In 2017, Ward Beullens et al. submitted Lifted Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar (LUOV) [4], a signature scheme based on the famous multivariate public key cryptosystem (MPKC) called Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar (UOV), to NIST for the competition for post-quantum public key scheme standardization. The defining feature of LUOV is that, though the public key P works in the extension field of degree r of F_2, the coefficients of P come from F_2. This is done to significantly reduce the size of P. The LUOV scheme is now in the second round of the NIST PQC standardization process. In this paper we introduce a new attack on LUOV. It exploits the “lifted” structure of LUOV to reduce direct attacks on it to those over a subfield. We show that this reduces the complexity below the targeted security for the NIST post-quantum standardization competition.

Anderson mixing (AM) is a powerful acceleration method for fixed-point iterations, but its computation requires storing many historical iterations. The extra memory footprint can be prohibitive when solving high-dimensional problems in a resource-limited machine. To reduce the memory overhead, we propose a novel class of short-term recurrence AM methods (ST-AM). The ST-AM methods only store two previous iterations with cheap corrections. We prove that the basic version of ST-AM is equivalent to the full-memory AM in strongly convex quadratic optimization, and with minor changes it has local linear convergence for solving general nonlinear fixed-point problems. We further analyze the convergence properties of the regularized ST-AM for nonconvex (stochastic) optimization. Finally, we apply ST-AM to several applications including solving root-finding problems and training neural networks. Experimental results show that ST-AM is competitive with the long-memory AM and outperforms many existing optimizers.

We show how the von Neumann theory of self-adjoint extensions can be used to investigatequantum systems the configuration space of which can be decomposed into parts of different dimensionalities. The method can be applied in many situations; we illustrate it on examples including point contact spectroscopy, nanotube systems, microwave resonators, or spin conductance oscillations.

We give a definition of character sheaves on the group compactification which is equivalent to Lusztig's definition in [G. Lusztig, Parabolic character sheaves, II, Mosc. Math. J. 4 (4) (2004) 869896]. We also prove some properties of the character sheaves on the group compactification.

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