Database fingerprinting schemes have been widely adopted to prevent unauthorized sharing of data and identify the source of data leakages. Although existing schemes are robust against common attacks, such as random bit flipping and subset attack, their robustness degrades significantly if attackers utilize the inherent correlations among database entries. In this paper, we first demonstrate this vulnerability of the existing database fingerprinting schemes by identifying different correlation attacks: column-wise correlation attack, row-wise correlation attack, and the integration of them. To provide robust fingerprinting against the identified correlation attacks, we then develop mitigation techniques, which can work as post-processing steps for any off-the-shelf database fingerprinting schemes. The proposed mitigation techniques also preserve the utility of the fingerprinted database considering different utility metrics. We empirically investigate the impact of the identified correlation attacks and the performance of mitigation techniques using two real-world relational databases. Our results show (i) high success rates of the identified correlation attacks against existing fingerprinting schemes (e.g., the integrated correlation attack can distort 64.8% fingerprint bits by just modifying 14.2% entries in a fingerprinted database), and (ii) high robustness of the proposed mitigation techniques (e.g., after the proposed mitigation techniques, the integrated correlation attack can only distort 3% fingerprint bits). Furthermore, we show that the proposed mitigation techniques effectively alleviate correlation attacks even if the database owner has less accurate knowledge about data correlations compared to the attacker.
Stock trend forecasting, aiming at predicting the stock future trends, is crucial for investors to seek maximized profits from the stock market. Many event-driven methods utilized the events extracted from news, social media, and discussion board to forecast the stock trend in recent years. However, existing event-driven methods have two main shortcomings: 1) overlooking the influence of event information differentiated by the stock-dependent properties; 2) neglecting the effect of event information from other related stocks. In this paper, we propose a relational event-driven stock trend forecasting (REST) framework, which can address the shortcoming of existing methods. To remedy the first shortcoming, we propose to model the stock context and learn the effect of event information on the stocks under different contexts. To address the second shortcoming, we construct a stock graph and design a new propagation layer to propagate the effect of event information from related stocks. The experimental studies on the real-world data demonstrate the efficiency of our REST framework. The results of investment simulation show that our framework can achieve a higher return of investment than baselines.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received considerable attention on graph-structured data learning for a wide variety of tasks. The well-designed propagation mechanism which has been demonstrated effective is the most fundamental part of GNNs. Although most of GNNs basically follow a message passing manner, litter effort has been made to discover and analyze their essential relations. In this paper, we establish a surprising connection between different propagation mechanisms with a unified optimization problem, showing that despite the proliferation of various GNNs, in fact, their proposed propagation mechanisms are the optimal solution optimizing a feature fitting function over a wide class of graph kernels with a graph regularization term. Our proposed unified optimization framework, summarizing the commonalities between several of the most representative GNNs, not only provides a macroscopic view on surveying the relations between different GNNs, but also further opens up new opportunities for flexibly designing new GNNs. With the proposed framework, we discover that existing works usually utilize naive graph convolutional kernels for feature fitting function, and we further develop two novel objective functions considering adjustable graph kernels showing low-pass or high-pass filtering capabilities respectively. Moreover, we provide the convergence proofs and expressive power comparisons for the proposed models. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets clearly show that the proposed GNNs not only outperform the state-of-the-art methods but also have good ability to alleviate over-smoothing, and further verify the feasibility for designing GNNs with our unified optimization framework.
This paper focuses on the expected difference in borrower's repayment when there is a change in the lender's credit decisions. Classical estimators overlook the confounding effects and hence the estimation error can be magnificent. As such, we propose another approach to construct the estimators such that the error can be greatly reduced. The proposed estimators are shown to be unbiased, consistent, and robust through a combination of theoretical analysis and numerical testing. Moreover, we compare the power of estimating the causal quantities between the classical estimators and the proposed estimators. The comparison is tested across a wide range of models, including linear regression models, tree-based models, and neural network-based models, under different simulated datasets that exhibit different levels of causality, different degrees of nonlinearity, and different distributional properties. Most importantly, we apply our approaches to a large observational dataset provided by a global technology firm that operates in both the e-commerce and the lending business. We find that the relative reduction of estimation error is strikingly substantial if the causal effects are accounted for correctly.
Knowledge graph completion aims to predict missing relations between entities in a knowledge graph. While many different methods have been proposed, there is a lack of a unifying framework that would lead to state-of-the-art results. Here we develop PathCon, a knowledge graph completion method that harnesses four novel insights to outperform existing methods. PathCon predicts relations between a pair of entities by: (1) Considering the Relational Context of each entity by capturing the relation types adjacent to the entity and modeled through a novel edge-based message passing scheme; (2) Considering the Relational Paths capturing all paths between the two entities; And, (3) adaptively integrating the Relational Context and Relational Path through a learnable attention mechanism. Importantly, (4) in contrast to conventional node-based representations, PathCon represents context and path only using the relation types, which makes it applicable in an inductive setting. Experimental results on knowledge graph benchmarks as well as our newly proposed dataset show that PathCon outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge graph completion methods by a large margin. Finally, PathCon is able to provide interpretable explanations by identifying relations that provide the context and paths that are important for a given predicted relation.
In this paper, we propose Latent Relation Language Models (LRLMs), a class of language models that parameterizes the joint distribution over the words in a document and the entities that occur therein via knowledge graph relations. This model has a number of attractive properties: it not only improves language modeling performance, but is also able to annotate the posterior probability of entity spans for a given text through relations. Experiments demonstrate empirical improvements over both a word-based baseline language model and a previous approach that incorporates knowledge graph information. Qualitative analysis further demonstrates the proposed model's ability to learn to predict appropriate relations in context.
The recent proliferation of knowledge graphs (KGs) coupled with incomplete or partial information, in the form of missing relations (links) between entities, has fueled a lot of research on knowledge base completion (also known as relation prediction). Several recent works suggest that convolutional neural network (CNN) based models generate richer and more expressive feature embeddings and hence also perform well on relation prediction. However, we observe that these KG embeddings treat triples independently and thus fail to cover the complex and hidden information that is inherently implicit in the local neighborhood surrounding a triple. To this effect, our paper proposes a novel attention based feature embedding that captures both entity and relation features in any given entity's neighborhood. Additionally, we also encapsulate relation clusters and multihop relations in our model. Our empirical study offers insights into the efficacy of our attention based model and we show marked performance gains in comparison to state of the art methods on all datasets.
Deep structured models are widely used for tasks like semantic segmentation, where explicit correlations between variables provide important prior information which generally helps to reduce the data needs of deep nets. However, current deep structured models are restricted by oftentimes very local neighborhood structure, which cannot be increased for computational complexity reasons, and by the fact that the output configuration, or a representation thereof, cannot be transformed further. Very recent approaches which address those issues include graphical model inference inside deep nets so as to permit subsequent non-linear output space transformations. However, optimization of those formulations is challenging and not well understood. Here, we develop a novel model which generalizes existing approaches, such as structured prediction energy networks, and discuss a formulation which maintains applicability of existing inference techniques.
There is a rising interest in studying the robustness of deep neural network classifiers against adversaries, with both advanced attack and defence techniques being actively developed. However, most recent work focuses on discriminative classifiers, which only model the conditional distribution of the labels given the inputs. In this paper we propose the deep Bayes classifier, which improves classical naive Bayes with conditional deep generative models. We further develop detection methods for adversarial examples, which reject inputs that have negative log-likelihood under the generative model exceeding a threshold pre-specified using training data. Experimental results suggest that deep Bayes classifiers are more robust than deep discriminative classifiers, and the proposed detection methods achieve high detection rates against many recently proposed attacks.
Average precision (AP), the area under the recall-precision (RP) curve, is the standard performance measure for object detection. Despite its wide acceptance, it has a number of shortcomings, the most important of which are (i) the inability to distinguish very different RP curves, and (ii) the lack of directly measuring bounding box localization accuracy. In this paper, we propose 'Localization Recall Precision (LRP) Error', a new metric which we specifically designed for object detection. LRP Error is composed of three components related to localization, false negative (FN) rate and false positive (FP) rate. Based on LRP, we introduce the 'Optimal LRP', the minimum achievable LRP error representing the best achievable configuration of the detector in terms of recall-precision and the tightness of the boxes. In contrast to AP, which considers precisions over the entire recall domain, Optimal LRP determines the 'best' confidence score threshold for a class, which balances the trade-off between localization and recall-precision. In our experiments, we show that, for state-of-the-art object (SOTA) detectors, Optimal LRP provides richer and more discriminative information than AP. We also demonstrate that the best confidence score thresholds vary significantly among classes and detectors. Moreover, we present LRP results of a simple online video object detector which uses a SOTA still image object detector and show that the class-specific optimized thresholds increase the accuracy against the common approach of using a general threshold for all classes. We provide the source code that can compute LRP for the PASCAL VOC and MSCOCO datasets in //github.com/cancam/LRP. Our source code can easily be adapted to other datasets as well.
We introduce an approach for deep reinforcement learning (RL) that improves upon the efficiency, generalization capacity, and interpretability of conventional approaches through structured perception and relational reasoning. It uses self-attention to iteratively reason about the relations between entities in a scene and to guide a model-free policy. Our results show that in a novel navigation and planning task called Box-World, our agent finds interpretable solutions that improve upon baselines in terms of sample complexity, ability to generalize to more complex scenes than experienced during training, and overall performance. In the StarCraft II Learning Environment, our agent achieves state-of-the-art performance on six mini-games -- surpassing human grandmaster performance on four. By considering architectural inductive biases, our work opens new directions for overcoming important, but stubborn, challenges in deep RL.