Tinkertoys for the E7 Theory

We classify the class $S$ theories of type $E_7$. These are four-dimensional $\mathcal{N}=2$ superconformal field theories arising from the compactification of the $E_7$ $(2,0)$ theory on a punctured Riemann surface, $C$. The classification is given by listing all 3-punctured spheres ("fixtures"), and connecting cylinders, which can arise in a pants-decomposition of $C$. We find exactly 11,000 fixtures with three regular punctures, and an additional 48 with one "irregular puncture" (in the sense used in our previous works). To organize this large number of theories, we have created a web application at https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/class-S/E7/ . Among these theories, we find 10 new ones with a simple exceptional global symmetry group, as well as a new rank-2 SCFT and several new rank-3 SCFTs. As an application, we study the strong-coupling limit of the $E_7$ gauge theory with 3 hypermultiplets in the $56$. Using our results, we also verify recent conjectures that the $T^2$ compactification of certain $6d$ $(1,0)$ theories can alternatively be realized in class $S$ as fixtures in the $E_7$ or $E_8$ theories.Comment: Fixed one entry in table of interacting fixtures with an irregular punctur

Game of Travesty: Decoy-based Psychological Cyber Deception for Proactive Human Agents

The concept of cyber deception has been receiving emerging attention. The development of cyber defensive deception techniques requires interdisciplinary work, among which cognitive science plays an important role. In this work, we adopt a signaling game framework between a defender and a human agent to develop a cyber defensive deception protocol that takes advantage of the cognitive biases of human decision-making using quantum decision theory to combat insider attacks (IA). The defender deceives an inside human attacker by luring him to access decoy sensors via generators producing perceptions of classical signals to manipulate the human attacker's psychological state of mind. Our results reveal that even without changing the classical traffic data, strategically designed generators can result in a worse performance for defending against insider attackers in identifying decoys than the ones in the deceptive scheme without generators, which generate random information based on input signals. The proposed framework leads to fundamental theories in designing more effective signaling schemes

Quantum Man-in-the-middle Attacks: a Game-theoretic Approach with Applications to Radars

The detection and discrimination of quantum states serve a crucial role in quantum signal processing, a discipline that studies methods and techniques to process signals that obey the quantum mechanics frameworks. However, just like classical detection, evasive behaviors also exist in quantum detection. In this paper, we formulate an adversarial quantum detection scenario where the detector is passive and does not know the quantum states have been distorted by an attacker. We compare the performance of a passive detector with the one of a non-adversarial detector to demonstrate how evasive behaviors can undermine the performance of quantum detection. We use a case study of target detection with quantum radars to corroborate our analytical results

Towards Unified Text-based Person Retrieval: A Large-scale Multi-Attribute and Language Search Benchmark

In this paper, we introduce a large Multi-Attribute and Language Search dataset for text-based person retrieval, called MALS, and explore the feasibility of performing pre-training on both attribute recognition and image-text matching tasks in one stone. In particular, MALS contains 1,510,330 image-text pairs, which is about 37.5 times larger than prevailing CUHK-PEDES, and all images are annotated with 27 attributes. Considering the privacy concerns and annotation costs, we leverage the off-the-shelf diffusion models to generate the dataset. To verify the feasibility of learning from the generated data, we develop a new joint Attribute Prompt Learning and Text Matching Learning (APTM) framework, considering the shared knowledge between attribute and text. As the name implies, APTM contains an attribute prompt learning stream and a text matching learning stream. (1) The attribute prompt learning leverages the attribute prompts for image-attribute alignment, which enhances the text matching learning. (2) The text matching learning facilitates the representation learning on fine-grained details, and in turn, boosts the attribute prompt learning. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the pre-training on MALS, achieving state-of-the-art retrieval performance via APTM on three challenging real-world benchmarks. In particular, APTM achieves a consistent improvement of +6.96%, +7.68%, and +16.95% Recall@1 accuracy on CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES, and RSTPReid datasets by a clear margin, respectively

Acute systemic loss of Mad2 leads to intestinal atrophy in adult mice

Chromosomal instability (CIN) is a hallmark of cancer, leading to aneuploid cells. To study the role that CIN plays in tumor evolution, several mouse models have been engineered over the last 2 decades. These models have unequivocally shown that systemic high-grade CIN is embryonic lethal. We and others have previously shown that embryonic lethality can be circumvented by provoking CIN in a tissue-specific fashion. In this study, we provoke systemic high-grade CIN in adult mice as an alternative to circumvent embryonic lethality. For this, we disrupt the spindle assembly checkpoint (SAC) by alleviating Mad2 or truncating Mps1, both essential genes for SAC functioning, with or without p53 inactivation. We find that disruption of the SAC leads to rapid villous atrophy, atypia and apoptosis of the epithelia of the jejunum and ileum, substantial weight loss, and death within 2-3 weeks after the start of the CIN insult. Despite this severe intestinal phenotype, most other tissues are unaffected, except for minor abnormalities in spleen, presumably due to the lower proliferation rate in these tissues. We conclude that high-grade CIN in vivo in adult mice is most toxic to the high cell turnover intestinal epithelia