arXiv subjects

Ziqi Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Ziqi Liu.

118 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Malicious Account Detection

We present, GEM, the first heterogeneous graph neural network approach for detecting malicious accounts at Alipay, one of the world's leading mobile cashless payment platform. Our approach, inspired from a connected subgraph approach, adaptively learns discriminative embeddings from heterogeneous account-device graphs based on two fundamental weaknesses of attackers, i.e. device aggregation and activity aggregation. For the heterogeneous graph consists of various types of nodes, we propose an attention mechanism to learn the importance of different types of nodes, while using the sum operator for modeling the aggregation patterns of nodes in each type. Experiments show that our approaches consistently perform promising results compared with competitive methods over time.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

Graph Representation Learning for Merchant Incentive Optimization in Mobile Payment Marketing

Mobile payment such as Alipay has been widely used in our daily lives. To further promote the mobile payment activities, it is important to run marketing campaigns under a limited budget by providing incentives such as coupons, commissions to merchants. As a result, incentive optimization is the key to maximizing the commercial objective of the marketing campaign. With the analyses of online experiments, we found that the transaction network can subtly describe the similarity of merchants' responses to different incentives, which is of great use in the incentive optimization problem. In this paper, we present a graph representation learning method atop of transaction networks for merchant incentive optimization in mobile payment marketing. With limited samples collected from online experiments, our end-to-end method first learns merchant representations based on an attributed transaction networks, then effectively models the correlations between the commercial objectives each merchant may achieve and the incentives under varying treatments. Thus we are able to model the sensitivity to incentive for each merchant, and spend the most budgets on those merchants that show strong sensitivities in the marketing campaign. Extensive offline and online experimental results at Alipay demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2020

Uncovering Insurance Fraud Conspiracy with Network Learning

Fraudulent claim detection is one of the greatest challenges the insurance industry faces. Alibaba's return-freight insurance, providing return-shipping postage compensations over product return on the e-commerce platform, receives thousands of potentially fraudulent claims every day. Such deliberate abuse of the insurance policy could lead to heavy financial losses. In order to detect and prevent fraudulent insurance claims, we developed a novel data-driven procedure to identify groups of organized fraudsters, one of the major contributions to financial losses, by learning network information. In this paper, we introduce a device-sharing network among claimants, followed by developing an automated solution for fraud detection based on graph learning algorithms, to separate fraudsters from regular customers and uncover groups of organized fraudsters. This solution applied at Alibaba achieves more than 80% precision while covering 44% more suspicious accounts compared with a previously deployed rule-based classifier after human expert investigations. Our approach can easily and effectively generalizes to other types of insurance.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2019

Model-Protected Multi-Task Learning

Multi-task learning (MTL) refers to the paradigm of learning multiple related tasks together. In contrast, in single-task learning (STL) each individual task is learned independently. MTL often leads to better trained models because they can leverage the commonalities among related tasks. However, because MTL algorithms can ``leak" information from different models across different tasks, MTL poses a potential security risk. Specifically, an adversary may participate in the MTL process through one task and thereby acquire the model information for another task. The previously proposed privacy-preserving MTL methods protect data instances rather than models, and some of them may underperform in comparison with STL methods. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving MTL framework to prevent information from each model leaking to other models based on a perturbation of the covariance matrix of the model matrix. We study two popular MTL approaches for instantiation, namely, learning the low-rank and group-sparse patterns of the model matrix. Our algorithms can be guaranteed not to underperform compared with STL methods. We build our methods based upon tools for differential privacy, and privacy guarantees, utility bounds are provided, and heterogeneous privacy budgets are considered. The experiments demonstrate that our algorithms outperform the baseline methods constructed by existing privacy-preserving MTL methods on the proposed model-protection problem.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2018

GeniePath: Graph Neural Networks with Adaptive Receptive Paths

We present, GeniePath, a scalable approach for learning adaptive receptive fields of neural networks defined on permutation invariant graph data. In GeniePath, we propose an adaptive path layer consists of two complementary functions designed for breadth and depth exploration respectively, where the former learns the importance of different sized neighborhoods, while the latter extracts and filters signals aggregated from neighbors of different hops away. Our method works in both transductive and inductive settings, and extensive experiments compared with competitive methods show that our approaches yield state-of-the-art results on large graphs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Distributed Collaborative Hashing and Its Applications in Ant Financial

Collaborative filtering, especially latent factor model, has been popularly used in personalized recommendation. Latent factor model aims to learn user and item latent factors from user-item historic behaviors. To apply it into real big data scenarios, efficiency becomes the first concern, including offline model training efficiency and online recommendation efficiency. In this paper, we propose a Distributed Collaborative Hashing (DCH) model which can significantly improve both efficiencies. Specifically, we first propose a distributed learning framework, following the state-of-the-art parameter server paradigm, to learn the offline collaborative model. Our model can be learnt efficiently by distributedly computing subgradients in minibatches on workers and updating model parameters on servers asynchronously. We then adopt hashing technique to speedup the online recommendation procedure. Recommendation can be quickly made through exploiting lookup hash tables. We conduct thorough experiments on two real large-scale datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that, comparing with the classic and state-of-the-art (distributed) latent factor models, DCH has comparable performance in terms of recommendation accuracy but has both fast convergence speed in offline model training procedure and realtime efficiency in online recommendation procedure. Furthermore, the encouraging performance of DCH is also shown for several real-world applications in Ant Financial.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Feature Propagation on Graph: A New Perspective to Graph Representation Learning

We study feature propagation on graph, an inference process involved in graph representation learning tasks. It's to spread the features over the whole graph to the $t$-th orders, thus to expand the end's features. The process has been successfully adopted in graph embedding or graph neural networks, however few works studied the convergence of feature propagation. Without convergence guarantees, it may lead to unexpected numerical overflows and task failures. In this paper, we first define the concept of feature propagation on graph formally, and then study its convergence conditions to equilibrium states. We further link feature propagation to several established approaches such as node2vec and structure2vec. In the end of this paper, we extend existing approaches from represent nodes to edges (edge2vec) and demonstrate its applications on fraud transaction detection in real world scenario. Experiments show that it is quite competitive.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2017

Attributing Hacks

In this paper we describe an algorithm for estimating the provenance of hacks on websites. That is, given properties of sites and the temporal occurrence of attacks, we are able to attribute individual attacks to joint causes and vulnerabilities, as well as estimating the evolution of these vulnerabilities over time. Specifically, we use hazard regression with a time-varying additive hazard function parameterized in a generalized linear form. The activation coefficients on each feature are continuous-time functions over time. We formulate the problem of learning these functions as a constrained variational maximum likelihood estimation problem with total variation penalty and show that the optimal solution is a 0th order spline (a piecewise constant function) with a finite number of known knots. This allows the inference problem to be solved efficiently and at scale by solving a finite dimensional optimization problem. Extensive experiments on real data sets show that our method significantly outperforms Cox's proportional hazard model. We also conduct a case study and verify that the fitted functions are indeed recovering vulnerable features and real-life events such as the release of code to exploit these features in hacker blogs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2016

Joint Hacking and Latent Hazard Rate Estimation

In this paper we describe an algorithm for predicting the websites at risk in a long range hacking activity, while jointly inferring the provenance and evolution of vulnerabilities on websites over continuous time. Specifically, we use hazard regression with a time-varying additive hazard function parameterized in a generalized linear form. The activation coefficients on each feature are continuous-time functions constrained with total variation penalty inspired by hacking campaigns. We show that the optimal solution is a 0th order spline with a finite number of adaptively chosen knots, and can be solved efficiently. Experiments on real data show that our method significantly outperforms classic methods while providing meaningful interpretability.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2015

Fast Differentially Private Matrix Factorization

Differentially private collaborative filtering is a challenging task, both in terms of accuracy and speed. We present a simple algorithm that is provably differentially private, while offering good performance, using a novel connection of differential privacy to Bayesian posterior sampling via Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics. Due to its simplicity the algorithm lends itself to efficient implementation. By careful systems design and by exploiting the power law behavior of the data to maximize CPU cache bandwidth we are able to generate 1024 dimensional models at a rate of 8.5 million recommendations per second on a single PC.

cs.LG↗