SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Fu Xiao

Publications and source records attributed to Fu Xiao.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Collaborative Orbital Edge Intelligence: A Decentralized Paradigm for Energy-Efficient Computing in Space

In recent years, Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites have been increasingly deployed to enable connectivity in remote and disaster-prone areas. Researchers have proposed Orbital Edge Computing, which adds computational intelligence to LEO satellites to process data on orbit, providing edge intelligence close to space data sources. Existing work on Orbital Edge Computing typically assumes centralized control without collaboration among satellites from different providers, leading to limited connectivity, higher latency, and increased satellite battery depletion. They have not fully explored decentralized inter-satellite collaboration for energy-efficient intelligence under heterogeneous LEO constellations. This paper introduces a novel paradigm, Collaborative Orbital Edge Intelligence (COEI), that leverages decentralized collaboration among LEO satellites to enable energy-efficient on-orbit processing of space data. We describe the overall system architecture of COEI, including the issues related to networking, computing, and power management. COEI can help create a multi-party, multi-orbit megaconstellation of satellites that delivers better service quality by providing benefits, including global resilient connectivity, real-time intelligence, and energy-efficient services. To demonstrate the COEI benefits, we conduct a case study on decentralized energy-aware satellite task offloading to maximize the task success rate while minimizing the sum of the maximum battery depth-of-discharge across all satellites. Finally, we outline future directions for COEI that offer opportunities for further investigation.

cs.DC

Safety Anchor: Defending Harmful Fine-tuning via Geometric Bottlenecks

The safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains vulnerable to Harmful Fine-tuning (HFT). While existing defenses impose constraints on parameters, gradients, or internal representations, we observe that they can be effectively circumvented under persistent HFT. Our analysis traces this failure to the inherent redundancy of the high-dimensional parameter space: attackers exploit optimization trajectories that are orthogonal to defense constraints to restore harmful capabilities while deceptively adhering to safety restrictions. To address this, we propose Safety Bottleneck Regularization (SBR). SBR shifts the defensive focus from the redundant parameter space to the unembedding layer, which serves as a geometric bottleneck. By anchoring the final hidden states of harmful queries to those of the safety-aligned model, SBR enables the model to maintain safe responses even under persistent HFT. Extensive experiments confirm SBR's effectiveness, demonstrating that utilizing just a single safety anchor is sufficient to reduce the Harmful Score to $<$10 while preserving competitive performance on benign downstream tasks.

cs.CR

MAS-SZZ: Multi-Agentic SZZ Algorithm for Vulnerability-Inducing Commit Identification

Accurate vulnerability-inducing commit identification serves as a foundation for a series of software security tasks, such as vulnerability detection and affected version analysis. A straightforward solution is the SZZ algorithm, which traces back through the code history to identify the earliest commit that modify the vulnerable code. Unfortunately, neither the customized V-SZZ nor state-of-the-art LLM4SZZ perform satisfactorily due to the incorrect anchor selection and inadequate backtracking capability, making them far beyond a reliable usage in practice. To overcome these challenges, we propose a multi-agentic SZZ algorithm, named MAS-SZZ, that facilitates the identification of vulnerability-inducing commits through collaboration among agents. Specifically, given a CVE description and its corresponding fixing commit, MAS-SZZ summarizes the root cause of the vulnerability and employs a structured step-forward prompting strategy to localize vulnerability-related statements based on the change intent of each patch hunk. These vulnerable statements serve as anchors from which MAS-SZZ autonomously traces backward through the repository's history to find the commit that first introduced the vulnerability. Extensive experiments show that MAS-SZZ outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines across datasets and programming languages, achieving F1-score gains of up to 65.22% over the best-performing SZZ algorithm.

cs.CR

HyGra: Accelerating Network-State Simulation for LLM Training in DCNs via Adaptive Packet-Flow Granularity

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have driven substantial intelligent transformation across diverse industries. Commercial LLM training is typically performed over data center networks (DCNs) comprising hundreds to thousands of GPUs, with multiple devices collocated per node. As network scale expands, inter-node communication becomes a primary bottleneck to training efficiency. Network-state simulators therefore play a crucial role by enabling cost-effective evaluation of network configurations and parallelization strategies through faithful emulation of DCN dynamics during LLM training. However, existing simulators are constrained by a efficiency-fidelity tradeoff, as packet-level simulators (PLSs) incur prohibitive runtime overhead, whereas flow-level simulators (FLSs) compromise essential modeling accuracy. In this paper, we develop \texttt{HyGra}, a hybrid-granularity network-state simulator that exploits intrinsic network dynamics in LLM training to adaptively switch simulation granularity. Specifically, \texttt{HyGra} employs packet-level simulation during non-steady phases with transient fluctuations and flow-level simulation during steady phases with periodic patterns, thereby accelerating execution while preserving high fidelity. Moreover, it requires no specialized hardware, supports single-machine deployment, and is compatible with existing simulators. Experiments based representative commercial LLM workloads, including ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and Qwen, show that \texttt{HyGra} achieves up to 15.4$\times$ speedup under single parallelization strategy and 7.8$\times$ under hybrid parallelization strategies while maintaining high accuracy.

cs.NI

Transferable Backdoor Attacks for Code Models via Sharpness-Aware Adversarial Perturbation

Code models are increasingly adopted in software development but remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks via poisoned training data. Existing backdoor attacks on code models face a fundamental trade-off between transferability and stealthiness. Static trigger-based attacks insert fixed dead code patterns that transfer well across models and datasets but are easily detected by code-specific defenses. In contrast, dynamic trigger-based attacks adaptively generate context-aware triggers to evade detection but suffer from poor cross-dataset transferability. Moreover, they rely on unrealistic assumptions of identical data distributions between poisoned and victim training data, limiting their practicality. To overcome these limitations, we propose Sharpness-aware Transferable Adversarial Backdoor (STAB), a novel attack that achieves both transferability and stealthiness without requiring complete victim data. STAB is motivated by the observation that adversarial perturbations in flat regions of the loss landscape transfer more effectively across datasets than those in sharp minima. To this end, we train a surrogate model using Sharpness-Aware Minimization to guide model parameters toward flat loss regions, and employ Gumbel-Softmax optimization to enable differentiable search over discrete trigger tokens for generating context-aware adversarial triggers. Experiments across three datasets and two code models show that STAB outperforms prior attacks in terms of transferability and stealthiness. It achieves a 73.2% average attack success rate after defense, outperforming static trigger-based attacks that fail under defense. STAB also surpasses the best dynamic trigger-based attack by 12.4% in cross-dataset attack success rate and maintains performance on clean inputs.

cs.CR

Path to Diversity: A Primer on ISAC-izing Commodity Wi-Fi for Practical Deployments

Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) has emerged as a key paradigm in next-generation wireless networks. While the ubiquity and low cost of commodity Wi-Fi make it an ideal platform for wide-scale sensing, it is the continuous evolution of Wi-Fi standards-towards higher frequency bands, wider bandwidths, and larger antenna arrays-that fundamentally unlocks the physical resources required for high-performance ISAC. To structure this rapidly expanding field, numerous surveys have appeared. However, prevailing literature predominantly adopts a top-down perspective, emphasizing upper-layer applications or deep learning models while treating the physical layer as an opaque abstraction. Consequently, these works often fail to touch the bottom layer of signal formation and lack technical guidance on overcoming the physical barriers that constrain sensing performance. To bridge this gap, this tutorial takes a bottom-up approach, systematically analyzing the sensing gains brought by Wi-Fi advancements through the lens of physical-layer diversity. We organize the framework around four orthogonal dimensions: i) Temporal Diversity addresses synchronization gaps to enable absolute ranging; ii) Frequency Diversity expands the effective bandwidth to sharpen range resolution; iii) Link Diversity leverages distributed topologies and digital feedback to achieve ubiquitous observability; and iv) Spatial Diversity utilizes multi-antenna arrays to combine passive angular discrimination with active directional control. Collectively, these orthogonal dimensions resolve fundamental ambiguities in time, range, and space, bridging physical capabilities with challenging sensing diversities. By synthesizing these dimensions, this tutorial provides a comprehensive guide for "ISAC-izing" commodity Wi-Fi, paving the way for future standardization and robust deployment.

cs.NI

Robust Federated Fine-Tuning in Heterogeneous Networks with Unreliable Connections: An Aggregation View

Federated Fine-Tuning (FFT) has attracted growing interest as it leverages both server- and client-side data to enhance global model generalization while preserving privacy, and significantly reduces the computational burden on edge devices by avoiding training from scratch. Despite these advantages, FFT performance is often degraded by unreliable server-client connections and heterogeneous client data distributions. Most existing methods assume homogeneous network conditions or require prior knowledge of connection failures. However, these assumptions are impractical in real-world networks characterized by diverse communication standards (e.g., wired, Wi-Fi, 4G, and 5G) and heterogeneous failure patterns. To address these limitations, we propose FedAuto, a novel FFT framework that mitigates the combined effects of connection failures and data heterogeneity via adaptive aggregation. FedAuto operates without prior knowledge of network conditions or modifications to existing infrastructure, enabling seamless plug-and-play deployment. Moreover, we establish a rigorous convergence guarantee for FedAuto. By adopting a novel per-round aggregation perspective, our analysis removes the need for assumptions on connection failures probabilities or client selection strategies commonly imposed in prior work, and guarantees convergence of FedAuto for each individual realization, providing a stronger theoretical assurance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedAuto consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under diverse connection failure scenarios for both full-parameter and partial-parameter fine-tuning (e.g., LoRA), and even surpasses strategies that rely on complex communication resource optimization.

cs.DC

HALF: Hollowing Analysis Framework for Binary Programs with Kernel Module Assistance

Binary program analysis represents a fundamental pillar of modern system security. Fine-grained methodologies like dynamic taint analysis still suffer from deployment complexity and performance overhead despite significant progress. Traditional in-process analysis tools trigger severe \textbf{address-space conflicts} that inevitably disrupt the native memory layout of the target. These conflicts frequently cause layout-sensitive exploits and evasive malware to deviate from their intended execution paths or fail entirely. This paper introduces \textbf{HALF} as a novel framework that resolves this fundamental tension while ensuring both analysis fidelity and practical performance. HALF achieves high-fidelity address-space transparency by leveraging a kernel-assisted process hollowing mechanism. This design effectively eliminates the observation artifacts that characterize traditional instrumentation tools. We further mitigate the synchronization latency of decoupled execution by implementing an exception-driven strategy via a lightweight kernel monitor. Extensive evaluation of a Windows-based prototype demonstrates that HALF maintains superior performance compared to conventional in-process baselines. HALF also provides unique capabilities for deconstructing complex, stealthy threats where existing frameworks fail to maintain execution integrity.

cs.SE

CovertAuth: Joint Covert Communication and Authentication in MmWave Systems

Beam alignment (BA) is a crucial process in millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications, enabling precise directional transmission and efficient link establishment. However, due to characteristics like omnidirectional exposure and the broadcast nature of the BA phase, it is particularly vulnerable to eavesdropping and identity impersonation attacks. To this end, this paper proposes a novel secure framework named CovertAuth, designed to enhance the security of the BA phase against such attacks. In particular, to combat eavesdropping attacks, the closed-form expressions of successful BA probability and covert transmission rate are first derived. Then, a covert communication problem aimed at jointly optimizing beam training budget and transmission power is formulated to maximize covert communication rate, subject to the covertness requirement. An alternating optimization algorithm combined with successive convex approximation is employed to iteratively achieve optimal results. To combat impersonation attacks, the mutual coupling effect of antenna array impairments is explored as a device feature to design a weighted-sum energy detector based physical layer authentication scheme. Moreover, theoretical models for authentication metrics like detection and false alarm probabilities are also provided to conduct performance analysis. Based on these models, an optimization problem is constructed to determine the optimal weight value that maximizes authentication accuracy. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that CovertAuth presents improved detection accuracy under the same covertness requirement compared to existing works.

cs.CR

Robust Federated Learning in Unreliable Wireless Networks: A Client Selection Approach

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising distributed learning paradigm for training deep neural networks (DNNs) at the wireless edge, but its performance can be severely hindered by unreliable wireless transmission and inherent data heterogeneity among clients. Existing solutions primarily address these challenges by incorporating wireless resource optimization strategies, often focusing on uplink resource allocation across clients under the assumption of homogeneous client-server network standards. However, these approaches overlooked the fact that mobile clients may connect to the server via diverse network standards (e.g., 4G, 5G, Wi-Fi) with customized configurations, limiting the flexibility of server-side modifications and restricting applicability in real-world commercial networks. This paper presents a novel theoretical analysis about how transmission failures in unreliable networks distort the effective label distributions of local samples, causing deviations from the global data distribution and introducing convergence bias in FL. Our analysis reveals that a carefully designed client selection strategy can mitigate biases induced by network unreliability and data heterogeneity. Motivated by this insight, we propose FedCote, a client selection approach that optimizes client selection probabilities without relying on wireless resource scheduling. Experimental results demonstrate the robustness of FedCote in DNN-based classification tasks under unreliable networks with frequent transmission failures.

cs.DC

Atomic insight into Li$^+$ ion transport in amorphous electrolytes Li$_x$AlO$_y$Cl$_{3+x-2y}$ (0.5 $\leq$ x $\leq$ 1.5, 0.25 $\leq$ y $\leq$ 0.75)

The recent study of viscoelastic amorphous oxychloride electrolytes has opened up a new field of research for solid-state electrolytes. In this work, we chose Li-Al-O-Cl system containing disordered structures with varying O/Cl ratio and Li$^+$ content to study their structural characteristics and ion transport mechanism using ab-initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulation and machine learning interatomic potential based molecular dynamics (MLIP-based MD) simulation. It is found that O-doping results in the presence of a skeleton of Al-chains formed by AlOCl tetrahedra and the increase of glass forming ability, causing Cl atoms' rotation around centered-Al within the tetrahedron thus facilitating the motion of Li$^+$ ions. However, further increase of O/Cl ratio decreases the number of rotating Cl atoms, weakening the transport of Li$^+$. So increasing glass forming ability without reducing Cl content or by methods through controlling synthesis conditions, are useful to promote Li$^+$ ion conducting of oxychloride electrolytes.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci

Fluid Antenna-enabled Integrated Sensing, Communication, and Computing Systems

The current integrated sensing, communication, and computing (ISCC) systems face significant challenges in both efficiency and resource utilization. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel fluid antenna (FA)-enabled ISCC system, specifically designed for vehicular networks. We develop detailed models for the communication and sensing processes to support this architecture. An integrated latency optimization problem is formulated to jointly optimize computing resources, receive combining matrices, and antenna positions. To tackle this complex problem, we decompose it into three sub-problems and analyze each separately. A mixed optimization algorithm is then designed to address the overall problem comprehensively. Numerical results demonstrate the rapid convergence of the proposed algorithm. Compared with baseline schemes, the FA-enabled vehicle ISCC system significantly improves resource utilization and reduces latency for communication, sensing, and computation.

cs.IT

Symmetrical Joint Learning Support-query Prototypes for Few-shot Segmentation

We propose Sym-Net, a novel framework for Few-Shot Segmentation (FSS) that addresses the critical issue of intra-class variation by jointly learning both query and support prototypes in a symmetrical manner. Unlike previous methods that generate query prototypes solely by matching query features to support prototypes, which is a form of bias learning towards the few-shot support samples, Sym-Net leverages a balanced symmetrical learning approach for both query and support prototypes, ensuring that the learning process does not favor one set (support or query) over the other. One of main modules of Sym-Net is the visual-text alignment-based prototype aggregation module, which is not just query-guided prototype refinement, it is a jointly learning from both support and query samples, which makes the model beneficial for handling intra-class discrepancies and allows it to generalize better to new, unseen classes. Specifically, a parameter-free prior mask generation module is designed to accurately localize both local and global regions of the query object by using sliding windows of different sizes and a self-activation kernel to suppress incorrect background matches. Additionally, to address the information loss caused by spatial pooling during prototype learning, a top-down hyper-correlation module is integrated to capture multi-scale spatial relationships between support and query images. This approach is further jointly optimized by implementing a co-optimized hard triplet mining strategy. Experimental results show that the proposed Sym-Net outperforms state-of-the-art models, which demonstrates that jointly learning support-query prototypes in a symmetrical manner for FSS offers a promising direction to enhance segmentation performance with limited annotated data.

cs.CV

Fluid Antenna for Mobile Edge Computing

In the evolving environment of mobile edge computing (MEC), optimizing system performance to meet the growing demand for low-latency computing services is a top priority. Integrating fluidic antenna (FA) technology into MEC networks provides a new approach to address this challenge. This letter proposes an FA-enabled MEC scheme that aims to minimize the total system delay by leveraging the mobility of FA to enhance channel conditions and improve computational offloading efficiency. By establishing an optimization problem focusing on the joint optimization of computation offloading and antenna positioning, we introduce an alternating iterative algorithm based on the interior point method and particle swarm optimization (IPPSO). Numerical results demonstrate the advantages of our proposed scheme compared to traditional fixed antenna positions, showing significant improvements in transmission rates and reductions in delays. The proposed IPPSO algorithm exhibits robust convergence properties, further validating the effectiveness of our method.

cs.IT

Quaternary codes and their binary images

Recently, simplicial complexes are used in constructions of several infinite families of minimal and optimal linear codes by Hyun {\em et al.} Building upon their research, in this paper more linear codes over the ring $\mathbb{Z}_4$ are constructed by simplicial complexes. Specifically, the Lee weight distributions of the resulting quaternary codes are determined and two infinite families of four-Lee-weight quaternary codes are obtained. Compared to the databases of $\mathbb Z_4$ codes by Aydin {\em et al.}, at least nine new quaternary codes are found. Thanks to the special structure of the defining sets, we have the ability to determine whether the Gray images of certain obtained quaternary codes are linear or not. This allows us to obtain two infinite families of binary nonlinear codes and one infinite family of binary minimal linear codes. Furthermore, utilizing these minimal binary codes, some secret sharing schemes as a byproduct also are established.

cs.IT

Hydrogen jet diffusion modeling by using physics-informed graph neural network and sparsely-distributed sensor data

Efficient modeling of jet diffusion during accidental release is critical for operation and maintenance management of hydrogen facilities. Deep learning has proven effective for concentration prediction in gas jet diffusion scenarios. Nonetheless, its reliance on extensive simulations as training data and its potential disregard for physical laws limit its applicability to unseen accidental scenarios. Recently, physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged to reconstruct spatial information by using data from sparsely-distributed sensors which are easily collected in real-world applications. However, prevailing approaches use the fully-connected neural network as the backbone without considering the spatial dependency of sensor data, which reduces the accuracy of concentration prediction. This study introduces the physics-informed graph deep learning approach (Physic_GNN) for efficient and accurate hydrogen jet diffusion prediction by using sparsely-distributed sensor data. Graph neural network (GNN) is used to model the spatial dependency of such sensor data by using graph nodes at which governing equations describing the physical law of hydrogen jet diffusion are immediately solved. The computed residuals are then applied to constrain the training process. Public experimental data of hydrogen jet is used to compare the accuracy and efficiency between our proposed approach Physic_GNN and state-of-the-art PINN. The results demonstrate our Physic_GNN exhibits higher accuracy and physical consistency of centerline concentration prediction given sparse concentration compared to PINN and more efficient compared to OpenFOAM. The proposed approach enables accurate and robust real-time spatial consequence reconstruction and underlying physical mechanisms analysis by using sparse sensor data.

cs.CE

The Building Data Genome Directory -- An open, comprehensive data sharing platform for building performance research

The building sector plays a crucial role in the worldwide decarbonization effort, accounting for significant portions of energy consumption and environmental effects. However, the scarcity of open data sources is a continuous challenge for built environment researchers and practitioners. Although several efforts have been made to consolidate existing open datasets, no database currently offers a comprehensive collection of building data types with all subcategories and time granularities (e.g., year, month, and sub-hour). This paper presents the Building Data Genome Directory, an open data-sharing platform serving as a one-stop shop for the data necessary for vital categories of building energy research. The data directory is an online portal (http://buildingdatadirectory.org/) that allows filtering and discovering valuable datasets. The directory covers meter, building-level, and aggregated community-level data at the spatial scale and year-to-minute level at the temporal scale. The datasets were consolidated from a comprehensive exploration of sources, including governments, research institutes, and online energy dashboards. The results of this effort include the aggregation of 60 datasets pertaining to building energy ontologies, building energy models, building energy and water data, electric vehicle data, weather data, building information data, text-mining-based research data, image data of buildings, fault detection diagnosis data and occupant data. A crowdsourcing mechanism in the platform allows users to submit datasets they suggest for inclusion by filling out an online form. This directory can fuel research and applications on building energy efficiency, which is an essential step toward addressing the world's energy and environmental challenges.

stat.AP

PAD: Towards Principled Adversarial Malware Detection Against Evasion Attacks

Machine Learning (ML) techniques can facilitate the automation of malicious software (malware for short) detection, but suffer from evasion attacks. Many studies counter such attacks in heuristic manners, lacking theoretical guarantees and defense effectiveness. In this paper, we propose a new adversarial training framework, termed Principled Adversarial Malware Detection (PAD), which offers convergence guarantees for robust optimization methods. PAD lays on a learnable convex measurement that quantifies distribution-wise discrete perturbations to protect malware detectors from adversaries, whereby for smooth detectors, adversarial training can be performed with theoretical treatments. To promote defense effectiveness, we propose a new mixture of attacks to instantiate PAD to enhance deep neural network-based measurements and malware detectors. Experimental results on two Android malware datasets demonstrate: (i) the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art defenses; (ii) it can harden ML-based malware detection against 27 evasion attacks with detection accuracies greater than 83.45%, at the price of suffering an accuracy decrease smaller than 2.16% in the absence of attacks; (iii) it matches or outperforms many anti-malware scanners in VirusTotal against realistic adversarial malware.

cs.CR