A key challenge of big data analytics is how to collect a large volume of (labeled) data. Crowdsourcing aims to address this challenge via aggregating and estimating high-quality data (e.g., sentiment label for text) from pervasive clients/users. Existing studies on crowdsourcing focus on designing new methods to improve the aggregated data quality from unreliable/noisy clients. However, the security aspects of such crowdsourcing systems remain under-explored to date. We aim to bridge this gap in this work. Specifically, we show that crowdsourcing is vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, in which malicious clients provide carefully crafted data to corrupt the aggregated data. We formulate our proposed data poisoning attacks as an optimization problem that maximizes the error of the aggregated data. Our evaluation results on one synthetic and two real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed attacks can substantially increase the estimation errors of the aggregated data. We also propose two defenses to reduce the impact of malicious clients. Our empirical results show that the proposed defenses can substantially reduce the estimation errors of the data poisoning attacks.
Shortcomings of randomized clinical trials are pronounced in urgent health crises, when rapid identification of effective treatments is critical. Leveraging short-term surrogates in real-world data (RWD) can guide policymakers evaluating new treatments. In this paper, we develop novel estimators for the proportion of treatment effect (PTE) on the true outcome explained by a surrogate in RWD settings. We propose inverse probability weighted and doubly robust (DR) estimators of an optimal transformation of the surrogate and PTE by semi-nonparametrically modeling the relationship between the true outcome and surrogate given baseline covariates. We show that our estimators are consistent and asymptotically normal, and the DR estimator is consistent when either the propensity score model or outcome regression model is correctly specified. We compare our proposed estimators to existing estimators and show a reduction in bias and gains in efficiency through simulations. We illustrate the utility of our method in obtaining an interpretable PTE by conducting a cross-trial comparison of two biologic therapies for ulcerative colitis.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence, especially deep learning technology, has advanced autonomous driving systems (ADSs) by providing precise control decisions to counterpart almost any driving event, spanning from anti-fatigue safe driving to intelligent route planning. However, ADSs are still plagued by increasing threats from different attacks, which could be categorized into physical attacks, cyberattacks and learning-based adversarial attacks. Inevitably, the safety and security of deep learning-based autonomous driving are severely challenged by these attacks, from which the countermeasures should be analyzed and studied comprehensively to mitigate all potential risks. This survey provides a thorough analysis of different attacks that may jeopardize ADSs, as well as the corresponding state-of-the-art defense mechanisms. The analysis is unrolled by taking an in-depth overview of each step in the ADS workflow, covering adversarial attacks for various deep learning models and attacks in both physical and cyber context. Furthermore, some promising research directions are suggested in order to improve deep learning-based autonomous driving safety, including model robustness training, model testing and verification, and anomaly detection based on cloud/edge servers.
We study a crowdsourcing problem where the platform aims to incentivize distributed workers to provide high quality and truthful solutions without the ability to verify the solutions. While most prior work assumes that the platform and workers have symmetric information, we study an asymmetric information scenario where the platform has informational advantages. Specifically, the platform knows more information regarding worker average solution accuracy, and can strategically reveal such information to workers. Workers will utilize the announced information to determine the likelihood that they obtain a reward if exerting effort on the task. We study two types of workers, naive workers who fully trust the announcement, and strategic workers who update prior belief based on the announcement. For naive workers, we show that the platform should always announce a high average accuracy to maximize its payoff. However, this is not always optimal for strategic workers, as it may reduce the credibility of the platform announcement and hence reduce the platform payoff. Interestingly, the platform may have an incentive to even announce an average accuracy lower than the actual value when facing strategic workers. Another counterintuitive result is that the platform payoff may decrease in the number of high accuracy workers.
Adversarial attack is a technique for deceiving Machine Learning (ML) models, which provides a way to evaluate the adversarial robustness. In practice, attack algorithms are artificially selected and tuned by human experts to break a ML system. However, manual selection of attackers tends to be sub-optimal, leading to a mistakenly assessment of model security. In this paper, a new procedure called Composite Adversarial Attack (CAA) is proposed for automatically searching the best combination of attack algorithms and their hyper-parameters from a candidate pool of \textbf{32 base attackers}. We design a search space where attack policy is represented as an attacking sequence, i.e., the output of the previous attacker is used as the initialization input for successors. Multi-objective NSGA-II genetic algorithm is adopted for finding the strongest attack policy with minimum complexity. The experimental result shows CAA beats 10 top attackers on 11 diverse defenses with less elapsed time (\textbf{6 $\times$ faster than AutoAttack}), and achieves the new state-of-the-art on $l_{\infty}$, $l_{2}$ and unrestricted adversarial attacks.
As data are increasingly being stored in different silos and societies becoming more aware of data privacy issues, the traditional centralized training of artificial intelligence (AI) models is facing efficiency and privacy challenges. Recently, federated learning (FL) has emerged as an alternative solution and continue to thrive in this new reality. Existing FL protocol design has been shown to be vulnerable to adversaries within or outside of the system, compromising data privacy and system robustness. Besides training powerful global models, it is of paramount importance to design FL systems that have privacy guarantees and are resistant to different types of adversaries. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive survey on this topic. Through a concise introduction to the concept of FL, and a unique taxonomy covering: 1) threat models; 2) poisoning attacks and defenses against robustness; 3) inference attacks and defenses against privacy, we provide an accessible review of this important topic. We highlight the intuitions, key techniques as well as fundamental assumptions adopted by various attacks and defenses. Finally, we discuss promising future research directions towards robust and privacy-preserving federated learning.
Recently, NLP has seen a surge in the usage of large pre-trained models. Users download weights of models pre-trained on large datasets, then fine-tune the weights on a task of their choice. This raises the question of whether downloading untrusted pre-trained weights can pose a security threat. In this paper, we show that it is possible to construct ``weight poisoning'' attacks where pre-trained weights are injected with vulnerabilities that expose ``backdoors'' after fine-tuning, enabling the attacker to manipulate the model prediction simply by injecting an arbitrary keyword. We show that by applying a regularization method, which we call RIPPLe, and an initialization procedure, which we call Embedding Surgery, such attacks are possible even with limited knowledge of the dataset and fine-tuning procedure. Our experiments on sentiment classification, toxicity detection, and spam detection show that this attack is widely applicable and poses a serious threat. Finally, we outline practical defenses against such attacks. Code to reproduce our experiments is available at //github.com/neulab/RIPPLe.
To solve the information explosion problem and enhance user experience in various online applications, recommender systems have been developed to model users preferences. Although numerous efforts have been made toward more personalized recommendations, recommender systems still suffer from several challenges, such as data sparsity and cold start. In recent years, generating recommendations with the knowledge graph as side information has attracted considerable interest. Such an approach can not only alleviate the abovementioned issues for a more accurate recommendation, but also provide explanations for recommended items. In this paper, we conduct a systematical survey of knowledge graph-based recommender systems. We collect recently published papers in this field and summarize them from two perspectives. On the one hand, we investigate the proposed algorithms by focusing on how the papers utilize the knowledge graph for accurate and explainable recommendation. On the other hand, we introduce datasets used in these works. Finally, we propose several potential research directions in this field.
There has been an ongoing cycle where stronger defenses against adversarial attacks are subsequently broken by a more advanced defense-aware attack. We present a new approach towards ending this cycle where we "deflect'' adversarial attacks by causing the attacker to produce an input that semantically resembles the attack's target class. To this end, we first propose a stronger defense based on Capsule Networks that combines three detection mechanisms to achieve state-of-the-art detection performance on both standard and defense-aware attacks. We then show that undetected attacks against our defense often perceptually resemble the adversarial target class by performing a human study where participants are asked to label images produced by the attack. These attack images can no longer be called "adversarial'' because our network classifies them the same way as humans do.
Unsupervised node embedding methods (e.g., DeepWalk, LINE, and node2vec) have attracted growing interests given their simplicity and effectiveness. However, although these methods have been proved effective in a variety of applications, none of the existing work has analyzed the robustness of them. This could be very risky if these methods are attacked by an adversarial party. In this paper, we take the task of link prediction as an example, which is one of the most fundamental problems for graph analysis, and introduce a data positioning attack to node embedding methods. We give a complete characterization of attacker's utilities and present efficient solutions to adversarial attacks for two popular node embedding methods: DeepWalk and LINE. We evaluate our proposed attack model on multiple real-world graphs. Experimental results show that our proposed model can significantly affect the results of link prediction by slightly changing the graph structures (e.g., adding or removing a few edges). We also show that our proposed model is very general and can be transferable across different embedding methods. Finally, we conduct a case study on a coauthor network to better understand our attack method.
We construct targeted audio adversarial examples on automatic speech recognition. Given any audio waveform, we can produce another that is over 99.9% similar, but transcribes as any phrase we choose (at a rate of up to 50 characters per second). We apply our iterative optimization-based attack to Mozilla's implementation DeepSpeech end-to-end, and show it has a 100% success rate. The feasibility of this attack introduce a new domain to study adversarial examples.