Backdoor attacks pose a significant threat to the security of federated learning systems. However, existing research primarily focuses on backdoor attacks and defenses within the generic FL scenario, where all clients collaborate to train a single global model. \citet{qin2023revisiting} conduct the first study of backdoor attacks in the personalized federated learning (pFL) scenario, where each client constructs a personalized model based on its local data. Notably, the study demonstrates that pFL methods with partial model-sharing can significantly boost robustness against backdoor attacks. In this paper, we whistleblow that pFL methods with partial model-sharing are still vulnerable to backdoor attacks in the absence of any defense. We propose three backdoor attack methods: BapFL, BapFL+, and Gen-BapFL, and we empirically demonstrate that they can effectively attack the pFL methods. Specifically, the key principle of BapFL lies in maintaining clean local parameters while implanting the backdoor into the global parameters. BapFL+ generalizes the attack success to benign clients by introducing Gaussian noise to the local parameters. Furthermore, we assume the collaboration of malicious clients and propose Gen-BapFL, which leverages meta-learning techniques to further enhances attack generalization. We evaluate our proposed attack methods against two classic pFL methods with partial model-sharing, FedPer and LG-FedAvg. Extensive experiments on four FL benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed attack methods. Additionally, we assess the defense efficacy of various defense strategies against our proposed attacks and find that Gradient Norm-Clipping is particularly effective. It is crucial to note that pFL method is not always secure in the presence of backdoor attacks, and we hope to inspire further research on attack and defense in pFL scenarios.
This paper proposes a shape anchor guided learning strategy (AncLearn) for robust holistic indoor scene understanding. We observe that the search space constructed by current methods for proposal feature grouping and instance point sampling often introduces massive noise to instance detection and mesh reconstruction. Accordingly, we develop AncLearn to generate anchors that dynamically fit instance surfaces to (i) unmix noise and target-related features for offering reliable proposals at the detection stage, and (ii) reduce outliers in object point sampling for directly providing well-structured geometry priors without segmentation during reconstruction. We embed AncLearn into a reconstruction-from-detection learning system (AncRec) to generate high-quality semantic scene models in a purely instance-oriented manner. Experiments conducted on the challenging ScanNetv2 dataset demonstrate that our shape anchor-based method consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of 3D object detection, layout estimation, and shape reconstruction. The code will be available at //github.com/Geo-Tell/AncRec.
Website Fingerprinting (WF) is considered a major threat to the anonymity of Tor users (and other anonymity systems). While state-of-the-art WF techniques have claimed high attack accuracies, e.g., by leveraging Deep Neural Networks (DNN), several recent works have questioned the practicality of such WF attacks in the real world due to the assumptions made in the design and evaluation of these attacks. In this work, we argue that such impracticality issues are mainly due to the attacker's inability in collecting training data in comprehensive network conditions, e.g., a WF classifier may be trained only on samples collected on specific high-bandwidth network links but deployed on connections with different network conditions. We show that augmenting network traces can enhance the performance of WF classifiers in unobserved network conditions. Specifically, we introduce NetAugment, an augmentation technique tailored to the specifications of Tor traces. We instantiate NetAugment through semi-supervised and self-supervised learning techniques. Our extensive open-world and close-world experiments demonstrate that under practical evaluation settings, our WF attacks provide superior performances compared to the state-of-the-art; this is due to their use of augmented network traces for training, which allows them to learn the features of target traffic in unobserved settings. For instance, with a 5-shot learning in a closed-world scenario, our self-supervised WF attack (named NetCLR) reaches up to 80% accuracy when the traces for evaluation are collected in a setting unobserved by the WF adversary. This is compared to an accuracy of 64.4% achieved by the state-of-the-art Triplet Fingerprinting [35]. We believe that the promising results of our work can encourage the use of network trace augmentation in other types of network traffic analysis.
Technology ecosystems often undergo significant transformations as they mature. For example, telephony, the Internet, and PCs all started with a single provider, but in the United States each is now served by a competitive market that uses comprehensive and universal technology standards to provide compatibility. This white paper presents our view on how the cloud ecosystem, barely over fifteen years old, could evolve as it matures.
Breakthroughs in machine learning in the last decade have led to `digital intelligence', i.e. machine learning models capable of learning from vast amounts of labeled data to perform several digital tasks such as speech recognition, face recognition, machine translation and so on. The goal of this thesis is to make progress towards designing algorithms capable of `physical intelligence', i.e. building intelligent autonomous navigation agents capable of learning to perform complex navigation tasks in the physical world involving visual perception, natural language understanding, reasoning, planning, and sequential decision making. Despite several advances in classical navigation methods in the last few decades, current navigation agents struggle at long-term semantic navigation tasks. In the first part of the thesis, we discuss our work on short-term navigation using end-to-end reinforcement learning to tackle challenges such as obstacle avoidance, semantic perception, language grounding, and reasoning. In the second part, we present a new class of navigation methods based on modular learning and structured explicit map representations, which leverage the strengths of both classical and end-to-end learning methods, to tackle long-term navigation tasks. We show that these methods are able to effectively tackle challenges such as localization, mapping, long-term planning, exploration and learning semantic priors. These modular learning methods are capable of long-term spatial and semantic understanding and achieve state-of-the-art results on various navigation tasks.
Recently, a considerable literature has grown up around the theme of Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). How to effectively leverage the rich structural information in complex graphs, such as knowledge graphs with heterogeneous types of entities and relations, is a primary open challenge in the field. Most GCN methods are either restricted to graphs with a homogeneous type of edges (e.g., citation links only), or focusing on representation learning for nodes only instead of jointly propagating and updating the embeddings of both nodes and edges for target-driven objectives. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing a novel framework, namely the Knowledge Embedding based Graph Convolutional Network (KE-GCN), which combines the power of GCNs in graph-based belief propagation and the strengths of advanced knowledge embedding (a.k.a. knowledge graph embedding) methods, and goes beyond. Our theoretical analysis shows that KE-GCN offers an elegant unification of several well-known GCN methods as specific cases, with a new perspective of graph convolution. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show the advantageous performance of KE-GCN over strong baseline methods in the tasks of knowledge graph alignment and entity classification.
Self-supervised learning has been widely used to obtain transferrable representations from unlabeled images. Especially, recent contrastive learning methods have shown impressive performances on downstream image classification tasks. While these contrastive methods mainly focus on generating invariant global representations at the image-level under semantic-preserving transformations, they are prone to overlook spatial consistency of local representations and therefore have a limitation in pretraining for localization tasks such as object detection and instance segmentation. Moreover, aggressively cropped views used in existing contrastive methods can minimize representation distances between the semantically different regions of a single image. In this paper, we propose a spatially consistent representation learning algorithm (SCRL) for multi-object and location-specific tasks. In particular, we devise a novel self-supervised objective that tries to produce coherent spatial representations of a randomly cropped local region according to geometric translations and zooming operations. On various downstream localization tasks with benchmark datasets, the proposed SCRL shows significant performance improvements over the image-level supervised pretraining as well as the state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods.
Graph Neural Networks (GNN) is an emerging field for learning on non-Euclidean data. Recently, there has been increased interest in designing GNN that scales to large graphs. Most existing methods use "graph sampling" or "layer-wise sampling" techniques to reduce training time. However, these methods still suffer from degrading performance and scalability problems when applying to graphs with billions of edges. This paper presents GBP, a scalable GNN that utilizes a localized bidirectional propagation process from both the feature vectors and the training/testing nodes. Theoretical analysis shows that GBP is the first method that achieves sub-linear time complexity for both the precomputation and the training phases. An extensive empirical study demonstrates that GBP achieves state-of-the-art performance with significantly less training/testing time. Most notably, GBP can deliver superior performance on a graph with over 60 million nodes and 1.8 billion edges in less than half an hour on a single machine.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have recently become the primary choice for learning from graph-structured data, superseding hash fingerprints in representing chemical compounds. However, GCNs lack the ability to take into account the ordering of node neighbors, even when there is a geometric interpretation of the graph vertices that provides an order based on their spatial positions. To remedy this issue, we propose Geometric Graph Convolutional Network (geo-GCN) which uses spatial features to efficiently learn from graphs that can be naturally located in space. Our contribution is threefold: we propose a GCN-inspired architecture which (i) leverages node positions, (ii) is a proper generalisation of both GCNs and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), (iii) benefits from augmentation which further improves the performance and assures invariance with respect to the desired properties. Empirically, geo-GCN outperforms state-of-the-art graph-based methods on image classification and chemical tasks.
Attention networks in multimodal learning provide an efficient way to utilize given visual information selectively. However, the computational cost to learn attention distributions for every pair of multimodal input channels is prohibitively expensive. To solve this problem, co-attention builds two separate attention distributions for each modality neglecting the interaction between multimodal inputs. In this paper, we propose bilinear attention networks (BAN) that find bilinear attention distributions to utilize given vision-language information seamlessly. BAN considers bilinear interactions among two groups of input channels, while low-rank bilinear pooling extracts the joint representations for each pair of channels. Furthermore, we propose a variant of multimodal residual networks to exploit eight-attention maps of the BAN efficiently. We quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate our model on visual question answering (VQA 2.0) and Flickr30k Entities datasets, showing that BAN significantly outperforms previous methods and achieves new state-of-the-arts on both datasets.
This paper proposes a method to modify traditional convolutional neural networks (CNNs) into interpretable CNNs, in order to clarify knowledge representations in high conv-layers of CNNs. In an interpretable CNN, each filter in a high conv-layer represents a certain object part. We do not need any annotations of object parts or textures to supervise the learning process. Instead, the interpretable CNN automatically assigns each filter in a high conv-layer with an object part during the learning process. Our method can be applied to different types of CNNs with different structures. The clear knowledge representation in an interpretable CNN can help people understand the logics inside a CNN, i.e., based on which patterns the CNN makes the decision. Experiments showed that filters in an interpretable CNN were more semantically meaningful than those in traditional CNNs.