arXiv subjects

Yuanchao Shu

Publications and source records attributed to Yuanchao Shu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

DWBench: Holistic Evaluation of Watermark for Dataset Copyright Auditing

The surging demand for large-scale datasets in deep learning has heightened the need for effective copyright protection, given the risks of unauthorized use to data owners. Although the dataset watermark technique holds promise for auditing and verifying usage, existing methods are hindered by inconsistent evaluations, which impede fair comparisons and assessments of real-world viability. To address this gap, we propose a two-layer taxonomy that categorizes methods by implementation (model-based vs. model-free injection; model-behavior vs. model-message verification), offering a structured framework for cross-task analysis. Then, we develop DWBench, a unified benchmark and open-source toolkit for systematically evaluating image dataset watermark techniques in classification and generation tasks. Using DWBench, we assess 25 representative methods under standardized conditions, perturbation-based robustness tests, multi-watermark coexistence, and multi-user interference. In addition to reporting the results of four commonly used metrics, we present the results of two new metrics: sample significance for fine-grained watermark distinguishability and verification success rate for dataset-level auditing, which enable accurate and reproducible benchmarking. Key findings reveal inherent trade-offs: no single method dominates all scenarios; classification and generation tasks require specialized approaches; and existing techniques exhibit instability at low watermark rates and in realistic multi-user settings, with elevated false positives or performance declines. We hope that DWBench can facilitate advances in watermark reliability and practicality, thus strengthening copyright safeguards in the face of widespread AI-driven data exploitation.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Rethinking Latency Denial-of-Service: Attacking the LLM Serving Framework, Not the Model

Large Language Models face an emerging and critical threat known as latency attacks. Because LLM inference is inherently expensive, even modest slowdowns can translate into substantial operating costs and severe availability risks. Recently, a growing body of research has focused on algorithmic complexity attacks by crafting inputs to trigger worst-case output lengths. However, we report a counter-intuitive finding that these algorithmic latency attacks are largely ineffective against modern LLM serving systems. We reveal that system-level optimization such as continuous batching provides a logical isolation to mitigate contagious latency impact on co-located users. To this end, in this paper, we shift the focus from the algorithm to the system layer, and introduce a new Fill and Squeeze attack strategy targeting the state transition of the scheduler. "Fill" first exhausts the global KV cache to induce Head-of-Line blocking, while "Squeeze" forces the system into repetitive preemption. By manipulating output lengths using methods from simple plain-text prompts to more complex prompt engineering, and leveraging side-channel probing of memory status, we demonstrate that the attack can be orchestrated in a black-box setting with much less cost. Extensive evaluations indicate by up to 20-280x average slowdown on Time to First Token and 1.5-4x average slowdown on Time Per Output Token compared to existing attacks with 30-40% lower attack cost.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

DeepGuard: Defending Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding Against Eavesdropping at Physical-Layer

Deep joint source-channel coding (DeepJSCC) has emerged as a promising paradigm for efficient and robust information transmission. However, its intrinsic characteristics also pose new security challenges, notably an increased vulnerability to eavesdropping attacks. Existing studies on defending against eavesdropping attacks in DeepJSCC, while demonstrating certain effectiveness, often incur considerable computational overhead or introduce performance trade-offs that may adversely affect legitimate users. In this paper, we present DeepGuard, to the best of our knowledge, the first physical-layer defense framework for DeepJSCC against eavesdropping attacks, validated through over-the-air experiments using software-defined radios (SDRs). Considering that existing eavesdropping attacks against DeepJSCC are limited to simulation under ideal channels, we take a step further by identifying and implementing four representative types of attacks under various configurations in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing systems. These attacks are evaluated over-the-air under diverse scenarios, allowing us to comprehensively characterize the real-world threat landscape. To mitigate these threats, DeepGuard introduces a novel preamble perturbation mechanism that modifies the preamble shared only between legitimate transceivers. To realize it, we first conduct a theoretical analysis of the perturbation's impact on the signals intercepted by the eavesdropper. Building upon this, we develop an end-to-end perturbation optimization algorithm that significantly degrades eavesdropping performance while preserving reliable communication for legitimate users. We prototype DeepGuard using SDRs and conduct extensive over-the-air experiments in practical scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeepGuard effectively mitigates eavesdropping threats.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

Cerberus: Real-Time Video Anomaly Detection via Cascaded Vision-Language Models

Video anomaly detection (VAD) has rapidly advanced by recent development of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). While these models offer superior zero-shot detection capabilities, their immense computational cost and unstable visual grounding performance hinder real-time deployment. To overcome these challenges, we introduce Cerberus, a two-stage cascaded system designed for efficient yet accurate real-time VAD. Cerberus learns normal behavioral rules offline, and combines lightweight filtering with fine-grained VLM reasoning during online inference. The performance gains of Cerberus come from two key innovations: motion mask prompting and rule-based deviation detection. The former directs the VLM's attention to regions relevant to motion, while the latter identifies anomalies as deviations from learned norms rather than enumerating possible anomalies. Extensive evaluations on four datasets show that Cerberus on average achieves 57.68 fps on an NVIDIA L40S GPU, a 151.79$\times$ speedup, and 97.2\% accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art VLM-based VAD methods, establishing it as a practical solution for real-time video analytics.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

mmExpert: Integrating Large Language Models for Comprehensive mmWave Data Synthesis and Understanding

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) sensing technology holds significant value in human-centric applications, yet the high costs associated with data acquisition and annotation limit its widespread adoption in our daily lives. Concurrently, the rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs) has opened up opportunities for addressing complex human needs. This paper presents mmExpert, an innovative mmWave understanding framework consisting of a data generation flywheel that leverages LLMs to automate the generation of synthetic mmWave radar datasets for specific application scenarios, thereby training models capable of zero-shot generalization in real-world environments. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the data synthesized by mmExpert significantly enhances the performance of downstream models and facilitates the successful deployment of large models for mmWave understanding.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

DeepStream: Prototyping Deep Joint Source-Channel Coding for Real-Time Multimedia Transmissions

Deep learning-based joint source-channel coding (DeepJSCC) has emerged as a promising technique in 6G for enhancing the efficiency and reliability of data transmission across diverse modalities, particularly in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) environments. This advantage is realized by leveraging powerful neural networks to learn an optimal end-to-end mapping from the source data directly to the transmit symbol sequence, eliminating the need for separate source coding, channel coding, and modulation. Although numerous efforts have been made towards efficient DeepJSCC, they have largely stayed at numerical simulations that can be far from practice, leaving the real-world viability of DeepJSCC largely unverified. To this end, we prototype DeepStream upon orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technology to offer efficient and robust DeepJSCC for multimedia transmission. In conforming to OFDM, we develop both a feature-to-symbol mapping method and a cross-subcarrier precoding method to improve the subcarrier independence and reduce peak-to-average power ratio. To reduce system complexity and enable flexibility in accommodating varying quality of service requirements, we further propose a progressive coding strategy that adjusts the compression ratio based on latency with minimal performance loss. We implement DeepStream for real-time image transmission and video streaming using software-defined radio. Extensive evaluations verify that DeepStream outperforms both the standard scheme and the direct deployment scheme. Particularly, at an SNR of 10 dB, DeepStream achieves a PSNR of 35 dB for image transmission and an MS-SSIM of 20 dB for video streaming, whereas the standard scheme fails to recover meaningful information.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

RoboInspector: Unveiling the Unreliability of Policy Code for LLM-enabled Robotic Manipulation

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in reasoning and code generation, enabling robotic manipulation to be initiated with just a single instruction. The LLM carries out various tasks by generating policy code required to control the robot. Despite advances in LLMs, achieving reliable policy code generation remains a significant challenge due to the diverse requirements of real-world tasks and the inherent complexity of user instructions. In practice, different users may provide distinct instructions to drive the robot for the same task, which may cause the unreliability of policy code generation. To bridge this gap, we design \textbf{RoboInspector}, a pipeline to unveil and characterize the unreliability of the policy code for LLM-enabled robotic manipulation from two perspectives: the complexity of the manipulation task and the granularity of the instruction. We perform comprehensive experiments with 216 distinct combinations of tasks, instructions, and LLMs in two prominent frameworks. The \textbf{RoboInspector} identifies four main unreliable behaviors that lead to manipulation failure. We provide a detailed characterization of these behaviors and their underlying causes, giving insight for practical development to reduce unreliability. Furthermore, we introduce a refinement approach guided by failure policy code feedback that improves the reliability of policy code generation by up to 35\% in LLM-enabled robotic manipulation, evaluated in both simulation and real-world environments.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

AVA: Towards Agentic Video Analytics with Vision Language Models

AI-driven video analytics has become increasingly important across diverse domains. However, existing systems are often constrained to specific, predefined tasks, limiting their adaptability in open-ended analytical scenarios. The recent emergence of Vision Language Models (VLMs) as transformative technologies offers significant potential for enabling open-ended video understanding, reasoning, and analytics. Nevertheless, their limited context windows present challenges when processing ultra-long video content, which is prevalent in real-world applications. To address this, we introduce AVA, a VLM-powered system designed for open-ended, advanced video analytics. AVA incorporates two key innovations: (1) the near real-time construction of Event Knowledge Graphs (EKGs) for efficient indexing of long or continuous video streams, and (2) an agentic retrieval-generation mechanism that leverages EKGs to handle complex and diverse queries. Comprehensive evaluations on public benchmarks, LVBench and VideoMME-Long, demonstrate that AVA achieves state-of-the-art performance, attaining 62.3% and 64.1% accuracy, respectively-significantly surpassing existing VLM and video Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Furthermore, to evaluate video analytics in ultra-long and open-world video scenarios, we introduce a new benchmark, AVA-100. This benchmark comprises 8 videos, each exceeding 10 hours in duration, along with 120 manually annotated, diverse, and complex question-answer pairs. On AVA-100, AVA achieves top-tier performance with an accuracy of 75.8%. The source code of AVA is available at https://github.com/I-ESC/Project-Ava. The AVA-100 benchmark can be accessed at https://huggingface.co/datasets/iesc/Ava-100.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Can't Slow me Down: Learning Robust and Hardware-Adaptive Object Detectors against Latency Attacks for Edge Devices

Object detection is a fundamental enabler for many real-time downstream applications such as autonomous driving, augmented reality and supply chain management. However, the algorithmic backbone of neural networks is brittle to imperceptible perturbations in the system inputs, which were generally known as misclassifying attacks. By targeting the real-time processing capability, a new class of latency attacks are reported recently. They exploit new attack surfaces in object detectors by creating a computational bottleneck in the post-processing module, that leads to cascading failure and puts the real-time downstream tasks at risks. In this work, we take an initial attempt to defend against this attack via background-attentive adversarial training that is also cognizant of the underlying hardware capabilities. We first draw system-level connections between latency attack and hardware capacity across heterogeneous GPU devices. Based on the particular adversarial behaviors, we utilize objectness loss as a proxy and build background attention into the adversarial training pipeline, and achieve a reasonable balance between clean and robust accuracy. The extensive experiments demonstrate the defense effectiveness of restoring real-time processing capability from $13$ FPS to $43$ FPS on Jetson Orin NX, with a better trade-off between the clean and robust accuracy.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

A Review on Edge Large Language Models: Design, Execution, and Applications

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing with their exceptional understanding, synthesizing, and reasoning capabilities. However, deploying LLMs on resource-constrained edge devices presents significant challenges due to computational limitations, memory constraints, and edge hardware heterogeneity. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of recent advancements in edge LLMs, covering the entire lifecycle: from resource-efficient model design and pre-deployment strategies to runtime inference optimizations. It also explores on-device applications across various domains. By synthesizing state-of-the-art techniques and identifying future research directions, this survey bridges the gap between the immense potential of LLMs and the constraints of edge computing.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2024

Minimizing End-to-End Latency for Joint Source-Channel Coding Systems

While existing studies have highlighted the advantages of deep learning (DL)-based joint source-channel coding (JSCC) schemes in enhancing transmission efficiency, they often overlook the crucial aspect of resource management during the deployment phase. In this paper, we propose an approach to minimize the transmission latency in an uplink JSCC-based system. We first analyze the correlation between end-to-end latency and task performance, based on which the end-to-end delay model for each device is established. Then, we formulate a non-convex optimization problem aiming at minimizing the maximum end-to-end latency across all devices, which is proved to be NP-hard. We then transform the original problem into a more tractable one, from which we derive the closed form solution on the optimal compression ratio, truncation threshold selection policy, and resource allocation strategy. We further introduce a heuristic algorithm with low complexity, leveraging insights from the structure of the optimal solution. Simulation results demonstrate that both the proposed optimal algorithm and the heuristic algorithm significantly reduce end-to-end latency. Notably, the proposed heuristic algorithm achieves nearly the same performance to the optimal solution but with considerably lower computational complexity.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2023

Confidant: Customizing Transformer-based LLMs via Collaborative Edge Training

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Nonetheless, it is challenging to deploy and fine-tune LLMs on mobile edge devices with limited computing, memory, and energy budgets. In this paper, we propose Confidant, a multi-backend collaborative training framework for customizing state-of-the-art LLMs on commodity mobile devices like smartphones. Confidant partitions an LLM into several sub-models so that each fits into a mobile device's memory. A pipeline parallel training mechanism is further developed to ensure fast and efficient distributed training. In addition, we propose a novel backend scheduler to allocate different attention heads to heterogeneous compute hardware, including mobile CPU and GPUs, to maximize the compute resource utilization on each edge device. Our preliminary experimental results show that Confidant achieves at most 45.3% memory reduction and 8.03x inference speedup in practical settings.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

AccEPT: An Acceleration Scheme for Speeding Up Edge Pipeline-parallel Training

It is usually infeasible to fit and train an entire large deep neural network (DNN) model using a single edge device due to the limited resources. To facilitate intelligent applications across edge devices, researchers have proposed partitioning a large model into several sub-models, and deploying each of them to a different edge device to collaboratively train a DNN model. However, the communication overhead caused by the large amount of data transmitted from one device to another during training, as well as the sub-optimal partition point due to the inaccurate latency prediction of computation at each edge device can significantly slow down training. In this paper, we propose AccEPT, an acceleration scheme for accelerating the edge collaborative pipeline-parallel training. In particular, we propose a light-weight adaptive latency predictor to accurately estimate the computation latency of each layer at different devices, which also adapts to unseen devices through continuous learning. Therefore, the proposed latency predictor leads to better model partitioning which balances the computation loads across participating devices. Moreover, we propose a bit-level computation-efficient data compression scheme to compress the data to be transmitted between devices during training. Our numerical results demonstrate that our proposed acceleration approach is able to significantly speed up edge pipeline parallel training up to 3 times faster in the considered experimental settings.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Turbo: Opportunistic Enhancement for Edge Video Analytics

Edge computing is being widely used for video analytics. To alleviate the inherent tension between accuracy and cost, various video analytics pipelines have been proposed to optimize the usage of GPU on edge nodes. Nonetheless, we find that GPU compute resources provisioned for edge nodes are commonly under-utilized due to video content variations, subsampling and filtering at different places of a pipeline. As opposed to model and pipeline optimization, in this work, we study the problem of opportunistic data enhancement using the non-deterministic and fragmented idle GPU resources. In specific, we propose a task-specific discrimination and enhancement module and a model-aware adversarial training mechanism, providing a way to identify and transform low-quality images that are specific to a video pipeline in an accurate and efficient manner. A multi-exit model structure and a resource-aware scheduler is further developed to make online enhancement decisions and fine-grained inference execution under latency and GPU resource constraints. Experiments across multiple video analytics pipelines and datasets reveal that by judiciously allocating a small amount of idle resources on frames that tend to yield greater marginal benefits from enhancement, our system boosts DNN object detection accuracy by $7.3-11.3\%$ without incurring any latency costs.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

GEMEL: Model Merging for Memory-Efficient, Real-Time Video Analytics at the Edge

Video analytics pipelines have steadily shifted to edge deployments to reduce bandwidth overheads and privacy violations, but in doing so, face an ever-growing resource tension. Most notably, edge-box GPUs lack the memory needed to concurrently house the growing number of (increasingly complex) models for real-time inference. Unfortunately, existing solutions that rely on time/space sharing of GPU resources are insufficient as the required swapping delays result in unacceptable frame drops and accuracy violations. We present model merging, a new memory management technique that exploits architectural similarities between edge vision models by judiciously sharing their layers (including weights) to reduce workload memory costs and swapping delays. Our system, GEMEL, efficiently integrates merging into existing pipelines by (1) leveraging several guiding observations about per-model memory usage and inter-layer dependencies to quickly identify fruitful and accuracy-preserving merging configurations, and (2) altering edge inference schedules to maximize merging benefits. Experiments across diverse workloads reveal that GEMEL reduces memory usage by up to 60.7%, and improves overall accuracy by 8-39% relative to time/space sharing alone.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2021

Custom Object Detection via Multi-Camera Self-Supervised Learning

This paper proposes MCSSL, a self-supervised learning approach for building custom object detection models in multi-camera networks. MCSSL associates bounding boxes between cameras with overlapping fields of view by leveraging epipolar geometry and state-of-the-art tracking and reID algorithms, and prudently generates two sets of pseudo-labels to fine-tune backbone and detection networks respectively in an object detection model. To train effectively on pseudo-labels,a powerful reID-like pretext task with consistency loss is constructed for model customization. Our evaluation shows that compared with legacy selftraining methods, MCSSL improves average mAP by 5.44% and 6.76% on WildTrack and CityFlow dataset, respectively.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Ekya: Continuous Learning of Video Analytics Models on Edge Compute Servers

Video analytics applications use edge compute servers for the analytics of the videos (for bandwidth and privacy). Compressed models that are deployed on the edge servers for inference suffer from data drift, where the live video data diverges from the training data. Continuous learning handles data drift by periodically retraining the models on new data. Our work addresses the challenge of jointly supporting inference and retraining tasks on edge servers, which requires navigating the fundamental tradeoff between the retrained model's accuracy and the inference accuracy. Our solution Ekya balances this tradeoff across multiple models and uses a micro-profiler to identify the models that will benefit the most by retraining. Ekya's accuracy gain compared to a baseline scheduler is 29% higher, and the baseline requires 4x more GPU resources to achieve the same accuracy as Ekya.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2020

Deep Learning in the Era of Edge Computing: Challenges and Opportunities

The era of edge computing has arrived. Although the Internet is the backbone of edge computing, its true value lies at the intersection of gathering data from sensors and extracting meaningful information from the sensor data. We envision that in the near future, majority of edge devices will be equipped with machine intelligence powered by deep learning. However, deep learning-based approaches require a large volume of high-quality data to train and are very expensive in terms of computation, memory, and power consumption. In this chapter, we describe eight research challenges and promising opportunities at the intersection of computer systems, networking, and machine learning. Solving those challenges will enable resource-limited edge devices to leverage the amazing capability of deep learning. We hope this chapter could inspire new research that will eventually lead to the realization of the vision of intelligent edge.

cs.LG↗