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Haoran Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Haoran Zhu.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

AuditWen:An Open-Source Large Language Model for Audit

Intelligent auditing represents a crucial advancement in modern audit practices, enhancing both the quality and efficiency of audits within the realm of artificial intelligence. With the rise of large language model (LLM), there is enormous potential for intelligent models to contribute to audit domain. However, general LLMs applied in audit domain face the challenges of lacking specialized knowledge and the presence of data biases. To overcome these challenges, this study introduces AuditWen, an open-source audit LLM by fine-tuning Qwen with constructing instruction data from audit domain. We first outline the application scenarios for LLMs in the audit and extract requirements that shape the development of LLMs tailored for audit purposes. We then propose an audit LLM, called AuditWen, by fine-tuning Qwen with constructing 28k instruction dataset from 15 audit tasks and 3 layers. In evaluation stage, we proposed a benchmark with 3k instructions that covers a set of critical audit tasks derived from the application scenarios. With the benchmark, we compare AuditWen with other existing LLMs from information extraction, question answering and document generation. The experimental results demonstrate superior performance of AuditWen both in question understanding and answer generation, making it an immediately valuable tool for audit.

cs.CL↗

Enhancing Fine-grained Object Detection in Aerial Images via Orthogonal Mapping

Fine-Grained Object Detection (FGOD) is a critical task in high-resolution aerial image analysis. This letter introduces Orthogonal Mapping (OM), a simple yet effective method aimed at addressing the challenge of semantic confusion inherent in FGOD. OM introduces orthogonal constraints in the feature space by decoupling features from the last layer of the classification branch with a class-wise orthogonal vector basis. This effectively mitigates semantic confusion and enhances classification accuracy. Moreover, OM can be seamlessly integrated into mainstream object detectors. Extensive experiments conducted on three FGOD datasets (FAIR1M, ShipRSImageNet, and MAR20) demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach. Notably, with just one line of code, OM achieves a 4.08% improvement in mean Average Precision (mAP) over FCOS on the ShipRSImageNet dataset. Codes are released at https://github.com/ZhuHaoranEIS/Orthogonal-FGOD.

cs.CV↗

TAME: Task Agnostic Continual Learning using Multiple Experts

The goal of lifelong learning is to continuously learn from non-stationary distributions, where the non-stationarity is typically imposed by a sequence of distinct tasks. Prior works have mostly considered idealistic settings, where the identity of tasks is known at least at training. In this paper we focus on a fundamentally harder, so-called task-agnostic setting where the task identities are not known and the learning machine needs to infer them from the observations. Our algorithm, which we call TAME (Task-Agnostic continual learning using Multiple Experts), automatically detects the shift in data distributions and switches between task expert networks in an online manner. At training, the strategy for switching between tasks hinges on an extremely simple observation that for each new coming task there occurs a statistically-significant deviation in the value of the loss function that marks the onset of this new task. At inference, the switching between experts is governed by the selector network that forwards the test sample to its relevant expert network. The selector network is trained on a small subset of data drawn uniformly at random. We control the growth of the task expert networks as well as selector network by employing online pruning. Our experimental results show the efficacy of our approach on benchmark continual learning data sets, outperforming the previous task-agnostic methods and even the techniques that admit task identities at both training and testing, while at the same time using a comparable model size.

cs.LG↗

MBCT: A Monero-Based Covert Transmission Approach with On-chain Dynamic Session Key Negotiation

Traditional covert transmission (CT) approaches have been hindering CT application while blockchain technology offers new avenue. Current blockchain-based CT approaches require off-chain negotiation of critical information and often overlook the dynamic session keys updating, which increases the risk of message and key leakage. Additionally, in some approaches the covert transactions exhibit obvious characteristics that can be easily detected by third-parties. Moreover, most approaches do not address the issue of decreased reliability of message transmission in blockchain attack scenarios. Bitcoin- and Ethereum-based approaches also have the issue of transaction linkability, which can be tackled by Monero-based approaches because of the privacy protection mechanisms in Monero. However, Monero-based CT has the problem of sender repudiation. In this paper, we propose a novel Monero-Based CT approach (MBCT), which enables on-chain session key dynamically updating without off-chain negotiation. MBCT can assure non-repudiation of transmission participants, confidentiality of keys, reliability of message transmission and less observable characteristics. There are achieved by the three components in MBCT, namely, a sender authentication method, a dynamically on-chain session key updating method and a state feedback method. We implement MBCT in Monero-0.18.1.0 and the experiment results demonstrate its high embedding capacity of MBCT.

cs.CR↗

OMP-Engineer: Bridging Syntax Analysis and In-Context Learning for Efficient Automated OpenMP Parallelization

In advancing parallel programming, particularly with OpenMP, the shift towards NLP-based methods marks a significant innovation beyond traditional S2S tools like Autopar and Cetus. These NLP approaches train on extensive datasets of examples to efficiently generate optimized parallel code, streamlining the development process. This method's strength lies in its ability to swiftly produce parallelized code that runs efficiently. However, this reliance on NLP models, without direct code analysis, can introduce inaccuracies, as these models might not fully grasp the nuanced semantics of the code they parallelize. We build OMP-Engineer, which balances the efficiency and scalability of NLP models with the accuracy and reliability of traditional methods, aiming to enhance the performance of automating parallelization while navigating its inherent challenges.

cs.DC↗

Towards Trust Proof for Secure Confidential Virtual Machines

The Virtual Machine (VM)-based Trusted-Execution-Environment (TEE) technology, like AMD Secure-Encrypted-Virtualization (SEV), enables the establishment of Confidential VMs (CVMs) to protect data privacy. But CVM lacks ways to provide the trust proof of its running state, degrading the user confidence of using CVM. The technology of virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) can be used to generate trust proof for CVM. However, the existing vTPM-based approaches have the weaknesses like lack of a well-defined root-of-trust, lack of vTPM protection, and lack of vTPM's trust proof. These weaknesses prevent the generation of the trust proof of the CVM. This paper proposes an approach to generate the trust proof for AMD SEV-based CVM so as to ensure its security by using a secure vTPM to construct Trusted Complete Chain for the CVM (T3CVM). T3CVM consists of three components: 1) TR-Manager, as the well-defined root-of-trust, helps to build complete trust chains for CVMs; 2) CN-TPMCVM, a special CVM provides secure vTPMs; 3) CN-CDriver, an enhanced TPM driver. Our approach overcomes the weaknesses of existing approaches and enables trusted computing-based applications to run seamlessly in the trusted CVM. We perform a formal security analysis of T3CVM, and implement a prototype system to evaluate its performance.

cs.CR↗

On an optimal problem of bilinear forms

We study an optimization problem originated from the Grothendieck constant. A generalized normal equation is proposed and analyzed. We establish a correspondence between solutions of the general normal equation and its dual equation. Explicit solutions are described for the two-dimensional case.

math.FA↗

Robust Tiny Object Detection in Aerial Images amidst Label Noise

Precise detection of tiny objects in remote sensing imagery remains a significant challenge due to their limited visual information and frequent occurrence within scenes. This challenge is further exacerbated by the practical burden and inherent errors associated with manual annotation: annotating tiny objects is laborious and prone to errors (i.e., label noise). Training detectors for such objects using noisy labels often leads to suboptimal performance, with networks tending to overfit on noisy labels. In this study, we address the intricate issue of tiny object detection under noisy label supervision. We systematically investigate the impact of various types of noise on network training, revealing the vulnerability of object detectors to class shifts and inaccurate bounding boxes for tiny objects. To mitigate these challenges, we propose a DeNoising Tiny Object Detector (DN-TOD), which incorporates a Class-aware Label Correction (CLC) scheme to address class shifts and a Trend-guided Learning Strategy (TLS) to handle bounding box noise. CLC mitigates inaccurate class supervision by identifying and filtering out class-shifted positive samples, while TLS reduces noisy box-induced erroneous supervision through sample reweighting and bounding box regeneration. Additionally, Our method can be seamlessly integrated into both one-stage and two-stage object detection pipelines. Comprehensive experiments conducted on synthetic (i.e., noisy AI-TOD-v2.0 and DOTA-v2.0) and real-world (i.e., AI-TOD) noisy datasets demonstrate the robustness of DN-TOD under various types of label noise. Notably, when applied to the strong baseline RFLA, DN-TOD exhibits a noteworthy performance improvement of 4.9 points under 40% mixed noise. Datasets, codes, and models will be made publicly available.

cs.CV↗

Delay Impact on Stubborn Mining Attack Severity in Imperfect Bitcoin Network

Stubborn mining attack greatly downgrades Bitcoin throughput and also benefits malicious miners (attackers). This paper aims to quantify the impact of block receiving delay on stubborn mining attack severity in imperfect Bitcoin networks. We develop an analytic model and derive formulas of both relative revenue and system throughput, which are applied to study attack severity. Experiment results validate our analysis method and show that imperfect networks favor attackers. The quantitative analysis offers useful insight into stubborn mining attack and then helps the development of countermeasures.

cs.CR↗

Towards Runtime Customizable Trusted Execution Environment on FPGA-SoC

Processing sensitive data and deploying well-designed Intellectual Property (IP) cores on remote Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) are prone to private data leakage and IP theft. One effective solution is constructing Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) on FPGA-SoCs (FPGA System on Chips). Researchers have integrated this type TEE with Trusted Platform Module (TPM)-based trusted boot, denoted as FPGA-SoC tbTEE. But there is no effort on secure and trusted runtime customization of FPGA-SoC TEE. This paper extends FPGA-SoC tbTEE to build Runtime Customizable TEE (RCTEE) on FPGA-SoC by additive three major components (our work): 1) CrloadIP, which can load an IP core at runtime such that RCTEE can be adjusted dynamically and securely; 2) CexecIP, which can not only execute an IP core without modifying the operating system of FPGA-SoC TEE, but also prevent insider attacks from executing IPs deployed in RCTEE; 3) CremoAT, which can provide the newly measured RCTEE state and establish a secure and trusted communication path between remote verifiers and RCTEE. We conduct a security analysis of RCTEE and its performance evaluation on Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ XCZU15EG 2FFVB1156 MPSoC.

cs.CR↗

Towards Semi-Markov Model-based Dependability Evaluation of VM-based Multi-Domain Service Function Chain

In NFV networks, service functions (SFs) can be deployed on virtual machines (VMs) across multiple domains and then form a service function chain (MSFC) for end-to-end network service provision. However, any software component in a VM-based MSFC must experience software aging issue after a long period of operation. This paper quantitatively investigates the capability of proactive rejuvenation techniques in reducing the damage of software aging on a VM-based MSFC. We develop a semi-Markov model to capture the behaviors of SFs, VMs and virtual machine monitors (VMMs) from software aging to recovery under the condition that failure times and recovery times follow general distributions. We derive the formulas for calculating the steady-state availability and reliability of the VM-based MSFC composed of multiple SFs running on VMs hosted by VMMs. Sensitivity analysis is also conducted to identify potential dependability bottlenecks.

cs.SE↗

Practical Solutions in Fully Homomorphic Encryption -- A Survey Analyzing Existing Acceleration Methods

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) has experienced significant development and continuous breakthroughs in theory, enabling its widespread application in various fields, like outsourcing computation and secure multi-party computing, in order to preserve privacy. Nonetheless, the application of FHE is constrained by its substantial computing overhead and storage cost. Researchers have proposed practical acceleration solutions to address these issues. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey for systematically comparing and analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of FHE acceleration schemes, which is currently lacking in the literature. The relevant researches conducted between 2019 and 2022 are investigated. We first provide a comprehensive summary of the latest research findings on accelerating FHE, aiming to offer valuable insights for researchers interested in FHE acceleration. Secondly, we classify existing acceleration schemes from algorithmic and hardware perspectives. We also propose evaluation metrics and conduct a detailed comparison of various methods. Finally, our study presents the future research directions of FHE acceleration, and also offers both guidance and support for practical application and theoretical research in this field.

cs.CR↗

ERASE-Net: Efficient Segmentation Networks for Automotive Radar Signals

Among various sensors for assisted and autonomous driving systems, automotive radar has been considered as a robust and low-cost solution even in adverse weather or lighting conditions. With the recent development of radar technologies and open-sourced annotated data sets, semantic segmentation with radar signals has become very promising. However, existing methods are either computationally expensive or discard significant amounts of valuable information from raw 3D radar signals by reducing them to 2D planes via averaging. In this work, we introduce ERASE-Net, an Efficient RAdar SEgmentation Network to segment the raw radar signals semantically. The core of our approach is the novel detect-then-segment method for raw radar signals. It first detects the center point of each object, then extracts a compact radar signal representation, and finally performs semantic segmentation. We show that our method can achieve superior performance on radar semantic segmentation task compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) technique. Furthermore, our approach requires up to 20x less computational resources. Finally, we show that the proposed ERASE-Net can be compressed by 40% without significant loss in performance, significantly more than the SOTA network, which makes it a more promising candidate for practical automotive applications.

cs.RO↗

Understanding Why ViT Trains Badly on Small Datasets: An Intuitive Perspective

Vision transformer (ViT) is an attention neural network architecture that is shown to be effective for computer vision tasks. However, compared to ResNet-18 with a similar number of parameters, ViT has a significantly lower evaluation accuracy when trained on small datasets. To facilitate studies in related fields, we provide a visual intuition to help understand why it is the case. We first compare the performance of the two models and confirm that ViT has less accuracy than ResNet-18 when trained on small datasets. We then interpret the results by showing attention map visualization for ViT and feature map visualization for ResNet-18. The difference is further analyzed through a representation similarity perspective. We conclude that the representation of ViT trained on small datasets is hugely different from ViT trained on large datasets, which may be the reason why the performance drops a lot on small datasets.

cs.CV↗

Is Stubborn Mining Severe in Imperfect GHOST Bitcoin-like Blockchains? Quantitative Analysis

GHOST, like the longest-chain protocol, is a chain selection protocol and its capability in resisting selfish mining attack has been validated in imperfect blockchains of Bitcoin and its variants (Bitcoin-like). This paper explores an analytical-model-based method to investigate the impact of stubborn mining attack in imperfect GHOST Bitcoin-like blockchains. We first quantify chain dynamics based on Markov chain and then derive the formulas of miner revenue and system throughput. We also propose a new metric, "Hazard Index", which can be used to compare attack severity and also assist attacker in determining whether it is profitable to conduct an attack. The experiment results show that 1) An attacker with more than 30% computing power can get huge profit and extremely downgrade system throughput by launching stubborn mining attack. 2) A rational attacker should not launch stubborn mining attack if it has less than 25% computing power. 3) Stubborn mining attack causes more damage than selfish mining attack under GHOST. Our work provides insight into stubborn mining attack and is helpful in designing countermeasures.

cs.CR↗

On the Complexity of Separating Cutting Planes for the Knapsack Polytope

We close three open problems in the separation complexity of valid inequalities for the knapsack polytope. Specifically, we establish that the separation problems for extended cover inequalities, (1,k)-configuration inequalities, and weight inequalities are all NP-complete. We also give a number of special cases where the separation problem can be solved in polynomial time.

math.OC↗

New Classes of Facets for Complementarity Knapsack Problems

The complementarity knapsack problem (CKP) is a knapsack problem with real-valued variables and complementarity conditions between pairs of its variables. We extend the polyhedral studies of De Farias et al. for CKP, by proposing three new families of cutting-planes that are all obtained from a combinatorial concept known as a pack. Sufficient conditions for these inequalities to be facet-defining, based on the concept of a maximal switching pack, are also provided. Moreover, we answer positively a conjecture by de Farias et~al.~about the separation complexity of the inequalities introduced in their work, and propose efficient separation algorithms for our newly defined cutting-planes.

math.OC↗