We introduce a new class of hardware trojans called interrupt-resilient trojans (IRTs). Our work is motivated by the observation that hardware trojan attacks on CPUs, even under favorable attack scenarios (e.g., an attacker with local system access), are affected by unpredictability due to non-deterministic context switching events. As we confirm experimentally, these events can lead to race conditions between trigger signals and the CPU events targeted by the trojan payloads (e.g., a CPU memory access), thus affecting the reliability of the attacks. Our work shows that interrupt-resilient trojans can successfully address the problem of non-deterministic triggering in CPUs, thereby providing high reliability guarantees in the implementation of sophisticated hardware trojan attacks. Specifically, we successfully utilize IRTs in different attack scenarios against a Linux-capable CPU design and showcase its resilience against context-switching events. More importantly, we show that our design allows for seamless integration during fabrication stage attacks.We evaluate different strategies for the implementation of our attacks on a tape-out ready high-speed RISC-V microarchitecture in a 28nm commercial technology process and successfully implement them with an average overhead delay of only 20 picoseconds, while leaving the sign-off characteristics of the layout intact. In doing so, we challenge the common wisdom regarding the low flexibility of late supply chain stages (e.g., fabrication) for the insertion of powerful trojans. To promote further research on microprocessor trojans, we open-source our designs and provide the accompanying supporting software logic.
Learning modular object-centric representations is crucial for systematic generalization. Existing methods show promising object-binding capabilities empirically, but theoretical identifiability guarantees remain relatively underdeveloped. Understanding when object-centric representations can theoretically be identified is crucial for scaling slot-based methods to high-dimensional images with correctness guarantees. To that end, we propose a probabilistic slot-attention algorithm that imposes an aggregate mixture prior over object-centric slot representations, thereby providing slot identifiability guarantees without supervision, up to an equivalence relation. We provide empirical verification of our theoretical identifiability result using both simple 2-dimensional data and high-resolution imaging datasets.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used in Software Engineering (SE) for various tasks, including generating code, designing and documenting software, adding code comments, reviewing code, and writing test scripts. However, creating test scripts or automating test cases demands test suite documentation that comprehensively covers functional requirements. Such documentation must enable thorough testing within a constrained scope and timeframe, particularly as requirements and user demands evolve. This article centers on generating user requirements as epics and high-level user stories and crafting test case scenarios based on these stories. It introduces a web-based software tool that employs an LLM-based agent and prompt engineering to automate the generation of test case scenarios against user requirements.
Digital systems are growing in importance and computing hardware is growing more heterogeneous. Hardware design, however, remains laborious and expensive, in part due to the limitations of conventional hardware description languages (HDLs) like VHDL and Verilog. A longstanding research goal has been programming hardware like software, with high-level languages that can generate efficient hardware designs. This paper describes Kanagawa, a language that takes a new approach to combine the programmer productivity benefits of traditional High-Level Synthesis (HLS) approaches with the expressibility and hardware efficiency of Register-Transfer Level (RTL) design. The language's concise syntax, matched with a hardware design-friendly execution model, permits a relatively simple toolchain to map high-level code into efficient hardware implementations.
With the increasing popularity of machine learning (ML), many open-source software (OSS) contributors are attracted to developing and adopting ML approaches. Comprehensive understanding of ML contributors is crucial for successful ML OSS development and maintenance. Without such knowledge, there is a risk of inefficient resource allocation and hindered collaboration in ML OSS projects. Existing research focuses on understanding the difficulties and challenges perceived by ML contributors by user surveys. There is a lack of understanding of ML contributors based on their activities tracked from software repositories. In this paper, we aim to understand ML contributors by identifying contributor profiles in ML libraries. We further study contributors' OSS engagement from three aspects: workload composition, work preferences, and technical importance. By investigating 7,640 contributors from 6 popular ML libraries (TensorFlow, PyTorch, Keras, MXNet, Theano, and ONNX), we identify four contributor profiles: Core-Afterhour, Core-Workhour, Peripheral-Afterhour, and Peripheral-Workhour. We find that: 1) project experience, authored files, collaborations, and geographical location are significant features of all profiles; 2) contributors in Core profiles exhibit significantly different OSS engagement compared to Peripheral profiles; 3) contributors' work preferences and workload compositions significantly impact project popularity; 4) long-term contributors evolve towards making fewer, constant, balanced and less technical contributions.
Modern speaker verification (SV) systems typically demand expensive storage and computing resources, thereby hindering their deployment on mobile devices. In this paper, we explore adaptive neural network quantization for lightweight speaker verification. Firstly, we propose a novel adaptive uniform precision quantization method which enables the dynamic generation of quantization centroids customized for each network layer based on k-means clustering. By applying it to the pre-trained SV systems, we obtain a series of quantized variants with different bit widths. To enhance the performance of low-bit quantized models, a mixed precision quantization algorithm along with a multi-stage fine-tuning (MSFT) strategy is further introduced. Unlike uniform precision quantization, mixed precision approach allows for the assignment of varying bit widths to different network layers. When bit combination is determined, MSFT is employed to progressively quantize and fine-tune network in a specific order. Finally, we design two distinct binary quantization schemes to mitigate performance degradation of 1-bit quantized models: the static and adaptive quantizers. Experiments on VoxCeleb demonstrate that lossless 4-bit uniform precision quantization is achieved on both ResNets and DF-ResNets, yielding a promising compression ratio of around 8. Moreover, compared to uniform precision approach, mixed precision quantization not only obtains additional performance improvements with a similar model size but also offers the flexibility to generate bit combination for any desirable model size. In addition, our suggested 1-bit quantization schemes remarkably boost the performance of binarized models. Finally, a thorough comparison with existing lightweight SV systems reveals that our proposed models outperform all previous methods by a large margin across various model size ranges.
The development of foundation models has revolutionized our ability to interpret the Earth's surface using satellite observational data. Traditional models have been siloed, tailored to specific sensors or data types like optical, radar, and hyperspectral, each with its own unique characteristics. This specialization hinders the potential for a holistic analysis that could benefit from the combined strengths of these diverse data sources. Our novel approach introduces the Dynamic One-For-All (DOFA) model, leveraging the concept of neural plasticity in brain science to integrate various data modalities into a single framework adaptively. This dynamic hypernetwork, adjusting to different wavelengths, enables a single versatile Transformer jointly trained on data from five sensors to excel across 12 distinct Earth observation tasks, including sensors never seen during pretraining. DOFA's innovative design offers a promising leap towards more accurate, efficient, and unified Earth observation analysis, showcasing remarkable adaptability and performance in harnessing the potential of multimodal Earth observation data.
The ability to learn compact, high-quality, and easy-to-optimize representations for visual data is paramount to many applications such as novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction. Recent work has shown substantial success in using tensor networks to design such compact and high-quality representations. However, the ability to optimize tensor-based representations, and in particular, the highly compact tensor train representation, is still lacking. This has prevented practitioners from deploying the full potential of tensor networks for visual data. To this end, we propose 'Prolongation Upsampling Tensor Train (PuTT)', a novel method for learning tensor train representations in a coarse-to-fine manner. Our method involves the prolonging or `upsampling' of a learned tensor train representation, creating a sequence of 'coarse-to-fine' tensor trains that are incrementally refined. We evaluate our representation along three axes: (1). compression, (2). denoising capability, and (3). image completion capability. To assess these axes, we consider the tasks of image fitting, 3D fitting, and novel view synthesis, where our method shows an improved performance compared to state-of-the-art tensor-based methods. For full results see our project webpage: //sebulo.github.io/PuTT_website/
Eliciting reasoning capabilities from language models (LMs) is a critical direction on the path towards building intelligent systems. Most recent studies dedicated to reasoning focus on out-of-distribution performance on procedurally-generated synthetic benchmarks, bespoke-built to evaluate specific skills only. This trend makes results hard to transfer across publications, slowing down progress. Three years ago, a similar issue was identified and rectified in the field of neural algorithmic reasoning, with the advent of the CLRS benchmark. CLRS is a dataset generator comprising graph execution traces of classical algorithms from the Introduction to Algorithms textbook. Inspired by this, we propose CLRS-Text -- a textual version of these algorithmic traces. Out of the box, CLRS-Text is capable of procedurally generating trace data for thirty diverse, challenging algorithmic tasks across any desirable input distribution, while offering a standard pipeline in which any additional algorithmic tasks may be created in the benchmark. We fine-tune and evaluate various LMs as generalist executors on this benchmark, validating prior work and revealing a novel, interesting challenge for the LM reasoning community. Our code is available at //github.com/google-deepmind/clrs/tree/master/clrs/_src/clrs_text.
Redescription mining is a data analysis technique that has found applications in diverse fields. The most used redescription mining approaches involve two phases: finding matching pairs among data attributes and extending the pairs. This process is relatively efficient when the number of attributes remains limited and when the attributes are Boolean, but becomes almost intractable when the data consist of many numerical attributes. In this paper, we present new algorithms that perform the matching and extension orders of magnitude faster than the existing approaches. Our algorithms are based on locality-sensitive hashing with a tailored approach to handle the discretisation of numerical attributes as used in redescription mining.
Random linear codes are a workhorse in coding theory, and are used to show the existence of codes with the best known or even near-optimal trade-offs in many noise models. However, they have little structure besides linearity, and are not amenable to tractable error-correction algorithms. In this work, we prove a general derandomization result applicable to random linear codes. Namely, in settings where the coding-theoretic property of interest is "local" (in the sense of forbidding certain bad configurations involving few vectors -- code distance and list-decodability being notable examples), one can replace random linear codes (RLCs) with a significantly derandomized variant with essentially no loss in parameters. Specifically, instead of randomly sampling coordinates of the (long) Hadamard code (which is an equivalent way to describe RLCs), one can randomly sample coordinates of any code with low bias. Over large alphabets, the low bias requirement can be weakened to just large distance. Furthermore, large distance suffices even with a small alphabet in order to match the current best known bounds for RLC list-decodability. In particular, by virtue of our result, all current (and future) achievability bounds for list-decodability of random linear codes extend automatically to random puncturings of any low-bias (or large alphabet) "mother" code. We also show that our punctured codes emulate the behavior of RLCs on stochastic channels, thus giving a derandomization of RLCs in the context of achieving Shannon capacity as well. Thus, we have a randomness-efficient way to sample codes achieving capacity in both worst-case and stochastic settings that can further inherit algebraic or other algorithmically useful structural properties of the mother code.