HNCSE: Advancing Sentence Embeddings via Hybrid Contrastive Learning with Hard Negatives

Unsupervised sentence representation learning remains a critical challenge in modern natural language processing (NLP) research. Recently, contrastive learning techniques have achieved significant success in addressing this issue by effectively capturing textual semantics. Many such approaches prioritize the optimization using negative samples. In fields such as computer vision, hard negative samples (samples that are close to the decision boundary and thus more difficult to distinguish) have been shown to enhance representation learning. However, adapting hard negatives to contrastive sentence learning is complex due to the intricate syntactic and semantic details of text. To address this problem, we propose HNCSE, a novel contrastive learning framework that extends the leading SimCSE approach. The hallmark of HNCSE is its innovative use of hard negative samples to enhance the learning of both positive and negative samples, thereby achieving a deeper semantic understanding. Empirical tests on semantic textual similarity and transfer task datasets validate the superiority of HNCSE.

VSRQ: Quantitative Assessment Method for Safety Risk of Vehicle Intelligent Connected System

The field of intelligent connected in modern vehicles continues to expand, and the functions of vehicles become more and more complex with the development of the times. This has also led to an increasing number of vehicle vulnerabilities and many safety issues. Therefore, it is particularly important to identify high-risk vehicle intelligent connected systems, because it can inform security personnel which systems are most vulnerable to attacks, allowing them to conduct more thorough inspections and tests. In this paper, we develop a new model for vehicle risk assessment by combining I-FAHP with FCA clustering: VSRQ model. We extract important indicators related to vehicle safety, use fuzzy cluster analys (FCA) combined with fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) to mine the vulnerable components of the vehicle intelligent connected system, and conduct priority testing on vulnerable components to reduce risks and ensure vehicle safety. We evaluate the model on OpenPilot and experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of the VSRQ model in identifying the safety of vehicle intelligent connected systems. The experiment fully complies with ISO 26262 and ISO/SAE 21434 standards, and our model has a higher accuracy rate than other models. These results provide a promising new research direction for predicting the security risks of vehicle intelligent connected systems and provide typical application tasks for VSRQ. The experimental results show that the accuracy rate is 94.36%, and the recall rate is 73.43%, which is at least 14.63% higher than all other known indicators.

EViT: Privacy-Preserving Image Retrieval via Encrypted Vision Transformer in Cloud Computing

Image retrieval systems help users to browse and search among extensive images in real-time. With the rise of cloud computing, retrieval tasks are usually outsourced to cloud servers. However, the cloud scenario brings a daunting challenge of privacy protection as cloud servers cannot be fully trusted. To this end, image-encryption-based privacy-preserving image retrieval schemes have been developed, which first extract features from cipher-images, and then build retrieval models based on these features. Yet, most existing approaches extract shallow features and design trivial retrieval models, resulting in insufficient expressiveness for the cipher-images. In this paper, we propose a novel paradigm named Encrypted Vision Transformer (EViT), which advances the discriminative representations capability of cipher-images. First, in order to capture comprehensive ruled information, we extract multi-level local length sequence and global Huffman-code frequency features from the cipher-images which are encrypted by stream cipher during JPEG compression process. Second, we design the Vision Transformer-based retrieval model to couple with the multi-level features, and propose two adaptive data augmentation methods to improve representation power of the retrieval model. Our proposal can be easily adapted to unsupervised and supervised settings via self-supervised contrastive learning manner. Extensive experiments reveal that EViT achieves both excellent encryption and retrieval performance, outperforming current schemes in terms of retrieval accuracy by large margins while protecting image privacy effectively. Code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/onlinehuazai/EViT}.