Protocols for tossing a common coin play a key role in the vast majority of implementations of consensus. Even though the common coins in the literature are usually \emph{fair} (they have equal chance of landing heads or tails), we focus on the problem of implementing a \emph{biased} common coin such that the probability of landing heads is $p \in [0,1]$. Even though biased common coins can be implemented using fair common coins, we show that this can require significant inter-party communication. In fact, we show that there is no bound on the number of messages needed to generate a common coin of bias $p$ in a way that tolerates even one malicious agent, even if we restrict $p$ to an arbitrary infinite subset of $[0,1]$ (e.g., rational numbers of the form $1/2^n$) and assume that the system is synchronous. By way of contrast, if we do not require the protocol to tolerate a faulty agent, we can do this. Thus, the cause of the message complexity is the requirement of fault tolerance.
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) learns from the preference signal provided by a probabilistic preference model, which takes a prompt and two responses as input, and produces a score indicating the preference of one response against another. So far, the most popular RLHF paradigm is reward-based, which starts with an initial step of reward modeling, and the constructed reward is then used to provide a reward signal for the subsequent reward optimization stage. However, the existence of a reward function is a strong assumption and the reward-based RLHF is limited in expressivity and cannot capture the real-world complicated human preference. In this work, we provide theoretical insights for a recently proposed learning paradigm, Nash learning from human feedback (NLHF), which considered a general preference model and formulated the alignment process as a game between two competitive LLMs. The learning objective is to find a policy that consistently generates responses preferred over any competing policy while staying close to the initial model. The objective is defined as the Nash equilibrium (NE) of the KL-regularized preference model. We aim to make the first attempt to study the theoretical learnability of the KL-regularized NLHF by considering both offline and online settings. For the offline learning from a pre-collected dataset, we propose algorithms that are efficient under suitable coverage conditions of the dataset. For batch online learning from iterative interactions with a preference oracle, our proposed algorithm enjoys a finite sample guarantee under the structural condition of the underlying preference model. Our results connect the new NLHF paradigm with traditional RL theory, and validate the potential of reward-model-free learning under general preference.
There is a notable dearth of results characterizing the preconditioning effect of Adam and showing how it may alleviate the curse of ill-conditioning -- an issue plaguing gradient descent (GD). In this work, we perform a detailed analysis of Adam's preconditioning effect for quadratic functions and quantify to what extent Adam can mitigate the dependence on the condition number of the Hessian. Our key finding is that Adam can suffer less from the condition number but at the expense of suffering a dimension-dependent quantity. Specifically, for a $d$-dimensional quadratic with a diagonal Hessian having condition number $\kappa$, we show that the effective condition number-like quantity controlling the iteration complexity of Adam without momentum is $\mathcal{O}(\min(d, \kappa))$. For a diagonally dominant Hessian, we obtain a bound of $\mathcal{O}(\min(d \sqrt{d \kappa}, \kappa))$ for the corresponding quantity. Thus, when $d < \mathcal{O}(\kappa^p)$ where $p = 1$ for a diagonal Hessian and $p = 1/3$ for a diagonally dominant Hessian, Adam can outperform GD (which has an $\mathcal{O}(\kappa)$ dependence). On the negative side, our results suggest that Adam can be worse than GD for a sufficiently non-diagonal Hessian even if $d \ll \mathcal{O}(\kappa^{1/3})$; we corroborate this with empirical evidence. Finally, we extend our analysis to functions satisfying per-coordinate Lipschitz smoothness and a modified version of the Polyak-\L ojasiewicz condition.
We study the data-generating mechanism for reconstructive SSL to shed light on its effectiveness. With an infinite amount of labeled samples, we provide a sufficient and necessary condition for perfect linear approximation. The condition reveals a full-rank component that preserves the label classes of Y, along with a redundant component. Motivated by the condition, we propose to approximate the redundant component by a low-rank factorization and measure the approximation quality by introducing a new quantity $\epsilon_s$, parameterized by the rank of factorization s. We incorporate $\epsilon_s$ into the excess risk analysis under both linear regression and ridge regression settings, where the latter regularization approach is to handle scenarios when the dimension of the learned features is much larger than the number of labeled samples n for downstream tasks. We design three stylized experiments to compare SSL with supervised learning under different settings to support our theoretical findings.
Honeypots are essential tools in cybersecurity. However, most of them (even the high-interaction ones) lack the required realism to engage and fool human attackers. This limitation makes them easily discernible, hindering their effectiveness. This work introduces a novel method to create dynamic and realistic software honeypots based on Large Language Models. Preliminary results indicate that LLMs can create credible and dynamic honeypots capable of addressing important limitations of previous honeypots, such as deterministic responses, lack of adaptability, etc. We evaluated the realism of each command by conducting an experiment with human attackers who needed to say if the answer from the honeypot was fake or not. Our proposed honeypot, called shelLM, reached an accuracy of 0.92. The source code and prompts necessary for replicating the experiments have been made publicly available.
From the outset, batteries have been the main power source for the Internet of Things (IoT). However, replacing and disposing of billions of dead batteries per year is costly in terms of maintenance and ecologically irresponsible. Since batteries are one of the greatest threats to a sustainable IoT, battery-less devices are the solution to this problem. These devices run on long-lived capacitors charged using various forms of energy harvesting, which results in intermittent on-off device behaviour. In this work, we model this intermittent battery-less behaviour for LoRaWAN devices. This model allows us to characterize the performance with the aim to determine under which conditions a LoRaWAN device can work without batteries, and how its parameters should be configured. Results show that the reliability directly depends on device configurations (i.e., capacitor size, turn-on voltage threshold), application behaviour (i.e., transmission interval, packet size) and environmental conditions (i.e., energy harvesting rate).
Despite the recent success associated with Large Language Models~(LLMs), they are notably cost-prohibitive to deploy in resource-constrained environments due to their excessive memory and computational demands. In addition to model parameters, the key-value cache is also stored in GPU memory, growing linearly with batch size and sequence length. As a remedy, recent works have proposed various eviction policies for maintaining the overhead of key-value cache under a given budget. This paper embarks on the efficacy of existing eviction policies in terms of \textit{importance score calculation} and \textit{eviction scope construction}. We identify the deficiency of prior policies in these two aspects and introduce RoCo, a \underline{r}\underline{o}bust \underline{c}ache \underline{o}mission policy based on temporal attention scores and robustness measures. Extensive experimentation spanning prefilling and auto-regressive decoding stages validates the superiority of RoCo. Finally, we release EasyKV, a versatile software package dedicated to user-friendly key-value constrained generative inference. Code available at \url{//github.com/DRSY/EasyKV}.
Diagnosis of bearing faults is paramount to reducing maintenance costs and operational breakdowns. Bearing faults are primary contributors to machine vibrations, and analyzing their signal morphology offers insights into their health status. Unfortunately, existing approaches are optimized for controlled environments, neglecting realistic conditions such as time-varying rotational speeds and the vibration's non-stationary nature. This paper presents a fusion of time-frequency analysis and deep learning techniques to diagnose bearing faults under time-varying speeds and varying noise levels. First, we formulate the bearing fault-induced vibrations and discuss the link between their non-stationarity and the bearing's inherent and operational parameters. We also elucidate quadratic time-frequency distributions and validate their effectiveness in resolving distinctive dynamic patterns associated with different bearing faults. Based on this, we design a time-frequency convolutional neural network (TF-CNN) to diagnose various faults in rolling-element bearings. Our experimental findings undeniably demonstrate the superior performance of TF-CNN in comparison to recently developed techniques. They also assert its versatility in capturing fault-relevant non-stationary features that couple with speed changes and show its exceptional resilience to noise, consistently surpassing competing methods across various signal-to-noise ratios and performance metrics. Altogether, the TF-CNN achieves substantial accuracy improvements up to 15%, in severe noise conditions.
High-resolution semantic segmentation requires substantial computational resources. Traditional approaches in the field typically downscale the input images before processing and then upscale the low-resolution outputs back to their original dimensions. While this strategy effectively identifies broad regions, it often misses finer details. In this study, we demonstrate that a streamlined model capable of directly producing high-resolution segmentations can match the performance of more complex systems that generate lower-resolution results. By simplifying the network architecture, we enable the processing of images at their native resolution. Our approach leverages a bottom-up information propagation technique across various scales, which we have empirically shown to enhance segmentation accuracy. We have rigorously tested our method using leading-edge semantic segmentation datasets. Specifically, for the Cityscapes dataset, we further boost accuracy by applying the Noisy Student Training technique.
LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) is an indispensable sensor for precise long- and wide-range 3D sensing, which directly benefited the recent rapid deployment of autonomous driving (AD). Meanwhile, such a safety-critical application strongly motivates its security research. A recent line of research finds that one can manipulate the LiDAR point cloud and fool object detectors by firing malicious lasers against LiDAR. However, these efforts face 3 critical research gaps: (1) considering only one specific LiDAR (VLP-16); (2) assuming unvalidated attack capabilities; and (3) evaluating object detectors with limited spoofing capability modeling and setup diversity. To fill these critical research gaps, we conduct the first large-scale measurement study on LiDAR spoofing attack capabilities on object detectors with 9 popular LiDARs, covering both first- and new-generation LiDARs, and 3 major types of object detectors trained on 5 different datasets. To facilitate the measurements, we (1) identify spoofer improvements that significantly improve the latest spoofing capability, (2) identify a new object removal attack that overcomes the applicability limitation of the latest method to new-generation LiDARs, and (3) perform novel mathematical modeling for both object injection and removal attacks based on our measurement results. Through this study, we are able to uncover a total of 15 novel findings, including not only completely new ones due to the measurement angle novelty, but also many that can directly challenge the latest understandings in this problem space. We also discuss defenses.
The Internet of Things (IoT) has evolved from a novel technology to an integral part of our everyday lives. It encompasses a multitude of heterogeneous devices that collect valuable data through various sensors. The sheer volume of these interconnected devices poses significant challenges as IoT provides complex network services with diverse requirements on a shared infrastructure. Network softwarization could help address these issues as it has emerged as a paradigm that enhances traditional networking by decoupling hardware from software and leveraging enabling technologies such as Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). In networking, Machine Learning (ML) has demonstrated impressive results across multiple domains. By smoothly integrating with network softwarization, ML plays a pivotal role in building efficient and intelligent IoT networks. This paper explores the fundamentals of IoT, network softwarization, and ML, while reviewing the latest advances in ML-enabled network softwarization for IoT.