This paper presents a novel approach for wireless federated learning (WFL) that, for the first time, enables the aggregation of local models with mild to moderate errors under practical communication settings, which has to date been prevented by floating-point standards, e.g., IEEE binary32, and encryption. Specifically, we propose a new conversion from floating-point local models to fixed-point models on a layer basis, eliminating the need to transmit error-intolerant sign and exponent bits of floating-point numbers while accommodating variations in model layer widths and magnitudes. We also quantify how bit errors in the ciphertext affect the plaintext when symmetric encryption is employed for local model uploading, e.g., under Rayleigh, Rician, and Nakagami-m fading channels. Notably, these bit errors are leveraged to enhance the privacy of local models. We interpret the local model transmission process as a (λ, ϵ)-Rényi Differential Privacy (DP) mechanism, where bit errors induced by noisy channels, controlled via transmit powers, and exacerbated by decryption act as DP perturbations. Experiments show the superiority of the new WFL to the status quo with higher training accuracy and lower communication overhead.

As machine learning models are deployed in critical applications, robustness against adversarial perturbations is crucial. While numerous defensive algorithms have been proposed to counter such attacks, they typically assume that all adversarial transformations are equally important, an assumption that rarely aligns with real-world applications. To address this, we study the problem of robust learning against adversarial perturbations under cost-sensitive scenarios, where the potential harm of different types of misclassifications is encoded in a cost matrix. Our solution introduces a provably robust learning algorithm to certify and optimize for cost-sensitive robustness, building on the scalable certification framework of randomized smoothing. Specifically, we formalize the definition of cost-sensitive certified radius and propose our novel adaptation of the standard certification algorithm to generate tight robustness certificates tailored to any cost matrix. In addition, we design a robust training method that improves certified cost-sensitive robustness without compromising model accuracy. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including challenging ones unsolvable by existing methods, demonstrate the effectiveness of our certification algorithm and training method across various cost-sensitive scenarios.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) for image classification remain vulnerable to adversarial perturbations–subtle input manipulations that induce catastrophic misclassifications. To address this issue, we propose the Adversarial Image Rectifier (AIR), a linguistically inspired detection and mitigation framework that enhances DNN robustness by intercepting and inverting adversarial perturbations at the feature level. Unlike existing defenses, AIR operates without prior knowledge of attack patterns: it first encodes hierarchical hidden-layer feature maps of a DNN into semantically structured sentence representations, then identifies adversarial inputs through “sentiment” anomalies in these sentences–a linguistic metaphor for subtle adversarial traces. Crucially, we pinpoint a pivotal intermediate layer where adversarial perturbations dominantly propagate and train a lightweight rectifier network to selectively nullify adversarial features at this layer while preserving benign semantics. Extensive experiments on Tiny-ImageNet, CIFAR-10, SVHN, and MS COCO demonstrate that AIR achieves a correction rate of up to 95.02% and 94.62% when defending against known attacks and unknown attacks, respectively, significantly surpassing existing defense techniques.

Despite being prevalent in the general field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), pre-trained language models inherently carry privacy and copyright concerns due to their nature of training on large-scale web-scraped data. In this paper, we pioneer a systematic exploration of such risks associated with pre-trained language encoders, specifically focusing on the membership leakage of pre-training data exposed through downstream models adapted from pre-trained language encoders–an aspect largely overlooked in existing literature. Our study encompasses comprehensive experiments across four types of pre-trained encoder architectures, three representative downstream tasks, and five benchmark datasets. Intriguingly, our evaluations reveal, for the first time, the existence of membership leakage even when only the black-box output of the downstream model is exposed, highlighting a privacy risk far greater than previously assumed. Alongside, we present in-depth analysis and insights toward guiding future researchers and practitioners in addressing the privacy considerations in developing pre-trained language models.

Depth estimation is playing an important role in indoor and outdoor scene understanding, autonomous driving, augmented reality and many other tasks. Vehicles and robotics are able to use active illumination sensors such as LIDAR to receive high precision depth estimation. However, high-resolution LIDARs are usually too expensive, which limits its massive production on various applications. Though single beam LIDAR enjoys the benefits of low cost, one beam depth sensing is not usually sufficient to perceive the surrounding environment in many scenarios. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based framework to explore to replicate similar or even higher performance as costly LIDARs with our designed self-supervised network and a low-cost single-beam LIDAR. After the accurate calibration with a visible camera, the single beam LIDAR can adjust the scale uncertainty of the depth map estimated by the visible camera. The adjusted depth map enjoys the benefits of high resolution and sensing accuracy as high beam LIDAR and maintains low-cost as single beam LIDAR. Thus we can achieve similar sensing effect of high beam LIDAR with more than a 30-100 times cheaper price (e.g., $80000 Velodyne HDL-64E LIDAR v.s. $2000 SICK TIM-781 2D LIDAR and normal camera). The proposed approach is verified on our collected dataset and public dataset with superior depth-sensing performance.

In this paper, we address the challenging unconstrained set-based face recognition problem where each subject face is instantiated by a set of media (images and videos) instead of a single image. Naively aggregating information from all the media within a set would suffer from the large intra-set variance caused by heterogeneous factors (e.g., varying media modalities, poses and illumination) and fail to learn discriminative face representations. A novel Multi-Prototype Network (MP- Net) model is thus proposed to learn multiple prototype face representations adaptively from the media sets. Each learned prototype is representative for the subject face under certain condition in terms of pose, illumination and media modality. Instead of handcrafting the set partition for prototype learn- ing, MPNet introduces a Dense SubGraph (DSG) learning sub-net that implicitly untangles inconsistent media and learns a number of representative prototypes. Qualitative and quantitative experiments clearly demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over state-of-the-arts.