work is motivated by the observation that the neighborhood aggregation function in standard GNNs can be equivalently viewed as the neighborhood reconstruction formulation. Based on it, we define two novel partial aggregation (reconstruction) functions on incomplete graph and derive PaGNNs for incomplete graph data learning. Extensive experiments on several datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed PaGNNs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Robust Unsupervised Video Anomaly Detection by Multi-Path Frame Prediction

Video anomaly detection is commonly used in many applications such as security surveillance and is very challenging.A majority of recent video anomaly detection approaches utilize deep reconstruction models, but their performance is often suboptimal because of insufficient reconstruction error differences between normal and abnormal video frames in practice. Meanwhile, frame prediction-based anomaly detection methods have shown promising performance. In this paper, we propose a novel and robust unsupervised video anomaly detection method by frame prediction with proper design which is more in line with the characteristics of surveillance videos. The proposed method is equipped with a multi-path ConvGRU-based frame prediction network that can better handle semantically informative objects and areas of different scales and capture spatial-temporal dependencies in normal videos. A noise tolerance loss is introduced during training to mitigate the interference caused by background noise. Extensive experiments have been conducted on the CUHK Avenue, ShanghaiTech Campus, and UCSD Pedestrian datasets, and the results show that our proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. Remarkably, our proposed method obtains the frame-level AUROC score of 88.3% on the CUHK Avenue dataset.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Covert Cycle Stealing in a Single FIFO Server

Consider a setting where Willie generates a Poisson stream of jobs and routes them to a single server that follows the first-in first-out discipline. Suppose there is an adversary Alice, who desires to receive service without being detected. We ask the question: what is the number of jobs that she can receive covertly, i.e. without being detected by Willie? In the case where both Willie and Alice jobs have exponential service times with respective rates $μ_1$ and $μ_2$, we demonstrate a phase-transition when Alice adopts the strategy of inserting a single job probabilistically when the server idles : over $n$ busy periods, she can achieve a covert throughput, measured by the expected number of jobs covertly inserted, of $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{n})$ when $μ_1 < 2μ_2$, $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{n/\log n})$ when $μ_1 = 2μ_2$, and $\mathcal{O}(n^{μ_2/μ_1})$ when $μ_1 > 2μ_2$. When both Willie and Alice jobs have general service times we establish an upper bound for the number of jobs Alice can execute covertly. This bound is related to the Fisher information. More general insertion policies are also discussed.

math.PR↗

arXiv2021

Towards More Flexible and Accurate Object Tracking with Natural Language: Algorithms and Benchmark

Tracking by natural language specification is a new rising research topic that aims at locating the target object in the video sequence based on its language description. Compared with traditional bounding box (BBox) based tracking, this setting guides object tracking with high-level semantic information, addresses the ambiguity of BBox, and links local and global search organically together. Those benefits may bring more flexible, robust and accurate tracking performance in practical scenarios. However, existing natural language initialized trackers are developed and compared on benchmark datasets proposed for tracking-by-BBox, which can't reflect the true power of tracking-by-language. In this work, we propose a new benchmark specifically dedicated to the tracking-by-language, including a large scale dataset, strong and diverse baseline methods. Specifically, we collect 2k video sequences (contains a total of 1,244,340 frames, 663 words) and split 1300/700 for the train/testing respectively. We densely annotate one sentence in English and corresponding bounding boxes of the target object for each video. We also introduce two new challenges into TNL2K for the object tracking task, i.e., adversarial samples and modality switch. A strong baseline method based on an adaptive local-global-search scheme is proposed for future works to compare. We believe this benchmark will greatly boost related researches on natural language guided tracking.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Tightness and Equivalence of Semidefinite Relaxations for MIMO Detection

The multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detection problem, a fundamental problem in modern digital communications, is to detect a vector of transmitted symbols from the noisy outputs of a fading MIMO channel. The maximum likelihood detector can be formulated as a complex least-squares problem with discrete variables, which is NP-hard in general. Various semidefinite relaxation (SDR) methods have been proposed in the literature to solve the problem due to their polynomial-time worst-case complexity and good detection error rate performance. In this paper, we consider two popular classes of SDR-based detectors and study the conditions under which the SDRs are tight and the relationship between different SDR models. For the enhanced complex and real SDRs proposed recently by Lu et al., we refine their analysis and derive the necessary and sufficient condition for the complex SDR to be tight, as well as a necessary condition for the real SDR to be tight. In contrast, we also show that another SDR proposed by Mobasher et al. is not tight with high probability under mild conditions. Moreover, we establish a general theorem that shows the equivalence between two subsets of positive semidefinite matrices in different dimensions by exploiting a special "separable" structure in the constraints. Our theorem recovers two existing equivalence results of SDRs defined in different settings and has the potential to find other applications due to its generality.

math.OC↗

arXiv2020

An exact penalty approach for optimization with nonnegative orthogonality constraints

Optimization with nonnegative orthogonality constraints has wide applications in machine learning and data sciences. It is NP-hard due to some combinatorial properties of the constraints. We first propose an equivalent optimization formulation with nonnegative and multiple spherical constraints and an additional single nonlinear constraint. Various constraint qualifications, the first- and second-order optimality conditions of the equivalent formulation are discussed. By establishing a local error bound of the feasible set, we design a class of (smooth) exact penalty models via keeping the nonnegative and multiple spherical constraints. The penalty models are exact if the penalty parameter is sufficiently large other than going to infinity. A practical penalty algorithm with postprocessing is then developed. It uses a second-order method to approximately solve a series of subproblems with nonnegative and multiple spherical constraints. We study the asymptotic convergence of the penalty algorithm and establish that any limit point is a weakly stationary point of the original problem and becomes a stationary point under some additional mild conditions. Extensive numerical results on the projection problem, orthogonal nonnegative matrix factorization problems and the K-indicators model show the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

math.OC↗

arXiv2020

Local Information Privacy and Its Application to Privacy-Preserving Data Aggregation

In this paper, we study local information privacy (LIP), and design LIP based mechanisms for statistical aggregation while protecting users' privacy without relying on a trusted third party. The notion of context-awareness is incorporated in LIP, which can be viewed as explicit modeling of the adversary's background knowledge. It enables the design of privacy-preserving mechanisms leveraging the prior distribution, which can potentially achieve a better utility-privacy tradeoff than context-free notions such as Local Differential Privacy (LDP). We present an optimization framework to minimize the mean square error in the data aggregation while protecting the privacy of each individual user's input data or a correlated latent variable while satisfying LIP constraints. Then, we study two different types of applications: (weighted) summation and histogram estimation and derive the optimal context-aware data perturbation parameters for each case, based on randomized response type of mechanism. We further compare the utility-privacy tradeoff between LIP and LDP and theoretically explain why the incorporation of prior knowledge enlarges feasible regions of the perturbation parameters, which thereby leads to higher utility. We also extend the LIP-based privacy mechanisms to the more general case when exact prior knowledge is not available. Finally, we validate our analysis by simulations using both synthetic and real-world data. Results show that our LIP-based privacy mechanism provides better utility-privacy tradeoffs than LDP, and the advantage of LIP is even more significant when the prior distribution is more skewed.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2020

Fast Object Detection with Latticed Multi-Scale Feature Fusion

Scale variance is one of the crucial challenges in multi-scale object detection. Early approaches address this problem by exploiting the image and feature pyramid, which raises suboptimal results with computation burden and constrains from inherent network structures. Pioneering works also propose multi-scale (i.e., multi-level and multi-branch) feature fusions to remedy the issue and have achieved encouraging progress. However, existing fusions still have certain limitations such as feature scale inconsistency, ignorance of level-wise semantic transformation, and coarse granularity. In this work, we present a novel module, the Fluff block, to alleviate drawbacks of current multi-scale fusion methods and facilitate multi-scale object detection. Specifically, Fluff leverages both multi-level and multi-branch schemes with dilated convolutions to have rapid, effective and finer-grained feature fusions. Furthermore, we integrate Fluff to SSD as FluffNet, a powerful real-time single-stage detector for multi-scale object detection. Empirical results on MS COCO and PASCAL VOC have demonstrated that FluffNet obtains remarkable efficiency with state-of-the-art accuracy. Additionally, we indicate the great generality of the Fluff block by showing how to embed it to other widely-used detectors as well.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

RegionTrack: A Trace-based Sound and Complete Checker to Debug Transactional Atomicity Violations and Non-Serializable Traces

Atomicity is a correctness criterion to reason about isolated code regions in a multithreaded program when they are executed concurrently. However, dynamic instances of these code regions, called transactions, may fail to behave atomically, resulting in transactional atomicity violations. Existing dynamic online atomicity checkers incur either false positives or false negatives in detecting transactions experiencing transactional atomicity violations. This paper proposes RegionTrack. RegionTrack tracks cross-thread dependences at the event, dynamic subregion, and transaction levels. It maintains both dynamic subregions within selected transactions and transactional happens-before relations through its novel timestamp propagation approach. We prove that RegionTrack is sound and complete in detecting both transactional atomicity violations and non-serializable traces. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first online technique that precisely captures the transitively closed set of happens-before relations over all conflicting events with respect to every running transaction for the above two kinds of issues. We have evaluated RegionTrack on 19 subjects of the DaCapo and the Java Grande Forum benchmarks. The empirical results confirm that RegionTrack precisely detected all those transactions which experienced transactional atomicity violations and identified all non-serializable traces. The overall results also show that RegionTrack incurred 1.10x and 1.08x lower memory and runtime overheads than Velodrome and 2.10x and 1.21x lower than Aerodrome, respectively. Moreover, it incurred 2.89x lower memory overhead than DoubleChecker. On average, Velodrome detected about 55% fewer violations than RegionTrack, which in turn reported about 3%-70% fewer violations than DoubleChecker.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2020

Neighborhood Matters: Influence Maximization in Social Networks with Limited Access

Influence maximization (IM) aims at maximizing the spread of influence by offering discounts to influential users (called seeding). In many applications, due to user's privacy concern, overwhelming network scale etc., it is hard to target any user in the network as one wishes. Instead, only a small subset of users is initially accessible. Such access limitation would significantly impair the influence spread, since IM often relies on seeding high degree users, which are particularly rare in such a small subset due to the power-law structure of social networks. In this paper, we attempt to solve the limited IM in real-world scenarios by the adaptive approach with seeding and diffusion uncertainty considered. Specifically, we consider fine-grained discounts and assume users accept the discount probabilistically. The diffusion process is depicted by the independent cascade model. To overcome the access limitation, we prove the set-wise friendship paradox (FP) phenomenon that neighbors have higher degree in expectation, and propose a two-stage seeding model with the FP embedded, where neighbors are seeded. On this basis, for comparison we formulate the non-adaptive case and adaptive case, both proven to be NP-hard. In the non-adaptive case, discounts are allocated to users all at once. We show the monotonicity of influence spread w.r.t. discount allocation and design a two-stage coordinate descent framework to decide the discount allocation. In the adaptive case, users are sequentially seeded based on observations of existing seeding and diffusion results. We prove the adaptive submodularity and submodularity of the influence spread function in two stages. Then, a series of adaptive greedy algorithms are proposed with constant approximation ratio.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

Visual Object Tracking by Segmentation with Graph Convolutional Network

Segmentation-based tracking has been actively studied in computer vision and multimedia. Superpixel based object segmentation and tracking methods are usually developed for this task. However, they independently perform feature representation and learning of superpixels which may lead to sub-optimal results. In this paper, we propose to utilize graph convolutional network (GCN) model for superpixel based object tracking. The proposed model provides a general end-to-end framework which integrates i) label linear prediction, and ii) structure-aware feature information of each superpixel together to obtain object segmentation and further improves the performance of tracking. The main benefits of the proposed GCN method have two main aspects. First, it provides an effective end-to-end way to exploit both spatial and temporal consistency constraint for target object segmentation. Second, it utilizes a mixed graph convolution module to learn a context-aware and discriminative feature for superpixel representation and labeling. An effective algorithm has been developed to optimize the proposed model. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate that our method obtains better performance against existing alternative methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

An Adaptive High Order Method for Finding Third-Order Critical Points of Nonconvex Optimization

It is well known that finding a global optimum is extremely challenging for nonconvex optimization. There are some recent efforts \cite{anandkumar2016efficient, cartis2018second, cartis2020sharp, chen2019high} regarding the optimization methods for computing higher-order critical points, which can exclude the so-called degenerate saddle points and reach a solution with better quality. Desipte theoretical development in \cite{anandkumar2016efficient, cartis2018second, cartis2020sharp, chen2019high}, the corresponding numerical experiments are missing. In this paper, we propose an implementable higher-order method, named adaptive high order method (AHOM), that aims to find the third-order critical points. This is achieved by solving an ``easier'' subproblem and incorporating the adaptive strategy of parameter-tuning in each iteration of the algorithm. The iteration complexity of the proposed method is established. Some preliminary numerical results are provided to show AHOM is able to escape the degenerate saddle points, where the second-order method could possibly get stuck.

math.OC↗

arXiv2020

EOSFuzzer: Fuzzing EOSIO Smart Contracts for Vulnerability Detection

EOSIO is one typical public blockchain platform. It is scalable in terms of transaction speeds and has a growing ecosystem supporting smart contracts and decentralized applications. However, the vulnerabilities within the EOSIO smart contracts have led to serious attacks, which caused serious financial loss to its end users. In this work, we systematically analyzed three typical EOSIO smart contract vulnerabilities and their related attacks. Then we presented EOSFuzzer, a general black-box fuzzing framework to detect vulnerabilities within EOSIO smart contracts. In particular, EOSFuzzer proposed effective attacking scenarios and test oracles for EOSIO smart contract fuzzing. Our fuzzing experiment on 3963 EOSIO smart contracts shows that EOSFuzzer is both effective and efficient to detect EOSIO smart contract vulnerabilities with high accuracy.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2020

WANA: Symbolic Execution of Wasm Bytecode for Cross-Platform Smart Contract Vulnerability Detection

Many popular blockchain platforms are supporting smart contracts for building decentralized applications. However, the vulnerabilities within smart contracts have led to serious financial loss to their end users. For the EOSIO blockchain platform, effective vulnerability detectors are still limited. Furthermore, existing vulnerability detection tools can only support one blockchain platform. In this work, we present WANA, a cross-platform smart contract vulnerability detection tool based on the symbolic execution of WebAssembly bytecode. Furthermore, WANA proposes a set of test oracles to detect the vulnerabilities in EOSIO and Ethereum smart contracts based on WebAssembly bytecode analysis. Our experimental analysis shows that WANA can effectively detect vulnerabilities in both EOSIO and Ethereum smart contracts with high efficiency.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2020

A Unified Adaptive Tensor Approximation Scheme to Accelerate Composite Convex Optimization

In this paper, we propose a unified two-phase scheme to accelerate any high-order regularized tensor approximation approach on the smooth part of a composite convex optimization model. The proposed scheme has the advantage of not needing to assume any prior knowledge of the Lipschitz constants for the gradient, the Hessian and/or high-order derivatives. This is achieved by tuning the parameters used in the algorithm \textit{adaptively} in its process of progression, which has been successfully incorporated in high-order nonconvex optimization (CartisGouldToint2018, Birgin-Gardenghi-Martinez-Santos-Toint-2017). In general, we show that the adaptive high-order method has an iteration bound of $O\left( 1 / ε^{1/(p+1)} \right)$ if the first $p$-th order derivative information is used in the approximation, which has the same iteration complexity as in that of the nonadaptive version in (Baes-2009, Nesterov-2018) where the Lipschitz constants are assumed to be known and the subproblems are assumed to be solved exactly. Thus, our results partially address the problem of incorporating adaptive strategies into the high-order {\it accelerated} methods raised by Nesterov in (Nesterov-2018), although our strategies cannot assure the convexity of the auxiliary problem and such adaptive strategies are already popular in high-order nonconvex optimization (CartisGouldToint2018, Birgin-Gardenghi-Martinez-Santos-Toint-2017). Our numerical experiment results show a clear effect of real acceleration displayed in the adaptive Newton's method with cubic regularization on a set of regularized logistic regression instances.

math.OC↗