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Signal peptides (SPs) play a crucial role in protein translocation in cells. The development of large protein language models (PLMs) and prompt-based learning provide a new opportunity for SP prediction, especially for the categories with limited annotated data. We present a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) framework for SP prediction, PEFT-SP, to effectively utilize pretrained PLMs. We integrated low-rank adaptation (LoRA) into ESM-2 models to better leverage the protein sequence evolutionary knowledge of PLMs. Experiments show that PEFT-SP using LoRA enhances state-of-the-art results, leading to a maximum Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) gain of 87.3% for SPs with small training samples and an overall MCC gain of 6.1%. Furthermore, we also employed two other PEFT methods, prompt tuning and adapter tuning, in ESM-2 for SP prediction. More elaborate experiments show that PEFT-SP using adapter tuning can also improve the state-of-the-art results by up to 28.1% MCC gain for SPs with small training samples and an overall MCC gain of 3.8%. LoRA requires fewer computing resources and less memory than the adapter tuning during the training stage, making it possible to adapt larger and more powerful protein models for SP prediction. 

Trapped-Ion (TI) technology offers potential breakthroughs for Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) computing. TI qubits offer extended coherence times and high gate fidelity, making them appealing for large-scale NISQ computers. Constructing such computers demands a distributed architecture connecting Quantum Charge Coupled Devices (QCCDs) via quantum matter-links and photonic switches. However, current distributed TI NISQ computers face hardware and system challenges. Entangling qubits across a photonic switch introduces significant latency, while existing compilers generate suboptimal mappings due to their unawareness of the interconnection topology. In this paper, we introduce TITAN, a large-scale distributed TI NISQ computer, which employs an innovative photonic interconnection design to reduce entanglement latency and an advanced partitioning and mapping algorithm to optimize matter-link communications. Our evaluations show that TITAN greatly enhances quantum application performance by 56.6% and fidelity by 19.7% compared to existing systems. 

This paper presents \textit{OFHE}, an electro-optical accelerator designed to process Discretized TFHE (DTFHE) operations, which encrypt multi-bit messages and support homomorphic multiplications, lookup table operations and full-domain functional bootstrappings. While DTFHE is more efficient and versatile than other fully homomorphic encryption schemes, it requires 32-, 64-, and 128-bit polynomial multiplications, which can be time-consuming. Existing TFHE accelerators are not easily upgradable to support DTFHE operations due to limited datapaths, a lack of datapath bit-width reconfigurability, and power inefficiencies when processing FFT and inverse FFT (IFFT) kernels. Compared to prior TFHE accelerators, OFHE addresses these challenges by improving the DTFHE operation latency by 8.7\%, the DTFHE operation throughput by $$57\%$$, and the DTFHE operation throughput per Watt by $$94\%$$. 

The carbon footprint associated with large language models (LLMs) is a significant concern, encompassing emissions from their training, inference, experimentation, and storage processes, including operational and embodied carbon emissions. An essential aspect is accurately estimating the carbon impact of emerging LLMs even before their training, which heavily relies on GPU usage. Existing studies have reported the carbon footprint of LLM training, but only one tool, mlco2, can predict the carbon footprint of new neural networks prior to physical training. However, mlco2 has several serious limitations. It cannot extend its estimation to dense or mixture-of-experts (MoE) LLMs, disregards critical architectural parameters, focuses solely on GPUs, and cannot model embodied carbon footprints. Addressing these gaps, we introduce \textit{\carb}, an end-to-end carbon footprint projection model designed for both dense and MoE LLMs. Compared to mlco2, \carb~significantly enhances the accuracy of carbon footprint estimations for various LLMs. The source code is released at \url{https://github.com/SotaroKaneda/MLCarbon}. 

We propose a circuit-level backdoor attack, QTrojan, against Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) in this paper. QTrojan is implemented by a few quantum gates inserted into the variational quantum circuit of the victim QNN. QTrojan is much stealthier than a prior Data-Poisoning-based Backdoor Attack (DPBA) since it does not embed any trigger in the inputs of the victim QNN or require access to original training datasets. Compared to a DPBA, QTrojan improves the clean data accuracy by 21% and the attack success rate by 19.9%. 

The widespread use of machine learning is changing our daily lives. Unfortunately, clients are often concerned about the privacy of their data when using machine learning-based applications. To address these concerns, the development of privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) is essential. One promising approach is the use of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) based PPML, which enables services to be performed on encrypted data without decryption. Although the speed of computationally expensive FHE operations can be significantly boosted by prior ASIC-based FHE accelerators, the performance of key-switching, the dominate primitive in various FHE operations, is seriously limited by their small bit-width datapaths and frequent matrix transpositions. In this paper, we present an electro-optical (EO) PPML accelerator, PriML, to accelerate FHE operations. Its 512-bit datapath supporting 510-bit residues greatly reduces the key-switching cost. We also create an in-scratchpad-memory transpose unit to fast transpose matrices. Compared to prior PPML accelerators, on average, PriML reduces the latency of various machine learning applications by > 94.4% and the energy consumption by > 95%.