Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly underpin intelligent web applications, from chatbots to search and recommendation, where efficient specialization is essential. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) enables such adaptation with minimal overhead, while federated LoRA allows web service providers to fine-tune shared models without data sharing. However, in privacy-sensitive deployments, clients inject varying levels of differential privacy (DP) noise, creating privacy heterogeneity that misaligns individual incentives and global performance. In this paper, we propose WinFLoRA, a privacy-heterogeneous federated LoRA that utilizes aggregation weights as incentives with noise awareness. Specifically, the noises from clients are estimated based on the uploaded LoRA adapters. A larger weight indicates greater influence on the global model and better downstream task performance, rewarding lower-noise contributions. By up-weighting low-noise updates, WinFLoRA improves global accuracy while accommodating clients' heterogeneous privacy requirements. Consequently, WinFLoRA aligns heterogeneous client utility in terms of privacy and downstream performance with global model objectives without third-party involvement. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that across multiple LLMs and datasets, WinFLoRA achieves up to 52.58% higher global accuracy and up to 2.56× client utility than state-of-the-art benchmarks. Source code is publicly available at https://github.com/koums24/WinFLoRA.git.

A reliable autonomous driving system requires a high-precision perception module. Collaborative perception is emerging as a web-scale information-sharing paradigm for autonomous driving, enabling multiple vehicles to collectively achieve a broader perception field than any single vehicle. However, existing approaches necessitate frequent one-to-many communication, which increases network load and leads to information redundancy. This paper presents Octopus, an innovative vehicle-to-road collaboration framework that leverages the computational capabilities of roadside units. Instead of frequent one-to-many communication, vehicles interact only with roadside units, which significantly reduces communication overhead and improves real-time processing efficiency. While this design alleviates communication burdens, vehicles may still struggle to achieve comprehensive situational awareness in highly dynamic environments. To further address this limitation, our framework incorporates global fusion results as prior knowledge, enabling closed-loop fusion to refine vehicle-side perception. Extensive experiments on OPV2V and V2V4Real datasets demonstrate that Octopus excels at collaborative perception, outperforming the state-of-the-art approach up to 11.58% on [email protected], 12.74% on [email protected] and 5514× reduction in communication volume.

Deceptive patterns (DPs) are user interface designs deliberately crafted to manipulate users into unintended decisions, often by exploiting cognitive biases for the benefit of companies or services. While numerous studies have explored ways to identify these deceptive patterns, many existing solutions require significant human intervention and struggle to keep pace with the evolving nature of deceptive designs. To address these challenges, we expanded the deceptive pattern taxonomy from security and privacy perspectives, refining its categories and scope. We created a comprehensive dataset of deceptive patterns by integrating existing small-scale datasets with new samples, resulting in 6,725 images and 10,421 DP instances from mobile apps and websites. We then developed DPGuard, a novel automatic tool leveraging commercial multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for deceptive pattern detection. Experimental results show that DPGuard outperforms state-of-the-art methods. An extensive empirical evaluation on 2,000 popular mobile apps and websites reveals that 25.7% of mobile apps and 49.0% websites feature at least one deceptive pattern instance. Through 4 unexplored case studies that inform security implications, we highlight the critical importance of the unified taxonomy in addressing the growing challenges of Internet deception.

Large-scale models are typically adapted to meet the diverse requirements of model owners and users.However, maintaining multiple specialized versions of the model is inefficient.In response, we propose Aim, a novel model modulation paradigm that enables a single model to exhibit diverse behaviors to meet the specific end requirements.Aim enables two key modulation modes: utility and focus modulations.The former provides model owners with dynamic control over output quality to deliver varying utility levels, and the latter offers users precise control to shift model's focused input features.Aim introduces a logits redistribution strategy that operates in a training data-agnostic and retraining-free manner.We establish a formal foundation to ensure Aim's regulation capability, based on the statistical properties of logits ordering via joint probability distributions.Our evaluation confirms Aim's practicality and versatility for AI model modulation, with tasks spanning image classification, semantic segmentation and text generation, and prevalent architectures including ResNet, SegFormer and Llama.

Protecting sensitive information on data streams is a pivotal challenge for modern systems. Current approaches to providing privacy in data streams can be broadly categorized into two strategies. The first strategy involves transforming the stream into a private sequence of values, enabling the subsequent use of non-private methods of analysis. While effective, this approach incurs high memory costs, often proportional to the size of the database. Alternatively, a compact data structure can be used to provide a private summary of the stream. However, these data structures are limited to predefined queries, restricting their flexibility. To overcome these limitations, we propose a lightweight synthetic data generator, PrivHP, that provides differential privacy guarantees. PrivHP is based on a novel method for the private hierarchical decomposition of the input domain in bounded memory. As the decomposition approximates the cumulative distribution function of the input, it serves as a lightweight structure for synthetic data generation. PrivHP is the first method to provide a principled trade-off between accuracy and space for private hierarchical decompositions. It achieves this by balancing hierarchy depth, noise addition, and selective pruning of low-frequency subdomains while preserving high-frequency ones, all identified in a privacy-preserving manner. To ensure memory efficiency, we employ private sketches to estimate subdomain frequencies without accessing the entire dataset. Central to our approach is the introduction of a pruning parameter k , which enables an almost smooth interpolation between space usage and utility, and a measure of skew tail k , which is a vector of subdomain frequencies containing all but the largest k coordinates. PrivHP processes a dataset X using M = O (k log 2 | X |)) space and, on input domain Ω = [0,1] d , while maintaining ε-differential privacy, produces a synthetic data generator that is at distance O ( M (1-1/d) /ε n + ||tail k ( X )|| 1 /M 1/d n ) from the empirical distribution in the expected Wasserstein metric. Compared to the state-of-the-art, PMM, which achieves accuracy O ((ε n) -1/d ) with memory O (ε n), our method introduces an additional approximation error term of O (||tail k ( X )|| 1 /(M 1/d n)), but operates in significantly reduced space. Additionally, we provide interpretable utility bounds that account for all error sources, including those introduced by the fixed hierarchy depth, privacy noise, hierarchy pruning, and frequency approximations.

The global deployment of the 5G network has led to a substantial increase in the deployment of edge servers to host web applications, catering to the growing demand for low service latency by edge web users. Yet, running edge servers 24/7 leads to enormous energy consumption and excessive carbon emissions. Energy-efficient edge resource provision is desired to achieve sustainable development goals in the new multi-access edge computing (MEC) architecture. Recently, several approaches have been proposed to solve the demand response problem for energy saving in cloud computing and MEC. However, accurate location information of edge web users should always be provided, which sacrifices users' privacy. To protect edge web users' location privacy while saving energy in MEC, we systematically formulate this location privacy-preserving edge demand response (LEDR) problem. To solve the LEDR problem effectively and efficiently, we propose a system named GEES by incorporating differential geo-obfuscation to secure user privacy while maximizing system utility and energy efficiency through inferences with theoretical analysis. Extensive and comprehensive experiments are conducted based on a synthetic real-world dataset, and the results demonstrate that GEES outperforms representative approaches by 23.02%, 31.47%, and 17.29% on average in terms of energy efficiency, user privacy and system utility.

The task of cardinality counting, pivotal for data analysis, endeavors to quantify unique elements within datasets and has significant applications across various sectors like healthcare, marketing, cybersecurity, and web analytics. Current methods, categorized into deterministic and probabilistic, often fail to prioritize data privacy. Given the fragmentation of datasets across various organizations, there is an elevated risk of inadvertently disclosing sensitive information during collaborative data studies using state-of-the-art cardinality counting techniques. This study introduces an innovative privacy-centric solution for the cardinality counting dilemma, leveraging a federated learning framework. Our approach involves employing a locally differentially private data encoding for initial processing, followed by a privacy-aware federated K-means clustering strategy, ensuring that cardinality counting occurs across distinct datasets without necessitating data amalgamation. The efficacy of our methodology is underscored by promising results from tests on both real-world and simulated datasets, pointing towards a transformative approach to privacy-sensitive cardinality counting in contemporary data science.

The energy industry is undergoing significant transformations as it strives to achieve net-zero emissions and future-proof its infrastructure, where every participant in the power grid has the potential to both consume and produce energy resources. Federated learning -- which enables multiple participants to collaboratively train a model without aggregating the training data -- becomes a viable technology. However, the global model parameters that have to be shared for optimization are still susceptible to training data leakage. In this work, we propose confined gradient descent (CGD) that enhances the privacy of federated learning by eliminating the sharing of global model parameters. CGD exploits the fact that a gradient descent optimization can start with a set of discrete points and converges to another set in the neighborhood of the global minimum of the objective function. As such, each participant can independently initiate its own private global model~(referred to as the confined model ), and collaboratively learn it towards the optimum. The updates to their own models are worked out in a secure collaborative way during the training process.In such a manner, CGD retains the ability of learning from distributed data but greatly diminishes information sharing. Such a strategy also allows the proprietary confined models to adapt to the heterogeneity in federated learning, providing inherent benefits of fairness. We theoretically and empirically demonstrate that decentralized CGD øne provides a stronger differential privacy (DP) protection; \two is robust against the state-of-the-art poisoning privacy attacks; þree results in bounded fairness guarantee among participants; and \four provides high test accuracy (comparable with centralized learning) with a bounded convergence rate over four real-world datasets.

The rapid development of deep learning has demonstrated its potential for deployment in many intelligent service systems. However, some issues such as optimisation (e.g., how to reduce the deployment resources costs and further improve the detection speed), especially in scenarios where limited resources are available, remain challenging to address. In this paper, we aim to delve into the principles of deep neural networks, focusing on the importance of network neurons. The goal is to identify the neurons that exert minimal impact on model performances, thereby aiding in the process of model pruning. In this work, we have thoroughly considered the deep learning model pruning process with and without fine-tuning step, ensuring the model performance consistency. To achieve our objectives, we propose a methodology that employs adversarial attack methods to explore deep neural network parameters. This approach is combined with an innovative attribution algorithm to analyse the level of network neurons involvement. In our experiments, our approach can effectively quantify the importance of network neuron. We extend the evaluation through comprehensive experiments conducted on a range of datasets, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and Caltech101. The results demonstrate that, our method have consistently achieved the state-of-the-art performance over many existing methods. We anticipate that this work will help to reduce the heavy training and inference cost of deep neural network models where a lightweight deep learning enhanced service and system is possible. The source code is open source at https://github.com/LMBTough/FVW.

The digital age has brought a world of opportunity to children. Connectivity can be a game-changer for some of the world’s most marginalized children. However, while legislatures around the world have enacted regulations to protect children’s online privacy, and app stores have instituted various protections, privacy in mobile apps remains a growing concern for parents and wider society. In this paper, we explore the potential privacy issues and threats that exist in these apps. We investigate 20195 mobile apps from the Google Play store that are designed particularly for children (Family apps) or include children in their target user groups (Normal apps). Using both static and dynamic analysis, we find that 4.47% of Family apps request location permissions, even though collecting location information from children is forbidden by the Play store, and 81.25% of Family apps use trackers (which are not allowed in children’s apps). Even major developers with 40+ kids apps on the Play store use ad trackers. Furthermore, we find that most permission request notifications are not well designed for children, and 19.25% apps have inconsistent content age ratings across the different protection authorities. Our findings suggest that, despite significant attention to children’s privacy, a large gap between regulatory provisions, app store policies, and actual development practices exist. Our research sheds light for government policymakers, app stores, and developers.

The Poisoning Membership Inference Attack (PMIA) is a newly emerging privacy attack that poses a significant threat to federated learning (FL). An adversary conducts data poisoning (i.e., performing adversarial manipulations on training examples) to extract membership information by exploiting the changes in loss resulting from data poisoning. The PMIA significantly exacerbates the traditional poisoning attack that is primarily focused on model corruption. However, there has been a lack of a comprehensive systematic study that thoroughly investigates this topic. In this work, we conduct a benchmark evaluation to assess the performance of PMIA against the Byzantine-robust FL setting that is specifically designed to mitigate poisoning attacks. We find that all existing coordinate-wise averaging mechanisms fail to defend against the PMIA, while the detect-then-drop strategy was proven to be effective in most cases, implying that the poison injection is memorized and the poisonous effect rarely dissipates. Inspired by this observation, we propose AgrEvader, a PMIA that maximizes the adversarial impact on the victim samples while circumventing the detection by Byzantine-robust mechanisms. AgrEvader significantly outperforms existing PMIAs. For instance, AgrEvader achieved a high attack accuracy of between 72.78% (on CIFAR-10) to 97.80% (on Texas100), which is an average accuracy increase of 13.89% compared to the strongest PMIA reported in the literature. We evaluated AgrEvader on five datasets across different domains, against a comprehensive list of threat models, which included black-box, gray-box and white-box models for targeted and non-targeted scenarios. AgrEvader demonstrated consistent high accuracy across all settings tested. The code is available at: https://github.com/PrivSecML/AgrEvader.