3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) renders pixels by rasterizing Gaussian primitives, where conditional alpha-blending dominates the computational cost in the rendering pipeline. This paper proposes TC-GS, an algorithm-independ-ent universal module that expands the applicability of Tensor Core (TCU) for 3DGS, leading to substantial speedups and seamless integration into existing 3DGS optimization frameworks. The key innovation lies in mapping alpha computation to matrix multiplication, fully utilizing otherwise idle TCUs in existing 3DGS implementations. TC-GS provides plug-and-play acceleration for existing top-tier acceleration algorithms and integrates seamlessly with rendering pipeline designs, such as Gaussian compression and redundancy elimination algorithms. Additionally, we introduce a global-to-local coordinate transformation to mitigate rounding errors from quadratic terms of pixel coordinates caused by Tensor Core half-precision computation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method maintains rendering quality while providing an additional 2.18× speedup over existing Gaussian acceleration algorithms, thereby achieving a total acceleration of up to 5.6×.

MOTIVATION: Understanding single-cell expression variability (scEV) or gene expression noise among cells of the same type and state is crucial for delineating population-level cellular function. While epigenetic mechanisms are widely implicated in gene expression regulation, a definitive link between chromatin accessibility and scEV remains elusive. Recent advances in single-cell techniques enable the study of single-cell multiomics data that include the simultaneous measurement of scATAC-seq and scRNA-seq within individual cells, presenting an unprecedented opportunity to address this gap. RESULTS: This article introduces an innovative testing pipeline to investigate the association between chromatin accessibility and scEV. With single-cell multiomics data of scATAC-seq and scRNA-seq, the pipeline hinges on comparing the prediction performance of scATAC-seq data on gene expression levels between highly variable genes (HVGs) and non-highly variable genes (non-HVGs). Applying this pipeline to paired scATAC-seq and scRNA-seq data from human hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells, we observed a significantly superior prediction performance of scATAC-seq data for HVGs compared to non-HVGs. Notably, there was a substantial overlap between well-predicted genes and HVGs. The gene pathways enriched from well-predicted genes are highly pertinent to cell type-specific functions. Our findings support the notion that scEV largely stems from cell-to-cell variability in chromatin accessibility, providing compelling evidence for the epigenetic regulation of scEV and offering promising avenues for investigating gene regulation mechanisms at the single-cell level. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The source code and data used in this article can be found at https://github.com/SiweiCui/EpigeneticControlOfSingle-CellExpressionVariability.

Smalltalk, one of the first object-oriented programming languages, has had a tremendous influence on the evolution of computer technology. Due to the simplicity and productivity provided by the language, Smalltalk is still in active use today by many companies with large legacy codebases and with new code written every day. A crucial problem in Smalltalk programming is the race condition. Like in any other parallel language, debugging race conditions is inherently challenging, but in Smalltalk, it is even more challenging due to its dynamic nature. Being a purely dynamically-typed language, Smalltalk allows assigning any object to any variable without type restrictions, and allows forking new threads to execute arbitrary anonymous code blocks passed as objects. In Smalltalk, race conditions can be introduced easily, but are difficult to prevent at runtime. We present SmallRace, a novel static race detection framework designed for multithreaded dynamic languages, with a focus on Smalltalk. A key component of SmallRace is SmallIR, a subset of LLVM IR, in which all variables are declared with the same type-a generic pointer 18✶. This allows SmallRace to design an effective interprocedural thread-sensitive pointer analysis to infer the concrete types of dynamic variables. SmallRace automatically translates Smalltalk source code into SmallIR, supports most of the modern Smalltalk syntax in Visual Works, and generates actionable race reports with detailed debugging information. Importantly, SmallRace has been used to analyze a production codebase in a large company with over a million lines of code, and it has found tens of complex race conditions in the production code.

Automated static dataflow analysis is an effective technique for detecting security critical issues like sensitive data leak, and vulnerability to injection attacks. Ensuring high precision and recall requires an analysis that is context, field and object sensitive. However, it is challenging to attain high precision and recall and scale to large industrial code bases. Compositional style analyses in which individual software components are analyzed separately, independent from their usage contexts, compute reusable summaries of components. This is an essential feature when deploying such analyses in CI/CD at code-review time or when scanning deployed container images. In both these settings the majority of software components stay the same between subsequent scans. However, it is not obvious how to extend such analyses to check the kind of contextual taint specifications that arise in practice, while maintaining compositionality.

Solana is a rapidly-growing high-performance blockchain powered by a Proof of History (PoH) consensus mechanism and a novel stateless programming model that decouples code from data. With parallel execution on the PoH Sealevel runtime (instead of PoW), it achieves 100X-1000X speedups compared to Ethereum in terms of transactions per second. With the new programming model, new constraints (owner, signer, keys, bump seeds) and vulnerabilities (missing checks, overflows, type confusion, etc.) must be carefully verified to ensure the security of Solana smart contracts.

In this paper, we work towards linking users’ identities on different social media platforms by exploring the user-generated contents (UGCs). This task is non-trivial due to the following challenges. 1) As UGCs involve multiple modalities (e.g., text and image), how to accurately characterize the user account based on their heterogeneous multi-modal UGCs poses the main challenge. 2) As people tend to post similar UGCs on different social media platforms during the same period, how to effectively model the temporal post correlation is a crucial challenge. And 3) no public benchmark dataset is available to support our user identity linkage based on heterogeneous UGCs with timestamps. Towards this end, we present an attentive time-aware user identity linkage scheme, which seamlessly integrates the temporal post correlation modeling and attentive user similarity modeling. To facilitate the evaluation, we create a comprehensive large-scale user identity linkage dataset from two popular social media platforms: Instagram and Twitter. Extensive experiments have been conducted on our dataset and the results verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. As a residual product, we have released the dataset, codes, and parameters to facilitate other researchers.