COVER: A Heuristic Greedy Adversarial Attack on Prompt-based Learning in Language Models

Prompt-based learning has been proved to be an effective way in pre-trained language models (PLMs), especially in low-resource scenarios like few-shot settings. However, the trustworthiness of PLMs is of paramount significance and potential vulnerabilities have been shown in prompt-based templates that could mislead the predictions of language models, causing serious security concerns. In this paper, we will shed light on some vulnerabilities of PLMs, by proposing a prompt-based adversarial attack on manual templates in black box scenarios. First of all, we design character-level and word-level heuristic approaches to break manual templates separately. Then we present a greedy algorithm for the attack based on the above heuristic destructive approaches. Finally, we evaluate our approach with the classification tasks on three variants of BERT series models and eight datasets. And comprehensive experimental results justify the effectiveness of our approach in terms of attack success rate and attack speed. Further experimental studies indicate that our proposed method also displays good capabilities in scenarios with varying shot counts, template lengths and query counts, exhibiting good generalizability

Characterization of Laser-Resistant Port Wine Stain Blood Vessels Using In Vivo Reflectance Confocal Microscopy.

Background and objectivesPort wine stain (PWS) is a congenital vascular malformation of the human skin. Laser is the treatment of choice for PWS. Laser-resistant PWS is one crucial factor accounting for inadequate treatment outcome, which needs to be fully characterized. This study aims to quantitatively characterize the morphology of laser-resistant PWS blood vessels in the upper papillary dermis using in vivo reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM).Study design/materials and methodsA total of 42 PWS subjects receiving laser treatment from August 2016 through July 2018 were enrolled into this study. Thirty-three subjects had facial PWS; nine had extremity PWS. All subject's PWS received multiplex 585/1,064 nm laser treatment. RCM images were taken before and after treatment. The density, diameter, blood flow, and depth of PWS blood vessels were analyzed.ResultsWe found 44.4% PWS on the extremities (four out of nine subjects) were laser-resistant, which was significantly higher (P < 0.001) when compared with those PWS on the face (15.2%, 5 out of 33 subjects). The laser-resistant facial PWS blood vessels had significantly higher blood flow (1.35 ± 0.26 U vs. 0.89 ± 0.22 U, P < 0.001), larger blood vessel diameters (109.60 ± 18.24 µm vs. 84.36 ± 24.04 µm, P = 0.033) and were located deeper in the skin (106.01 ± 13.87 µm vs. 87.82 ± 12.57 µm, P < 0.001) in the skin when compared with laser-responsive PWS on the face. The average PWS blood vessel density (17.01 ± 4.63/mm2 vs. 16.61 ± 4.44/mm2 , P = 0.857) was not correlated to the laser resistance.ConclusionsLaser-resistant PWS blood vessels had significantly higher blood flow, larger diameters, and were located deeper in the skin. RCM can be a valuable tool for a prognostic evaluation on laser-resistant lesions before treatment, thereby providing guidance for tailored laser treatment protocols, which may improve the therapeutic outcome. The limitations for this study include relative small sample size and acquisitions of different blood vessels before and after 2 months of treatment. Lasers Surg. Med. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc

Functionalized erythrocyte-derived optical nanoparticles to target ephrin-B2 ligands.

Over- or under-expression of erythropoietin-production human hepatocellular receptors (Eph) and their ligands are associated with various diseases. Therefore, these molecular biomarkers can potentially be used as binding targets for the delivery of therapeutic and/or imaging agents to cells characterized by such irregular expressions. We have engineered nanoparticles derived from erythrocytes and doped with the near-infrared (NIR) FDA-approved dye, indocyanine green. We refer to these nanoparticles as NIR erythrocyte-derived transducers (NETs). We functionalized the NETs with the ligand-binding domain of a particular Eph receptor, EphB1, to target the genetically modified human dermal microvascular endothelial cells (hDMVECs) with coexpression of EphB1 receptor and its ligand ephrin-B2. This cell model mimics the pathological phenotypes of lesional endothelial cells (ECs) in port wine stains (PWSs). Our quantitative fluorescence imaging results demonstrate that such functionalized NETs bind to the ephrin-B2 ligands on these hDMVECs in a dose-dependent manner that varies sigmoidally with the number density of the particles. These nanoparticles may potentially serve as agents to target PWS lesional ECs and other diseases characterized with over-expression of Eph receptors or their associated ligands to mediate phototherapy

Cryptanalysis of Yasuda, Takagi and Sakurai\u27s Signature Scheme Using Invariant Subspaces

In PQCrypto 2013 Yasuda, Takagi and Sakurai proposed an interesting signature scheme of efficiency $O(n^2)$ with parameter $(q=6781, n=121)$ claimed to have 140-bit security level. Later on almost at the same time two independent and different attacks were then proposed by Y. Hashimoto in PQCrypto 2014 and by the authors in ICISC 2014. Hashimoto\u27s attack has complexity $O(n^4)$ and breaks $(q=6781, n=121)$ in several minutes. In this paper, we make an essential extension of our work in ICISC 2014. We develop for the our previous method a thorough and rigorous mathematical theory by applying intensively the theory of invariant subspaces, then work out a much better attack with complexity $O(n^4)$, and especially implement it successfully. Our new attack efficiently recovers equivalent private keys of many randomly generated instances, especially breaking $(q=6781, n=121)$ in only about 14.77 seconds, much faster than Y. Hashimoto\u27s attack. The approach developed here might have further applications

MI-T-HFE, a New Multivariate Signature Scheme

In this paper, we propose a new multivariate signature scheme named MI-T-HFE as a competitor of QUARTZ. The core map of MI-T-HFE is of an HFEv type but more importantly has a specially designed trapdoor. This special trapdoor makes MI-T-HFE have several attractive advantages over QUARTZ. First of all, the core map and the public map of MI-T-HFE are both surjective. This surjectivity property is important for signature schemes because any message should always have valid signatures; otherwise it may be troublesome to exclude those messages without valid signatures. However this property is missing for a few major signature schemes, including QUARTZ. A practical parameter set is proposed for MI-T-HFE with the same length of message and same level of security as QUARTZ, but it has smaller public key size, and is more efficient than (the underlying HFEv- of) QUARTZ with the only cost that its signature length is twice that of QUARTZ

On the Security and Key Generation of the ZHFE Encryption Scheme

At PQCrypto\u2714 Porras, Baena and Ding proposed a new interesting construction to overcome the security weakness of the HFE encryption scheme, and called their new encryption scheme ZHFE. They provided experimental evidence for the security of ZHFE, and proposed the parameter set $(q,n,D)= (7,55,105)$ with claimed security level $2^{80}$ estimated by experiment. However there is an important gap in the state-of-the-art cryptanalysis of ZHFE, i.e., a sound theoretical estimation for the security level of ZHFE is missing. In this paper we fill in this gap by computing upper bounds for the Q-Rank and for the degree of regularity of ZHFE in terms of $\log_q D$, and thus providing such a theoretical estimation. For instance the security level of ZHFE(7,55,105) can now be estimated theoretically as at least $2^{96}$. Moreover for the inefficient key generation of ZHFE, we also provide a solution to improve it significantly, making almost no computation needed

Cross-View Hierarchy Network for Stereo Image Super-Resolution

Stereo image super-resolution aims to improve the quality of high-resolution stereo image pairs by exploiting complementary information across views. To attain superior performance, many methods have prioritized designing complex modules to fuse similar information across views, yet overlooking the importance of intra-view information for high-resolution reconstruction. It also leads to problems of wrong texture in recovered images. To address this issue, we explore the interdependencies between various hierarchies from intra-view and propose a novel method, named Cross-View-Hierarchy Network for Stereo Image Super-Resolution (CVHSSR). Specifically, we design a cross-hierarchy information mining block (CHIMB) that leverages channel attention and large kernel convolution attention to extract both global and local features from the intra-view, enabling the efficient restoration of accurate texture details. Additionally, a cross-view interaction module (CVIM) is proposed to fuse similar features from different views by utilizing cross-view attention mechanisms, effectively adapting to the binocular scene. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. CVHSSR achieves the best stereo image super-resolution performance than other state-of-the-art methods while using fewer parameters. The source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/AlexZou14/CVHSSR.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, CVPRW, NTIRE202