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With the rapid development of AI technology, we have witnessed numerous innovations and conveniences. However, along with these advancements come privacy threats and risks. Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) emerges as a key technology for privacy-preserving computation, enabling computations while maintaining data privacy. Nevertheless, FHE has limitations in processing continuous non-polynomial functions as it is restricted to discrete integers and supports only addition and multiplication. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) operate on discrete spike signals, naturally aligning with the properties of FHE. In this paper, we present a framework called FHE-DiCSNN. This framework is based on the efficient TFHE scheme and leverages the discrete properties of SNNs to achieve high prediction performance on ciphertexts. Firstly, by employing bootstrapping techniques, we successfully implement computations of the Leaky Integrate-and-Fire neuron model on ciphertexts. Through bootstrapping, we can facilitate computations for SNNs of arbitrary depth. This framework can be extended to other spiking neuron models, providing a novel framework for the homomorphic evaluation of SNNs. Secondly, inspired by CNNs, we adopt convolutional methods to replace Poisson encoding. This not only enhances accuracy but also mitigates the issue of prolonged simulation time caused by random encoding. Furthermore, we employ engineering techniques to parallelize the computation of bootstrapping, resulting in a significant improvement in computational efficiency. Finally, we evaluate our model on the MNIST dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that, with the optimal parameter configuration, FHE-DiCSNN achieves an accuracy of 97.94% on ciphertexts, with a loss of only 0.53% compared to the original network's accuracy of 98.47%. Moreover, each prediction requires only 0.75 seconds of computation time

The rapid development of artificial intelligence has brought considerable convenience, yet also introduces significant security risks. One of the research hotspots is to balance data privacy and utility in the real world of artificial intelligence. The present second-generation artificial neural networks have made tremendous advances, but some big models could have really high computational costs. The third-generation neural network, SNN (Spiking Neural Network), mimics real neurons by using discrete spike signals, whose sequences exhibit strong sparsity, providing advantages such as low energy consumption and high efficiency. In this paper, we construct a framework to evaluate the homomorphic computation of SNN named FHE-DiSNN that enables SNN to achieve good prediction performance on encrypted data. First, benefitting from the discrete nature of spike signals, our proposed model avoids the errors introduced by discretizing activation functions. Second, by applying bootstrapping, we design new private preserving functions FHE-Fire and FHE-Reset, through which noise can be refreshed, allowing us to evaluate SNN for an arbitrary number of operations. Furthermore, We improve the computational efficiency of FHE-DiSNN while maintaining a high level of accuracy. Finally, we evaluate our model on the MNIST dataset. The experiments show that FHE-DiSNN with 30 neurons in the hidden layer achieves a minimum prediction accuracy of 94.4%. Under optimal parameters, it achieves a 95.1% accuracy, with only a 0.6% decrease compared to the original SNN (95.7%). These results demonstrate the superiority of SNN over second-generation neural networks for homomorphic evaluation.

With the fast development of quantitative portfolio optimization in financial engineering, lots of AI-based algorithmic trading strategies have demonstrated promising results, among which reinforcement learning begins to manifest competitive advantages. However, the environment from real financial markets is complex and hard to be fully simulated, considering the observation of abrupt transitions, unpredictable hidden causal factors, heavy tail properties and so on. Thus, in this paper, first, we adopt a heavy-tailed preserving normalizing flows to simulate high-dimensional joint probability of the complex trading environment and develop a model-based reinforcement learning framework to better understand the intrinsic mechanisms of quantitative online trading. Second, we experiment with various stocks from three different financial markets (Dow, NASDAQ and S&P) and show that among these three financial markets, Dow gets the best performance based on various evaluation metrics under our back-testing system. Especially, our proposed method is able to mitigate the impact of unpredictable financial market crises during the COVID-19 pandemic period, resulting in a lower maximum drawdown. Third, we also explore the explanation of our RL algorithm. (1), we utilize the pattern causality method to study the interactive relation among different stocks in the environment. (2), We analyze the dynamic loss and actor loss to ensure the convergence of our strategies. (3), by visualizing high dimensional state transition data comparisons from real and virtual buffers with t-SNE, we uncover some effective patterns of better portfolio optimization strategies. (4), we also utilize eigenvalue analysis to study the convergence properties of the environmen's model., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2205.15056

Reinforcement learning (RL) is gaining attention by more and more researchers in quantitative finance as the agent-environment interaction framework is aligned with decision making process in many business problems. Most of the current financial applications using RL algorithms are based on model-free method, which still faces stability and adaptivity challenges. As lots of cutting-edge model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) algorithms mature in applications such as video games or robotics, we design a new approach that leverages resistance and support (RS) level as regularization terms for action in MBRL, to improve the algorithm's efficiency and stability. From the experiment results, we can see RS level, as a market timing technique, enhances the performance of pure MBRL models in terms of various measurements and obtains better profit gain with less riskiness. Besides, our proposed method even resists big drop (less maximum drawdown) during COVID-19 pandemic period when the financial market got unpredictable crisis. Explanations on why control of resistance and support level can boost MBRL is also investigated through numerical experiments, such as loss of actor-critic network and prediction error of the transition dynamical model. It shows that RS indicators indeed help the MBRL algorithms to converge faster at early stage and obtain smaller critic loss as training episodes increase.

Binary-source code matching plays an important role in many security and software engineering related tasks such as malware detection, reverse engineering and vulnerability assessment. Currently, several approaches have been proposed for binary-source code matching by jointly learning the embeddings of binary code and source code in a common vector space. Despite much effort, existing approaches target on matching the binary code and source code written in a single programming language. However, in practice, software applications are often written in different programming languages to cater for different requirements and computing platforms. Matching binary and source code across programming languages introduces additional challenges when maintaining multi-language and multi-platform applications. To this end, this paper formulates the problem of cross-language binary-source code matching, and develops a new dataset for this new problem. We present a novel approach XLIR, which is a Transformer-based neural network by learning the intermediate representations for both binary and source code. To validate the effectiveness of XLIR, comprehensive experiments are conducted on two tasks of cross-language binary-source code matching, and cross-language source-source code matching, on top of our curated dataset. Experimental results and analysis show that our proposed XLIR with intermediate representations significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art models in both of the two tasks., Comment: SANER2022