In this paper, we provide a new theoretical framework of pyramid Markov processes to solve some open and fundamental problems of blockchain selfish mining under a rigorous mathematical setting. We first describe a more general model of blockchain selfish mining with both a two-block leading competitive criterion and a new economic incentive mechanism. Then we establish a pyramid Markov process and show that it is irreducible and positive recurrent, and its stationary probability vector is matrix-geometric with an explicitly representable rate matrix. Also, we use the stationary probability vector to study the influence of many orphan blocks on the waste of computing resource. Next, we set up a pyramid Markov reward process to investigate the long-run average profits of the honest and dishonest mining pools, respectively. As a by-product, we build three approximative Markov processes and provide some new interesting interpretation on the Markov chain and the revenue analysis reported in the seminal work by Eyal and Sirer (2014). Note that the pyramid Markov (reward) processes can open up a new avenue in the study of blockchain selfish mining. Thus we hope that the methodology and results developed in this paper shed light on the blockchain selfish mining such that a series of promising research can be developed potentially.
We study Markov Decision Processes (MDP) wherein states correspond to causal graphs that stochastically generate rewards. In this setup, the learner's goal is to identify atomic interventions that lead to high rewards by intervening on variables at each state. Generalizing the recent causal-bandit framework, the current work develops (simple) regret minimization guarantees for two-stage causal MDPs, with parallel causal graph at each state. We propose an algorithm that achieves an instance dependent regret bound. A key feature of our algorithm is that it utilizes convex optimization to address the exploration problem. We identify classes of instances wherein our regret guarantee is essentially tight, and experimentally validate our theoretical results.
Several formal systems, such as resolution and minimal model semantics, provide a framework for logic programming. In this paper, we will survey the use of structural proof theory as an alternative foundation. Researchers have been using this foundation for the past 35 years to elevate logic programming from its roots in first-order classical logic into higher-order versions of intuitionistic and linear logic. These more expressive logic programming languages allow for capturing stateful computations and rich forms of abstractions, including higher-order programming, modularity, and abstract data types. Term-level bindings are another kind of abstraction, and these are given an elegant and direct treatment within both proof theory and these extended logic programming languages. Logic programming has also inspired new results in proof theory, such as those involving polarity and focused proofs. These recent results provide a high-level means for presenting the differences between forward-chaining and backward-chaining style inferences. Anchoring logic programming in proof theory has also helped identify its connections and differences with functional programming, deductive databases, and model checking.
We propose a two-factor authentication (2FA) mechanism called 2D-2FA to address security and usability issues in existing methods. 2D-2FA has three distinguishing features: First, after a user enters a username and password on a login terminal, a unique $\textit{identifier}$ is displayed to her. She $\textit{inputs}$ the same identifier on her registered 2FA device, which ensures appropriate engagement in the authentication process. Second, a one-time PIN is computed on the device and $\textit{automatically}$ transferred to the server. Thus, the PIN can have very high entropy, making guessing attacks infeasible. Third, the identifier is also incorporated into the PIN computation, which renders $\textit{concurrent attacks}$ ineffective. Third-party services such as push-notification providers and 2FA service providers, do not need to be trusted for the security of the system. The choice of identifiers depends on the device form factor and the context. Users could choose to draw patterns, capture QR codes, etc. We provide a proof of concept implementation, and evaluate performance, accuracy, and usability of the system. We show that the system offers a lower error rate (about half) and better efficiency (2-3 times faster) compared to the commonly used PIN-2FA. Our study indicates a high level of usability with a SUS of 75, and a high perception of efficiency, security, accuracy, and adoptability.
Based on rectangle theory of formal concept and set covering theory, the concept reduction preserving binary relations is investigated in this paper. It is known that there are three types of formal concepts: core concepts, relative necessary concepts and unnecessary concepts. First, we present the new judgment results for relative necessary concepts and unnecessary concepts. Second, we derive the bounds for both the maximum number of relative necessary concepts and the maximum number of unnecessary concepts and it is a difficult problem as either in concept reduction preserving binary relations or attribute reduction of decision formal contexts, the computation of formal contexts from formal concepts is a challenging problem. Third, based on rectangle theory of formal concept, a fast algorithm for reducing attributes while preserving the extensions for a set of formal concepts is proposed using the extension bit-array technique, which allows multiple context cells to be processed by a single 32-bit or 64-bit operator. Technically, the new algorithm could store both formal context and extent of a concept as bit-arrays, and we can use bit-operations to process set operations "or" as well as "and". One more merit is that the new algorithm does not need to consider other concepts in the concept lattice, thus the algorithm is explicit to understand and fast. Experiments demonstrate that the new algorithm is effective in the computation of attribute reductions.
The list-decodable code has been an active topic in theoretical computer science.There are general results about the list-decodability to the Johnson radius and the list-decoding capacity theorem. In this paper we show that rates, list-decodable radius and list sizes are closely related to the classical topic of covering codes. We prove new general simple but strong upper bounds for list-decodable codes in general finite metric spaces based on various covering codes. The general covering code upper bounds can be applied to the case that the volumes of the balls depend on the centers, not only on the radius. Then any good upper bound on the covering radius or the size of covering code imply a good upper bound on the sizes of list-decodable codes. Our results give exponential improvements on the recent generalized Singleton upper bound in STOC 2020 for Hamming metric list-decodable codes, when the code lengths are large. A generalized Singleton upper bound for average-radius list-decodable codes is also given from our general covering code upper bound. Even for the list size $L=1$ case our covering code upper bounds give highly non-trivial upper bounds on the sizes of codes with the given minimum distance. The asymptotic forms of covering code bounds in the Hamming metric setting lead to an asymptotic bound for list-decodable binary codes, which is similar to and weaker than the classical McEliece-Rudemich-Rumsey-Welch bound. We also suggest to study the combinatorial covering list-decodable codes as a natural generalization of combinatorial list-decodable codes. We apply our general covering code upper bounds for list-decodable rank-metric codes, list-decodable subspace codes, list-decodable insertion codes and list-decodable deletion codes. Some new better results about non-list-decodability of rank-metric codes and subspace codes are obtained.
Fast developing artificial intelligence (AI) technology has enabled various applied systems deployed in the real world, impacting people's everyday lives. However, many current AI systems were found vulnerable to imperceptible attacks, biased against underrepresented groups, lacking in user privacy protection, etc., which not only degrades user experience but erodes the society's trust in all AI systems. In this review, we strive to provide AI practitioners a comprehensive guide towards building trustworthy AI systems. We first introduce the theoretical framework of important aspects of AI trustworthiness, including robustness, generalization, explainability, transparency, reproducibility, fairness, privacy preservation, alignment with human values, and accountability. We then survey leading approaches in these aspects in the industry. To unify the current fragmented approaches towards trustworthy AI, we propose a systematic approach that considers the entire lifecycle of AI systems, ranging from data acquisition to model development, to development and deployment, finally to continuous monitoring and governance. In this framework, we offer concrete action items to practitioners and societal stakeholders (e.g., researchers and regulators) to improve AI trustworthiness. Finally, we identify key opportunities and challenges in the future development of trustworthy AI systems, where we identify the need for paradigm shift towards comprehensive trustworthy AI systems.
The growing energy and performance costs of deep learning have driven the community to reduce the size of neural networks by selectively pruning components. Similarly to their biological counterparts, sparse networks generalize just as well, if not better than, the original dense networks. Sparsity can reduce the memory footprint of regular networks to fit mobile devices, as well as shorten training time for ever growing networks. In this paper, we survey prior work on sparsity in deep learning and provide an extensive tutorial of sparsification for both inference and training. We describe approaches to remove and add elements of neural networks, different training strategies to achieve model sparsity, and mechanisms to exploit sparsity in practice. Our work distills ideas from more than 300 research papers and provides guidance to practitioners who wish to utilize sparsity today, as well as to researchers whose goal is to push the frontier forward. We include the necessary background on mathematical methods in sparsification, describe phenomena such as early structure adaptation, the intricate relations between sparsity and the training process, and show techniques for achieving acceleration on real hardware. We also define a metric of pruned parameter efficiency that could serve as a baseline for comparison of different sparse networks. We close by speculating on how sparsity can improve future workloads and outline major open problems in the field.
Reasoning is essential for the development of large knowledge graphs, especially for completion, which aims to infer new triples based on existing ones. Both rules and embeddings can be used for knowledge graph reasoning and they have their own advantages and difficulties. Rule-based reasoning is accurate and explainable but rule learning with searching over the graph always suffers from efficiency due to huge search space. Embedding-based reasoning is more scalable and efficient as the reasoning is conducted via computation between embeddings, but it has difficulty learning good representations for sparse entities because a good embedding relies heavily on data richness. Based on this observation, in this paper we explore how embedding and rule learning can be combined together and complement each other's difficulties with their advantages. We propose a novel framework IterE iteratively learning embeddings and rules, in which rules are learned from embeddings with proper pruning strategy and embeddings are learned from existing triples and new triples inferred by rules. Evaluations on embedding qualities of IterE show that rules help improve the quality of sparse entity embeddings and their link prediction results. We also evaluate the efficiency of rule learning and quality of rules from IterE compared with AMIE+, showing that IterE is capable of generating high quality rules more efficiently. Experiments show that iteratively learning embeddings and rules benefit each other during learning and prediction.
Accurately classifying malignancy of lesions detected in a screening scan plays a critical role in reducing false positives. Through extracting and analyzing a large numbers of quantitative image features, radiomics holds great potential to differentiate the malignant tumors from benign ones. Since not all radiomic features contribute to an effective classifying model, selecting an optimal feature subset is critical. This work proposes a new multi-objective based feature selection (MO-FS) algorithm that considers both sensitivity and specificity simultaneously as the objective functions during the feature selection. In MO-FS, we developed a modified entropy based termination criterion (METC) to stop the algorithm automatically rather than relying on a preset number of generations. We also designed a solution selection methodology for multi-objective learning using the evidential reasoning approach (SMOLER) to automatically select the optimal solution from the Pareto-optimal set. Furthermore, an adaptive mutation operation was developed to generate the mutation probability in MO-FS automatically. The MO-FS was evaluated for classifying lung nodule malignancy in low-dose CT and breast lesion malignancy in digital breast tomosynthesis. Compared with other commonly used feature selection methods, the experimental results for both lung nodule and breast lesion malignancy classification demonstrated that the feature set by selected MO-FS achieved better classification performance.
We propose a new method of estimation in topic models, that is not a variation on the existing simplex finding algorithms, and that estimates the number of topics K from the observed data. We derive new finite sample minimax lower bounds for the estimation of A, as well as new upper bounds for our proposed estimator. We describe the scenarios where our estimator is minimax adaptive. Our finite sample analysis is valid for any number of documents (n), individual document length (N_i), dictionary size (p) and number of topics (K), and both p and K are allowed to increase with n, a situation not handled well by previous analyses. We complement our theoretical results with a detailed simulation study. We illustrate that the new algorithm is faster and more accurate than the current ones, although we start out with a computational and theoretical disadvantage of not knowing the correct number of topics K, while we provide the competing methods with the correct value in our simulations.