arXiv subjects

Zhan Qin

Publications and source records attributed to Zhan Qin.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Prompt-Consistency Image Generation (PCIG): A Unified Framework Integrating LLMs, Knowledge Graphs, and Controllable Diffusion Models

The rapid advancement of Text-to-Image(T2I) generative models has enabled the synthesis of high-quality images guided by textual descriptions. Despite this significant progress, these models are often susceptible in generating contents that contradict the input text, which poses a challenge to their reliability and practical deployment. To address this problem, we introduce a novel diffusion-based framework to significantly enhance the alignment of generated images with their corresponding descriptions, addressing the inconsistency between visual output and textual input. Our framework is built upon a comprehensive analysis of inconsistency phenomena, categorizing them based on their manifestation in the image. Leveraging a state-of-the-art large language module, we first extract objects and construct a knowledge graph to predict the locations of these objects in potentially generated images. We then integrate a state-of-the-art controllable image generation model with a visual text generation module to generate an image that is consistent with the original prompt, guided by the predicted object locations. Through extensive experiments on an advanced multimodal hallucination benchmark, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in accurately generating the images without the inconsistency with the original prompt. The code can be accessed via https://github.com/TruthAI-Lab/PCIG.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

ERASER: Machine Unlearning in MLaaS via an Inference Serving-Aware Approach

Over the past years, Machine Learning-as-a-Service (MLaaS) has received a surging demand for supporting Machine Learning-driven services to offer revolutionized user experience across diverse application areas. MLaaS provides inference service with low inference latency based on an ML model trained using a dataset collected from numerous individual data owners. Recently, for the sake of data owners' privacy and to comply with the "right to be forgotten (RTBF)" as enacted by data protection legislation, many machine unlearning methods have been proposed to remove data owners' data from trained models upon their unlearning requests. However, despite their promising efficiency, almost all existing machine unlearning methods handle unlearning requests independently from inference requests, which unfortunately introduces a new security issue of inference service obsolescence and a privacy vulnerability of undesirable exposure for machine unlearning in MLaaS. In this paper, we propose the ERASER framework for machinE unleaRning in MLaAS via an inferencE seRving-aware approach. ERASER strategically choose appropriate unlearning execution timing to address the inference service obsolescence issue. A novel inference consistency certification mechanism is proposed to avoid the violation of RTBF principle caused by postponed unlearning executions, thereby mitigating the undesirable exposure vulnerability. ERASER offers three groups of design choices to allow for tailor-made variants that best suit the specific environments and preferences of various MLaaS systems. Extensive empirical evaluations across various settings confirm ERASER's effectiveness, e.g., it can effectively save up to 99% of inference latency and 31% of computation overhead over the inference-oblivion baseline.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

SWAT: A System-Wide Approach to Tunable Leakage Mitigation in Encrypted Data Stores

Numerous studies have underscored the significant privacy risks associated with various leakage patterns in encrypted data stores. While many solutions have been proposed to mitigate these leakages, they either (1) incur substantial overheads, (2) focus on specific subsets of leakage patterns, or (3) apply the same security notion across various workloads, thereby impeding the attainment of fine-tuned privacy-efficiency trade-offs. In light of various detrimental leakage patterns, this paper starts with an investigation into which specific leakage patterns require our focus in the contexts of key-value, range-query, and dynamic workloads, respectively. Subsequently, we introduce new security notions tailored to the specific privacy requirements of these workloads. Accordingly, we propose and instantiate SWAT, an efficient construction that progressively enables these workloads, while provably mitigating system-wide leakage via a suite of algorithms with tunable privacy-efficiency trade-offs. We conducted extensive experiments and compiled a detailed result analysis, showing the efficiency of our solution. SWATis about an order of magnitude slower than an encryption-only data store that reveals various leakage patterns and is two orders of magnitude faster than a trivial zero-leakage solution. Meanwhile, the performance of SWATremains highly competitive compared to other designs that mitigate specific types of leakage.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Sora Detector: A Unified Hallucination Detection for Large Text-to-Video Models

The rapid advancement in text-to-video (T2V) generative models has enabled the synthesis of high-fidelity video content guided by textual descriptions. Despite this significant progress, these models are often susceptible to hallucination, generating contents that contradict the input text, which poses a challenge to their reliability and practical deployment. To address this critical issue, we introduce the SoraDetector, a novel unified framework designed to detect hallucinations across diverse large T2V models, including the cutting-edge Sora model. Our framework is built upon a comprehensive analysis of hallucination phenomena, categorizing them based on their manifestation in the video content. Leveraging the state-of-the-art keyframe extraction techniques and multimodal large language models, SoraDetector first evaluates the consistency between extracted video content summary and textual prompts, then constructs static and dynamic knowledge graphs (KGs) from frames to detect hallucination both in single frames and across frames. Sora Detector provides a robust and quantifiable measure of consistency, static and dynamic hallucination. In addition, we have developed the Sora Detector Agent to automate the hallucination detection process and generate a complete video quality report for each input video. Lastly, we present a novel meta-evaluation benchmark, T2VHaluBench, meticulously crafted to facilitate the evaluation of advancements in T2V hallucination detection. Through extensive experiments on videos generated by Sora and other large T2V models, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in accurately detecting hallucinations. The code and dataset can be accessed via GitHub.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

LLM-Guided Multi-View Hypergraph Learning for Human-Centric Explainable Recommendation

As personalized recommendation systems become vital in the age of information overload, traditional methods relying solely on historical user interactions often fail to fully capture the multifaceted nature of human interests. To enable more human-centric modeling of user preferences, this work proposes a novel explainable recommendation framework, i.e., LLMHG, synergizing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and the structural advantages of hypergraph neural networks. By effectively profiling and interpreting the nuances of individual user interests, our framework pioneers enhancements to recommendation systems with increased explainability. We validate that explicitly accounting for the intricacies of human preferences allows our human-centric and explainable LLMHG approach to consistently outperform conventional models across diverse real-world datasets. The proposed plug-and-play enhancement framework delivers immediate gains in recommendation performance while offering a pathway to apply advanced LLMs for better capturing the complexity of human interests across machine learning applications.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

FedTracker: Furnishing Ownership Verification and Traceability for Federated Learning Model

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm allowing multiple clients to collaboratively train a global model without sharing their local data. However, FL entails exposing the model to various participants. This poses a risk of unauthorized model distribution or resale by the malicious client, compromising the intellectual property rights of the FL group. To deter such misbehavior, it is essential to establish a mechanism for verifying the ownership of the model and as well tracing its origin to the leaker among the FL participants. In this paper, we present FedTracker, the first FL model protection framework that provides both ownership verification and traceability. FedTracker adopts a bi-level protection scheme consisting of global watermark mechanism and local fingerprint mechanism. The former authenticates the ownership of the global model, while the latter identifies which client the model is derived from. FedTracker leverages Continual Learning (CL) principles to embed the watermark in a way that preserves the utility of the FL model on both primitive task and watermark task. FedTracker also devises a novel metric to better discriminate different fingerprints. Experimental results show FedTracker is effective in ownership verification, traceability, and maintains good fidelity and robustness against various watermark removal attacks.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

PoisonPrompt: Backdoor Attack on Prompt-based Large Language Models

Prompts have significantly improved the performance of pretrained Large Language Models (LLMs) on various downstream tasks recently, making them increasingly indispensable for a diverse range of LLM application scenarios. However, the backdoor vulnerability, a serious security threat that can maliciously alter the victim model's normal predictions, has not been sufficiently explored for prompt-based LLMs. In this paper, we present POISONPROMPT, a novel backdoor attack capable of successfully compromising both hard and soft prompt-based LLMs. We evaluate the effectiveness, fidelity, and robustness of POISONPROMPT through extensive experiments on three popular prompt methods, using six datasets and three widely used LLMs. Our findings highlight the potential security threats posed by backdoor attacks on prompt-based LLMs and emphasize the need for further research in this area.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

PromptCARE: Prompt Copyright Protection by Watermark Injection and Verification

Large language models (LLMs) have witnessed a meteoric rise in popularity among the general public users over the past few months, facilitating diverse downstream tasks with human-level accuracy and proficiency. Prompts play an essential role in this success, which efficiently adapt pre-trained LLMs to task-specific applications by simply prepending a sequence of tokens to the query texts. However, designing and selecting an optimal prompt can be both expensive and demanding, leading to the emergence of Prompt-as-a-Service providers who profit by providing well-designed prompts for authorized use. With the growing popularity of prompts and their indispensable role in LLM-based services, there is an urgent need to protect the copyright of prompts against unauthorized use. In this paper, we propose PromptCARE, the first framework for prompt copyright protection through watermark injection and verification. Prompt watermarking presents unique challenges that render existing watermarking techniques developed for model and dataset copyright verification ineffective. PromptCARE overcomes these hurdles by proposing watermark injection and verification schemes tailor-made for prompts and NLP characteristics. Extensive experiments on six well-known benchmark datasets, using three prevalent pre-trained LLMs (BERT, RoBERTa, and Facebook OPT-1.3b), demonstrate the effectiveness, harmlessness, robustness, and stealthiness of PromptCARE.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2023

Masked Diffusion Models Are Fast Distribution Learners

Diffusion model has emerged as the \emph{de-facto} model for image generation, yet the heavy training overhead hinders its broader adoption in the research community. We observe that diffusion models are commonly trained to learn all fine-grained visual information from scratch. This paradigm may cause unnecessary training costs hence requiring in-depth investigation. In this work, we show that it suffices to train a strong diffusion model by first pre-training the model to learn some primer distribution that loosely characterizes the unknown real image distribution. Then the pre-trained model can be fine-tuned for various generation tasks efficiently. In the pre-training stage, we propose to mask a high proportion (e.g., up to 90\%) of input images to approximately represent the primer distribution and introduce a masked denoising score matching objective to train a model to denoise visible areas. In subsequent fine-tuning stage, we efficiently train diffusion model without masking. Utilizing the two-stage training framework, we achieves significant training acceleration and a new FID score record of 6.27 on CelebA-HQ $256 \times 256$ for ViT-based diffusion models. The generalizability of a pre-trained model further helps building models that perform better than ones trained from scratch on different downstream datasets. For instance, a diffusion model pre-trained on VGGFace2 attains a 46\% quality improvement when fine-tuned on a different dataset that contains only 3000 images. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/jiachenlei/maskdm}.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Local Differentially Private Heavy Hitter Detection in Data Streams with Bounded Memory

Top-$k$ frequent items detection is a fundamental task in data stream mining. Many promising solutions are proposed to improve memory efficiency while still maintaining high accuracy for detecting the Top-$k$ items. Despite the memory efficiency concern, the users could suffer from privacy loss if participating in the task without proper protection, since their contributed local data streams may continually leak sensitive individual information. However, most existing works solely focus on addressing either the memory-efficiency problem or the privacy concerns but seldom jointly, which cannot achieve a satisfactory tradeoff between memory efficiency, privacy protection, and detection accuracy. In this paper, we present a novel framework HG-LDP to achieve accurate Top-$k$ item detection at bounded memory expense, while providing rigorous local differential privacy (LDP) protection. Specifically, we identify two key challenges naturally arising in the task, which reveal that directly applying existing LDP techniques will lead to an inferior ``accuracy-privacy-memory efficiency'' tradeoff. Therefore, we instantiate three advanced schemes under the framework by designing novel LDP randomization methods, which address the hurdles caused by the large size of the item domain and by the limited space of the memory. We conduct comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets to show that the proposed advanced schemes achieve a superior ``accuracy-privacy-memory efficiency'' tradeoff, saving $2300\times$ memory over baseline methods when the item domain size is $41,270$. Our code is open-sourced via the link.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

RemovalNet: DNN Fingerprint Removal Attacks

With the performance of deep neural networks (DNNs) remarkably improving, DNNs have been widely used in many areas. Consequently, the DNN model has become a valuable asset, and its intellectual property is safeguarded by ownership verification techniques (e.g., DNN fingerprinting). However, the feasibility of the DNN fingerprint removal attack and its potential influence remains an open problem. In this paper, we perform the first comprehensive investigation of DNN fingerprint removal attacks. Generally, the knowledge contained in a DNN model can be categorized into general semantic and fingerprint-specific knowledge. To this end, we propose a min-max bilevel optimization-based DNN fingerprint removal attack named RemovalNet, to evade model ownership verification. The lower-level optimization is designed to remove fingerprint-specific knowledge. While in the upper-level optimization, we distill the victim model's general semantic knowledge to maintain the surrogate model's performance. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the fidelity, effectiveness, and efficiency of the RemovalNet against four advanced defense methods on six metrics. The empirical results demonstrate that (1) the RemovalNet is effective. After our DNN fingerprint removal attack, the model distance between the target and surrogate models is x100 times higher than that of the baseline attacks, (2) the RemovalNet is efficient. It uses only 0.2% (400 samples) of the substitute dataset and 1,000 iterations to conduct our attack. Besides, compared with advanced model stealing attacks, the RemovalNet saves nearly 85% of computational resources at most, (3) the RemovalNet achieves high fidelity that the created surrogate model maintains high accuracy after the DNN fingerprint removal process. Our code is available at: https://github.com/grasses/RemovalNet.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Pitfalls in Language Models for Code Intelligence: A Taxonomy and Survey

Modern language models (LMs) have been successfully employed in source code generation and understanding, leading to a significant increase in research focused on learning-based code intelligence, such as automated bug repair, and test case generation. Despite their great potential, language models for code intelligence (LM4Code) are susceptible to potential pitfalls, which hinder realistic performance and further impact their reliability and applicability in real-world deployment. Such challenges drive the need for a comprehensive understanding - not just identifying these issues but delving into their possible implications and existing solutions to build more reliable language models tailored to code intelligence. Based on a well-defined systematic research approach, we conducted an extensive literature review to uncover the pitfalls inherent in LM4Code. Finally, 67 primary studies from top-tier venues have been identified. After carefully examining these studies, we designed a taxonomy of pitfalls in LM4Code research and conducted a systematic study to summarize the issues, implications, current solutions, and challenges of different pitfalls for LM4Code systems. We developed a comprehensive classification scheme that dissects pitfalls across four crucial aspects: data collection and labeling, system design and learning, performance evaluation, and deployment and maintenance. Through this study, we aim to provide a roadmap for researchers and practitioners, facilitating their understanding and utilization of LM4Code in reliable and trustworthy ways.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

FINER: Enhancing State-of-the-art Classifiers with Feature Attribution to Facilitate Security Analysis

Deep learning classifiers achieve state-of-the-art performance in various risk detection applications. They explore rich semantic representations and are supposed to automatically discover risk behaviors. However, due to the lack of transparency, the behavioral semantics cannot be conveyed to downstream security experts to reduce their heavy workload in security analysis. Although feature attribution (FA) methods can be used to explain deep learning, the underlying classifier is still blind to what behavior is suspicious, and the generated explanation cannot adapt to downstream tasks, incurring poor explanation fidelity and intelligibility. In this paper, we propose FINER, the first framework for risk detection classifiers to generate high-fidelity and high-intelligibility explanations. The high-level idea is to gather explanation efforts from model developer, FA designer, and security experts. To improve fidelity, we fine-tune the classifier with an explanation-guided multi-task learning strategy. To improve intelligibility, we engage task knowledge to adjust and ensemble FA methods. Extensive evaluations show that FINER improves explanation quality for risk detection. Moreover, we demonstrate that FINER outperforms a state-of-the-art tool in facilitating malware analysis.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2023

Quantifying and Defending against Privacy Threats on Federated Knowledge Graph Embedding

Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) is a fundamental technique that extracts expressive representation from knowledge graph (KG) to facilitate diverse downstream tasks. The emerging federated KGE (FKGE) collaboratively trains from distributed KGs held among clients while avoiding exchanging clients' sensitive raw KGs, which can still suffer from privacy threats as evidenced in other federated model trainings (e.g., neural networks). However, quantifying and defending against such privacy threats remain unexplored for FKGE which possesses unique properties not shared by previously studied models. In this paper, we conduct the first holistic study of the privacy threat on FKGE from both attack and defense perspectives. For the attack, we quantify the privacy threat by proposing three new inference attacks, which reveal substantial privacy risk by successfully inferring the existence of the KG triple from victim clients. For the defense, we propose DP-Flames, a novel differentially private FKGE with private selection, which offers a better privacy-utility tradeoff by exploiting the entity-binding sparse gradient property of FKGE and comes with a tight privacy accountant by incorporating the state-of-the-art private selection technique. We further propose an adaptive privacy budget allocation policy to dynamically adjust defense magnitude across the training procedure. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that the proposed defense can successfully mitigate the privacy threat by effectively reducing the success rate of inference attacks from $83.1\%$ to $59.4\%$ on average with only a modest utility decrease.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

OpBoost: A Vertical Federated Tree Boosting Framework Based on Order-Preserving Desensitization

Vertical Federated Learning (FL) is a new paradigm that enables users with non-overlapping attributes of the same data samples to jointly train a model without directly sharing the raw data. Nevertheless, recent works show that it's still not sufficient to prevent privacy leakage from the training process or the trained model. This paper focuses on studying the privacy-preserving tree boosting algorithms under the vertical FL. The existing solutions based on cryptography involve heavy computation and communication overhead and are vulnerable to inference attacks. Although the solution based on Local Differential Privacy (LDP) addresses the above problems, it leads to the low accuracy of the trained model. This paper explores to improve the accuracy of the widely deployed tree boosting algorithms satisfying differential privacy under vertical FL. Specifically, we introduce a framework called OpBoost. Three order-preserving desensitization algorithms satisfying a variant of LDP called distance-based LDP (dLDP) are designed to desensitize the training data. In particular, we optimize the dLDP definition and study efficient sampling distributions to further improve the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed algorithms. The proposed algorithms provide a trade-off between the privacy of pairs with large distance and the utility of desensitized values. Comprehensive evaluations show that OpBoost has a better performance on prediction accuracy of trained models compared with existing LDP approaches on reasonable settings. Our code is open source.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

L-SRR: Local Differential Privacy for Location-Based Services with Staircase Randomized Response

Location-based services (LBS) have been significantly developed and widely deployed in mobile devices. It is also well-known that LBS applications may result in severe privacy concerns by collecting sensitive locations. A strong privacy model ''local differential privacy'' (LDP) has been recently deployed in many different applications (e.g., Google RAPPOR, iOS, and Microsoft Telemetry) but not effective for LBS applications due to the low utility of existing LDP mechanisms. To address such deficiency, we propose the first LDP framework for a variety of location-based services (namely ''L-SRR''), which privately collects and analyzes user locations with high utility. Specifically, we design a novel randomization mechanism ''Staircase Randomized Response'' (SRR) and extend the empirical estimation to significantly boost the utility for SRR in different LBS applications (e.g., traffic density estimation, and k-nearest neighbors). We have conducted extensive experiments on four real LBS datasets by benchmarking with other LDP schemes in practical applications. The experimental results demonstrate that L-SRR significantly outperforms them.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

Vanilla Feature Distillation for Improving the Accuracy-Robustness Trade-Off in Adversarial Training

Adversarial training has been widely explored for mitigating attacks against deep models. However, most existing works are still trapped in the dilemma between higher accuracy and stronger robustness since they tend to fit a model towards robust features (not easily tampered with by adversaries) while ignoring those non-robust but highly predictive features. To achieve a better robustness-accuracy trade-off, we propose the Vanilla Feature Distillation Adversarial Training (VFD-Adv), which conducts knowledge distillation from a pre-trained model (optimized towards high accuracy) to guide adversarial training towards higher accuracy, i.e., preserving those non-robust but predictive features. More specifically, both adversarial examples and their clean counterparts are forced to be aligned in the feature space by distilling predictive representations from the pre-trained/clean model, while previous works barely utilize predictive features from clean models. Therefore, the adversarial training model is updated towards maximally preserving the accuracy as gaining robustness. A key advantage of our method is that it can be universally adapted to and boost existing works. Exhaustive experiments on various datasets, classification models, and adversarial training algorithms demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Feature Importance-aware Transferable Adversarial Attacks

Transferability of adversarial examples is of central importance for attacking an unknown model, which facilitates adversarial attacks in more practical scenarios, e.g., black-box attacks. Existing transferable attacks tend to craft adversarial examples by indiscriminately distorting features to degrade prediction accuracy in a source model without aware of intrinsic features of objects in the images. We argue that such brute-force degradation would introduce model-specific local optimum into adversarial examples, thus limiting the transferability. By contrast, we propose the Feature Importance-aware Attack (FIA), which disrupts important object-aware features that dominate model decisions consistently. More specifically, we obtain feature importance by introducing the aggregate gradient, which averages the gradients with respect to feature maps of the source model, computed on a batch of random transforms of the original clean image. The gradients will be highly correlated to objects of interest, and such correlation presents invariance across different models. Besides, the random transforms will preserve intrinsic features of objects and suppress model-specific information. Finally, the feature importance guides to search for adversarial examples towards disrupting critical features, achieving stronger transferability. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness and superior performance of the proposed FIA, i.e., improving the success rate by 9.5% against normally trained models and 12.8% against defense models as compared to the state-of-the-art transferable attacks. Code is available at: https://github.com/hcguoO0/FIA

cs.CV↗