arXiv subjects

Yuantian Miao

Publications and source records attributed to Yuantian Miao.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

BadFU: Backdoor Federated Learning through Adversarial Machine Unlearning

Federated learning (FL) has been widely adopted as a decentralized training paradigm that enables multiple clients to collaboratively learn a shared model without exposing their local data. As concerns over data privacy and regulatory compliance grow, machine unlearning, which aims to remove the influence of specific data from trained models, has become increasingly important in the federated setting to meet legal, ethical, or user-driven demands. However, integrating unlearning into FL introduces new challenges and raises largely unexplored security risks. In particular, adversaries may exploit the unlearning process to compromise the integrity of the global model. In this paper, we present the first backdoor attack in the context of federated unlearning, demonstrating that an adversary can inject backdoors into the global model through seemingly legitimate unlearning requests. Specifically, we propose BadFU, an attack strategy where a malicious client uses both backdoor and camouflage samples to train the global model normally during the federated training process. Once the client requests unlearning of the camouflage samples, the global model transitions into a backdoored state. Extensive experiments under various FL frameworks and unlearning strategies validate the effectiveness of BadFU, revealing a critical vulnerability in current federated unlearning practices and underscoring the urgent need for more secure and robust federated unlearning mechanisms.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

SmartLLMs Scheduler: A Framework for Cost-Effective LLMs Utilization

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 and Llama have shown remarkable capabilities in a variety of software engineering tasks. Despite the advancements, their practical deployment faces challenges, including high financial costs, long response time, and varying performance, especially when handling a large number of queries (jobs). Existing optimization strategies for deploying LLMs for diverse tasks focus on static scheduling, which requires extensive training data for performance prediction, increasing the computational costs and limiting the applicability and flexibility. In this paper, we propose the SmartLLMs Scheduler (SLS), a dynamic and cost-effective scheduling solution. The key idea is to learn LLMs' performance on diverse tasks and incorporate their real-time feedback to update strategies periodically. Specifically, SLS incorporates three key components, including an Adaptive Cache Manager, a Performance-Cost Optimized Scheduler, and a Dynamic Update Manager. The Cache Manager stores the outputs of previously processed queries and employs an adaptive strategy to reduce redundant computations and minimize response times. For queries not found in the cache, the Scheduler dynamically allocates them to the most suitable LLM based on the predicted performance and cost from models that take both query-specific and LLM-specific features as input. The Update Manager continuously refines the cache and scheduling strategies based on real-time feedback from the assigned queries to enhance decision-making and adapt to evolving task characteristics. To evaluate the effectiveness of SLS, we conduct extensive experiments on two LLM-based software engineering tasks, including log parsing and code generation. The results show that SLS significantly outperforms the baseline methods, achieving an average performance improvement of 198.82% and an average processing time reduction of 63.28%.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

From Principles to Practice: A Deep Dive into AI Ethics and Regulations

In the rapidly evolving domain of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the complex interaction between innovation and regulation has become an emerging focus of our society. Despite tremendous advancements in AI's capabilities to excel in specific tasks and contribute to diverse sectors, establishing a high degree of trust in AI-generated outputs and decisions necessitates meticulous caution and continuous oversight. A broad spectrum of stakeholders, including governmental bodies, private sector corporations, academic institutions, and individuals, have launched significant initiatives. These efforts include developing ethical guidelines for AI and engaging in vibrant discussions on AI ethics, both among AI practitioners and within the broader society. This article thoroughly analyzes the ground-breaking AI regulatory framework proposed by the European Union. It delves into the fundamental ethical principles of safety, transparency, non-discrimination, traceability, and environmental sustainability for AI developments and deployments. Considering the technical efforts and strategies undertaken by academics and industry to uphold these principles, we explore the synergies and conflicts among the five ethical principles. Through this lens, work presents a forward-looking perspective on the future of AI regulations, advocating for a harmonized approach that safeguards societal values while encouraging technological advancement.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

OptLLM: Optimal Assignment of Queries to Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered considerable attention owing to their remarkable capabilities, leading to an increasing number of companies offering LLMs as services. Different LLMs achieve different performance at different costs. A challenge for users lies in choosing the LLMs that best fit their needs, balancing cost and performance. In this paper, we propose a framework for addressing the cost-effective query allocation problem for LLMs. Given a set of input queries and candidate LLMs, our framework, named OptLLM, provides users with a range of optimal solutions to choose from, aligning with their budget constraints and performance preferences, including options for maximizing accuracy and minimizing cost. OptLLM predicts the performance of candidate LLMs on each query using a multi-label classification model with uncertainty estimation and then iteratively generates a set of non-dominated solutions by destructing and reconstructing the current solution. To evaluate the effectiveness of OptLLM, we conduct extensive experiments on various types of tasks, including text classification, question answering, sentiment analysis, reasoning, and log parsing. Our experimental results demonstrate that OptLLM substantially reduces costs by 2.40% to 49.18% while achieving the same accuracy as the best LLM. Compared to other multi-objective optimization algorithms, OptLLM improves accuracy by 2.94% to 69.05% at the same cost or saves costs by 8.79% and 95.87% while maintaining the highest attainable accuracy.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2022

FAAG: Fast Adversarial Audio Generation through Interactive Attack Optimisation

Automatic Speech Recognition services (ASRs) inherit deep neural networks' vulnerabilities like crafted adversarial examples. Existing methods often suffer from low efficiency because the target phases are added to the entire audio sample, resulting in high demand for computational resources. This paper proposes a novel scheme named FAAG as an iterative optimization-based method to generate targeted adversarial examples quickly. By injecting the noise over the beginning part of the audio, FAAG generates adversarial audio in high quality with a high success rate timely. Specifically, we use audio's logits output to map each character in the transcription to an approximate position of the audio's frame. Thus, an adversarial example can be generated by FAAG in approximately two minutes using CPUs only and around ten seconds with one GPU while maintaining an average success rate over 85%. Specifically, the FAAG method can speed up around 60% compared with the baseline method during the adversarial example generation process. Furthermore, we found that appending benign audio to any suspicious examples can effectively defend against the targeted adversarial attack. We hope that this work paves the way for inventing new adversarial attacks against speech recognition with computational constraints.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2021

Machine Learning Based Cyber Attacks Targeting on Controlled Information: A Survey

Stealing attack against controlled information, along with the increasing number of information leakage incidents, has become an emerging cyber security threat in recent years. Due to the booming development and deployment of advanced analytics solutions, novel stealing attacks utilize machine learning (ML) algorithms to achieve high success rate and cause a lot of damage. Detecting and defending against such attacks is challenging and urgent so that governments, organizations, and individuals should attach great importance to the ML-based stealing attacks. This survey presents the recent advances in this new type of attack and corresponding countermeasures. The ML-based stealing attack is reviewed in perspectives of three categories of targeted controlled information, including controlled user activities, controlled ML model-related information, and controlled authentication information. Recent publications are summarized to generalize an overarching attack methodology and to derive the limitations and future directions of ML-based stealing attacks. Furthermore, countermeasures are proposed towards developing effective protections from three aspects -- detection, disruption, and isolation.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2021

The Audio Auditor: User-Level Membership Inference in Internet of Things Voice Services

With the rapid development of deep learning techniques, the popularity of voice services implemented on various Internet of Things (IoT) devices is ever increasing. In this paper, we examine user-level membership inference in the problem space of voice services, by designing an audio auditor to verify whether a specific user had unwillingly contributed audio used to train an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model under strict black-box access. With user representation of the input audio data and their corresponding translated text, our trained auditor is effective in user-level audit. We also observe that the auditor trained on specific data can be generalized well regardless of the ASR model architecture. We validate the auditor on ASR models trained with LSTM, RNNs, and GRU algorithms on two state-of-the-art pipelines, the hybrid ASR system and the end-to-end ASR system. Finally, we conduct a real-world trial of our auditor on iPhone Siri, achieving an overall accuracy exceeding 80\%. We hope the methodology developed in this paper and findings can inform privacy advocates to overhaul IoT privacy.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2018

Automated Big Traffic Analytics for Cyber Security

Network traffic analytics technology is a cornerstone for cyber security systems. We demonstrate its use through three popular and contemporary cyber security applications in intrusion detection, malware analysis and botnet detection. However, automated traffic analytics faces the challenges raised by big traffic data. In terms of big data's three characteristics --- volume, variety and velocity, we review three state of the art techniques to mitigate the key challenges including real-time traffic classification, unknown traffic classification, and efficiency of classifiers. The new techniques using statistical features, unknown discovery and correlation analytics show promising potentials to deal with big traffic data. Readers are encouraged to devote to improving the performance and practicability of automatic traffic analytic in cyber security.

cs.CR↗