QUANT-PHJan 9, 2023
VQNet 2.0: A New Generation Machine Learning Framework that Unifies Classical and QuantumHuanyu Bian, Zhilong Jia, Menghan Dou et al.
With the rapid development of classical and quantum machine learning, a large number of machine learning frameworks have been proposed. However, existing machine learning frameworks usually only focus on classical or quantum, rather than both. Therefore, based on VQNet 1.0, we further propose VQNet 2.0, a new generation of unified classical and quantum machine learning framework that supports hybrid optimization. The core library of the framework is implemented in C++, and the user level is implemented in Python, and it supports deployment on quantum and classical hardware. In this article, we analyze the development trend of the new generation machine learning framework and introduce the design principles of VQNet 2.0 in detail: unity, practicality, efficiency, and compatibility, as well as full particulars of implementation. We illustrate the functions of VQNet 2.0 through several basic applications, including classical convolutional neural networks, quantum autoencoders, hybrid classical-quantum networks, etc. After that, through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the operation speed of VQNet 2.0 is higher than the comparison method. Finally, through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that VQNet 2.0 can deploy on different hardware platforms, the overall calculation speed is faster than the comparison method. It also can be mixed and optimized with quantum circuits composed of multiple quantum computing libraries.
SEDec 24, 2021
1-to-1 or 1-to-n? Investigating the effect of function inlining on binary similarity analysisAng Jia, Ming Fan, Wuxia Jin et al.
Binary similarity analysis is critical to many code-reuse-related issues and "1-to-1" mechanism is widely applied, where one function in a binary file is matched against one function in a source file or binary file. However, we discover that function mapping is a more complex problem of "1-to-n" or even "n-to-n" due to the existence of function inlining. In this paper, we investigate the effect of function inlining on binary similarity analysis. We first construct 4 inlining-oriented datasets for four similarity analysis tasks, including code search, OSS reuse detection, vulnerability detection, and patch presence test. Then, we further study the extent of function inlining, the performance of existing works under function inlining, and the effectiveness of existing inlining-simulation strategies. Results show that the proportion of function inlining can reach nearly 70%, while most existing works neglect it and use "1-to-1" mechanism. The mismatches cause a 30% loss in performance during code search and a 40% loss during vulnerability detection. Moreover, two existing inlining-simulation strategies can only recover 60% of the inlined functions. We discover that inlining is usually cumulative when optimization increases. Conditional inlining and incremental inlining are suggested to design low-cost and high-coverage inlining-simulation strategies.