Quantum key distribution (QKD) was conceived by Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard in December of 1984. In the ensuing 39 years QKD systems have been deployed around the world to provide secure encryption for terrestrial as well as satellite communication. In 2016 the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) began a program to standardize a series of quantum resistant algorithms to replace our current encryption standards thereby protecting against future quantum computers breaking public key cryptography. This program is known as post quantum cryptography or PQC. One of the tenets of cybersecurity is to use an approach that simultaneously provides multiple protections known as defense-in-depth. This approach seeks to avoid single points of failure. The goal of this paper is to examine the suitability of a hybrid QKD / PQC defense-in-depth strategy. A focus of the paper will be to examine the sufficiency of initial QKD hardware authentication (entity source authentication) which is necessary to guard against man-in-the-middle attacks.
In recent years, the mathematical limits and algorithmic bounds for probabilistic group testing having become increasingly well-understood, with exact asymptotic thresholds now being known in general scaling regimes for the noiseless setting. In the noisy setting where each test outcome is flipped with constant probability, there have been similar developments, but the overall understanding has lagged significantly behind the noiseless setting. In this paper, we substantially narrow this gap by deriving exact asymptotic thresholds for the noisy setting under two widely-studied random test designs: i.i.d. Bernoulli and near-constant tests-per-item. These thresholds are established by combining components of an existing information-theoretic threshold decoder with a novel analysis of maximum-likelihood decoding (upper bounds), and deriving a novel set of impossibility results by analyzing certain failure events for optimal maximum-likelihood decoding (lower bounds). Our results show that existing algorithmic upper bounds for the noisy setting are strictly suboptimal, and leave open the interesting question of whether our thresholds can be attained using computationally efficient algorithms.
In recent years, an increasing number of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) approaches have been implemented and evaluated in Virtual Reality (VR), as it allows to speed-up design iterations and makes it safer for the final user to evaluate and master the HRI primitives. However, identifying the most suitable VR experience is not straightforward. In this work, we evaluate how, in a smart agriculture scenario, immersive and non-immersive VR are perceived by users with respect to a speech act understanding task. In particular, we collect opinions and suggestions from the 81 participants involved in both experiments to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of these different experiences.
Recent years have witnessed growing concerns about the privacy of sensitive data. In response to these concerns, differential privacy has emerged as a rigorous framework for privacy protection, gaining widespread recognition in both academic and industrial circles. While substantial progress has been made in private data analysis, existing methods often suffer from impracticality or a significant loss of statistical efficiency. This paper aims to alleviate these concerns in the context of hypothesis testing by introducing differentially private permutation tests. The proposed framework extends classical non-private permutation tests to private settings, maintaining both finite-sample validity and differential privacy in a rigorous manner. The power of the proposed test depends on the choice of a test statistic, and we establish general conditions for consistency and non-asymptotic uniform power. To demonstrate the utility and practicality of our framework, we focus on reproducing kernel-based test statistics and introduce differentially private kernel tests for two-sample and independence testing: dpMMD and dpHSIC. The proposed kernel tests are straightforward to implement, applicable to various types of data, and attain minimax optimal power across different privacy regimes. Our empirical evaluations further highlight their competitive power under various synthetic and real-world scenarios, emphasizing their practical value. The code is publicly available to facilitate the implementation of our framework.
We propose a novel end-to-end pipeline for online long-range vectorized high-definition (HD) map construction using on-board camera sensors. The vectorized representation of HD maps, employing polylines and polygons to represent map elements, is widely used by downstream tasks. However, previous schemes designed with reference to dynamic object detection overlook the structural constraints within linear map elements, resulting in performance degradation in long-range scenarios. In this paper, we exploit the properties of map elements to improve the performance of map construction. We extract more accurate bird's eye view (BEV) features guided by their linear structure, and then propose a hierarchical sparse map representation to further leverage the scalability of vectorized map elements and design a progressive decoding mechanism and a supervision strategy based on this representation. Our approach, ScalableMap, demonstrates superior performance on the nuScenes dataset, especially in long-range scenarios, surpassing previous state-of-the-art model by 6.5 mAP while achieving 18.3 FPS. Code is available at //github.com/jingy1yu/ScalableMap.
Novelty, akin to gene mutation in evolution, opens possibilities for scientific advancement. Despite peer review being the gold standard for evaluating novelty in scholarly communication and resource allocation, the vast volume of submissions necessitates an automated measure of scientific novelty. Adopting a perspective that views novelty as the atypical combination of existing knowledge, we introduce an information-theoretic measure of novelty in scholarly publications. This measure is quantified by the degree of `surprise' perceived by a language model that represents the distribution of scientific discourse. The proposed measure is accompanied by face and construct validity evidence; the former demonstrates correspondence to scientific common sense, and the latter is endorsed through alignments with novelty evaluations from a select panel of domain experts. Additionally, characterized by its interpretability, fine granularity, and accessibility, this measure addresses gaps prevalent in existing methods. We believe this measure holds great potential to benefit editors, stakeholders, and policymakers, and it provides a confident lens for examining the relationship between novelty and scientific dynamics such as creativity, interdisciplinarity, scientific advances, and more.
The precise characterization and modeling of Cyber-Physical-Social Systems (CPSS) requires more comprehensive and accurate data, which imposes heightened demands on intelligent sensing capabilities. To address this issue, Crowdsensing Intelligence (CSI) has been proposed to collect data from CPSS by harnessing the collective intelligence of a diverse workforce. Our first and second Distributed/Decentralized Hybrid Workshop on Crowdsensing Intelligence (DHW-CSI) have focused on principles and high-level processes of organizing and operating CSI, as well as the participants, methods, and stages involved in CSI. This letter reports the outcomes of the latest DHW-CSI, focusing on Autonomous Crowdsensing (ACS) enabled by a range of technologies such as decentralized autonomous organizations and operations, large language models, and human-oriented operating systems. Specifically, we explain what ACS is and explore its distinctive features in comparison to traditional crowdsensing. Moreover, we present the ``6A-goal" of ACS and propose potential avenues for future research.
When exploring the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a critical task for these models involves interpreting and processing information from multiple image inputs. However, Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) encounter two issues in such scenarios: (1) a lack of fine-grained perception, and (2) a tendency to blend information across multiple images. We first extensively investigate the capability of LMMs to perceive fine-grained visual details when dealing with multiple input images. The research focuses on two aspects: first, image-to-image matching (to evaluate whether LMMs can effectively reason and pair relevant images), and second, multi-image-to-text matching (to assess whether LMMs can accurately capture and summarize detailed image information). We conduct evaluations on a range of both open-source and closed-source large models, including GPT-4V, Gemini, OpenFlamingo, and MMICL. To enhance model performance, we further develop a Contrastive Chain-of-Thought (CoCoT) prompting approach based on multi-input multimodal models. This method requires LMMs to compare the similarities and differences among multiple image inputs, and then guide the models to answer detailed questions about multi-image inputs based on the identified similarities and differences. Our experimental results showcase CoCoT's proficiency in enhancing the multi-image comprehension capabilities of large multimodal models.
This article presents the affordances that Generative Artificial Intelligence can have in disinformation context, one of the major threats to our digitalized society. We present a research framework to generate customized agent-based social networks for disinformation simulations that would enable understanding and evaluation of the phenomena whilst discussing open challenges.
Text Classification is the most essential and fundamental problem in Natural Language Processing. While numerous recent text classification models applied the sequential deep learning technique, graph neural network-based models can directly deal with complex structured text data and exploit global information. Many real text classification applications can be naturally cast into a graph, which captures words, documents, and corpus global features. In this survey, we bring the coverage of methods up to 2023, including corpus-level and document-level graph neural networks. We discuss each of these methods in detail, dealing with the graph construction mechanisms and the graph-based learning process. As well as the technological survey, we look at issues behind and future directions addressed in text classification using graph neural networks. We also cover datasets, evaluation metrics, and experiment design and present a summary of published performance on the publicly available benchmarks. Note that we present a comprehensive comparison between different techniques and identify the pros and cons of various evaluation metrics in this survey.
Domain generalization (DG), i.e., out-of-distribution generalization, has attracted increased interests in recent years. Domain generalization deals with a challenging setting where one or several different but related domain(s) are given, and the goal is to learn a model that can generalize to an unseen test domain. For years, great progress has been achieved. This paper presents the first review for recent advances in domain generalization. First, we provide a formal definition of domain generalization and discuss several related fields. Next, we thoroughly review the theories related to domain generalization and carefully analyze the theory behind generalization. Then, we categorize recent algorithms into three classes and present them in detail: data manipulation, representation learning, and learning strategy, each of which contains several popular algorithms. Third, we introduce the commonly used datasets and applications. Finally, we summarize existing literature and present some potential research topics for the future.