The interest in quantum computing has grown rapidly in recent years, and with it grows the importance of securing quantum circuits. A novel type of threat to quantum circuits that dedicated attackers could launch are power trace attacks. To address this threat, this paper presents first formalization and demonstration of using power traces to unlock and steal quantum circuit secrets. With access to power traces, attackers can recover information about the control pulses sent to quantum computers. From the control pulses, the gate level description of the circuits, and eventually the secret algorithms can be reverse engineered. This work demonstrates how and what information could be recovered. This work uses algebraic reconstruction from power traces to realize two new types of single trace attacks: per-channel and total power attacks. The former attack relies on per-channel measurements to perform a brute-force attack to reconstruct the quantum circuits. The latter attack performs a single-trace attack using Mixed-Integer Linear Programming optimization. Through the use of algebraic reconstruction, this work demonstrates that quantum circuit secrets can be stolen with high accuracy. Evaluation on 32 real benchmark quantum circuits shows that our technique is highly effective at reconstructing quantum circuits. The findings not only show the veracity of the potential attacks, but also the need to develop new means to protect quantum circuits from power trace attacks. Throughout this work real control pulse information from real quantum computers is used to demonstrate potential attacks based on simulation of collection of power traces.
We examine the linear regression problem in a challenging high-dimensional setting with correlated predictors where the vector of coefficients can vary from sparse to dense. In this setting, we propose a combination of probabilistic variable screening with random projection tools as a viable approach. More specifically, we introduce a new data-driven random projection tailored to the problem at hand and derive a theoretical bound on the gain in expected prediction error over conventional random projections. The variables to enter the projection are screened by accounting for predictor correlation. To reduce the dependence on fine-tuning choices, we aggregate over an ensemble of linear models. A thresholding parameter is introduced to obtain a higher degree of sparsity. Both this parameter and the number of models in the ensemble can be chosen by cross-validation. In extensive simulations, we compare the proposed method with other random projection tools and with classical sparse and dense methods and show that it is competitive in terms of prediction across a variety of scenarios with different sparsity and predictor covariance settings. We also show that the method with cross-validation is able to rank the variables satisfactorily. Finally, we showcase the method on two real data applications.
Current reinforcement learning algorithms struggle in sparse and complex environments, most notably in long-horizon manipulation tasks entailing a plethora of different sequences. In this work, we propose the Intrinsically Guided Exploration from Large Language Models (IGE-LLMs) framework. By leveraging LLMs as an assistive intrinsic reward, IGE-LLMs guides the exploratory process in reinforcement learning to address intricate long-horizon with sparse rewards robotic manipulation tasks. We evaluate our framework and related intrinsic learning methods in an environment challenged with exploration, and a complex robotic manipulation task challenged by both exploration and long-horizons. Results show IGE-LLMs (i) exhibit notably higher performance over related intrinsic methods and the direct use of LLMs in decision-making, (ii) can be combined and complement existing learning methods highlighting its modularity, (iii) are fairly insensitive to different intrinsic scaling parameters, and (iv) maintain robustness against increased levels of uncertainty and horizons.
Social recommendation systems face the problem of social influence bias, which can lead to an overemphasis on recommending items that friends have interacted with. Addressing this problem is crucial, and existing methods often rely on techniques such as weight adjustment or leveraging unbiased data to eliminate this bias. However, we argue that not all biases are detrimental, i.e., some items recommended by friends may align with the user's interests. Blindly eliminating such biases could undermine these positive effects, potentially diminishing recommendation accuracy. In this paper, we propose a Causal Disentanglement-based framework for Regulating Social influence Bias in social recommendation, named CDRSB, to improve recommendation performance. From the perspective of causal inference, we find that the user social network could be regarded as a confounder between the user and item embeddings (treatment) and ratings (outcome). Due to the presence of this social network confounder, two paths exist from user and item embeddings to ratings: a non-causal social influence path and a causal interest path. Building upon this insight, we propose a disentangled encoder that focuses on disentangling user and item embeddings into interest and social influence embeddings. Mutual information-based objectives are designed to enhance the distinctiveness of these disentangled embeddings, eliminating redundant information. Additionally, a regulatory decoder that employs a weight calculation module to dynamically learn the weights of social influence embeddings for effectively regulating social influence bias has been designed. Experimental results on four large-scale real-world datasets Ciao, Epinions, Dianping, and Douban book demonstrate the effectiveness of CDRSB compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Human intelligence thrives on the concept of cognitive synergy, where collaboration and information integration among different cognitive processes yield superior outcomes compared to individual cognitive processes in isolation. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising performance as general task-solving agents, they still struggle with tasks that require intensive domain knowledge and complex reasoning. In this work, we propose Solo Performance Prompting (SPP), which transforms a single LLM into a cognitive synergist by engaging in multi-turn self-collaboration with multiple personas. A cognitive synergist refers to an intelligent agent that collaborates with multiple minds, combining their individual strengths and knowledge, to enhance problem-solving and overall performance in complex tasks. By dynamically identifying and simulating different personas based on task inputs, SPP unleashes the potential of cognitive synergy in LLMs. We have discovered that assigning multiple, fine-grained personas in LLMs elicits better problem-solving abilities compared to using a single or fixed number of personas. We evaluate SPP on three challenging tasks: Trivia Creative Writing, Codenames Collaborative, and Logic Grid Puzzle, encompassing both knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive types. Unlike previous works, such as Chain-of-Thought, that solely enhance the reasoning abilities in LLMs, SPP effectively elicits internal knowledge acquisition abilities, reduces hallucination, and maintains strong reasoning capabilities. Code, data, and prompts can be found at: //github.com/MikeWangWZHL/Solo-Performance-Prompting.git.
With the breakthrough of AlphaGo, deep reinforcement learning becomes a recognized technique for solving sequential decision-making problems. Despite its reputation, data inefficiency caused by its trial and error learning mechanism makes deep reinforcement learning hard to be practical in a wide range of areas. Plenty of methods have been developed for sample efficient deep reinforcement learning, such as environment modeling, experience transfer, and distributed modifications, amongst which, distributed deep reinforcement learning has shown its potential in various applications, such as human-computer gaming, and intelligent transportation. In this paper, we conclude the state of this exciting field, by comparing the classical distributed deep reinforcement learning methods, and studying important components to achieve efficient distributed learning, covering single player single agent distributed deep reinforcement learning to the most complex multiple players multiple agents distributed deep reinforcement learning. Furthermore, we review recently released toolboxes that help to realize distributed deep reinforcement learning without many modifications of their non-distributed versions. By analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, a multi-player multi-agent distributed deep reinforcement learning toolbox is developed and released, which is further validated on Wargame, a complex environment, showing usability of the proposed toolbox for multiple players and multiple agents distributed deep reinforcement learning under complex games. Finally, we try to point out challenges and future trends, hoping this brief review can provide a guide or a spark for researchers who are interested in distributed deep reinforcement learning.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
With the rapid development of facial forgery techniques, forgery detection has attracted more and more attention due to security concerns. Existing approaches attempt to use frequency information to mine subtle artifacts under high-quality forged faces. However, the exploitation of frequency information is coarse-grained, and more importantly, their vanilla learning process struggles to extract fine-grained forgery traces. To address this issue, we propose a progressive enhancement learning framework to exploit both the RGB and fine-grained frequency clues. Specifically, we perform a fine-grained decomposition of RGB images to completely decouple the real and fake traces in the frequency space. Subsequently, we propose a progressive enhancement learning framework based on a two-branch network, combined with self-enhancement and mutual-enhancement modules. The self-enhancement module captures the traces in different input spaces based on spatial noise enhancement and channel attention. The Mutual-enhancement module concurrently enhances RGB and frequency features by communicating in the shared spatial dimension. The progressive enhancement process facilitates the learning of discriminative features with fine-grained face forgery clues. Extensive experiments on several datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art face forgery detection methods.
Deep reinforcement learning algorithms can perform poorly in real-world tasks due to the discrepancy between source and target environments. This discrepancy is commonly viewed as the disturbance in transition dynamics. Many existing algorithms learn robust policies by modeling the disturbance and applying it to source environments during training, which usually requires prior knowledge about the disturbance and control of simulators. However, these algorithms can fail in scenarios where the disturbance from target environments is unknown or is intractable to model in simulators. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel model-free actor-critic algorithm -- namely, state-conservative policy optimization (SCPO) -- to learn robust policies without modeling the disturbance in advance. Specifically, SCPO reduces the disturbance in transition dynamics to that in state space and then approximates it by a simple gradient-based regularizer. The appealing features of SCPO include that it is simple to implement and does not require additional knowledge about the disturbance or specially designed simulators. Experiments in several robot control tasks demonstrate that SCPO learns robust policies against the disturbance in transition dynamics.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently become increasingly popular due to their ability to learn complex systems of relations or interactions arising in a broad spectrum of problems ranging from biology and particle physics to social networks and recommendation systems. Despite the plethora of different models for deep learning on graphs, few approaches have been proposed thus far for dealing with graphs that present some sort of dynamic nature (e.g. evolving features or connectivity over time). In this paper, we present Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs), a generic, efficient framework for deep learning on dynamic graphs represented as sequences of timed events. Thanks to a novel combination of memory modules and graph-based operators, TGNs are able to significantly outperform previous approaches being at the same time more computationally efficient. We furthermore show that several previous models for learning on dynamic graphs can be cast as specific instances of our framework. We perform a detailed ablation study of different components of our framework and devise the best configuration that achieves state-of-the-art performance on several transductive and inductive prediction tasks for dynamic graphs.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.