48,137 research outputs found
Inferring long memory processes in the climate network via ordinal pattern analysis
We use ordinal patterns and symbolic analysis to construct global climate
networks and uncover long and short term memory processes. The data analyzed is
the monthly averaged surface air temperature (SAT field) and the results
suggest that the time variability of the SAT field is determined by patterns of
oscillatory behavior that repeat from time to time, with a periodicity related
to intraseasonal oscillations and to El Ni\~{n}o on seasonal-to-interannual
time scales.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures Enlarged version, new sections and figures.
Accepted in Chao
Detecting event-related recurrences by symbolic analysis: Applications to human language processing
Quasistationarity is ubiquitous in complex dynamical systems. In brain
dynamics there is ample evidence that event-related potentials reflect such
quasistationary states. In order to detect them from time series, several
segmentation techniques have been proposed. In this study we elaborate a recent
approach for detecting quasistationary states as recurrence domains by means of
recurrence analysis and subsequent symbolisation methods. As a result,
recurrence domains are obtained as partition cells that can be further aligned
and unified for different realisations. We address two pertinent problems of
contemporary recurrence analysis and present possible solutions for them.Comment: 24 pages, 6 figures. Draft version to appear in Proc Royal Soc
Neural Machine Translation Inspired Binary Code Similarity Comparison beyond Function Pairs
Binary code analysis allows analyzing binary code without having access to
the corresponding source code. A binary, after disassembly, is expressed in an
assembly language. This inspires us to approach binary analysis by leveraging
ideas and techniques from Natural Language Processing (NLP), a rich area
focused on processing text of various natural languages. We notice that binary
code analysis and NLP share a lot of analogical topics, such as semantics
extraction, summarization, and classification. This work utilizes these ideas
to address two important code similarity comparison problems. (I) Given a pair
of basic blocks for different instruction set architectures (ISAs), determining
whether their semantics is similar or not; and (II) given a piece of code of
interest, determining if it is contained in another piece of assembly code for
a different ISA. The solutions to these two problems have many applications,
such as cross-architecture vulnerability discovery and code plagiarism
detection. We implement a prototype system INNEREYE and perform a comprehensive
evaluation. A comparison between our approach and existing approaches to
Problem I shows that our system outperforms them in terms of accuracy,
efficiency and scalability. And the case studies utilizing the system
demonstrate that our solution to Problem II is effective. Moreover, this
research showcases how to apply ideas and techniques from NLP to large-scale
binary code analysis.Comment: Accepted by Network and Distributed Systems Security (NDSS) Symposium
201
Integer Echo State Networks: Hyperdimensional Reservoir Computing
We propose an approximation of Echo State Networks (ESN) that can be
efficiently implemented on digital hardware based on the mathematics of
hyperdimensional computing. The reservoir of the proposed Integer Echo State
Network (intESN) is a vector containing only n-bits integers (where n<8 is
normally sufficient for a satisfactory performance). The recurrent matrix
multiplication is replaced with an efficient cyclic shift operation. The intESN
architecture is verified with typical tasks in reservoir computing: memorizing
of a sequence of inputs; classifying time-series; learning dynamic processes.
Such an architecture results in dramatic improvements in memory footprint and
computational efficiency, with minimal performance loss.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, 1 tabl
The Progress, Challenges, and Perspectives of Directed Greybox Fuzzing
Most greybox fuzzing tools are coverage-guided as code coverage is strongly
correlated with bug coverage. However, since most covered codes may not contain
bugs, blindly extending code coverage is less efficient, especially for corner
cases. Unlike coverage-guided greybox fuzzers who extend code coverage in an
undirected manner, a directed greybox fuzzer spends most of its time allocation
on reaching specific targets (e.g., the bug-prone zone) without wasting
resources stressing unrelated parts. Thus, directed greybox fuzzing (DGF) is
particularly suitable for scenarios such as patch testing, bug reproduction,
and specialist bug hunting. This paper studies DGF from a broader view, which
takes into account not only the location-directed type that targets specific
code parts, but also the behaviour-directed type that aims to expose abnormal
program behaviours. Herein, the first in-depth study of DGF is made based on
the investigation of 32 state-of-the-art fuzzers (78% were published after
2019) that are closely related to DGF. A thorough assessment of the collected
tools is conducted so as to systemise recent progress in this field. Finally,
it summarises the challenges and provides perspectives for future research.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figure
Morphological Analysis as Classification: an Inductive-Learning Approach
Morphological analysis is an important subtask in text-to-speech conversion,
hyphenation, and other language engineering tasks. The traditional approach to
performing morphological analysis is to combine a morpheme lexicon, sets of
(linguistic) rules, and heuristics to find a most probable analysis. In
contrast we present an inductive learning approach in which morphological
analysis is reformulated as a segmentation task. We report on a number of
experiments in which five inductive learning algorithms are applied to three
variations of the task of morphological analysis. Results show (i) that the
generalisation performance of the algorithms is good, and (ii) that the lazy
learning algorithm IB1-IG performs best on all three tasks. We conclude that
lazy learning of morphological analysis as a classification task is indeed a
viable approach; moreover, it has the strong advantages over the traditional
approach of avoiding the knowledge-acquisition bottleneck, being fast and
deterministic in learning and processing, and being language-independent.Comment: 11 pages, 5 encapsulated postscript figures, uses non-standard NeMLaP
proceedings style nemlap.sty; inputs ipamacs (international phonetic
alphabet) and epsf macro
On Recursive Edit Distance Kernels with Application to Time Series Classification
This paper proposes some extensions to the work on kernels dedicated to
string or time series global alignment based on the aggregation of scores
obtained by local alignments. The extensions we propose allow to construct,
from classical recursive definition of elastic distances, recursive edit
distance (or time-warp) kernels that are positive definite if some sufficient
conditions are satisfied. The sufficient conditions we end-up with are original
and weaker than those proposed in earlier works, although a recursive
regularizing term is required to get the proof of the positive definiteness as
a direct consequence of the Haussler's convolution theorem. The classification
experiment we conducted on three classical time warp distances (two of which
being metrics), using Support Vector Machine classifier, leads to conclude
that, when the pairwise distance matrix obtained from the training data is
\textit{far} from definiteness, the positive definite recursive elastic kernels
outperform in general the distance substituting kernels for the classical
elastic distances we have tested.Comment: 14 page
Sudden drop of fractal dimension of electromagnetic emissions recorded prior to significant earthquake
The variation of fractal dimension and entropy during a damage evolution
process, especially approaching critical failure, has been recently
investigated. A sudden drop of fractal dimension has been proposed as a
quantitative indicator of damage localization or a likely precursor of an
impending catastrophic failure. In this contribution, electromagnetic emissions
recorded prior to significant earthquake are analysed to investigate whether
they also present such sudden fractal dimension and entropy drops as the main
catastrophic event is approaching. The pre-earthquake electromagnetic time
series analysis results reveal a good agreement to the theoretically expected
ones indicating that the critical fracture is approaching
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