Modular reduction is a crucial operation in many post-quantum cryptographic schemes, including the Kyber key exchange method or Dilithium signature scheme. However, it can be computationally expensive and pose a performance bottleneck in hardware implementations. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach for computing modular reduction efficiently in hardware for arbitrary static moduli. Unlike other commonly used methods such as Barrett or Montgomery reduction, the method does not require any multiplications. It is not dependent on properties of any particular choice of modulus for good performance and low area consumption. Its major strength lies in its low area consumption, which was reduced by 60% for optimized and up to 90% for generic Barrett implementations for Kyber and Dilithium. Additionally, it is well suited for parallelization and pipelining and scales linearly in hardware resource consumption with increasing operation width. All operations can be performed in the bit-width of the modulus, rather than the size of the number being reduced. This shortens carry chains and allows for faster clocking. Moreover, our method can be executed in constant time, which is essential for cryptography applications where timing attacks can be used to obtain information about the secret key.
Bayesian optimization (BO) developed as an approach for the efficient optimization of expensive black-box functions without gradient information. A typical BO paper introduces a new approach and compares it to some alternatives on simulated and possibly real examples to show its efficacy. Yet on a different example, this new algorithm might not be as effective as the alternatives. This paper looks at a broader family of approaches to explain the strengths and weaknesses of algorithms in the family, with guidance on what choices might work best on different classes of problems.
We develop a Bayesian inference method for discretely-observed stochastic differential equations (SDEs). Inference is challenging for most SDEs, due to the analytical intractability of the likelihood function. Nevertheless, forward simulation via numerical methods is straightforward, motivating the use of approximate Bayesian computation (ABC). We propose a conditional simulation scheme for SDEs that is based on lookahead strategies for sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) and particle smoothing using backward simulation. This leads to the simulation of trajectories that are consistent with the observed trajectory, thereby increasing the ABC acceptance rate. We additionally employ an invariant neural network, previously developed for Markov processes, to learn the summary statistics function required in ABC. The neural network is incrementally retrained by exploiting an ABC-SMC sampler, which provides new training data at each round. Since the SDE simulation scheme differs from standard forward simulation, we propose a suitable importance sampling correction, which has the added advantage of guiding the parameters towards regions of high posterior density, especially in the first ABC-SMC round. Our approach achieves accurate inference and is about three times faster than standard (forward-only) ABC-SMC. We illustrate our method in four simulation studies, including three examples from the Chan-Karaolyi-Longstaff-Sanders SDE family.
Optimal algorithms are developed for robust detection of changes in non-stationary processes. These are processes in which the distribution of the data after change varies with time. The decision-maker does not have access to precise information on the post-change distribution. It is shown that if the post-change non-stationary family has a distribution that is least favorable in a well-defined sense, then the algorithms designed using the least favorable distributions are robust and optimal. Non-stationary processes are encountered in public health monitoring and space and military applications. The robust algorithms are applied to real and simulated data to show their effectiveness.
In this work, a local Fourier analysis is presented to study the convergence of multigrid methods based on additive Schwarz smoothers. This analysis is presented as a general framework which allows us to study these smoothers for any type of discretization and problem. The presented framework is crucial in practice since it allows one to know a priori the answer to questions such as what is the size of the patch to use within these relaxations, the size of the overlapping, or even the optimal values for the weights involved in the smoother. Results are shown for a class of additive and restricted additive Schwarz relaxations used within a multigrid framework applied to high-order finite-element discretizations and saddle point problems, which are two of the contexts in which these type of relaxations are widely used.
While backpropagation (BP) is the mainstream approach for gradient computation in neural network training, its heavy reliance on the chain rule of differentiation constrains the designing flexibility of network architecture and training pipelines. We avoid the recursive computation in BP and develop a unified likelihood ratio (ULR) method for gradient estimation with just one forward propagation. Not only can ULR be extended to train a wide variety of neural network architectures, but the computation flow in BP can also be rearranged by ULR for better device adaptation. Moreover, we propose several variance reduction techniques to further accelerate the training process. Our experiments offer numerical results across diverse aspects, including various neural network training scenarios, computation flow rearrangement, and fine-tuning of pre-trained models. All findings demonstrate that ULR effectively enhances the flexibility of neural network training by permitting localized module training without compromising the global objective and significantly boosts the network robustness.
We investigate the dimension-parametric complexity of the reachability problem in vector addition systems with states (VASS) and its extension with pushdown stack (pushdown VASS). Up to now, the problem is known to be $\mathcal{F}_k$-hard for VASS of dimension $3k+2$ (the complexity class $\mathcal{F}_k$ corresponds to the $k$th level of the fast-growing hierarchy), and no essentially better bound is known for pushdown VASS. We provide a new construction that improves the lower bound for VASS: $\mathcal{F}_k$-hardness in dimension $2k+3$. Furthermore, building on our new insights we show a new lower bound for pushdown VASS: $\mathcal{F}_k$-hardness in dimension $\frac k 2 + 4$. This dimension-parametric lower bound is strictly stronger than the upper bound for VASS, which suggests that the (still unknown) complexity of the reachability problem in pushdown VASS is higher than in plain VASS (where it is Ackermann-complete).
Case-based reasoning (CBR) as a methodology for problem-solving can use any appropriate computational technique. This position paper argues that CBR researchers have somewhat overlooked recent developments in deep learning and large language models (LLMs). The underlying technical developments that have enabled the recent breakthroughs in AI have strong synergies with CBR and could be used to provide a persistent memory for LLMs to make progress towards Artificial General Intelligence.
Semantic role labeling (SRL) has multiple disjoint label sets, e.g., VerbNet and PropBank. Creating these datasets is challenging, therefore a natural question is how to use each one to help the other. Prior work has shown that cross-task interaction helps, but only explored multitask learning so far. A common issue with multi-task setup is that argument sequences are still separately decoded, running the risk of generating structurally inconsistent label sequences (as per lexicons like Semlink). In this paper, we eliminate such issue with a framework that jointly models VerbNet and PropBank labels as one sequence. In this setup, we show that enforcing Semlink constraints during decoding constantly improves the overall F1. With special input constructions, our joint model infers VerbNet arguments from given PropBank arguments with over 99 F1. For learning, we propose a constrained marginal model that learns with knowledge defined in Semlink to further benefit from the large amounts of PropBank-only data. On the joint benchmark based on CoNLL05, our models achieve state-of-the-art F1's, outperforming the prior best in-domain model by 3.5 (VerbNet) and 0.8 (PropBank). For out-of-domain generalization, our models surpass the prior best by 3.4 (VerbNet) and 0.2 (PropBank).
Multimodal image-text memes are prevalent on the internet, serving as a unique form of communication that combines visual and textual elements to convey humor, ideas, or emotions. However, some memes take a malicious turn, promoting hateful content and perpetuating discrimination. Detecting hateful memes within this multimodal context is a challenging task that requires understanding the intertwined meaning of text and images. In this work, we address this issue by proposing a novel approach named ISSUES for multimodal hateful meme classification. ISSUES leverages a pre-trained CLIP vision-language model and the textual inversion technique to effectively capture the multimodal semantic content of the memes. The experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on the Hateful Memes Challenge and HarMeme datasets. The code and the pre-trained models are publicly available at //github.com/miccunifi/ISSUES.
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is essential for reliable and trustworthy machine learning. Recent multi-modal OOD detection leverages textual information from in-distribution (ID) class names for visual OOD detection, yet it currently neglects the rich contextual information of ID classes. Large language models (LLMs) encode a wealth of world knowledge and can be prompted to generate descriptive features for each class. Indiscriminately using such knowledge causes catastrophic damage to OOD detection due to LLMs' hallucinations, as is observed by our analysis. In this paper, we propose to apply world knowledge to enhance OOD detection performance through selective generation from LLMs. Specifically, we introduce a consistency-based uncertainty calibration method to estimate the confidence score of each generation. We further extract visual objects from each image to fully capitalize on the aforementioned world knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art.