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Perceptual hashing algorithms (PHAs) are utilized extensively for identifying illegal online content. Given their crucial role in sensitive applications, understanding their security strengths and weaknesses is critical. This paper compares three major PHAs deployed widely in practice: PhotoDNA, PDQ, and NeuralHash, and assesses their robustness against three typical attacks: normal image editing attacks, malicious adversarial attacks, and hash inversion attacks. Contrary to prevailing studies, this paper reveals that these PHAs exhibit resilience to black-box adversarial attacks when realistic constraints regarding the distortion and query budget are applied, attributed to the unique property of random hash variations. Moreover, this paper illustrates that original images can be reconstructed from the hash bits, raising significant privacy concerns. By comprehensively exposing their security vulnerabilities, this paper contributes to the ongoing efforts aimed at enhancing the security of PHAs for effective deployment.

Fact verification tasks aim to identify the integrity of textual contents according to the truthful corpus. Existing fact verification models usually build a fully connected reasoning graph, which regards claim-evidence pairs as nodes and connects them with edges. They employ the graph to propagate the semantics of the nodes. Nevertheless, the noisy nodes usually propagate their semantics via the edges of the reasoning graph, which misleads the semantic representations of other nodes and amplifies the noise signals. To mitigate the propagation of noisy semantic information, we introduce a Confidential Graph Attention Network (CO-GAT), which proposes a node masking mechanism for modeling the nodes. Specifically, CO-GAT calculates the node confidence score by estimating the relevance between the claim and evidence pieces. Then, the node masking mechanism uses the node confidence scores to control the noise information flow from the vanilla node to the other graph nodes. CO-GAT achieves a 73.59% FEVER score on the FEVER dataset and shows the generalization ability by broadening the effectiveness to the science-specific domain., Comment: 12pages

Based on the holographic model, which incorporates the equation of state (EoS) and baryon number susceptibility for different flavors, we calculate the drag force, jet quenching parameter, and diffusion coefficient of the heavy quark at finite temperature and chemical potential. The holographic results for the diffusion coefficient align with lattice data for $N_f = 0$ and $N_f = 2+1$, falling within their error margins. The holographic diffusion coefficient for heavy quark in the systems of different flavors agrees with the fitting results of ALICE data well. The jet quenching parameter in our model demonstrates strong consistency with the results from both RHIC and LHC for different flavors. By comparing the experimental data with other models, we can confirm the validity of our holographic model calculation. The work reinforces the potential of bottom-up holographic model in advancing our understanding of transport properties of hot and dense quark-gluon plasma.

This paper proposes Text mAtching based SequenTial rEcommendation model (TASTE), which maps items and users in an embedding space and recommends items by matching their text representations. TASTE verbalizes items and user-item interactions using identifiers and attributes of items. To better characterize user behaviors, TASTE additionally proposes an attention sparsity method, which enables TASTE to model longer user-item interactions by reducing the self-attention computations during encoding. Our experiments show that TASTE outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on widely used sequential recommendation datasets. TASTE alleviates the cold start problem by representing long-tail items using full-text modeling and bringing the benefits of pretrained language models to recommendation systems. Our further analyses illustrate that TASTE significantly improves the recommendation accuracy by reducing the popularity bias of previous item id based recommendation models and returning more appropriate and text-relevant items to satisfy users. All codes are available at https://github.com/OpenMatch/TASTE., Comment: Accepted by CIKM 2023

Using gauge/gravity duality, we study the potential energy and the melting of triply heavy baryon at finite temperature and chemical potential in this paper. First, we calculate three-quark potential and compare the results with quark-antiquark potential. With the increase of temperature and chemical potential, the potential energy will decrease at large distances. It is found that the three-quark potential will have an endpoint at high temperature and/or large chemical potential, which means triply heavy baryons will melt at enough high temperature and/or large chemical potential. We also discuss screening distance which can be extracted from the three-quark potential. At last, we draw the melting diagram of triply heavy baryons in the $T-\mu$ plane.

In the present work, based on Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB) theory, considering the cluster preformation probability (Pc), we systematically investigate the cluster radioactivity half-lives of 22 trans-lead nuclei ranging from 221Fr to 242Cm. As for Pc, when the mass number of the emitted cluster Ac<28, it is obtained by the exponential relationship of Pc to the alpha decay preformation probability Pa proposed by R.Blendowskeis et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 61, 1930 (1988)], while Pa is calculated through cluster-formation model (CFM). Whereas Ac >= 28, it is achieved through the charge-number dependence of Pc on the decay products proposed by Ren et al. [Phys. Rev. C 70, 034304 (2004)]. The half-lives of cluster radioactivity have been calculated by the density-dependent cluster model [Phys. Rev. C 70, 034304 (2004)] and by the unified formula of half-lives for alpha decay and cluster radioactivity [Phys. Rev. C 78, 044310 (2008)]. For comparison, a universal decay law (UDL) proposed by Qi et al. [Phys. Rev. C 80, 044326 (2009)], a semi-empirical model for both alpha decay and cluster radioactivity proposed by Santhosh [J. Phys. G: Nucl. Part. Phys. 35, 085102 (2008)] and a unified formula of half-lives for alpha decay and cluster radioactivity [Phys. Rev. C 78, 044310 (2008)] are also used. The calculated results in our work, Ni's formula as well as UDL can well reproduce the experimental data and are better than those in Santhosh's model. In addition, we extend this model to predict the half-lives for 51 nuclei, whose cluster radioactivity is energetically allowed or observed but yet not quantified in NUBASE2020.

Limited by the cost and complexity, superresolution lithography is hard to achieve through the traditional interference lithography. We here developed the plasmonic interference lithography technique by using a hyperbolic metamaterials (HMMs) / photoresist / metal plasmonic waveguide to push the feature sizes theoretically down to 16 nm and even to 11 nm at the wavelength of 365 nm with TM polarization. The waveguide based on the proposed HMMs can support high-k mode for superresolution lithography. Furthermore, plasmonic mode supported in the proposed lithography structure can be tailored by dimension of HMM and permittivity of the materials, which makes it possible to get higher resolution pattern under conventional UV light. Our findings open up an avenue to pushing the nanolithography node towards 10 nm for low-cost and large area fabrication under conventional UV light source.

The fast integration of 5G communication, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies is envisioned to enable Next Generation Networks (NGNs) for diverse smart services and user-defined applications for Smart Cities. However, it is still challenging to build a scalable and efficient infrastructure that satisfies the various performance, security, and management demands by heterogeneous IoT applications across multiple administrative domains. This paper presents a dynamic edge resource federation architecture, which integrates the concept of network slicing (NS) and blockchain to improve scalability, dynamicity, and security for multi-domain IoT applications. A NS-enabled dynamic edge resource federation framework adopts intelligent mechanisms to support efficient multi-domain service coordination that satisfies diverse Quality of Service (QoS) and security requirements. We propose a Hierarchical Integrated Federated Ledger (HIFL), which aims to guarantee decentralized security and privacy-preserving properties in multi-domain resource orchestration and service re-adjustment. As a secure-by-design solution, HIFL is promising to support efficient, trust and secured end-to-end IoT services. A preliminary proof-of-concept prototype has been implemented for comparing intra- and inter-domain performance expectations.

Dense retrievers encode queries and documents and map them in an embedding space using pre-trained language models. These embeddings need to be high-dimensional to fit training signals and guarantee the retrieval effectiveness of dense retrievers. However, these high-dimensional embeddings lead to larger index storage and higher retrieval latency. To reduce the embedding dimensions of dense retrieval, this paper proposes a Conditional Autoencoder (ConAE) to compress the high-dimensional embeddings to maintain the same embedding distribution and better recover the ranking features. Our experiments show that ConAE is effective in compressing embeddings by achieving comparable ranking performance with its teacher model and making the retrieval system more efficient. Our further analyses show that ConAE can alleviate the redundancy of the embeddings of dense retrieval with only one linear layer. All codes of this work are available at https://github.com/NEUIR/ConAE., Comment: Accepted by EMNLP 2022

Black-box adversarial attacks generate adversarial samples via iterative optimizations using repeated queries. Defending deep neural networks against such attacks has been challenging. In this paper, we propose an efficient Boundary Defense (BD) method which mitigates black-box attacks by exploiting the fact that the adversarial optimizations often need samples on the classification boundary. Our method detects the boundary samples as those with low classification confidence and adds white Gaussian noise to their logits. The method's impact on the deep network's classification accuracy is analyzed theoretically. Extensive experiments are conducted and the results show that the BD method can reliably defend against both soft and hard label black-box attacks. It outperforms a list of existing defense methods. For IMAGENET models, by adding zero-mean white Gaussian noise with standard deviation 0.1 to logits when the classification confidence is less than 0.3, the defense reduces the attack success rate to almost 0 while limiting the classification accuracy degradation to around 1 percent.

In black-box adversarial attacks, adversaries query the deep neural network (DNN), use the output to reconstruct gradients, and then optimize the adversarial inputs iteratively. In this paper, we study the method of adding white noise to the DNN output to mitigate such attacks, with a unique focus on the trade-off analysis of noise level and query cost. The attacker's query count (QC) is derived mathematically as a function of noise standard deviation. With this result, the defender can conveniently find the noise level needed to mitigate attacks for the desired security level specified by QC and limited DNN performance loss. Our analysis shows that the added noise is drastically magnified by the small variation of DNN outputs, which makes the reconstructed gradient have an extremely low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Adding slight white noise with a standard deviation less than 0.01 is enough to increase QC by many orders of magnitude without introducing any noticeable classification accuracy reduction. Our experiments demonstrate that this method can effectively mitigate both soft-label and hard-label black-box attacks under realistic QC constraints. We also show that this method outperforms many other defense methods and is robust to the attacker's countermeasures.