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Elijah Pelofske

Publications and source records attributed to Elijah Pelofske.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Classical Combinatorial Optimization Scaling for Random Ising Models on 2D Heavy-Hex Graphs

Motivated by near term quantum computing hardware limitations, combinatorial optimization problems that can be addressed by current quantum algorithms and noisy hardware with little or no overhead are used to probe capabilities of quantum algorithms such as the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA). In this study, a specific class of near term quantum computing hardware defined combinatorial optimization problems, Ising models on heavy-hex graphs both with and without geometrically local cubic terms, are examined for their classical computational hardness via empirical computation time scaling quantification. Specifically the Time-to-Solution metric using the classical heuristic simulated annealing is measured for finding optimal variable assignments (ground states), as well as the time required for the optimization software Gurobi to find an optimal variable assignment. Because of the sparsity of these Ising models, the classical algorithms are able to find optimal solutions efficiently even for large instances (i.e. $100,000$ variables). The Ising models both with and without geometrically local cubic terms exhibit average-case linear-time or weakly quadratic scaling when solved exactly using Gurobi, and the Ising models with no cubic terms show evidence of exponential-time Time-to-Solution scaling when sampled using simulated annealing. These findings point to the necessity of developing and testing more complex, namely more densely connected, optimization problems in order for quantum computing to ever have a practical advantage over classical computing. Our results are another illustration that different classical algorithms can indeed have exponentially different running times, thus making the identification of the best practical classical technique important in any quantum computing vs. classical computing comparison.

math.OC↗

Single Qubit Multi-Party Transmission Using Universal Symmetric Quantum Cloning

We consider the hypothetical quantum network case where Alice wishes to transmit one qubit of information (specifically a pure quantum state) to $M$ parties, where $M$ is some large number. The remote receivers locally perform single qubit quantum state tomography on the transmitted qubits in order to compute the quantum state within some error rate (dependent on the tomography technique and the number of transmitted qubits). We show that with the use of an intermediate optimal symmetric universal quantum cloning machine (between Alice and the remote receivers) as a repeater-type node in a hypothetical quantum network, Alice can send significantly fewer qubits compared to direct transmission of the message qubits to each of the $M$ remote receivers. This is possible due to two properties of quantum cloning. The first being that single qubit quantum clones retain the same Bloch angle as the initial quantum state. This means that if the mixed state of the quantum clone can be computed to high enough accuracy, the original pure quantum state can be inferred by extrapolating that vector to the surface of the Bloch sphere. The second property is that the state overlap of approximate quantum clones, with respect to the original pure quantum state, quickly converges (specifically for $1 \rightarrow M$ the limit of the fidelity as M goes to infinity is $\frac{2}{3}$). This means that Alice can prepare a constant number of qubits (which are then passed through the quantum cloning machine) in order to achieve a desired error rate, if $M$ is large enough. Combined, these two properties mean that for large $M$, Alice can prepare many orders of magnitude fewer qubits in order to achieve the same single qubit transmission accuracy compared to the naive direct qubit transmission approach.

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Biased Degenerate Ground-State Sampling of Small Ising Models with Converged QAOA

The Quantum Alternating Operator Ansatz, a generalization of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), is a quantum algorithm used for approximately solving combinatorial optimization problems. QAOA typically uses the Transverse field mixer as the driving Hamiltonian. One of the interesting properties of the Transverse-field driving Hamiltonian is that it results in non-uniform sampling of degenerate ground states of optimization problems. In this study we numerically examine the fair sampling properties transverse field mixer QAOA, and Grover Mixer QAOA (GM-QAOA) which provides theoretical guarantees of fair sampling of degenerate optimal solutions, up to large enough $p$ such that the mean expectation value converges to an optimal approximation ratio of $1$. This comparison is performed with high quality heuristically computed, but not necessarily optimal, QAOA angles which give strictly monotonically improving solution quality as p increases. These angles are computed using the Julia based numerical simulation software JuliQAOA. Fair sampling of degenerate ground-states is quantified using Shannon entropy of the ground-state amplitudes distribution. The fair sampling properties are reported on several quantum signature Hamiltonians from previous quantum annealing fair sampling studies. Small random fully connected spin glasses are shown which exhibit exponential suppression of some degenerate ground-states with transverse field mixer QAOA. The transverse field mixer QAOA simulations show that some problem instances clearly saturate the Shannon entropy of $0$ with a maximally biased distribution that occurs when the learning converges to an approximation ratio of $1$ while other problem instances never deviate from a maximum Shannon entropy (uniform distribution) at any $p$ step.

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Comparing Quantum Annealing and Spiking Neuromorphic Computing for Sampling Binary Sparse Coding QUBO Problems

We consider the problem of computing a sparse binary representation of an image. To be precise, given an image and an overcomplete, non-orthonormal basis, we aim to find a sparse binary vector indicating the minimal set of basis vectors that when added together best reconstruct the given input. We formulate this problem with an $L_2$ loss on the reconstruction error, and an $L_0$ (or, equivalently, an $L_1$) loss on the binary vector enforcing sparsity. This yields a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization problem (QUBO), whose optimal solution(s) in general is NP-hard to find. The contribution of this work is twofold. First, we solve the sparse representation QUBOs by solving them both on a D-Wave quantum annealer with Pegasus chip connectivity via minor embedding, as well as on the Intel Loihi 2 spiking neuromorphic processor using a stochastic Non-equilibrium Boltzmann Machine (NEBM). Second, we deploy Quantum Evolution Monte Carlo with Reverse Annealing and iterated warm starting on Loihi 2 to evolve the solution quality from the respective machines. The solutions are benchmarked against simulated annealing, a classical heuristic, and the optimal solutions are computed using CPLEX. Iterated reverse quantum annealing performs similarly to simulated annealing, although simulated annealing is always able to sample the optimal solution whereas quantum annealing was not always able to. The Loihi 2 solutions that are sampled are on average more sparse than the solutions from any of the other methods. We demonstrate that both quantum annealing and neuromorphic computing are suitable for binary sparse coding QUBOs, and that Loihi 2 outperforms a D-Wave quantum annealer standard linear-schedule anneal, while iterated reverse quantum annealing performs much better than both unmodified linear-schedule quantum annealing and iterated warm starting on Loihi 2.

cs.ET↗

Quantum Approximate Multi-Objective Optimization

The goal of multi-objective optimization is to understand optimal trade-offs between competing objective functions by finding the Pareto front, i.e., the set of all Pareto optimal solutions, where no objective can be improved without degrading another one. Multi-objective optimization can be challenging classically, even if the corresponding single-objective optimization problems are efficiently solvable. Thus, multi-objective optimization represents a compelling problem class to analyze with quantum computers. In this work, we use low-depth Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm to approximate the optimal Pareto front of certain multi-objective weighted maximum cut problems. We demonstrate its performance on an IBM Quantum computer, as well as with Matrix Product State numerical simulation, and show its potential to outperform classical approaches.

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Efficient Online Quantum Circuit Learning with No Upfront Training

We propose a surrogate-based method for optimizing parameterized quantum circuits which is designed to operate with few calls to a quantum computer. We employ a computationally inexpensive classical surrogate to approximate the cost function of a variational quantum algorithm. An initial surrogate is fit to data obtained by sparse sampling of the true cost function using noisy quantum computers. The surrogate is iteratively refined by querying the true cost at the surrogate optima, then using radial basis function interpolation with existing and new true cost data. The use of radial basis function interpolation enables surrogate construction without hyperparameters to pre-train. Additionally, using the surrogate as an acquisition function focuses hardware queries in the vicinity of the true optima. For 16-qubit random 3-regular Max-Cut problems solved using the QAOA ansatz, we find that our method outperforms the prior state of the art. Furthermore, we demonstrate successful optimization of QAOA circuits for 127-qubit random Ising models on an IBM quantum processor using measurement counts of the order of $10^4-10^5$. The strong empirical performance of this approach is an important step towards the large-scale practical application of variational quantum algorithms and a clear demonstration of the effectiveness of classical-surrogate-based learning approaches.

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Increasing the Hardness of Posiform Planting Using Random QUBOs for Programmable Quantum Annealer Benchmarking

Posiform planting is a method for constructing QUBO problems with a single unique planted solution that can be tailored to arbitrary connectivity graphs. In this study we investigate making posiform planted QUBOs computationally harder by fusing many smaller random discrete coefficient spin-glass Ising models, whose global minimum energy is computed classically using classical binary integer programming optimization software, with posiform-planted QUBOs. The single unique ground-state solution of the resulting QUBO problem is the concatenation of (exactly one of) the ground-states of each of the smaller problems. We apply these modified posiform planted QUBOs to the task of benchmarking programmable D-Wave quantum annealers. The proposed method enables generating binary variable combinatorial optimization problems that cover the entire quantum annealing processor hardware graph, have a unique solution, are entirely hardware-graph-native, and can have tunable computational hardness. We benchmark the capabilities of three D-Wave superconducting qubit quantum annealing processors, having from 563 up to 5627 qubits, to sample the optimal unique planted solution of problems generated by our proposed method and compare them against simulated annealing and Gurobi. We find that the D-Wave QPU ground-state sampling success rate does not change with respect to the size of the random QUBOs we employ. Surprisingly, we find that some of these classes of QUBOs are solved at very high success rates at short annealing times compared to longer annealing times for the Zephyr connectivity graph QPUs.

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Scaling Whole-Chip QAOA for Higher-Order Ising Spin Glass Models on Heavy-Hex Graphs

We show through numerical simulation that the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) for higher-order, random-coefficient, heavy-hex compatible spin glass Ising models has strong parameter concentration across problem sizes from $16$ up to $127$ qubits for $p=1$ up to $p=5$, which allows for straight-forward transfer learning of QAOA angles on instance sizes where exhaustive grid-search is prohibitive even for $p>1$. We use Matrix Product State (MPS) simulation at different bond dimensions to obtain confidence in these results, and we obtain the optimal solutions to these combinatorial optimization problems using CPLEX. In order to assess the ability of current noisy quantum hardware to exploit such parameter concentration, we execute short-depth QAOA circuits (with a CNOT depth of 6 per $p$, resulting in circuits which contain $1420$ two qubit gates for $127$ qubit $p=5$ QAOA) on $100$ higher-order (cubic term) Ising models on IBM quantum superconducting processors with $16, 27, 127$ qubits using QAOA angles learned from a single $16$-qubit instance. We show that (i) the best quantum processors generally find lower energy solutions up to $p=3$ for 27 qubit systems and up to $p=2$ for 127 qubit systems and are overcome by noise at higher values of $p$, (ii) the best quantum processors find mean energies that are about a factor of two off from the noise-free numerical simulation results. Additional insights from our experiments are that large performance differences exist among different quantum processors even of the same generation and that dynamical decoupling significantly improve performance for some, but decrease performance for other quantum processors. Lastly we show $p=1$ QAOA angle mean energy landscapes computed using up to a $414$ qubit quantum computer, showing that the mean QAOA energy landscapes remain very similar as the problem size changes.

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Comparing Three Generations of D-Wave Quantum Annealers for Minor Embedded Combinatorial Optimization Problems

Quantum annealing is a novel type of analog computation that aims to use quantum mechanical fluctuations to search for optimal solutions of Ising problems. Quantum annealing in the Transverse Ising model, implemented on D-Wave QPUs, are available as cloud computing resources. In this article we report concise benchmarks across three generations of D-Wave quantum annealers, consisting of four different devices, for the NP-Hard combinatorial optimization problems unweighted maximum clique and unweighted maximum cut on random graphs. The Ising, or equivalently QUBO, formulation of these problems do not require auxiliary variables for order reduction, and their overall structure and weights are not highly complex, which makes these problems simple test cases to understand the sampling capability of current D-Wave quantum annealers. All-to-all minor embeddings of size $52$, with relatively uniform chain lengths, are used for a direct comparison across the Chimera, Pegasus, and Zephyr device topologies. A grid search over annealing times and the minor embedding chain strengths is performed in order to determine the level of reasonable performance for each device and problem type. Experiment metrics that are reported are approximation ratios for non-broken chain samples and chain break proportions. How fairly the quantum annealers sample optimal maximum cliques, for instances which contain multiple maximum cliques, is also quantified using entropy of the measured ground state distributions. The newest generation of quantum annealing hardware, which has a Zephyr hardware connectivity, performed the best overall with respect to approximation ratios and chain break frequencies.

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Simulating Heavy-Hex Transverse Field Ising Model Magnetization Dynamics Using Programmable Quantum Annealers

Recently, a Hamiltonian dynamics simulation was performed on a kicked ferromagnetic 2D transverse field Ising model with a connectivity graph native to the 127 qubit heavy-hex IBM Quantum architecture using ZNE quantum error mitigation. We demonstrate that one of the observables in this Trotterized Hamiltonian dynamics simulation, namely magnetization, can be efficiently simulated on current superconducting qubit-based programmable quantum annealing computers. We show this using two distinct methods: reverse quantum annealing and h-gain state encoding. This simulation is possible because the 127 qubit heavy-hex connectivity graph can be natively embedded onto the D-Wave Pegasus quantum annealer hardware graph and because there exists a direct equivalence between the energy scales of the two types of quantum computers. We derive equivalent anneal pauses in order to simulate the Trotterized quantum circuit dynamics for varying Rx rotations $θ_h \in (0, \fracπ{2}]$, using quantum annealing processors. Multiple disjoint instances of the Ising model of interest can be embedded onto the D-Wave Pegasus hardware graph, allowing for parallel quantum annealing. We report equivalent magnetization dynamics using quantum annealing for time steps of 20, 50 up to 10,000, which we find are consistent with exact classical 27 qubit heavy-hex Trotterized circuit magnetization dynamics, and we observe reasonable, albeit noisy, agreement with the existing simulations for single site magnetization at 20 Trotter steps. The quantum annealers are able to simulate equivalent magnetization dynamics for thousands of time steps, significantly out of the computational reach of the digital quantum computers on which the original Hamiltonian dynamics simulations were performed.

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Automated Software Vulnerability Static Code Analysis Using Generative Pre-Trained Transformer Models

Generative Pre-Trained Transformer models have been shown to be surprisingly effective at a variety of natural language processing tasks -- including generating computer code. We evaluate the effectiveness of open source GPT models for the task of automatic identification of the presence of vulnerable code syntax (specifically targeting C and C++ source code). This task is evaluated on a selection of 36 source code examples from the NIST SARD dataset, which are specifically curated to not contain natural English that indicates the presence, or lack thereof, of a particular vulnerability. The NIST SARD source code dataset contains identified vulnerable lines of source code that are examples of one out of the 839 distinct Common Weakness Enumerations (CWE), allowing for exact quantification of the GPT output classification error rate. A total of 5 GPT models are evaluated, using 10 different inference temperatures and 100 repetitions at each setting, resulting in 5,000 GPT queries per vulnerable source code analyzed. Ultimately, we find that the GPT models that we evaluated are not suitable for fully automated vulnerability scanning because the false positive and false negative rates are too high to likely be useful in practice. However, we do find that the GPT models perform surprisingly well at automated vulnerability detection for some of the test cases, in particular surpassing random sampling, and being able to identify the exact lines of code that are vulnerable albeit at a low success rate. The best performing GPT model result found was Llama-2-70b-chat-hf with inference temperature of 0.1 applied to NIST SARD test case 149165 (which is an example of a buffer overflow vulnerability), which had a binary classification recall score of 1.0 and a precision of 1.0 for correctly and uniquely identifying the vulnerable line of code and the correct CWE number.

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Automated Creation of Source Code Variants of a Cryptographic Hash Function Implementation Using Generative Pre-Trained Transformer Models

Generative pre-trained transformers (GPT's) are a type of large language machine learning model that are unusually adept at producing novel, and coherent, natural language. In this study the ability of GPT models to generate novel and correct versions, and notably very insecure versions, of implementations of the cryptographic hash function SHA-1 is examined. The GPT models Llama-2-70b-chat-h, Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.1, and zephyr-7b-alpha are used. The GPT models are prompted to re-write each function using a modified version of the localGPT framework and langchain to provide word embedding context of the full source code and header files to the model, resulting in over 150,000 function re-write GPT output text blocks, approximately 50,000 of which were able to be parsed as C code and subsequently compiled. The generated code is analyzed for being compilable, correctness of the algorithm, memory leaks, compiler optimization stability, and character distance to the reference implementation. Remarkably, several generated function variants have a high implementation security risk of being correct for some test vectors, but incorrect for other test vectors. Additionally, many function implementations were not correct to the reference algorithm of SHA-1, but produced hashes that have some of the basic characteristics of hash functions. Many of the function re-writes contained serious flaws such as memory leaks, integer overflows, out of bounds accesses, use of uninitialised values, and compiler optimization instability. Compiler optimization settings and SHA-256 hash checksums of the compiled binaries are used to cluster implementations that are equivalent but may not have identical syntax - using this clustering over 100,000 novel and correct versions of the SHA-1 codebase were generated where each component C function of the reference implementation is different from the original code.

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Increasing the Measured Effective Quantum Volume with Zero Noise Extrapolation

Quantum Volume is a full-stack benchmark for near-term quantum computers. It quantifies the largest size of a square circuit which can be executed on the target device with reasonable fidelity. Error mitigation is a set of techniques intended to remove the effects of noise present in the computation of noisy quantum computers when computing an expectation value of interest. Effective quantum volume is a proposed metric that applies error mitigation to the quantum volume protocol in order to evaluate the effectiveness not only of the target device but also of the error mitigation algorithm. Digital Zero-Noise Extrapolation (ZNE) is an error mitigation technique that estimates the noiseless expectation value using circuit folding to amplify errors by known scale factors and extrapolating to the zero-noise limit. Here we demonstrate that ZNE, with global and local unitary folding with fractional scale factors, in conjunction with dynamical decoupling, can increase the effective quantum volume over the vendor-measured quantum volume. Specifically, we measure the effective quantum volume of four IBM Quantum superconducting processor units, obtaining values that are larger than the vendor-measured quantum volume on each device. This is the first such increase reported.

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A near-term quantum algorithm for solving linear systems of equations based on the Woodbury identity

Quantum algorithms for solving linear systems of equations have generated excitement because of the potential speed-ups involved and the importance of solving linear equations in many applications. However, applying these algorithms can be challenging. The Harrow-Hassidim-Lloyd algorithm and improvements thereof require complex subroutines suitable for fault-tolerant hardware such as Hamiltonian simulation, making it ill-suited to current hardware. Variational algorithms, on the other hand, involve expensive optimization loops, which can be prone to barren plateaus and local optima. We describe a quantum algorithm for solving linear systems of equations that avoids these problems. Our algorithm is based on the Woodbury identity, which analytically describes the inverse of a matrix that is a low-rank modification of another (easily-invertible) matrix. This approach only utilizes basic quantum subroutines like the Hadamard test or the swap test, so it is well-suited to current hardware. There is no optimization loop, so barren plateaus and local optima do not present a problem. The low-rank aspect of the identity enables us to efficiently transfer information to and from the quantum computer. This approach can produce accurate results on current hardware. As evidence of this, we estimate an inner product involving the solution of a system of more than 16 million equations with 2% error using IBM's Auckland quantum computer. To our knowledge, no system of equations this large has previously been solved to this level of accuracy on a quantum computer.

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An Efficient All-to-All GCD Algorithm for Low Entropy RSA Key Factorization

RSA is an incredibly successful and useful asymmetric encryption algorithm. One of the types of implementation flaws in RSA is low entropy of the key generation, specifically the prime number creation stage. This can occur due to flawed usage of random prime number generator libraries, or on computers where there is a lack of a source of external entropy. These implementation flaws result in some RSA keys sharing prime factors, which means that the full factorization of the public modulus can be recovered incredibly efficiently by performing a computation GCD between the two public key moduli that share the prime factor. However, since one does not know which of the composite moduli share a prime factor a-priori, to determine if any such shared prime factors exist, an all-to-all GCD attack (also known as a batch GCD attack, or a bulk GCD attack) can be performed on the available public keys so as to recover any shared prime factors. This study describes a novel all-to-all batch GCD algorithm, which will be referred to as the binary tree batch GCD algorithm, that is more efficient than the current best batch GCD algorithm (the remainder tree batch GCD algorithm). A comparison against the best existing batch GCD method (which is a product tree followed by a remainder tree computation) is given using a dataset of random RSA moduli that are constructed such that some of the moduli share prime factors. This proposed binary tree batch GCD algorithm has better runtime than the existing remainder tree batch GCD algorithm, although asymptotically it has nearly identical scaling and its complexity is dependent on how many shared prime factors exist in the set of RSA keys. In practice, the implementation of the proposed binary tree batch GCD algorithm has a roughly 6x speedup compared to the standard remainder tree batch GCD approach.

cs.CR↗

Probing Quantum Telecloning on Superconducting Quantum Processors

Quantum information can not be perfectly cloned, but approximate copies of quantum information can be generated. Quantum telecloning combines approximate quantum cloning, more typically referred as quantum cloning, and quantum teleportation. Quantum telecloning allows approximate copies of quantum information to be constructed by separate parties, using the classical results of a Bell measurement made on a prepared quantum telecloning state. Quantum telecloning can be implemented as a circuit on quantum computers using a classical co-processor to compute classical feed forward instructions using if statements based on the results of a mid-circuit Bell measurement in real time. We present universal, symmetric, optimal $1 \rightarrow M$ telecloning circuits, and experimentally demonstrate these quantum telecloning circuits for $M=2$ up to $M=10$, natively executed with real time classical control systems on IBM Quantum superconducting processors, known as dynamic circuits. We perform the cloning procedure on many different message states across the Bloch sphere, on $7$ IBM Quantum processors, optionally using the error suppression technique X-X sequence digital dynamical decoupling. Two circuit optimizations are utilized, one which removes ancilla qubits for $M=2, 3$, and one which reduces the total number of gates in the circuit but still uses ancilla qubits. Parallel single qubit tomography with MLE density matrix reconstruction is used in order to compute the mixed state density matrices of the clone qubits, and clone quality is measured using quantum fidelity. These results present one of the largest and most comprehensive NISQ computer experimental analyses on (single qubit) quantum telecloning to date. The clone fidelity sharply decreases to $0.5$ for $M > 5$, but for $M=2$ we are able to achieve a mean clone fidelity of up to $0.79$ using dynamical decoupling.

quant-ph↗

Automated Multi-Language to English Machine Translation Using Generative Pre-Trained Transformers

The task of accurate and efficient language translation is an extremely important information processing task. Machine learning enabled and automated translation that is accurate and fast is often a large topic of interest in the machine learning and data science communities. In this study, we examine using local Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT) models to perform automated zero shot black-box, sentence wise, multi-natural-language translation into English text. We benchmark 16 different open-source GPT models, with no custom fine-tuning, from the Huggingface LLM repository for translating 50 different non-English languages into English using translated TED Talk transcripts as the reference dataset. These GPT model inference calls are performed strictly locally, on single A100 Nvidia GPUs. Benchmark metrics that are reported are language translation accuracy, using BLEU, GLEU, METEOR, and chrF text overlap measures, and wall-clock time for each sentence translation. The best overall performing GPT model for translating into English text for the BLEU metric is ReMM-v2-L2-13B with a mean score across all tested languages of $0.152$, for the GLEU metric is ReMM-v2-L2-13B with a mean score across all tested languages of $0.256$, for the chrF metric is Llama2-chat-AYT-13B with a mean score across all tested languages of $0.448$, and for the METEOR metric is ReMM-v2-L2-13B with a mean score across all tested languages of $0.438$.

cs.CL↗

A Robust Cybersecurity Topic Classification Tool

In this research, we use user defined labels from three internet text sources (Reddit, Stackexchange, Arxiv) to train 21 different machine learning models for the topic classification task of detecting cybersecurity discussions in natural text. We analyze the false positive and false negative rates of each of the 21 model's in a cross validation experiment. Then we present a Cybersecurity Topic Classification (CTC) tool, which takes the majority vote of the 21 trained machine learning models as the decision mechanism for detecting cybersecurity related text. We also show that the majority vote mechanism of the CTC tool provides lower false negative and false positive rates on average than any of the 21 individual models. We show that the CTC tool is scalable to the hundreds of thousands of documents with a wall clock time on the order of hours.

cs.IR↗