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Jie Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Jie Zhang.

At least 433 records · Page 24Linked to original sources

SSD: A State-based Stealthy Backdoor Attack For Navigation System in UAV Route Planning

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly employed to perform high-risk tasks that require minimal human intervention. However, UAVs face escalating cybersecurity threats, particularly from GNSS spoofing attacks. While previous studies have extensively investigated the impacts of GNSS spoofing on UAVs, few have focused on its effects on specific tasks. Moreover, the influence of UAV motion states on the assessment of network security risks is often overlooked. To address these gaps, we first provide a detailed evaluation of how motion states affect the effectiveness of network attacks. We demonstrate that nonlinear motion states not only enhance the effectiveness of position spoofing in GNSS spoofing attacks but also reduce the probability of speed-related attack detection. Building upon this, we propose a state-triggered backdoor attack method (SSD) to deceive GNSS systems and assess its risk to trajectory planning tasks. Extensive validation of SSD's effectiveness and stealthiness is conducted. Experimental results show that, with appropriately tuned hyperparameters, SSD significantly increases positioning errors and the risk of task failure, while maintaining 100% stealth across three state-of-the-art detectors.

cs.CR↗

FpgaHub: Fpga-centric Hyper-heterogeneous Computing Platform for Big Data Analytics

Modern data analytics requires a huge amount of computing power and processes a massive amount of data. At the same time, the underlying computing platform is becoming much more heterogeneous on both hardware and software. Even though specialized hardware, e.g., FPGA- or GPU- or TPU-based systems, often achieves better performance than a CPU-only system due to the slowing of Moore's law, such systems are limited in what they can do. For example, GPU-only approaches suffer from severe IO limitations. To truly exploit the potential of hardware heterogeneity, we present FpgaHub, an FPGA-centric hyper-heterogeneous computing platform for big data analytics. The key idea of FpgaHub is to use reconfigurable computing to implement a versatile hub complementing other processors (CPUs, GPUs, DPUs, programmable switches, computational storage, etc.). Using an FPGA as the basis, we can take advantage of its highly reconfigurable nature and rich IO interfaces such as PCIe, networking, and on-board memory, to place it at the center of the architecture and use it as a data and control plane for data movement, scheduling, pre-processing, etc. FpgaHub enables architectural flexibility to allow exploring the rich design space of heterogeneous computing platforms.

cs.DC↗

Experimental observation of gapped shear waves and liquid-like to gas-like dynamical crossover in active granular matter

Unlike crystalline solids, liquids lack long-range order, resulting in diffusive shear fluctuations rather than propagating waves. Simulations predict that liquids exhibit a $k$-gap in wave-vector space, where solid-like transverse waves reappear above this gap. Experimental evidence in classical liquids has been limited, observed only in 2D dusty plasmas. Here, we investigate this phenomenon using active Brownian vibrators and uncover distinct gas-like and liquid-like phases depending on the packing fraction. We measure key properties, including pair correlation functions, mean square displacements, velocity auto-correlation functions, and vibrational density of states. In the liquid-like phase, we confirm the $k$-gap in transverse excitations, whose size grows as the packing fraction decreases and eventually disappears in the gas phase. Our findings extend the concept of the $k$-gap to active granular systems and reveal striking parallels with supercritical fluids.

cond-mat.soft↗

MAGIC: Mastering Physical Adversarial Generation in Context through Collaborative LLM Agents

Physical adversarial attacks in driving scenarios can expose critical vulnerabilities in visual perception models. However, developing such attacks remains challenging due to diverse real-world environments and the requirement for maintaining visual naturality. Building upon this challenge, we reformulate physical adversarial attacks as a one-shot patch generation problem. Our approach generates adversarial patches through a deep generative model that considers the specific scene context, enabling direct physical deployment in matching environments. The primary challenge lies in simultaneously achieving two objectives: generating adversarial patches that effectively mislead object detection systems while determining contextually appropriate deployment within the scene. We propose MAGIC (Mastering Physical Adversarial Generation In Context), a novel framework powered by multi-modal LLM agents to address these challenges. MAGIC automatically understands scene context and generates adversarial patch through the synergistic interaction of language and vision capabilities. In particular, MAGIC orchestrates three specialized LLM agents: The adv-patch generation agent (GAgent) masters the creation of deceptive patches through strategic prompt engineering for text-to-image models. The adv-patch deployment agent (DAgent) ensures contextual coherence by determining optimal deployment strategies based on scene understanding. The self-examination agent (EAgent) completes this trilogy by providing critical oversight and iterative refinement of both processes. We validate our method on both digital and physical levels, i.e., nuImage and manually captured real-world scenes, where both statistical and visual results prove that our MAGIC is powerful and effective for attacking widely applied object detection systems, i.e., YOLO and DETR series.

cs.CV↗

Probing Globular Cluster with MeerKAT and FAST: A Pulsar Polarization Census

Only one globular cluster (GC), 47 Tuc, has been found to contain intracluster medium, with an electron density 100 times higher than that of the ISM in its vicinity. The characteristics of this intracluster medium are closely related to GC evolution and the compact objects within. However, significant knowledge gaps remain regarding the ionized gas content of GCs, particularly in Galactic halo clusters. We carried out a polarization census of GC pulsars using MeerKAT and FAST. This first combined effort of observations from these two major radio telescopes resulted in high signal-to-noise ratio, full polarization pulse profiles for 43 pulsars in 8 GCs, doubling the number of rotation measures (RMs) known in these clusters. The accuracy of dispersion measures (DMs) was improved by a factor of 8 compared to previous publications. No intracluster medium was found, and at least two halo GCs showed more stringent upper limits on electron density than that detected in 47 Tuc. The surprising barrenness of GCs suggests effective gas removal mechanisms, such as strong winds from millisecond pulsars and/or ionizing radiation from post-AGB stars and young white dwarfs.

astro-ph.HE↗

The New CMS Measure of Excessive Radiation Dose or Inadequate CT Image Quality: Methods for Size-Adjusted Dose and Their Variabilities

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has introduced CMS1074v2, a quality measure for computed tomography (CT) that assesses radiation dose and image quality across 18 CT exam categories. This measure mandates the calculation of size-adjusted dose (SAD) using patient effective diameter and predefined size-adjustment coefficients. However, variability in SAD calculation methods raises concerns about standardization, compliance, and clinical applicability. This study evaluates five commonly used methods for estimating effective diameter and their impact on SAD determination in thoracic and abdominal CT protocols. A retrospective analysis of 719 CT exams was performed, comparing SAD values across different calculation approaches. Results indicate significant variability in SAD, with attenuation-based methods overestimating SAD in chest exams and projection-based methods exhibiting greater variability in abdominal exams. The findings highlight potential inconsistencies in CMS-defined dose thresholds and challenges in applying the measure across diverse patient populations and institutional imaging practices. Addressing these inconsistencies is critical for ensuring accurate dose reporting and maintaining diagnostic integrity in CT imaging.

physics.med-ph↗

Membership Inference Attacks Cannot Prove that a Model Was Trained On Your Data

We consider the problem of a training data proof, where a data creator or owner wants to demonstrate to a third party that some machine learning model was trained on their data. Training data proofs play a key role in recent lawsuits against foundation models trained on web-scale data. Many prior works suggest to instantiate training data proofs using membership inference attacks. We argue that this approach is fundamentally unsound: to provide convincing evidence, the data creator needs to demonstrate that their attack has a low false positive rate, i.e., that the attack's output is unlikely under the null hypothesis that the model was not trained on the target data. Yet, sampling from this null hypothesis is impossible, as we do not know the exact contents of the training set, nor can we (efficiently) retrain a large foundation model. We conclude by offering two paths forward, by showing that data extraction attacks and membership inference on special canary data can be used to create sound training data proofs.

cs.LG↗

Exploiting Vulnerabilities in Speech Translation Systems through Targeted Adversarial Attacks

As speech translation (ST) systems become increasingly prevalent, understanding their vulnerabilities is crucial for ensuring robust and reliable communication. However, limited work has explored this issue in depth. This paper explores methods of compromising these systems through imperceptible audio manipulations. Specifically, we present two innovative approaches: (1) the injection of perturbation into source audio, and (2) the generation of adversarial music designed to guide targeted translation, while also conducting more practical over-the-air attacks in the physical world. Our experiments reveal that carefully crafted audio perturbations can mislead translation models to produce targeted, harmful outputs, while adversarial music achieve this goal more covertly, exploiting the natural imperceptibility of music. These attacks prove effective across multiple languages and translation models, highlighting a systemic vulnerability in current ST architectures. The implications of this research extend beyond immediate security concerns, shedding light on the interpretability and robustness of neural speech processing systems. Our findings underscore the need for advanced defense mechanisms and more resilient architectures in the realm of audio systems. More details and samples can be found at https://adv-st.github.io.

cs.SD↗

WarmFed: Federated Learning with Warm-Start for Globalization and Personalization Via Personalized Diffusion Models

Federated Learning (FL) stands as a prominent distributed learning paradigm among multiple clients to achieve a unified global model without privacy leakage. In contrast to FL, Personalized federated learning aims at serving for each client in achieving persoanlized model. However, previous FL frameworks have grappled with a dilemma: the choice between developing a singular global model at the server to bolster globalization or nurturing personalized model at the client to accommodate personalization. Instead of making trade-offs, this paper commences its discourse from the pre-trained initialization, obtaining resilient global information and facilitating the development of both global and personalized models. Specifically, we propose a novel method called WarmFed to achieve this. WarmFed customizes Warm-start through personalized diffusion models, which are generated by local efficient fine-tunining (LoRA). Building upon the Warm-Start, we advance a server-side fine-tuning strategy to derive the global model, and propose a dynamic self-distillation (DSD) to procure more resilient personalized models simultaneously. Comprehensive experiments underscore the substantial gains of our approach across both global and personalized models, achieved within just one-shot and five communication(s).

cs.LG↗

Towards Efficient Deep Hashing Retrieval: Condensing Your Data via Feature-Embedding Matching

Deep hashing retrieval has gained widespread use in big data retrieval due to its robust feature extraction and efficient hashing process. However, training advanced deep hashing models has become more expensive due to complex optimizations and large datasets. Coreset selection and Dataset Condensation lower overall training costs by reducing the volume of training data without significantly compromising model accuracy for classification task. In this paper, we explore the effect of mainstream dataset condensation methods for deep hashing retrieval and propose IEM (Information-intensive feature Embedding Matching), which is centered on distribution matching and incorporates model and data augmentation techniques to further enhance the feature of hashing space. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance and efficiency of our approach.

cs.CV↗

Converting Transformers into DGNNs Form

Recent advances in deep learning have established Transformer architectures as the predominant modeling paradigm. Central to the success of Transformers is the self-attention mechanism, which scores the similarity between query and key matrices to modulate a value matrix. This operation bears striking similarities to digraph convolution, prompting an investigation into whether digraph convolution could serve as an alternative to self-attention. In this study, we formalize this concept by introducing a synthetic unitary digraph convolution based on the digraph Fourier transform. The resulting model, which we term Converter, effectively converts a Transformer into a Directed Graph Neural Network (DGNN) form. We have tested Converter on Long-Range Arena benchmark, long document classification, and DNA sequence-based taxonomy classification. Our experimental results demonstrate that Converter achieves superior performance while maintaining computational efficiency and architectural simplicity, which establishes it as a lightweight yet powerful Transformer variant.

cs.LG↗

Realizing stable zig-zag polymeric nitrogen chains in P-N compounds

The zig-zag Nitrogen (N) chain similar to the Ch-N structure has long been considered a potential high energy density structure. However, all previously predicted zig-zag N chain structures similar to Ch-N exhibit imaginary frequencies in their phonon spectra at 0 GPa. Here, we conducted a systematic investigation of P-N compounds using first-principles calculations, uncovering a series of structurally similar stable phases, C2/m-PNx (x = 6, 8, 10, 12, 14), in which N forms zig-zag N chains similar to those in Ch-N. In P-N compounds, the longest zig-zag N chain that can theoretically remain stable under ambient pressure is the N chain composed of 14 N atoms in C2/m-PN14. If the N chain continues to grow, inter-chain vibrational imaginary frequencies will arise in the system. Notably, N chains with an even number of atoms are more likely to be energetically favorable. The five C2/m-PNx phases and one metastable phase (R-PN6) exhibit both remarkable stability and excellent detonability at ambient pressure, positioning them as promising candidates for high-energy-density materials. In addition, the R-PN6 is the first structure to stabilize the N6 ring through covalent bonding, with the covalent network contributing to its high hardness (47.59 GPa).

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

Non-Homophilic Graph Pre-Training and Prompt Learning

Graphs are ubiquitous for modeling complex relationships between objects across various fields. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have become a mainstream technique for graph-based applications, but their performance heavily relies on abundant labeled data. To reduce labeling requirement, pre-training and prompt learning has become a popular alternative. However, most existing prompt methods do not differentiate homophilic and heterophilic characteristics of real-world graphs. In particular, many real-world graphs are non-homophilic, not strictly or uniformly homophilic with mixing homophilic and heterophilic patterns, exhibiting varying non-homophilic characteristics across graphs and nodes. In this paper, we propose ProNoG, a novel pre-training and prompt learning framework for such non-homophilic graphs. First, we analyze existing graph pre-training methods, providing theoretical insights into the choice of pre-training tasks. Second, recognizing that each node exhibits unique non-homophilic characteristics, we propose a conditional network to characterize the node-specific patterns in downstream tasks. Finally, we thoroughly evaluate and analyze ProNoG through extensive experiments on ten public datasets.

cs.LG↗

VideoShield: Regulating Diffusion-based Video Generation Models via Watermarking

Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has advanced significantly, particularly with the development of video generation models such as text-to-video (T2V) models and image-to-video (I2V) models. However, like other AIGC types, video generation requires robust content control. A common approach is to embed watermarks, but most research has focused on images, with limited attention given to videos. Traditional methods, which embed watermarks frame-by-frame in a post-processing manner, often degrade video quality. In this paper, we propose VideoShield, a novel watermarking framework specifically designed for popular diffusion-based video generation models. Unlike post-processing methods, VideoShield embeds watermarks directly during video generation, eliminating the need for additional training. To ensure video integrity, we introduce a tamper localization feature that can detect changes both temporally (across frames) and spatially (within individual frames). Our method maps watermark bits to template bits, which are then used to generate watermarked noise during the denoising process. Using DDIM Inversion, we can reverse the video to its original watermarked noise, enabling straightforward watermark extraction. Additionally, template bits allow precise detection for potential temporal and spatial modification. Extensive experiments across various video models (both T2V and I2V models) demonstrate that our method effectively extracts watermarks and detects tamper without compromising video quality. Furthermore, we show that this approach is applicable to image generation models, enabling tamper detection in generated images as well. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/hurunyi/VideoShield.

cs.CV↗

Dysca: A Dynamic and Scalable Benchmark for Evaluating Perception Ability of LVLMs

Currently many benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate the perception ability of the Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, most benchmarks conduct questions by selecting images from existing datasets, resulting in the potential data leakage. Besides, these benchmarks merely focus on evaluating LVLMs on the realistic style images and clean scenarios, leaving the multi-stylized images and noisy scenarios unexplored. In response to these challenges, we propose a dynamic and scalable benchmark named Dysca for evaluating LVLMs by leveraging synthesis images. Specifically, we leverage Stable Diffusion and design a rule-based method to dynamically generate novel images, questions and the corresponding answers. We consider 51 kinds of image styles and evaluate the perception capability in 20 subtasks. Moreover, we conduct evaluations under 4 scenarios (i.e., Clean, Corruption, Print Attacking and Adversarial Attacking) and 3 question types (i.e., Multi-choices, True-or-false and Free-form). Thanks to the generative paradigm, Dysca serves as a scalable benchmark for easily adding new subtasks and scenarios. A total of 24 advanced open-source LVLMs and 2 close-source LVLMs are evaluated on Dysca, revealing the drawbacks of current LVLMs. The benchmark is released at https://github.com/Robin-WZQ/Dysca.

cs.CV↗

Reinforcement Learning Enhanced LLMs: A Survey

Reinforcement learning (RL) enhanced large language models (LLMs), particularly exemplified by DeepSeek-R1, have exhibited outstanding performance. Despite the effectiveness in improving LLM capabilities, its implementation remains highly complex, requiring complex algorithms, reward modeling strategies, and optimization techniques. This complexity poses challenges for researchers and practitioners in developing a systematic understanding of RL-enhanced LLMs. Moreover, the absence of a comprehensive survey summarizing existing research on RL-enhanced LLMs has limited progress in this domain, hindering further advancements. In this work, we are going to make a systematic review of the most up-to-date state of knowledge on RL-enhanced LLMs, attempting to consolidate and analyze the rapidly growing research in this field, helping researchers understand the current challenges and advancements. Specifically, we (1) detail the basics of RL; (2) introduce popular RL-enhanced LLMs; (3) review researches on two widely-used reward model-based RL techniques: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF); and (4) explore Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a set of methods that bypass the reward model to directly use human preference data for aligning LLM outputs with human expectations. We will also point out current challenges and deficiencies of existing methods and suggest some avenues for further improvements. Project page of this work can be found at https://github.com/ShuheWang1998/Reinforcement-Learning-Enhanced-LLMs-A-Survey.

cs.CL↗

GenderCARE: A Comprehensive Framework for Assessing and Reducing Gender Bias in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities in natural language generation, but they have also been observed to magnify societal biases, particularly those related to gender. In response to this issue, several benchmarks have been proposed to assess gender bias in LLMs. However, these benchmarks often lack practical flexibility or inadvertently introduce biases. To address these shortcomings, we introduce GenderCARE, a comprehensive framework that encompasses innovative Criteria, bias Assessment, Reduction techniques, and Evaluation metrics for quantifying and mitigating gender bias in LLMs. To begin, we establish pioneering criteria for gender equality benchmarks, spanning dimensions such as inclusivity, diversity, explainability, objectivity, robustness, and realisticity. Guided by these criteria, we construct GenderPair, a novel pair-based benchmark designed to assess gender bias in LLMs comprehensively. Our benchmark provides standardized and realistic evaluations, including previously overlooked gender groups such as transgender and non-binary individuals. Furthermore, we develop effective debiasing techniques that incorporate counterfactual data augmentation and specialized fine-tuning strategies to reduce gender bias in LLMs without compromising their overall performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate a significant reduction in various gender bias benchmarks, with reductions peaking at over 90% and averaging above 35% across 17 different LLMs. Importantly, these reductions come with minimal variability in mainstream language tasks, remaining below 2%. By offering a realistic assessment and tailored reduction of gender biases, we hope that our GenderCARE can represent a significant step towards achieving fairness and equity in LLMs. More details are available at https://github.com/kstanghere/GenderCARE-ccs24.

cs.CL↗

Electron-scale Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in magnetized shear flows

Electron-scale Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities (ESKHI) are found in several astrophysical scenarios. Naturally ESKHI is subject to a background magnetic field, but an analytical dispersion relation and an accurate growth rate of ESKHI under this circumstance are long absent, as former MHD derivations are not applicable in the relativistic regime. We present a generalized dispersion relation of ESKHI in relativistic magnetized shear flows, with few assumptions. ESKHI linear growth rates in certain cases are numerically calculated. We conclude that the presence of an external magnetic field decreases the maximum instability growth rate in most cases, but can slightly increase it when the shear velocity is sufficiently high. Also, the external magnetic field results in a larger cutoff wavenumber of the unstable band and increases the wavenumber of the most unstable mode. PIC simulations are carried out to verify our conclusions, where we also observe the suppressing of kinetic DC magnetic field generation, resulting from electron gyration induced by the external magnetic field.

physics.plasm-ph↗