Microarchitectural timing channels are a major threat to computer security. A set of OS mechanisms called time protection was recently proposed as a principled way of preventing information leakage through such channels and prototyped in the seL4 microkernel. We formalise time protection and the underlying hardware mechanisms in a way that allows linking them to the information-flow proofs that showed the absence of storage channels in seL4.
Optimizing static risk-averse objectives in Markov decision processes is difficult because they do not admit standard dynamic programming equations common in Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. Dynamic programming decompositions that augment the state space with discrete risk levels have recently gained popularity in the RL community. Prior work has shown that these decompositions are optimal when the risk level is discretized sufficiently. However, we show that these popular decompositions for Conditional-Value-at-Risk (CVaR) and Entropic-Value-at-Risk (EVaR) are inherently suboptimal regardless of the discretization level. In particular, we show that a saddle point property assumed to hold in prior literature may be violated. However, a decomposition does hold for Value-at-Risk and our proof demonstrates how this risk measure differs from CVaR and EVaR. Our findings are significant because risk-averse algorithms are used in high-stake environments, making their correctness much more critical.
Local explanation methods highlight the input tokens that have a considerable impact on the outcome of classifying the document at hand. For example, the Anchor algorithm applies a statistical analysis of the sensitivity of the classifier to changes in the token. Aggregating local explanations over a dataset provides a global explanation of the model. Such aggregation aims to detect words with the most impact, giving valuable insights about the model, like what it has learned in training and which adversarial examples expose its weaknesses. However, standard aggregation methods bear a high computational cost: a na\"ive implementation applies a costly algorithm to each token of each document, and hence, it is infeasible for a simple user running in the scope of a short analysis session. % We devise techniques for accelerating the global aggregation of the Anchor algorithm. Specifically, our goal is to compute a set of top-$k$ words with the highest global impact according to different aggregation functions. Some of our techniques are lossless and some are lossy. We show that for a very mild loss of quality, we are able to accelerate the computation by up to 30$\times$, reducing the computation from hours to minutes. We also devise and study a probabilistic model that accounts for noise in the Anchor algorithm and diminishes the bias toward words that are frequent yet low in impact.
Code writing is repetitive and predictable, inspiring us to develop various code intelligence techniques. This survey focuses on code search, that is, to retrieve code that matches a given query by effectively capturing the semantic similarity between the query and code. Deep learning, being able to extract complex semantics information, has achieved great success in this field. Recently, various deep learning methods, such as graph neural networks and pretraining models, have been applied to code search with significant progress. Deep learning is now the leading paradigm for code search. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of deep learning-based code search. We review the existing deep learning-based code search framework which maps query/code to vectors and measures their similarity. Furthermore, we propose a new taxonomy to illustrate the state-of-the-art deep learning-based code search in a three-steps process: query semantics modeling, code semantics modeling, and matching modeling which involves the deep learning model training. Finally, we suggest potential avenues for future research in this promising field.
Edge devices have typically been used for DNN inferencing. The increase in the compute power of accelerated edges is leading to their use in DNN training also. As privacy becomes a concern on multi-tenant edge devices, Docker containers provide a lightweight virtualization mechanism to sandbox models. But their overheads for edge devices are not yet explored. In this work, we study the impact of containerized DNN inference and training workloads on an NVIDIA AGX Orin edge device and contrast it against bare metal execution on running time, CPU, GPU and memory utilization, and energy consumption. Our analysis provides several interesting insights on these overheads.
Autonomous robots used in infrastructure inspection, space exploration and other critical missions operate in highly dynamic environments. As such, they must continually verify their ability to complete the tasks associated with these missions safely and effectively. Here we present a Bayesian learning framework that enables this runtime verification of autonomous robots. The framework uses prior knowledge and observations of the verified robot to learn expected ranges for the occurrence rates of regular and singular (e.g., catastrophic failure) events. Interval continuous-time Markov models defined using these ranges are then analysed to obtain expected intervals of variation for system properties such as mission duration and success probability. We apply the framework to an autonomous robotic mission for underwater infrastructure inspection and repair. The formal proofs and experiments presented in the paper show that our framework produces results that reflect the uncertainty intrinsic to many real-world systems, enabling the robust verification of their quantitative properties under parametric uncertainty.
One of the motivations for explainable AI is to allow humans to make better and more informed decisions regarding the use and deployment of AI models. But careful evaluations are needed to assess whether this expectation has been fulfilled. Current evaluations mainly focus on algorithmic properties of explanations, and those that involve human subjects often employ subjective questions to test human's perception of explanation usefulness, without being grounded in objective metrics and measurements. In this work, we evaluate whether explanations can improve human decision-making in practical scenarios of machine learning model development. We conduct a mixed-methods user study involving image data to evaluate saliency maps generated by SmoothGrad, GradCAM, and an oracle explanation on two tasks: model selection and counterfactual simulation. To our surprise, we did not find evidence of significant improvement on these tasks when users were provided with any of the saliency maps, even the synthetic oracle explanation designed to be simple to understand and highly indicative of the answer. Nonetheless, explanations did help users more accurately describe the models. These findings suggest caution regarding the usefulness and potential for misunderstanding in saliency-based explanations.
The resolution is an important performance metric of near-field communication networks. In particular, the resolution of near field beamforming measures how effectively users can be distinguished in the distance-angle domain, which is one of the most significant features of near-field communications. In a comparison, conventional far-field beamforming can distinguish users in the angle domain only, which means that near-field communication yields the full utilization of user spatial resources to improve spectrum efficiency. In the literature of near-field communications, there have been a few studies on whether the resolution of near-field beamforming is perfect. However, each of the existing results suffers its own limitations, e.g., each is accurate for special cases only, and cannot precisely and comprehensively characterize the resolution. In this letter, a general analytical framework is developed to evaluate the resolution of near-field beamforming. Based on this derived expression, the impacts of parameters on the resolution are investigated, which can shed light on the design of the near-field communications, including the designs of beamforming and multiple access tequniques.
Deep Learning(DL) and Machine Learning(ML) applications are rapidly increasing in recent days. Massive amounts of data are being generated over the internet which can derive meaningful results by the use of ML and DL algorithms. Hardware resources and open-source libraries have made it easy to implement these algorithms. Tensorflow and Pytorch are one of the leading frameworks for implementing ML projects. By using those frameworks, we can trace the operations executed on both GPU and CPU to analyze the resource allocations and consumption. This paper presents the time and memory allocation of CPU and GPU while training deep neural networks using Pytorch. This paper analysis shows that GPU has a lower running time as compared to CPU for deep neural networks. For a simpler network, there are not many significant improvements in GPU over the CPU.
Research progress in quantum computing has, thus far, focused on a narrow set of application domains. Expanding the suite of quantum application domains is vital for the discovery of new software toolchains and architectural abstractions. In this work, we unlock a new class of applications ripe for quantum computing research -- computational cognitive modeling. Cognitive models are critical to understanding and replicating human intelligence. Our work connects computational cognitive models to quantum computer architectures for the first time. We release QUATRO, a collection of quantum computing applications from cognitive models. The development and execution of QUATRO shed light on gaps in the quantum computing stack that need to be closed to ease programming and drive performance. Among several contributions, we propose and study ideas pertaining to quantum cloud scheduling (using data from gate- and annealing-based quantum computers), parallelization, and more. In the long run, we expect our research to lay the groundwork for more versatile quantum computer systems in the future.
AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles(e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities,and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.