Adversarial attacks based on randomized search schemes have obtained state-of-the-art results in black-box robustness evaluation recently.

Traditionally, these would be made according to hard-coded expert heuristics implemented in solvers.

The growing demand for sparse tensor algebra (SpTA) in machine learning and big data has driven the development of various sparse tensor accelerators. However, most existing manually designed accelerators are limited to specific scenarios, and it's time-consuming and challenging to adjust a large number of design factors when scenarios change. Therefore, automating the design of SpTA accelerators is crucial. Nevertheless, previous works focus solely on either mapping (i.e., tiling communication and computation in space and time) or sparse strategy (i.e., bypassing zero elements for efficiency), leading to suboptimal designs due to the lack of comprehensive consideration of both. A unified framework that jointly optimizes both is urgently needed. However, integrating mapping and sparse strategies leads to a combinatorial explosion in the design space(e.g., as large as $O(10^{41})$ for the workload $P_{32 \times 64} \times Q_{64 \times 48} = Z_{32 \times 48}$). This vast search space renders most conventional optimization methods (e.g., particle swarm optimization, reinforcement learning and Monte Carlo tree search) inefficient. To address this challenge, we propose an evolution strategy-based sparse tensor accelerator optimization framework, called SparseMap. SparseMap constructing a more comprehensive design space with the consideration of both mapping and sparse strategy. We introduce a series of enhancements to genetic encoding and evolutionary operators, enabling SparseMap to efficiently explore the vast and diverse design space. We quantitatively compare SparseMap with prior works and classical optimization methods, demonstrating that SparseMap consistently finds superior solutions.

Min-max optimization arises in many domains such as game theory, adversarial machine learning, etc., with gradient-based methods as a typical computational tool. Beyond convex-concave min-max optimization, the solutions found by gradient-based methods may be arbitrarily far from global optima. In this work, we present an algorithmic apparatus for computing globally optimal solutions in convex-non-concave and non-convex-concave min-max optimization. For former, we employ a reformulation that transforms it into a non-concave-convex max-min optimization problem with suitably defined feasible sets and objective function. The new form can be viewed as a generalization of Sion's minimax theorem. Next, we introduce EXOTIC-an Exact, Optimistic, Tree-based algorithm for solving the reformulated max-min problem. EXOTIC employs an iterative convex optimization solver to (approximately) solve the inner minimization and a hierarchical tree search for the outer maximization to optimistically select promising regions to search based on the approximate solution returned by convex optimization solver. We establish an upper bound on its optimality gap as a function of the number of calls to the inner solver, the solver's convergence rate, and additional problem-dependent parameters. Both our algorithmic apparatus along with its accompanying theoretical analysis can also be applied for non-convex-concave min-max optimization. In addition, we propose a class of benchmark convex-non-concave min-max problems along with their analytical global solutions, providing a testbed for evaluating algorithms for min-max optimization. Empirically, EXOTIC outperforms gradient-based methods on this benchmark as well as on existing numerical benchmark problems from the literature. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of EXOTIC by computing security strategies in multi-player games with three or more players.

The core mechanical system is built around three stepper motors for physical manipulation, a microcontroller for hardware control, a camera and YOLO detection model for real-time cube state detection. A significant software component is the development of a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) designed in Unity. The initial state after detection from real-time YOLOv8 model (Precision 0.98443, Recall 0.98419, Box Loss 0.42051, Class Loss 0.2611) is virtualized on GUI. To get the solution, the system employs the Kociemba's algorithm while physical manipulation with a single degree of freedom is done by combination of stepper motors' interaction with the cube achieving the average solving time of ~2.2 minutes.

Federated learning (FL) offers a promising paradigm for collaborative model training while preserving data privacy. However, its susceptibility to gradient inversion attacks poses a significant challenge, necessitating robust privacy protection mechanisms. This paper introduces a novel theoretical framework to decipher the intricate interplay between attack and protection complexities in privacy-preserving FL. We formally define "Attack Complexity" as the minimum computational and data resources an adversary requires to reconstruct private data below a given error threshold, and "Protection Complexity" as the expected distortion introduced by privacy mechanisms. Leveraging Maximum Bayesian Privacy (MBP), we derive tight theoretical bounds for protection complexity, demonstrating its scaling with model dimensionality and privacy budget. Furthermore, we establish comprehensive bounds for attack complexity, revealing its dependence on privacy leakage, gradient distortion, model dimension, and the chosen privacy level. Our findings quantitatively illuminate the fundamental trade-offs between privacy guarantees, system utility, and the effort required for both attacking and defending. This framework provides critical insights for designing more secure and efficient federated learning systems.

Integer programming lies at the heart of crucial combinatorial optimization tasks but remains challenging due to its NP-hard nature. An effective approach for practically solving integer programs is the manual design of acceleration cuts, i.e. inequalities that improve solver performance. However, this creative process demands deep expertise and is yet to be automated. Our proposed framework, EvoCut, automates the generation of acceleration cuts by combining large language models (LLMs) with an evolutionary search. EvoCut (i) initializes a diverse population of candidate cuts via an LLM-based initializer agent; (ii) for each cut empirically evaluates both preservation of the optimal solution and its ability to cut off fractional solutions across a verification set; and (iii) iteratively refines the population through evolutionary crossover and mutation agents. We quantify each cut's utility by its relative reduction in the solver's optimality gap. Our comparisons against standard integer programming practice show that EvoCut reduces optimality gap by 17-57% within a fixed time. It obtains the same solutions up to 4 times as fast, and obtains higher-quality solutions within the same time limit. Requiring no human expert input, EvoCut reliably generates, improves, and empirically verifies cuts that generalize to unseen instances. The code is available at https://github.com/milad1378yz/EvoCut.

Scaling inference-time computation has substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of language models. However, existing methods have significant limitations: serialized chain-of-thought approaches generate overly long outputs, leading to increased latency and exhausted context windows, while parallel methods such as self-consistency suffer from insufficient coordination, resulting in redundant computations and limited performance gains. To address these shortcomings, we propose Adaptive Parallel Reasoning (APR), a novel reasoning framework that enables language models to orchestrate both serialized and parallel computations end-to-end. APR generalizes existing reasoning methods by enabling adaptive multi-threaded inference using spawn() and join() operations. A key innovation is our end-to-end reinforcement learning strategy, optimizing both parent and child inference threads to enhance task success rate without requiring predefined reasoning structures. Experiments on the Countdown reasoning task demonstrate significant benefits of APR: (1) higher performance within the same context window (83.4% vs. 60.0% at 4k context); (2) superior scalability with increased computation (80.1% vs. 66.6% at 20k total tokens); (3) improved accuracy at equivalent latency (75.2% vs. 57.3% at approximately 5,000ms). APR represents a step towards enabling language models to autonomously optimize their reasoning processes through adaptive allocation of computation.

Using machine learning to solve combinatorial optimization (CO) problems is challenging, especially when the data is unlabeled. This work proposes an unsupervised learning framework for CO problems.