Brian Kim

Vishesh Prasad, Brian Kim, Nickvash Kani

Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP), particularly with the emergence of large language models (LLMs), have significantly enhanced the field of textual analysis. However, while these developments have yielded substantial progress in analyzing textual data, applying analysis to mathematical equations and their relationships within texts has produced mixed results. In this paper, we take the initial steps toward understanding the dependency relationships between mathematical expressions in STEM articles. Our dataset, sourced from a random sampling of the arXiv corpus, contains an analysis of 107 published STEM manuscripts whose inter-equation dependency relationships have been hand-labeled, resulting in a new object we refer to as a derivation graph that summarizes the mathematical content of the manuscript. We exhaustively evaluate analytical and NLP-based models to assess their capability to identify and extract the derivation relationships for each article and compare the results with the ground truth. Our comprehensive testing finds that both analytical and NLP models (including LLMs) achieve $\sim$40-50% F1 scores for extracting derivation graphs from articles, revealing that the recent advances in NLP have not made significant inroads in comprehending mathematical texts compared to simpler analytic models. While current approaches offer a solid foundation for extracting mathematical information, further research is necessary to improve accuracy and depth in this area.

Brian Kim, Tugba Erpek, Yalin E. Sagduyu et al.

By moving from massive antennas to antenna surfaces for software-defined wireless systems, the reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) rely on arrays of unit cells to control the scattering and reflection profiles of signals, mitigating the propagation loss and multipath attenuation, and thereby improving the coverage and spectral efficiency. In this paper, covert communication is considered in the presence of the RIS. While there is an ongoing transmission boosted by the RIS, both the intended receiver and an eavesdropper individually try to detect this transmission using their own deep neural network (DNN) classifiers. The RIS interaction vector is designed by balancing two (potentially conflicting) objectives of focusing the transmitted signal to the receiver and keeping the transmitted signal away from the eavesdropper. To boost covert communications, adversarial perturbations are added to signals at the transmitter to fool the eavesdropper's classifier while keeping the effect on the receiver low. Results from different network topologies show that adversarial perturbation and RIS interaction vector can be jointly designed to effectively increase the signal detection accuracy at the receiver while reducing the detection accuracy at the eavesdropper to enable covert communications.