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Yan Pang

Publications and source records attributed to Yan Pang.

32 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Black-box Membership Inference Attacks against Fine-tuned Diffusion Models

With the rapid advancement of diffusion-based image-generative models, the quality of generated images has become increasingly photorealistic. Moreover, with the release of high-quality pre-trained image-generative models, a growing number of users are downloading these pre-trained models to fine-tune them with downstream datasets for various image-generation tasks. However, employing such powerful pre-trained models in downstream tasks presents significant privacy leakage risks. In this paper, we propose the first reconstruction-based membership inference attack framework, tailored for recent diffusion models, and in the more stringent black-box access setting. Considering four distinct attack scenarios and three types of attacks, this framework is capable of targeting any popular conditional generator model, achieving high precision, evidenced by an impressive AUC of $0.95$.

cs.CR↗

Vertical Federated Graph Neural Network for Recommender System

Conventional recommender systems are required to train the recommendation model using a centralized database. However, due to data privacy concerns, this is often impractical when multi-parties are involved in recommender system training. Federated learning appears as an excellent solution to the data isolation and privacy problem. Recently, Graph neural network (GNN) is becoming a promising approach for federated recommender systems. However, a key challenge is to conduct embedding propagation while preserving the privacy of the graph structure. Few studies have been conducted on the federated GNN-based recommender system. Our study proposes the first vertical federated GNN-based recommender system, called VerFedGNN. We design a framework to transmit: (i) the summation of neighbor embeddings using random projection, and (ii) gradients of public parameter perturbed by ternary quantization mechanism. Empirical studies show that VerFedGNN has competitive prediction accuracy with existing privacy preserving GNN frameworks while enhanced privacy protection for users' interaction information.

cs.CR↗

Split-and-Denoise: Protect large language model inference with local differential privacy

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in natural language understanding by capturing hidden semantics in vector space. This process enriches the value of text embeddings for various downstream tasks, thereby fostering the Embedding-as-a-Service (EaaS) business model. However, the risk of privacy leakage due to direct text transmission to servers remains a critical concern. To address this, we introduce Split-N-Denoise (SnD), an private inference framework that splits the model to execute the token embedding layer on the client side at minimal computational cost. This allows the client to introduce noise prior to transmitting the embeddings to the server, and subsequently receive and denoise the perturbed output embeddings for downstream tasks. Our approach is designed for the inference stage of LLMs and requires no modifications to the model parameters. Extensive experiments demonstrate SnD's effectiveness in optimizing the privacy-utility tradeoff across various LLM architectures and diverse downstream tasks. The results reveal an improvement in performance under the same privacy budget compared to the baselines by over 10\% on average, offering clients a privacy-preserving solution for local privacy protection.

cs.AI↗

Towards Understanding Unsafe Video Generation

Video generation models (VGMs) have demonstrated the capability to synthesize high-quality output. It is important to understand their potential to produce unsafe content, such as violent or terrifying videos. In this work, we provide a comprehensive understanding of unsafe video generation. First, to confirm the possibility that these models could indeed generate unsafe videos, we choose unsafe content generation prompts collected from 4chan and Lexica, and three open-source SOTA VGMs to generate unsafe videos. After filtering out duplicates and poorly generated content, we created an initial set of 2112 unsafe videos from an original pool of 5607 videos. Through clustering and thematic coding analysis of these generated videos, we identify 5 unsafe video categories: Distorted/Weird, Terrifying, Pornographic, Violent/Bloody, and Political. With IRB approval, we then recruit online participants to help label the generated videos. Based on the annotations submitted by 403 participants, we identified 937 unsafe videos from the initial video set. With the labeled information and the corresponding prompts, we created the first dataset of unsafe videos generated by VGMs. We then study possible defense mechanisms to prevent the generation of unsafe videos. Existing defense methods in image generation focus on filtering either input prompt or output results. We propose a new approach called Latent Variable Defense (LVD), which works within the model's internal sampling process. LVD can achieve 0.90 defense accuracy while reducing time and computing resources by 10x when sampling a large number of unsafe prompts.

cs.CR↗

Data Valuation and Detections in Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative model training while preserving the privacy of raw data. A challenge in this framework is the fair and efficient valuation of data, which is crucial for incentivizing clients to contribute high-quality data in the FL task. In scenarios involving numerous data clients within FL, it is often the case that only a subset of clients and datasets are pertinent to a specific learning task, while others might have either a negative or negligible impact on the model training process. This paper introduces a novel privacy-preserving method for evaluating client contributions and selecting relevant datasets without a pre-specified training algorithm in an FL task. Our proposed approach FedBary, utilizes Wasserstein distance within the federated context, offering a new solution for data valuation in the FL framework. This method ensures transparent data valuation and efficient computation of the Wasserstein barycenter and reduces the dependence on validation datasets. Through extensive empirical experiments and theoretical analyses, we demonstrate the potential of this data valuation method as a promising avenue for FL research.

cs.LG↗

Infinitely many solutions for three quasilinear Laplacian systems on weighted graphs

We investigate a generalized poly-Laplacian system with a parameter on weighted finite graph, a generalized poly-Laplacian system with a parameter and Dirichlet boundary value on weighted locally finite graphs, and a $(p,q)$-Laplacian system with a parameter on weighted locally finite graphs. We utilize a critical points theorem built by Bonanno and Bisci [Bonanno, Bisci, and Regan, Math. Comput. Model. 2010, 52(1-2): 152-160], which is an abstract critical points theorem without compactness condition, to obtain that these three systems have infinitely many nontrivial solutions with unbounded norm when the parameters locate some well-determined range.

math.AP↗

Enhanced boiling heat transfer using conducting-insulating microcavity surfaces in an electric field: A lattice Boltzmann study

The field trap effect on the microcavity surface under the action of an electric field is not conducive to boiling heat transfer. This numerical study found that using conducting-insulating microcavity surfaces in an electric field removes the field trap effect, increasing the critical heat flux by more than 200%. Bubble behavior and heat transfer mechanisms on heating surfaces were further explored. The results show that a large electrical force can be generated at the junction of the conducting and insulating surfaces under the action of the electric field, which drives the bubbles in the cavity to departure quickly from the heating surface and avoids the formation of a vapor block. As the electric field intensity increases, the contact line produces pinning, which facilitates the formation of multiple continuously open vapor-liquid separation paths on the heating surface, resulting in a significant enhancement of the boiling heat transfer performance. Finally, a modified correlation equation is proposed to predict the critical heat flux under non-uniform electric field.

physics.flu-dyn↗

Existence of three solutions for a poly-Laplacian system on graphs

We deal with the existence of three distinct solutions for a poly-Laplacian system with a parameter on finite graphs and a $(p,q)$-Laplacian system with a parameter on locally finite graphs.The main tool is an abstract critical points theorem in [Bonanno and Bisci, J.Math.Appl.Anal, 2011, 382(1): 1-8]. A key point in this paper is that we overcome the difficulty to prove that the G$\hat{\mbox{a}}$teaux derivative of the variational functional for poly-Laplacian operator admits a continuous inverse, which is caused by the special definition of the poly-Laplacian operator on graph and mutual coupling of two variables in system.

math.AP↗

GFlowCausal: Generative Flow Networks for Causal Discovery

Causal discovery aims to uncover causal structure among a set of variables. Score-based approaches mainly focus on searching for the best Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) based on a predefined score function. However, most of them are not applicable on a large scale due to the limited searchability. Inspired by the active learning in generative flow networks, we propose a novel approach to learning a DAG from observational data called GFlowCausal. It converts the graph search problem to a generation problem, in which direct edges are added gradually. GFlowCausal aims to learn the best policy to generate high-reward DAGs by sequential actions with probabilities proportional to predefined rewards. We propose a plug-and-play module based on transitive closure to ensure efficient sampling. Theoretical analysis shows that this module could guarantee acyclicity properties effectively and the consistency between final states and fully-connected graphs. We conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real datasets, and results show the proposed approach to be superior and also performs well in a large-scale setting.

cs.LG↗

DAG Matters! GFlowNets Enhanced Explainer For Graph Neural Networks

Uncovering rationales behind predictions of graph neural networks (GNNs) has received increasing attention over the years. Existing literature mainly focus on selecting a subgraph, through combinatorial optimization, to provide faithful explanations. However, the exponential size of candidate subgraphs limits the applicability of state-of-the-art methods to large-scale GNNs. We enhance on this through a different approach: by proposing a generative structure -- GFlowNets-based GNN Explainer (GFlowExplainer), we turn the optimization problem into a step-by-step generative problem. Our GFlowExplainer aims to learn a policy that generates a distribution of subgraphs for which the probability of a subgraph is proportional to its' reward. The proposed approach eliminates the influence of node sequence and thus does not need any pre-training strategies. We also propose a new cut vertex matrix to efficiently explore parent states for GFlowNets structure, thus making our approach applicable in a large-scale setting. We conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real datasets, and both qualitative and quantitative results show the superiority of our GFlowExplainer.

cs.LG↗

PrivMVMF: Privacy-Preserving Multi-View Matrix Factorization for Recommender Systems

With an increasing focus on data privacy, there have been pilot studies on recommender systems in a federated learning (FL) framework, where multiple parties collaboratively train a model without sharing their data. Most of these studies assume that the conventional FL framework can fully protect user privacy. However, there are serious privacy risks in matrix factorization in federated recommender systems based on our study. This paper first provides a rigorous theoretical analysis of the server reconstruction attack in four scenarios in federated recommender systems, followed by comprehensive experiments. The empirical results demonstrate that the FL server could infer users' information with accuracy >80% based on the uploaded gradients from FL nodes. The robustness analysis suggests that our reconstruction attack analysis outperforms the random guess by >30% under Laplace noises with b no larger than 0.5 for all scenarios. Then, the paper proposes a new privacy-preserving framework based on homomorphic encryption, Privacy-Preserving Multi-View Matrix Factorization (PrivMVMF), to enhance user data privacy protection in federated recommender systems. The proposed PrivMVMF is successfully implemented and tested thoroughly with the MovieLens dataset.

cs.IR↗

Sparse-Dyn: Sparse Dynamic Graph Multi-representation Learning via Event-based Sparse Temporal Attention Network

Dynamic graph neural networks have been widely used in modeling and representation learning of graph structure data. Current dynamic representation learning focuses on either discrete learning which results in temporal information loss or continuous learning that involves heavy computation. In this work, we proposed a novel dynamic graph neural network, Sparse-Dyn. It adaptively encodes temporal information into a sequence of patches with an equal amount of temporal-topological structure. Therefore, while avoiding the use of snapshots which causes information loss, it also achieves a finer time granularity, which is close to what continuous networks could provide. In addition, we also designed a lightweight module, Sparse Temporal Transformer, to compute node representations through both structural neighborhoods and temporal dynamics. Since the fully-connected attention conjunction is simplified, the computation cost is far lower than the current state-of-the-arts. Link prediction experiments are conducted on both continuous and discrete graph datasets. Through comparing with several state-of-the-art graph embedding baselines, the experimental results demonstrate that Sparse-Dyn has a faster inference speed while having competitive performance.

cs.LG↗

Graph Decipher: A transparent dual-attention graph neural network to understand the message-passing mechanism for the node classification

Graph neural networks can be effectively applied to find solutions for many real-world problems across widely diverse fields. The success of graph neural networks is linked to the message-passing mechanism on the graph, however, the message-aggregating behavior is still not entirely clear in most algorithms. To improve functionality, we propose a new transparent network called Graph Decipher to investigate the message-passing mechanism by prioritizing in two main components: the graph structure and node attributes, at the graph, feature, and global levels on a graph under the node classification task. However, the computation burden now becomes the most significant issue because the relevance of both graph structure and node attributes are computed on a graph. In order to solve this issue, only relevant representative node attributes are extracted by graph feature filters, allowing calculations to be performed in a category-oriented manner. Experiments on seven datasets show that Graph Decipher achieves state-of-the-art performance while imposing a substantially lower computation burden under the node classification task. Additionally, since our algorithm has the ability to explore the representative node attributes by category, it is utilized to alleviate the imbalanced node classification problem on multi-class graph datasets.

cs.LG↗

Generation of vector beams in planar photonic crystal cavities with multiple missing-hole defects

We propose a novel method to generate vector beams in planar photonic crystal cavities with multiple missing-hole defects. Simulating the resonant modes in the cavities, we observe that the optical fields in each defect have different phase and polarization state distributions, which promise the compositions of vector beams by the scattered light from the defects. The far-field radiation patterns of the cavity modes calculated via the Sommerfeld diffraction theory present vector beams possessing hollow intensity profiles and polarization singularities. In addition, the extraction efficiencies of the vector beams from the cavities could be improved by modifying the air-holes surrounding the defects. This planar photonic crystal cavity-based vector beam generator may provide useful insights for the on-chip controlling of vector beams in their propagations and interactions with matter.

physics.optics↗