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Peng Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Peng Liu.

At least 433 records · Page 24Linked to original sources
arXiv2017

Holographic superconductivity from higher derivative theory

We construct a $6$ derivative holographic superconductor model in the $4$-dimensional bulk spacetimes, in which the normal state describes a quantum critical (QC) phase. The phase diagram $(γ_1,\hat{T}_c)$ and the condensation as the function of temperature are worked out numerically. We observe that with the decrease of the coupling parameter $γ_1$, the critical temperature $\hat{T}_c$ decreases and the formation of charged scalar hair becomes harder. We also calculate the optical conductivity. An appealing characteristic is a wider extension of the superconducting energy gap, comparing with that of $4$ derivative theory. It is expected that this phenomena can be observed in the real materials of high temperature superconductor. Also the Homes' law in our present models with $4$ and $6$ derivative corrections is explored. We find that in certain range of parameters $γ$ and $γ_1$, the experimentally measured value of the universal constant $C$ in Homes' law can be obtained.

hep-th↗
arXiv2017

Pure Even Harmonic Generation from Oriented CO in Linearly Polarized Laser Fields

The first high harmonic spectrum, containing only the odd orders, was observed in experiments 30 years ago (1987). However, a spectrum containing pure even harmonics has never been observed. We investigate the generation of pure even harmonics from oriented CO molecules in linearly polarized laser fields employing the time-dependent density-functional theory. We find that the even harmonics, with no odd orders, are generated with the polarization perpendicular to the laser polarization, when the molecular axis of CO is perpendicular to the laser polarization. Generation of pure even harmonics reveals a type of dipole acceleration originating from the permanent dipole moment. This phenomenon exists in all system with permanent dipole moments, including bulk crystal and polyatomic molecules.

physics.optics↗
arXiv2017

GaDei: On Scale-up Training As A Service For Deep Learning

Deep learning (DL) training-as-a-service (TaaS) is an important emerging industrial workload. The unique challenge of TaaS is that it must satisfy a wide range of customers who have no experience and resources to tune DL hyper-parameters, and meticulous tuning for each user's dataset is prohibitively expensive. Therefore, TaaS hyper-parameters must be fixed with values that are applicable to all users. IBM Watson Natural Language Classifier (NLC) service, the most popular IBM cognitive service used by thousands of enterprise-level clients around the globe, is a typical TaaS service. By evaluating the NLC workloads, we show that only the conservative hyper-parameter setup (e.g., small mini-batch size and small learning rate) can guarantee acceptable model accuracy for a wide range of customers. We further justify theoretically why such a setup guarantees better model convergence in general. Unfortunately, the small mini-batch size causes a high volume of communication traffic in a parameter-server based system. We characterize the high communication bandwidth requirement of TaaS using representative industrial deep learning workloads and demonstrate that none of the state-of-the-art scale-up or scale-out solutions can satisfy such a requirement. We then present GaDei, an optimized shared-memory based scale-up parameter server design. We prove that the designed protocol is deadlock-free and it processes each gradient exactly once. Our implementation is evaluated on both commercial benchmarks and public benchmarks to demonstrate that it significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art parameter-server based implementation while maintaining the required accuracy and our implementation reaches near the best possible runtime performance, constrained only by the hardware limitation. Furthermore, to the best of our knowledge, GaDei is the only scale-up DL system that provides fault-tolerance.

stat.ML↗
arXiv2017

Introduction of Improved Repairing Locality into Secret Sharing Schemes with Perfect Security

Repairing locality is an appreciated feature for distributed storage, in which a damaged or lost data share can be repaired by accessing a subset of other shares much smaller than is required for decoding the complete data. However for Secret Sharing (SS) schemes, it has been proven theoretically that local repairing can not be achieved with perfect security for the majority of threshold SS schemes, where all the shares are equally regarded in both secret recovering and share repairing. In this paper we make an attempt on decoupling the two processes to make secure local repairing possible. Dedicated repairing redundancies only for the repairing process are generated, which are random numbers to the original secret. Through this manner a threshold SS scheme with improved repairing locality is achieved on the condition that security of repairing redundancies is ensured, or else our scheme degenerates into a perfect access structure that is equivalent to the best existing schemes can do. To maximize security of the repairing redundancies, a random placement mechanism is also proposed.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2017

Exploiting Physical Dynamics to Detect Actuator and Sensor Attacks in Mobile Robots

Mobile robots are cyber-physical systems where the cyberspace and the physical world are strongly coupled. Attacks against mobile robots can transcend cyber defenses and escalate into disastrous consequences in the physical world. In this paper, we focus on the detection of active attacks that are capable of directly influencing robot mission operation. Through leveraging physical dynamics of mobile robots, we develop RIDS, a novel robot intrusion detection system that can detect actuator attacks as well as sensor attacks for nonlinear mobile robots subject to stochastic noises. We implement and evaluate a RIDS on Khepera mobile robot against concrete attack scenarios via various attack channels including signal interference, sensor spoofing, logic bomb, and physical damage. Evaluation of 20 experiments shows that the averages of false positive rates and false negative rates are both below 1%. Average detection delay for each attack remains within 0.40s.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2017

Learning Pixel-Distribution Prior with Wider Convolution for Image Denoising

In this work, we explore an innovative strategy for image denoising by using convolutional neural networks (CNN) to learn pixel-distribution from noisy data. By increasing CNN's width with large reception fields and more channels in each layer, CNNs can reveal the ability to learn pixel-distribution, which is a prior existing in many different types of noise. The key to our approach is a discovery that wider CNNs tends to learn the pixel-distribution features, which provides the probability of that inference-mapping primarily relies on the priors instead of deeper CNNs with more stacked nonlinear layers. We evaluate our work: Wide inference Networks (WIN) on additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and demonstrate that by learning the pixel-distribution in images, WIN-based network consistently achieves significantly better performance than current state-of-the-art deep CNN-based methods in both quantitative and visual evaluations. \textit{Code and models are available at \url{https://github.com/cswin/WIN}}.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2017

TrustShadow: Secure Execution of Unmodified Applications with ARM TrustZone

The rapid evolution of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies has led to an emerging need to make it smarter. A variety of applications now run simultaneously on an ARM-based processor. For example, devices on the edge of the Internet are provided with higher horsepower to be entrusted with storing, processing and analyzing data collected from IoT devices. This significantly improves efficiency and reduces the amount of data that needs to be transported to the cloud for data processing, analysis and storage. However, commodity OSes are prone to compromise. Once they are exploited, attackers can access the data on these devices. Since the data stored and processed on the devices can be sensitive, left untackled, this is particularly disconcerting. In this paper, we propose a new system, TrustShadow that shields legacy applications from untrusted OSes. TrustShadow takes advantage of ARM TrustZone technology and partitions resources into the secure and normal worlds. In the secure world, TrustShadow constructs a trusted execution environment for security-critical applications. This trusted environment is maintained by a lightweight runtime system that coordinates the communication between applications and the ordinary OS running in the normal world. The runtime system does not provide system services itself. Rather, it forwards requests for system services to the ordinary OS, and verifies the correctness of the responses. To demonstrate the efficiency of this design, we prototyped TrustShadow on a real chip board with ARM TrustZone support, and evaluated its performance using both microbenchmarks and real-world applications. We showed TrustShadow introduces only negligible overhead to real-world applications.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2017

Hey, you, keep away from my device: remotely implanting a virus expeller to defeat Mirai on IoT devices

Mirai is botnet which targets out-of-date Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices. The disruptive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack last year has hit major Internet companies, causing intermittent service for millions of Internet users. Since the affected devices typically do not support firmware update, it becomes challenging to expel these vulnerable devices in the wild. Both industry and academia have made great efforts in amending the situation. However, none of these efforts is simple to deploy, and at the same time effective in solving the problem. In this work, we design a collaborative defense strategy to tackle Mirai. Our key idea is to take advantage of human involvement in the least aggressive way. In particular, at a negotiated time slot, a customer is required to reboot the compromised device, then a "white" Mirai operated by the manufacturer breaks into the clean-state IoT devices immediately. The "white" Mirai expels other malicious Mirai variants, blocks vulnerable ports, and keeps a heart-beat connection with the server operated by the manufacturer. Once the heart-beat is lost, the server re-implants the "white" Mirai instantly. We have implemented a full prototype of the designed system, and the results show that our system can evade Mirai attacks effectively.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2017

Uniform tail approximation of homogenous functionals of Gaussian fields

Let $X(t),t\in R^d$ be a centered Gaussian random field with continuous trajectories and set $ξ_u(t)= X(f(u)t),t\in R^d$ with $f$ some positive function. Classical results establish the tail asymptotics of $P\{ Γ(ξ_u) > u\}$ as $u\to \infty$ with $Γ(ξ_u)= \sup_{t \in [0,T ]^d} ξ_u(t),T>0$ by requiring that $f(u) \to 0$ with speed controlled by the local behaviour of the correlation function of $X$. Recent research shows that for applications more general continuous functionals than supremum should be considered and the Gaussian field can depend also on some additional parameter $τ_u \in K$, say $ξ_{u,τ_u}(t),t\in R^d$. In this contribution we derive uniform approximations of $P\{ Γ(ξ_{u,τ_u})> u\}$ with respect to $τ_u$ in some index set $K_u$, as $u\to\infty$. Our main result have important theoretical implications; two applications are already included in [10,11]. In this paper we present three additional ones, namely i) we derive uniform upper bounds for the probability of double-maxima, ii) we extend Piterbarg-Prisyazhnyuk theorem to some large classes of homogeneous functionals of centered Gaussian fields $ξ_{u}$, and iii) we show the finiteness of generalized Piterbarg constants.

math.PR↗
arXiv2017

Distributed Model Predictive Control of Spatially Interconnected Systems Using Switched Cost Functions

This note proposes a distributed model predictive control (DMPC) scheme with switched cost functions for a class of spatially interconnected systems with communication constraints. Non-iterative and parallel communication strategy is considered to ensure that all distributed controllers complete input updates at each single information exchange step. The proposed DMPC scheme switches the optimization index on a switching surface generated by control invariant sets. With the index-switching strategy, stability of the origin is ensured by a terminal control law. Convergence conditions of the optimal cost to zero are established taking into account the causal link between the presumed trajectory and the optimized trajectory of the previous step. The compatibility constraints preserve the quadratic program property that is desired in practical applications. It is also observed that the proposed DMPC scheme has benefits dealing with systems that need to take into account safety-related spatial constraints.

math.OC↗
arXiv2017

From Physical to Cyber: Escalating Protection for Personalized Auto Insurance

Nowadays, auto insurance companies set personalized insurance rate based on data gathered directly from their customers' cars. In this paper, we show such a personalized insurance mechanism -- wildly adopted by many auto insurance companies -- is vulnerable to exploit. In particular, we demonstrate that an adversary can leverage off-the-shelf hardware to manipulate the data to the device that collects drivers' habits for insurance rate customization and obtain a fraudulent insurance discount. In response to this type of attack, we also propose a defense mechanism that escalates the protection for insurers' data collection. The main idea of this mechanism is to augment the insurer's data collection device with the ability to gather unforgeable data acquired from the physical world, and then leverage these data to identify manipulated data points. Our defense mechanism leveraged a statistical model built on unmanipulated data and is robust to manipulation methods that are not foreseen previously. We have implemented this defense mechanism as a proof-of-concept prototype and tested its effectiveness in the real world. Our evaluation shows that our defense mechanism exhibits a false positive rate of 0.032 and a false negative rate of 0.013.

cs.CR↗
arXiv2017

Attack-resilient Estimation of Switched Nonlinear Stochastic Cyber-Physical Systems

This paper studies attack-resilient estimation of a class of switched nonlinear systems subject to stochastic noises. The systems are threatened by both of signal attacks and switching attacks. The problem is formulated as the joint estimation of states, attack vectors and modes of hidden-mode switched systems. We propose an estimation algorithm which is composed of a bank of state and attack vector estimators and a mode estimator. The mode estimator selects the most likely mode based on modes' posterior probabilities induced by the discrepancies between obtained outputs and predicted outputs. We formally analyze the stability of estimation errors in probability for the proposed estimator associated with the true mode when the hidden mode is time-invariant but remains unknown. For hidden-mode switched linear systems, we discuss a way to reduce computational complexity which originates from unknown signal attack locations. Lastly, we present numerical simulations on the IEEE 68-bus test system to show the estimator performance for time-varying modes with a regular mode set and a reduced mode set.

math.OC↗
arXiv2017

Y-system for $γ$-deformed ABJM Theory

We investigate the integrable aspects of the planar $γ$-deformed ABJM theory and propose the twisted asymptotic Bethe ansatz equations. A more general method through a twisted generating functional is discussed, based on which, the asymptotic large L solution of Y-system is modified in order to match the asymptotic Bethe ansatz equations. Several applications of our method were made in the $sl(2)$-like sector and some important examples in $β$-deformed ABJM are presented as well.

hep-th↗
arXiv2017

Note on the butterfly effect in holographic superconductor models

In this note we remark that the butterfly effect can be used to diagnose the phase transition of superconductivity in a holographic framework. Specifically, we compute the butterfly velocity in a charged black hole background as well as anisotropic backgrounds with Q-lattice structure. In both cases we find its derivative to the temperature is discontinuous at critical points. We also propose that the butterfly velocity can signalize the occurrence of thermal phase transition in general holographic models.

hep-th↗
arXiv2017

On the Unambiguous Distance of Multi-Carrier Phase Ranging with Random Hopped Frequencie

In a multi-carrier phase ranging (MPR) system, the distance that radio signal travels is estimated through phase shift of multiple carrier frequencies. Due to phase ambiguity, a unique estimation can only be obtained within the unambiguous distance (UD), which depends on the carrier frequencies used for ranging. Without external information, the maximum measurable distance of an MPR system is defined by its UD. The MPR system employing random frequency hopping (FH) waveform has a strong anti-jamming capability and sees promising potentials in many fields. However, it is challenging to depict its measurable distance. Different from current MPR system employing deterministic frequencies, the carrier frequency under the FH waveform hops randomly within the occupied bandwidth. Consequently, the UD is a random variable. In this paper, we try to find a deterministic value to depict the UD of an MPR system under the random spaced frequencies (RSF) configuration, serving as a metric of its measurable distance in engineering applications. It is safe to adopt the lower bound of the random UD as the metric, but the measurable distance may be drastically underestimated. Alternatively, we propose to adopt the upper bound of the random UD as the metric, because when the RSF set contains more than a dozen of carriers, i) we prove the probability that the random UD obtains its upper bound is very close to 1 if phase noise is not introduced; ii) simulations show that the upper bound can also be obtained reliably in the presence of phase noise. As a comparison, the practical measurable range of the MPR system under the traditional linearly spaced frequencies (LSF) configuration is only a fraction of its theoretical UD because the UD is more sensitive to phase error.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2017

Holographic Metal-Insulator Transition in Higher Derivative Gravity

We introduce a Weyl term into the Einstein-Maxwell-Axion theory in four dimensional spacetime. Up to the first order of the Weyl coupling parameter $γ$, we construct charged black brane solutions without translational invariance in a perturbative manner. Among all the holographic frameworks involving higher derivative gravity, we are the first to obtain metal-insulator transitions (MIT) when varying the system parameters at zero temperature. Furthermore, we study the holographic entanglement entropy (HEE) of strip geometry in this model and find that the second order derivative of HEE with respect to the axion parameter exhibits maximization behavior near quantum critical points (QCPs) of MIT. It testifies the conjecture in 1502.03661 and 1604.04857 that HEE itself or its derivatives can be used to diagnose quantum phase transition (QPT).

hep-th↗
arXiv2016

Extremes of Gaussian Random Fields with maximum variance attained over smooth curves

Let $X(s,t), (s,t)\in E$, with $E\subset \mathbb{R}^2$ a compact set, be a centered two dimensional Gaussian random field with continuous trajectories and variance function $σ(s,t)$. Denote by $\mathcal{L}=\{(s,t): σ(s,t)=\max_{(s',t')\in E}σ(s',t')\}$. In this contribution, we derive the exact asymptotics of $\mathbb{P}\left(\sup_{(s,t)\in E}X(s,t)>u\right)$, as $u\to\infty$, under condition that $\mathcal{L}$ is a smooth curve. We illustrate our findings by an application concerned with extremes of the aggregation of two independent fractional Brownian motions.

math.PR↗