arXiv subjects

Ziyao Cui

Publications and source records attributed to Ziyao Cui.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Mapping Subnational Vulnerability to Inadequate Micronutrient Intake using a Bayesian Small Area Estimation Framework

Inadequate dietary micronutrient intake is a significant risk factor for deficiency and remains a major global health challenge. Nutrition programmes and interventions are most effective when targeted to populations at greatest risk. Household Consumption and Expenditure Surveys (HCES) are a widely available source of dietary data; however, they are often not powered for estimation below the first administrative level, limiting their utility for geographically targeted interventions. To address this, we applied Bayesian Small Area Estimation (SAE) methods to estimate the prevalence of apparent inadequate intake at the second administrative level. Three approaches were considered: a cluster level Beta binomial model and two area level models (mean smoothing and joint smoothing). Models were evaluated using a Rwanda HCES survey that supports inference at this scale. All models were implemented in a fully Bayesian framework to propagate uncertainty. Simulation results in Rwanda showed that the cluster level Beta binomial model achieved the strongest performance, while the area level joint smoothing model was the most reliable alternative among models accounting for survey design. Based on these results, models were applied to Senegal and Nigeria. In Senegal, second administrative level estimates captured meaningful subnational variation, reduced uncertainty relative to direct estimates, and remained consistent with first administrative level benchmarks. In Nigeria, despite smaller sample sizes and survey design constraints, modelled estimates reduced extreme uncertainty and showed good agreement with first administrative level estimates. This study demonstrates that Bayesian SAE methods can be applied to HCES data to generate reliable fine scale estimates of inadequate micronutrient intake, supporting localised nutrition interventions.

stat.AP↗

arXiv2026

How Is Uncertainty Propagated in Knowledge Distillation?

Knowledge distillation transfers behavior from a teacher to a student model, but the process is inherently stochastic: teacher outputs, student training, and student inference can all be random. Collapsing these uncertainties to a single point estimate can distort what is learned. We systematically study how uncertainty propagates through knowledge distillation across three representative model classes--linear regression, feed-forward neural networks, and large language models (LLMs)--and propose simple corrections. We distinguish inter-student uncertainty (variance across independently distilled students) from intra-student uncertainty (variance of a single student's predictive distribution), showing that standard single-response knowledge distillation suppresses intra-student variance while leaving substantial inter-student variability. To address these mismatches, we introduce two variance-aware strategies: averaging multiple teacher responses, which reduces noise at rate $O(1/k)$, and variance-weighting, which combines teacher and student estimates via inverse-variance weighting to yield a minimum-variance estimator. We provide formal guarantees in linear regression, validate the methods in neural networks, and demonstrate empirical gains in LLM distillation, including reduced systematic noise and hallucination. These results reframe knowledge distillation as an uncertainty transformation and show that variance-aware distillation produces more stable students that better reflect teacher uncertainty.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Beyond the Laplacian: Interpolated Spectral Augmentation for Graph Neural Networks

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are fundamental tools in graph machine learning. The performance of GNNs relies crucially on the availability of informative node features, which can be limited or absent in real-life datasets and applications. A natural remedy is to augment the node features with embeddings computed from eigenvectors of the graph Laplacian matrix. While it is natural to default to Laplacian spectral embeddings, which capture meaningful graph connectivity information, we ask whether spectral embeddings from alternative graph matrices can also provide useful representations for learning. We introduce Interpolated Laplacian Embeddings (ILEs), which are derived from a simple yet expressive family of graph matrices. Using tools from spectral graph theory, we offer a straightforward interpretation of the structural information that ILEs capture. We demonstrate through simulations and experiments on real-world datasets that feature augmentation via ILEs can improve performance across commonly used GNN architectures. Our work offers a straightforward and practical approach that broadens the practitioner's spectral augmentation toolkit when node features are limited.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Learning to Attack: Uncovering Privacy Risks in Sequential Data Releases

Privacy concerns have become increasingly critical in modern AI and data science applications, where sensitive information is collected, analyzed, and shared across diverse domains such as healthcare, finance, and mobility. While prior research has focused on protecting privacy in a single data release, many real-world systems operate under sequential or continuous data publishing, where the same or related data are released over time. Such sequential disclosures introduce new vulnerabilities, as temporal correlations across releases may enable adversaries to infer sensitive information that remains hidden in any individual release. In this paper, we investigate whether an attacker can compromise privacy in sequential data releases by exploiting dependencies between consecutive publications, even when each individual release satisfies standard privacy guarantees. To this end, we propose a novel attack model that captures these sequential dependencies by integrating a Hidden Markov Model with a reinforcement learning-based bi-directional inference mechanism. This enables the attacker to leverage both earlier and later observations in the sequence to infer private information. We instantiate our framework in the context of trajectory data, demonstrating how an adversary can recover sensitive locations from sequential mobility datasets. Extensive experiments on Geolife, Porto Taxi, and SynMob datasets show that our model consistently outperforms baseline approaches that treat each release independently. The results reveal a fundamental privacy risk inherent to sequential data publishing, where individually protected releases can collectively leak sensitive information when analyzed temporally. These findings underscore the need for new privacy-preserving frameworks that explicitly model temporal dependencies, such as time-aware differential privacy or sequential data obfuscation strategies.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Revisiting Broken Windows Theory

We revisit the longstanding question of how physical structures in urban landscapes influence crime. Leveraging machine learning-based matching techniques to control for demographic composition, we estimate the effects of several types of urban structures on the incidence of violent crime in New York City and Chicago. We additionally contribute to a growing body of literature documenting the relationship between perception of crime and actual crime rates by separately analyzing how the physical urban landscape shapes subjective feelings of safety. Our results are twofold. First, in consensus with prior work, we demonstrate a "broken windows" effect in which abandoned buildings, a sign of social disorder, are associated with both greater incidence of crime and a heightened perception of danger. This is also true of types of urban structures that draw foot traffic such as public transportation infrastructure. Second, these effects are not uniform within or across cities. The criminogenic effects of the same structure types across two cities differ in magnitude, degree of spatial localization, and heterogeneity across subgroups, while within the same city, the effects of different structure types are confounded by different demographic variables. Taken together, these results emphasize that one-size-fits-all approaches to crime reduction are untenable and policy interventions must be specifically tailored to their targets.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

On Membership Inference Attacks in Knowledge Distillation

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on massive corpora that may contain sensitive information, creating privacy risks under membership inference attacks (MIAs). Knowledge distillation is widely used to compress LLMs into smaller student models, but its privacy implications are poorly understood. We systematically evaluate how distillation affects MIA vulnerability across six teacher-student model pairs and six attack methods. We find that distilled student models do not consistently exhibit lower MIA success than their teacher models, and in some cases demonstrate substantially higher member-specific attack success, challenging the assumption that knowledge distillation inherently improves privacy. We attribute this to mixed supervision in distillation: for vulnerable training data points, teacher predictions often align with ground-truth labels, causing student models to learn overly confident predictions that amplify the separability between members and non-members; conversely, for non-vulnerable points, teacher predictions and ground truth frequently diverge, providing inconsistent learning signals. To mitigate this, we propose three practical interventions -- restricting distillation to non-vulnerable points, adding a low-dimensional Bottleneck Projection, and a normalization variant (NoNorm). Experiments show these methods reduce both aggregate and member-specific MIA success while preserving model utility, improving privacy-utility trade-offs for distilled LLMs.

cs.LG↗