Present-day quantum systems face critical bottlenecks, including limited qubit counts, brief coherence intervals, and high susceptibility to errors—all of which obstruct the execution of large and complex circuits. The advancement of quantum algorithms has outpaced the capabilities of existing quantum hardware, making it difficult to scale computations effectively. Additionally, inconsistencies in hardware performance and pervasive quantum noise undermine system stability and computational accuracy. To optimize quantum workloads under these constraints, strategic approaches to task scheduling and resource coordination are essential. One of the persistent challenges in this domain is how to efficiently divide and execute large circuits across multiple quantum processors (QPUs), especially in error-prone environments. In response, we introduce a simulation-based tool that supports distributed scheduling and concurrent execution of quantum jobs on networked QPUs connected via real-time classical channels. The tool models circuit decomposition for workloads that surpass individual QPU limits, allowing for parallel execution through inter-processor communication. Using this simulation environment, we compare four distinct scheduling techniques—among them, a model informed by reinforcement learning. These strategies are evaluated across multiple metrics, including runtime efficiency, fidelity preservation, and communication costs. Our analysis underscores the trade-offs inherent in each approach and highlights how parallelized, noise-aware scheduling can meaningfully improve computational throughput in distributed quantum infrastructures.

Distributed Quantum Computing (DQC) provides a scalable architecture by interconnecting multiple quantum processor units (QPUs).Among various DQC implementations, quantum data centers (QDCs) -where QPUs in different racks are connected through reconfigurable optical switch networks -are becoming feasible in the near term.However, the latency of cross-rack communications and dynamic switch reconfigurations poses unique challenges to communications in QDCs, significantly increasing the overall latency, thereby also reducing the overall fidelity.In this paper, we address these challenges by introducing a novel compiler that optimizes scheduling of communications across the program and network layers.Our evaluation shows that it reduces the overall latency by 8.02× over prior approaches with a small overhead and can be integrated with quantum error correction (QEC) to facilitate fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC).We have open-sourced our codes at https://zenodo.org/records/15377656.

Traffic fingerprinting attack is a promising approach for Tor hidden services (HS) de-anonymization. However, it is inherently difficult to acquire traffic of target HSs (HST) for fingerprinting model training, because the physical location of the services is hidden due to the design of Tor protocol. In order to solve this problem, some alternatives such as mirrored HST (MHST) and client-side HST (CHST) have been proposed for training fingerprinting model. These alternatives are easy to acquire and aim to closely match the characteristics of the target HST. However, they cannot perfectly replace the target HST for the aspects of consistency of both response and protocol. In this paper, we propose a proxied fingerprinting approach called PF. A Proxy HS is deployed to acquire proxied HS traffic (PHST) as an alternative to conduct traffic fingerprinting attack, which satisfies both response and protocol consistency and is easy to acquire. In order to mitigate the impact introduced by Proxy HS, PF also introduces Burst Reshaping which includes burst reconstruction and pseudo-label learning to enhance the similarities between PHST and target HST. Experiments show that, PHST is a superior alternative to target HST, fingerprinting model trained using PF achieved an accuracy of 92.2%, surpassing the models trained with MHST and CHST by 72% and 34%, respectively. Additionally, PF is an add-on approach capable of improving the HS deanonymization effectiveness of any fingerprinting model architecture. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Lzreal/BurstReshapedPHST.

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm in the Internet of Things (IoT), which allows multiple devices to collaboratively train models without leaking local data. In the open scenario of IoT, malicious devices can launch poisoning attacks to compromise the final model by submitting crafted gradients. Some previous studies defend against poisoning attacks by analyzing the statistical characteristics of plaintext gradients. However, plaintext gradients would expose private information to malicious FL devices or servers. To simultaneously resist poisoning attacks and preserve privacy, cryptography technology can be utilized to obfuscate the gradients in defense methods, but the private calculation of resisting poisoning attack methods will cause efficiency problems, especially imposing unaffordable overhead on resource-limited IoT devices. Therefore, resisting poisoning attacks efficiently while protecting privacy remains a challenge. This paper proposes a secure and privacy-enhanced FL (SPEFL) framework for efficient privacy-preserving and poisoning-resistant federated learning in IoT. We design an efficient secure computation protocol based on a three-server architecture to facilitate the cryptographic computation of large linear and complex nonlinear operators in the method against poisoning attacks. In SPEFL, most of the calculations are efficiently performed on the servers, which will not impose too much burden on resource-limited IoT devices. In addition, we design a security-enhanced verifiable protocol to detect the malicious behavior of the server and guarantee the correctness of FL aggregation results. Experimental and theoretical results demonstrate that SPEFL can efficiently complete FL training meanwhile guaranteeing the accuracy of the model.

Darknet markets provide a large platform for trading illicit goods and services due to their anonymity. Learning an invariant representation of each user based on their posts on different markets makes it easy to aggregate user information across different platforms, which helps identify anonymous users. Traditional user representation methods mainly rely on modeling the text information of posts and cannot capture the temporal content and the forum interaction of posts. While recent works mainly use CNN to model the text information of posts, failing to effectively model posts whose length changes frequently in an episode. To address the above problems, we propose a model named URM4DMU(User Representation Model for Darknet Markets Users) which mainly improves the post representation by augmenting convolutional operators and self-attention with an adaptive gate mechanism. It performs much better when combined with the temporal content and the forum interaction of posts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of URM4DMU on four darknet markets. The average improvements on MRR value and Recall@10 are 22.5% and 25.5% over the state-of-the-art method respectively.

Extracting relations from plain text is an important task with wide application. Most existing methods formulate it as a supervised problem and utilize one-hot hard labels as the sole target in training, neglecting the rich semantic information among relations. In this paper, we aim to explore the supervision with soft labels in relation extraction, which makes it possible to integrate prior knowledge. Specifically, a bipartite graph is first devised to discover type constraints between entities and relations based on the entire corpus. Then, we combine such type constraints with neural networks to achieve a knowledgeable model. Furthermore, this model is regarded as teacher to generate well-informed soft labels and guide the optimization of a student network via knowledge distillation. Besides, a multi-aspect attention mechanism is introduced to help student mine latent information from text. In this way, the enhanced student inherits the dark knowledge (e.g., type constraints and relevance among relations) from teacher, and directly serves the testing scenarios without any extra constraints. We conduct extensive experiments on the TACRED and SemEval datasets, the experimental results justify the effectiveness of our approach.

Correspondence detection is a vital step in point cloud registration and it can help getting a reliable initial alignment. In this paper, we put forward an advanced point feature-based graph matching algorithm to solve the initial alignment problem of rigid 3D point cloud registration with partial overlap. Specifically, Fast Point Feature Histograms are used to determine the initial possible correspondences firstly. Next, a new objective function is provided to make the graph matching more suitable for partially overlapping point cloud. The objective function is optimized by the simulated annealing algorithm for final group of correct correspondences. Finally, we present a novel set partitioning method which can transform the NP-hard optimization problem into a O(n3)-solvable one. Experiments on the Stanford and UWA public data sets indicates that our method can obtain better result in terms of both accuracy and time cost compared with other point cloud registration methods.