Haibo Xiao

Zishuo Zhao, Zhixuan Fang, Xuechao Wang et al.

Most concurrent blockchain systems rely heavily on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanisms for decentralized consensus and security assurance. However, the substantial energy expenditure stemming from computationally intensive yet meaningless tasks has raised considerable concerns surrounding traditional PoW approaches, The PoS mechanism, while free of energy consumption, is subject to security and economic issues. Addressing these issues, the paradigm of Proof-of-Useful-Work (PoUW) seeks to employ challenges of practical significance as PoW, thereby imbuing energy consumption with tangible value. While previous efforts in Proof of Learning (PoL) explored the utilization of deep learning model training SGD tasks as PoUW challenges, recent research has revealed its vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks and the theoretical hardness in crafting a byzantine-secure PoL mechanism. In this paper, we introduce the concept of incentive-security that incentivizes rational provers to behave honestly for their best interest, bypassing the existing hardness to design a PoL mechanism with computational efficiency, a provable incentive-security guarantee and controllable difficulty. Particularly, our work is secure against two attacks, and also improves the computational overhead from $Θ(1)$ to $O(\frac{\log E}{E})$. Furthermore, while most recent research assumes trusted problem providers and verifiers, our design also guarantees frontend incentive-security even when problem providers are untrusted, and verifier incentive-security that bypasses the Verifier's Dilemma. By incorporating ML training into blockchain consensus mechanisms with provable guarantees, our research not only proposes an eco-friendly solution to blockchain systems, but also provides a proposal for a completely decentralized computing power market in the new AI age.

Haibo Xiao, Hanzhe Liang, Jie Zhou et al.

Detecting anomalies from 3D point clouds has received increasing attention in the field of computer vision, with some group-based or point-based methods achieving impressive results in recent years. However, learning accurate point-wise representations for 3D anomaly detection faces great challenges due to the large scale and sparsity of point clouds. In this study, a surface-based method is proposed for 3D anomaly detection, which learns a discriminative signed distance function using multi-scale level-of-detail features. We first present a Noisy Points Generation (NPG) module to generate different types of noise, thereby facilitating the learning of discriminative features by exposing abnormal points. Then, we introduce a Multi-scale Level-of-detail Feature (MLF) module to capture multi-scale information from a point cloud, which provides both fine-grained local and coarse-grained global feature information. Finally, we design an Implicit Surface Discrimination (ISD) module that leverages the extracted multi-scale features to learn an implicit surface representation of point clouds, which effectively trains a signed distance function to distinguish between abnormal and normal points. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an average object-level AUROC of 92.1\% and 85.9\% on the Anomaly-ShapeNet and Real3D-AD datasets, outperforming the current best approach by 2.1\% and 3.6\%, respectively. Codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DLF-3AD-DA61.

Zishuo Zhao, Zhixuan Fang, Xuechao Wang et al.

Most concurrent blockchain systems rely heavily on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanisms for decentralized consensus and security assurance. However, the substantial energy expenditure stemming from computationally intensive yet meaningless tasks has raised considerable concerns surrounding traditional PoW approaches, The PoS mechanism, while free of energy consumption, is subject to security and economic issues. Addressing these issues, the paradigm of Proof-of-Useful-Work (PoUW) seeks to employ challenges of practical significance as PoW, thereby imbuing energy consumption with tangible value. While previous efforts in Proof of Learning (PoL) explored the utilization of deep learning model training SGD tasks as PoUW challenges, recent research has revealed its vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks and the theoretical hardness in crafting a byzantine-secure PoL mechanism. In this paper, we introduce the concept of incentive-security that incentivizes rational provers to behave honestly for their best interest, bypassing the existing hardness to design a PoL mechanism with computational efficiency, a provable incentive-security guarantee and controllable difficulty. Particularly, our work is secure against two attacks, and also improves the computational overhead from $Θ(1)$ to $O(\frac{\log E}{E})$. Furthermore, while most recent research assumes trusted problem providers and verifiers, our design also guarantees frontend incentive-security even when problem providers are untrusted, and verifier incentive-security that bypasses the Verifier's Dilemma. By incorporating ML training into blockchain consensus mechanisms with provable guarantees, our research not only proposes an eco-friendly solution to blockchain systems, but also provides a proposal for a completely decentralized computing power market in the new AI age.