VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Wei Yuan 0003
dblp:67/2268-3
· DBLP profile ↗
25ranked-venue papers in the field
12as first author
23since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-9400-842XORCID · conflict
Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several
Information Retrieval & Web Search · 14 (7 first)Database Systems & Data Management · 4 (2 first)Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 4 (1 first)Knowledge Engineering, Semantic Web & Information Systems · 2 (2 first)Other / Interdisciplinary · 1
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | LogicGate: Adaptive Rule-Based Modeling of Exogenous Effects for Time Series Forecasting
Tong Chen 0005, Wei Yuan 0003, Li-Zhen Cui 0001, Hongzhi Yin |
DASFAA (5) | 3 |
| 2026 | LLM-UP: SIGIR 2026 Workshop on LLM-powered User Profiling for Search and RecommendationabstractThe rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has opened new possibilities for understanding users in search and recommendation. While traditional behavior-based or feature-driven user models rely primarily on explicit interactions or handcrafted representations, LLMs introduce a fundamentally different paradigm: LLM-powered user profiling, where user preferences, intents, and contextual attributes can be extracted, summarized, or reasoned about directly through natural language. This shift unlocks powerful new paths to achieve personalization but also raises pressing questions related to modeling fidelity, temporal dynamics, evaluation methodology, privacy, and responsible deployment. The LLM-UP workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to systematize emerging progress in LLM-powered user profiling, identify open challenges, and explore opportunities for integrating such techniques into search and recommendation pipelines. The LLM-UP workshop adopts an interactive structure featuring lightning talks, panel discussions, and paper presentations to foster active engagement, cross-disciplinary dialogue, and community-driven agenda setting for this rapidly evolving field. Hongzhi Yin, Wei Yuan 0003, Yi Zhang 0103, Joel Mackenzie, Nguyen Quoc Viet Hung, Wayne Xin Zhao, Yong Li 0008, Lina Yao 0001 |
SIGIR | 2 |
| 2026 | Towards On-device Personalization: Cloud-device Collaborative Data Augmentation for Efficient On-device Language ModelabstractWith the advancement of large language models (LLMs), significant progress has been achieved in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, existing LLMs still face two major challenges that hinder their broader adoption: (1) their responses tend to be generic and lack personalization tailored to individual users, and (2) they rely heavily on cloud infrastructure due to intensive computational requirements, leading to stable network dependency and response delay. Recent research has predominantly focused on either developing cloud-based personalized LLMs or exploring the on-device deployment of general-purpose LLMs. However, few studies have addressed both limitations simultaneously by investigating personalized on-device language models (LMs). To bridge this gap, we propose CDCDA-PLM, a framework for deploying personalized on-device LMs on user devices with support from a powerful cloud-based LLM. Specifically, CDCDA-PLM leverages the server-side LLM’s strong generalization capabilities to augment users’ limited personal data, mitigating the issue of data scarcity. Using both real and synthetic data, a personalized on-device LM is fine-tuned via parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) modules and deployed on users’ local devices, enabling them to process queries without depending on cloud-based LLMs. This approach eliminates reliance on network stability and ensures high response speeds. Experimental results across six NLP personalization tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of CDCDA-PLM. Zhaofeng Zhong, Wei Yuan 0003, Liang Qu, Tong Chen 0005, Hao Wang 0005, Xiangyu Zhao 0001, Hongzhi Yin |
ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol. | 2 |
| 2026 | Erratum: Lightweight Embeddings with Graph Rewiring for Collaborative FilteringabstractThis is an erratum for the article “Lightweight Embeddings with Graph Rewiring for Collaborative Filtering” published in ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 43, 4, Article 108 (July 2025), 29 pages. Xurong Liang, Tong Chen 0005, Wei Yuan 0003, Hongzhi Yin |
ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. | 3 |
| 2026 | HMamba: Hyperbolic Mamba for Sequential RecommendationabstractSequential recommendation systems require both temporal efficiency to handle long interaction histories and hierarchical representation to model complex user–item relationships. Existing approaches face a fundamental tension: Mamba-based methods offer linear-time efficiency ( \(\mathcal{O}(L)\) ) but operate in Euclidean space, which distorts hierarchical patterns; hyperbolic models capture taxonomies well but suffer quadratic complexity ( \(\mathcal{O}(L^{2})\) ). To solve this dual challenge , we propose Hyperbolic Mamba (HMamba), the first architecture that unifies curvature-aware state spaces with hyperbolic geometry. Our key insight is that hyperbolic curvature \(\kappa\) simultaneously governs: (1) state transition granularity through \(\mathbf{\bar{A}}=\exp(\Delta\mathbf{A}\odot\mathbf{K}(\kappa))\) and (2) hierarchical distance preservation via \(d_{\mathcal{L}}\propto\sqrt{\kappa}\log(\cdot)\) . This enables joint optimization of efficiency and hierarchy—addressing the previously unsolved problem of deep-long modeling . Experiments show HMamba achieves 3–11% accuracy gains while maintaining 3.2 \(\times\) faster training than attention-based models, establishing a new paradigm for hierarchy-aware sequential recommendation. The code and datasets accompanying our paper are publicly available at https://github.com/CoderPowerBeyond/HMamba . Qianru Zhang, Honggang Wen, Wei Yuan 0003, Crystal Chen, Menglin Yang 0001, Siu-Ming Yiu, Hongzhi Yin |
ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. | 3 |
| 2025 | Towards Propagation-Aware Representation Learning for Supervised Social Media Graph AnalyticsabstractSocial media platforms generate vast, complex graph-structured data, facilitating diverse tasks such as rumor detection, bot identification, and influence modeling. Real-world applications like public opinion monitoring and stock trading – which have a strong attachment to social media - demand models that are performant across diverse tasks and datasets. However, most existing solutions are purely data-driven, exhibiting vulnerability to the inherent noise within social media data. Moreover, the reliance on task-specific model design challenges efficient reuse of the same model architecture on different tasks, incurring repetitive engineering efforts. To address these challenges in social media graph analytics, we propose a general representation learning framework that integrates a dual-encoder structure with a kinetic-guided propagation module. In addition to jointly modeling structural and contextual information with two encoders, our framework innovatively captures the information propagation dynamics within social media graphs by integrating principled kinetic knowledge. By deriving a propagationaware encoder and corresponding optimization objective from a Markov chain-based transmission model, the representation learning pipeline receives a boost in its robustness to noisy data and versatility in diverse tasks. Extensive experiments verify that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with a unified architecture on a variety of social media graph mining tasks spanning graph classification, node classification, and link prediction. Besides, our solution exhibits strong zero-shot and few-shot transferability across datasets, demonstrating practicality when handling data-scarce tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/WeiJiang01/RPRL. Wei Jiang 0006, Tong Chen 0005, Wei Yuan 0003, Xiangyu Zhao 0001, Nguyen Quoc Viet Hung, Hongzhi Yin |
ICDM | 3 |
| 2025 | Data Watermarking for Sequential Recommender SystemsabstractIn the era of large foundation models, data has become a crucial component in building high-performance AI systems. As the demand for high-quality and large-scale data continues to rise, data copyright protection is attracting increasing attention. In this work, we explore the problem of data watermarking for sequential recommender systems, where a watermark is embedded into the target dataset and can be detected in models trained on that dataset. We focus on two settings: dataset watermarking, which protects the ownership of the entire dataset, and user watermarking, which safeguards the data of individual users. We present a method named Dataset Watermarking for Recommender Systems (DWRS) to address them. We define the watermark as a sequence of consecutive items inserted into normal users' interaction sequences. We define a Receptive Field (RF) to guide the inserting process to facilitate the memorization of the watermark. Extensive experiments on five representative sequential recommendation models and three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DWRS in protecting data copyright while preserving model utility. Sixiao Zhang, Cheng Long 0001, Wei Yuan 0003, Hongxu Chen 0002, Hongzhi Yin |
KDD (2) | 3 |
| 2025 | On-Device Recommender Systems: A Comprehensive SurveyabstractAbstract Recommender systems have been widely deployed in various real-world applications to help users identify content of interest from massive amounts of information. Traditional recommender systems work by collecting user-item interaction data in a cloud-based data center and training a centralized model to perform the recommendation service. However, such cloud-based recommender systems (CloudRSs) inevitably suffer from excessive resource consumption, response latency, as well as privacy and security risks concerning both data and models. Recently, driven by the advances in storage, communication, and computation capabilities of edge devices, there has been a shift of focus from CloudRSs to on-device recommender systems (DeviceRSs), which leverage the capabilities of edge devices to minimize centralized data storage requirements, reduce the response latency caused by communication overheads, and enhance user privacy and security by localizing data processing and model training. Despite the rapid rise of DeviceRSs, there is a clear absence of timely literature reviews that systematically introduce, categorize and contrast these methods. To bridge this gap, we aim to provide a comprehensive survey of DeviceRSs, covering three main aspects: (1) the deployment and inference of DeviceRSs, exploring how large recommendation models can be compressed and utilized within resource-constrained on-device environments; (2) the training and update of DeviceRSs, discussing how local data can be leveraged for model optimization on the device side; (3) the security and privacy of DeviceRSs, unveiling their potential vulnerability to malicious attacks and defensive strategies to safeguard these systems. Furthermore, we provide a fine-grained and systematic taxonomy of the methods involved in each aspect, followed by a discussion regarding challenges and future research directions. This is the first comprehensive survey on DeviceRSs that covers a spectrum of tasks to fit various needs. We believe this survey will help readers understand the current research status in this field, equip them with relevant technical foundations, and stimulate new research ideas for developing DeviceRSs. Hongzhi Yin, Liang Qu, Tong Chen 0005, Wei Yuan 0003, Ruiqi Zheng, Jing Long, Xin Xia 0013, Yuhui Shi 0001, Chengqi Zhang |
Data Sci. Eng. | 4 |
| 2025 | Lightweight Embeddings with Graph Rewiring for Collaborative FilteringabstractGNN-based recommender systems have become increasingly popular in academia and industry due to their ability to capture high-order information from user-item interaction graphs. However, as recommendation services scale rapidly and their deployment now commonly involves resource-constrained edge devices, GNN-based models face significant challenges, including high embedding storage costs and run-time latency from graph propagations. Our previous work, LEGCF, effectively reduced embedding storage costs but struggled to maintain recommendation performance under stricter storage limits. Additionally, LEGCF did not address the extensive run-time computation costs associated with graph propagation, which involves heavy multiplication and accumulation operations (MACs). These challenges consequently hinder effective training and inference on resource-constrained edge devices. To address these limitations, we propose Lightweight Embeddings with Rewired Graph (LERG) for Graph Collaborative Filtering, an improved extension of LEGCF. LERG retains LEGCF’s compositional codebook structure but introduces quantization techniques to reduce the storage cost of embedding weights, enabling the inclusion of more meta-embeddings within the same storage constraints for improved model expressiveness. To optimize graph propagation for edge devices, we pretrain the quantized compositional embedding table using the full interaction graph on resource-rich servers, after which a fine-tuning stage is engaged to identify and prune low-contribution entities via a gradient-free binary integer programming approach, constructing a rewired graph that excludes these entities (i.e., user/item nodes) from propagating signals. The quantized compositional embedding table with selective embedding participation and sparse rewired graph is transferred to edge devices which significantly reduce computation memory and inference time. Experiments on three public benchmark datasets, including an industry-scale dataset, demonstrate that LERG achieves superior recommendation performance while dramatically reducing storage and computation costs for graph-based recommendation services. Xurong Liang, Tong Chen 0005, Wei Yuan 0003, Hongzhi Yin |
ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. | 3 |
| 2025 | PTF-FSR: A Parameter Transmission-Free Federated Sequential Recommender SystemabstractSequential recommender systems, as a specialized branch of recommender systems that can capture users’ dynamic preferences for more accurate and timely recommendations, have made significant progress. Recently, due to increasing concerns about user data privacy, some researchers have implemented federated learning for sequential recommendation, a.k.a., Federated Sequential Recommender Systems (FedSeqRecs), in which a public sequential recommender model is shared and frequently transmitted between a central server and clients to achieve collaborative learning. Although these solutions mitigate user privacy to some extent, they present two significant limitations that affect their practical usability: (1) They require a globally shared sequential recommendation model. However, in real-world scenarios, the recommendation model constitutes a critical intellectual property for platform and service providers. Therefore, service providers may be reluctant to disclose their meticulously developed models. (2) The communication costs are high as they correlate with the number of model parameters. This becomes particularly problematic as the current FedSeqRec will be inapplicable when sequential recommendation marches into a large language model era. To overcome the above challenges, this article proposes a parameter transmission-free federated sequential recommendation framework (PTF-FSR), which ensures both model and data privacy protection to meet the privacy needs of service providers and system users alike. Furthermore, since PTF-FSR only transmits prediction results under privacy protection, which are independent of model sizes, this new federated learning architecture can accommodate more complex and larger sequential recommendation models. Extensive experiments conducted on three widely used recommendation datasets, employing various sequential recommendation models from both ID-based and ID-free paradigms, demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization capability of our proposed framework. To facilitate future research in this direction, we release our code at https://github.com/hi-weiyuan/PTF-FSR . Wei Yuan 0003, Chaoqun Yang 0002, Liang Qu, Nguyen Quoc Viet Hung, Guanhua Ye, Hongzhi Yin |
ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. | 1 |
| 2025 | FELLAS: Enhancing Federated Sequential Recommendation with LLM as External ServicesabstractSequential recommendation has been widely studied in the recommendation domain since it can capture users’ temporal preferences and provide more accurate and timely recommendations. To address user privacy concerns, the combination of federated learning and sequential recommender systems (FedSeqRec) has gained growing attention. Unfortunately, the performance of FedSeqRec is still unsatisfactory because the models used in FedSeqRec have to be lightweight to accommodate communication bandwidth and clients’ on-device computational resource constraints. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited strong transferable and generalized language understanding abilities and therefore, in the NLP area, many downstream tasks now utilize LLMs as a service to achieve superior performance without constructing complex models. Inspired by this successful practice, we propose a generic FedSeqRec framework, FELLAS, which aims to enhance FedSeqRec by utilizing LLMs as an external service. Specifically, FELLAS employs an LLM server to provide both item-level and sequence-level representation assistance. The item-level representation service is queried by the central server to enrich the original ID-based item embedding with textual information, while the sequence-level representation service is accessed by each client. However, invoking the sequence-level representation service requires clients to send sequences to the external LLM server. To safeguard privacy, we implement \(d_{\mathcal{X}}\) -privacy satisfied sequence perturbation, which protects clients’ sensitive data with guarantees. Additionally, a contrastive learning-based method is designed to transfer knowledge from the noisy sequence representation to clients’ sequential recommendation models. Furthermore, to empirically validate the privacy protection capability of FELLAS, we propose two interacted item inference attacks, considering the threats posed by the LLM server and the central server acting as curious-but-honest adversaries in cooperation. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets with two widely used sequential recommendation models demonstrate the effectiveness and privacy-preserving capability of FELLAS. Wei Yuan 0003, Chaoqun Yang 0002, Guanhua Ye, Tong Chen 0005, Nguyen Quoc Viet Hung, Hongzhi Yin |
ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. | 1 |
| 2024 | Watermarking Recommender SystemsabstractRecommender systems embody significant commercial value and represent crucial intellectual property. However, the integrity of these systems is constantly challenged by malicious actors seeking to steal their underlying models. Safeguarding against such threats is paramount to upholding the rights and interests of the model owner. While model watermarking has emerged as a potent defense mechanism in various domains, its direct application to recommender systems remains unexplored and non-trivial. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing Autoregressive Out-of-distribution Watermarking (AOW), a novel technique tailored specifically for recommender systems. Our approach entails selecting an initial item and querying it through the oracle model, followed by the selection of subsequent items with small prediction scores. This iterative process generates a watermark sequence autoregressively, which is then ingrained into the model's memory through training. To assess the efficacy of the watermark, the model is tasked with predicting the subsequent item given a truncated watermark sequence. Through extensive experimentation and analysis, we demonstrate the superior performance and robust properties of AOW. Notably, our watermarking technique exhibits high-confidence extraction capabilities and maintains effectiveness even in the face of distillation and fine-tuning processes. Sixiao Zhang, Cheng Long 0001, Wei Yuan 0003, Hongxu Chen 0002, Hongzhi Yin |
CIKM | 3 |
| 2024 | HeteFedRec: Federated Recommender Systems with Model HeterogeneityabstractOwing to the nature of privacy protection, feder-ated recommender systems (FedRecs) have garnered increasing interest in the realm of on-device recommender systems. However, most existing FedRecs only allow participating clients to collaboratively train a recommendation model of the same public parameter size. Training a model of the same size for all clients can lead to suboptimal performance since clients possess varying resources. For example, clients with limited training data may prefer to train a smaller recommendation model to avoid excessive data consumption, while clients with sufficient data would benefit from a larger model to achieve higher recommendation accuracy. To address the above challenge, this paper introduces HeteFedRec, a novel FedRec framework that enables the assignment of personalized model sizes to partici-pants. Specifically, we present a heterogeneous recommendation model aggregation strategy, including a unified dual-task learning mechanism and a dimensional decorrelation regularization, to allow knowledge aggregation among recommender models of different sizes. Additionally, a relation-based ensemble knowledge distillation method is proposed to effectively distil knowledge from heterogeneous item embeddings. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world recommendation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of HeteFedRec in training federated recommender systems under heterogeneous settings. Wei Yuan 0003, Liang Qu, Li-Zhen Cui 0001, Yongxin Tong, Xiaofang Zhou 0001, Hongzhi Yin |
ICDE | 1 |
| 2024 | Hide Your Model: A Parameter Transmission-free Federated Recommender SystemabstractWith the growing concerns regarding user data privacy, Federated Recommender System (FedRec) has garnered significant attention recently due to its privacy-preserving capabilities. Existing FedRecs generally adhere to a learning protocol in which a central server shares a global recommendation model with clients, and participants achieve collaborative learning by frequently communicating the model's public parameters. Nevertheless, this learning framework has two drawbacks that limit its practical usability: (1) It necessitates a global-sharing recommendation model; however, in real-world scenarios, information related to the recommendation model, including its algorithm and parameters, constitutes the platforms' intellectual property. Hence, service providers are unlikely to release such information actively. (2) The communication costs of model parameter transmission are expensive since the model parameters are usually high-dimensional matrices. With the model size increasing, the communication burden will be the bottleneck for such traditional FedRecs. Given the above limitations, this paper introduces a novel parameter transmission-free federated recommendation framework that balances the protection between users' data privacy and platforms' model privacy, namely PTF-FedRec. Unlike traditional FedRecs, participants in PTF-FedRec collaboratively exchange knowledge by sharing their predictions within a privacy-preserving mechanism. Through this approach, the central server can learn a recommender model without disclosing its model parameters or accessing clients' raw data, preserving both the server's model privacy and users' data privacy. Besides, since clients and the central server only need to communicate prediction scores which are just a few real numbers, the communication overhead is significantly reduced compared to traditional FedRecs. Extensive experiments conducted on three commonly used recommendation datasets with three recommendation models demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and generalization of our proposed federated recommendation framework. Wei Yuan 0003, Chaoqun Yang 0002, Liang Qu, Nguyen Quoc Viet Hung, Hongzhi Yin |
ICDE | 1 |
| 2024 | Towards Personalized Privacy: User-Governed Data Contribution for Federated RecommendationabstractFederated recommender systems (FedRecs) have gained significant attention for their potential to protect user's privacy by keeping user privacy data locally and only communicating model parameters/gradients to the server. Nevertheless, the currently existing architecture of FedRecs assumes that all users have the same 0-privacy budget, i.e., they do not upload any data to the server, thus overlooking those users who are less concerned about privacy and are willing to upload data to get a better recommendation service. To bridge this gap, this paper explores a user-governed data contribution federated recommendation architecture where users are free to take control of whether they share data and the proportion of data they share to the server. To this end, this paper presents a cloud-device collaborative graph neural network federated recommendation model, named CDCGNNFed. It trains user-centric ego graphs locally, and high-order graphs based on user-shared data in the server in a collaborative manner via contrastive learning. Furthermore, a graph mending strategy is utilized to predict missing links in the graph on the server, thus leveraging the capabilities of graph neural networks over high-order graphs. Extensive experiments were conducted on two public datasets, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Liang Qu, Wei Yuan 0003, Ruiqi Zheng, Li-Zhen Cui 0001, Yuhui Shi 0001, Hongzhi Yin |
WWW | 2 |
| 2024 | Comprehensive Privacy Analysis on Federated Recommender System Against Attribute Inference AttacksabstractIn recent years, recommender systems are crucially important for the delivery of personalized services that satisfy users’ preferences. With personalized recommendation services, users can enjoy a variety of recommendations such as movies, books, ads, restaurants, and more. Despite the great benefits, personalized recommendations typically require the collection of personal data for user modelling and analysis, which can make users susceptible to attribute inference attacks. Specifically, the vulnerability of existing centralized recommenders under attribute inference attacks leaves malicious attackers a backdoor to infer users’ private attributes, as the systems remember information of their training data (i.e., interaction data and side information). An emerging practice is to implement recommender systems in the federated setting, which enables all user devices to collaboratively learn a shared global recommender while keeping all the training data on device. However, the privacy issues in federated recommender systems have been rarely explored. In this paper, we first design a novel attribute inference attacker to perform a comprehensive privacy analysis of the GCN-based federated recommender models. The experimental results show that the vulnerability of each model component against attribute inference attack is varied, highlighting the need for new defense approaches. Therefore, we propose a novel adaptive privacy-preserving approach to protect users’ sensitive data in the presence of attribute inference attacks and meanwhile maximize the recommendation accuracy. Extensive experimental results on two real-world datasets validate the superior performance of our model on both recommendation effectiveness and resistance to inference attacks. Wei Yuan 0003, Hongzhi Yin |
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. | 2 |
| 2024 | Adversarial Item Promotion on Visually-Aware Recommender Systems by Guided DiffusionabstractVisually-aware recommender systems have found widespread applications in domains where visual elements significantly contribute to the inference of users’ potential preferences. While the incorporation of visual information holds the promise of enhancing recommendation accuracy and alleviating the cold-start problem, it is essential to point out that the inclusion of item images may introduce substantial security challenges. Some existing works have shown that the item provider can manipulate item exposure rates to its advantage by constructing adversarial images. However, these works cannot reveal the real vulnerability of visually-aware recommender systems because (1) the generated adversarial images are markedly distorted, rendering them easily detected by human observers; and (2) the effectiveness of these attacks is inconsistent and even ineffective in some scenarios or datasets. To shed light on the real vulnerabilities of visually-aware recommender systems when confronted with adversarial images, this article introduces a novel attack method, Item Promotion by Diffusion Generated Image (IPDGI). Specifically, IPDGI employs a guided diffusion model to generate adversarial samples designed to promote the exposure rates of target items (e.g., long-tail items). Taking advantage of accurately modeling benign images’ distribution by diffusion models, the generated adversarial images have high fidelity with original images, ensuring the stealth of our IPDGI. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods, we conduct extensive experiments on two commonly used e-commerce recommendation datasets (Amazon Beauty and Amazon Baby) with several typical visually-aware recommender systems. The experimental results show that our attack method significantly improves both the performance of promoting the long-tailed (i.e., unpopular) items and the quality of generated adversarial images. Wei Yuan 0003, Tong Chen 0005, Guanhua Ye, Nguyen Quoc Viet Hung, Hongzhi Yin |
ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. | 2 |
| 2024 | Manipulating Visually Aware Federated Recommender Systems and Its CountermeasuresabstractFederated recommender systems (FedRecs) have been widely explored recently due to their capability to safeguard user data privacy. These systems enable a central server to collaboratively learn recommendation models by sharing public parameters with clients, providing privacy-preserving solutions. However, this collaborative approach also creates a vulnerability that allows adversaries to manipulate FedRecs. Existing works on FedRec security already reveal that items can easily be promoted by malicious users via model poisoning attacks, but all of them mainly focus on FedRecs with only collaborative information (i.e., user–item interactions). We contend that these attacks are effective primarily due to the data sparsity of collaborative signals. In light of this, we propose a method to address data sparsity and model poisoning threats by incorporating product visual information. Intriguingly, our empirical findings demonstrate that the inclusion of visual information renders all existing model poisoning attacks ineffective. Nevertheless, the integration of visual information also introduces a new avenue for adversaries to manipulate federated recommender systems, as this information typically originates from external sources. To assess such threats, we propose a novel form of poisoning attack tailored for visually aware FedRecs, namely image poisoning attacks, where adversaries can gradually modify the uploaded image with human-unaware perturbations to manipulate item ranks during the FedRecs’ training process. Moreover, we provide empirical evidence showcasing a heightened threat when image poisoning attacks are combined with model poisoning attacks, resulting in easier manipulation of the federated recommendation systems. To ensure the safe utilization of visual information, we employ a diffusion model in visually aware FedRecs to purify each uploaded image and detect the adversarial images. Extensive experiments conducted with two FedRecs on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our proposed attacks and defenses. Wei Yuan 0003, Shilong Yuan, Chaoqun Yang 0002, Nguyen Quoc Viet Hung, Hongzhi Yin |
ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. | 1 |
| 2023 | Manipulating Federated Recommender Systems: Poisoning with Synthetic Users and Its CountermeasuresabstractFederated Recommender Systems (FedRecs) are considered privacy-preserving techniques to collaboratively learn a recommendation model without sharing user data. Since all participants can directly influence the systems by uploading gradients, FedRecs are vulnerable to poisoning attacks of malicious clients. However, most existing poisoning attacks on FedRecs are either based on some prior knowledge or with less effectiveness. To reveal the real vulnerability of FedRecs, in this paper, we present a new poisoning attack method to manipulate target items' ranks and exposure rates effectively in the top-K recommendation without relying on any prior knowledge. Specifically, our attack manipulates target items' exposure rate by a group of synthetic malicious users who upload poisoned gradients considering target items' alternative products. We conduct extensive experiments with two widely used FedRecs (Fed-NCF and Fed-LightGCN) on two real-world recommendation datasets. The experimental results show that our attack can significantly improve the exposure rate of unpopular target items with extremely fewer malicious users and fewer global epochs than state-of-the-art attacks. In addition to disclosing the security hole, we design a novel countermeasure for poisoning attacks on FedRecs. Specifically, we propose a hierarchical gradient clipping with sparsified updating to defend against existing poisoning attacks. The empirical results demonstrate that the proposed defending mechanism improves the robustness of FedRecs. Wei Yuan 0003, Nguyen Quoc Viet Hung, Tieke He, Liang Chen 0001, Hongzhi Yin |
SIGIR | 1 |
| 2023 | Federated Unlearning for On-Device RecommendationabstractThe increasing data privacy concerns in recommendation systems have made federated recommendations attract more and more attention. Existing federated recommendation systems mainly focus on how to effectively and securely learn personal interests and preferences from their on-device interaction data. Still, none of them considers how to efficiently erase a user's contribution to the federated training process. We argue that such a dual setting is necessary. First, from the privacy protection perspective, "the right to be forgotten (RTBF)" requires that users have the right to withdraw their data contributions. Without the reversible ability, federated recommendation systems risk breaking data protection regulations. On the other hand, enabling a federated recommender to forget specific users can improve its robustness and resistance to malicious clients' attacks. Wei Yuan 0003, Hongzhi Yin, Fangzhao Wu, Tieke He, Hao Wang 0005 |
WSDM | 1 |
| 2023 | Interaction-level Membership Inference Attack Against Federated Recommender SystemsabstractThe marriage of federated learning and recommender system (FedRec) has been widely used to address the growing data privacy concerns in personalized recommendation services. In FedRecs, users’ attribute information and behavior data (i.e., user-item interaction data) are kept locally on their personal devices, therefore, it is considered a fairly secure approach to protect user privacy. As a result, the privacy issue of FedRecs is rarely explored. Unfortunately, several recent studies reveal that FedRecs are vulnerable to user attribute inference attacks, highlighting the privacy concerns of FedRecs. In this paper, we further investigate the privacy problem of user behavior data (i.e., user-item interactions) in FedRecs. Specifically, we perform the first systematic study on interaction-level membership inference attacks on FedRecs. An interaction-level membership inference attacker is first designed, and then the classical privacy protection mechanism, Local Differential Privacy (LDP), is adopted to defend against the membership inference attack. Unfortunately, the empirical analysis shows that LDP is not effective against such new attacks unless the recommendation performance is largely compromised. To mitigate the interaction-level membership attack threats, we design a simple yet effective defense method to significantly reduce the attacker’s inference accuracy without losing recommendation performance. Extensive experiments are conducted with two widely used FedRecs (Fed-NCF and Fed-LightGCN) on three real-world recommendation datasets (MovieLens-100K, Steam-200K, and Amazon Cell Phone), and the experimental results show the effectiveness of our solutions. Wei Yuan 0003, Chaoqun Yang 0002, Nguyen Quoc Viet Hung, Li-Zhen Cui 0002, Tieke He, Hongzhi Yin |
WWW | 1 |
| 2022 | Unified Question Generation with Continual Lifelong LearningabstractQuestion Generation (QG), as a challenging Natural Language Processing task, aims at generating questions based on given answers and context. Existing QG methods mainly focus on building or training models for specific QG datasets. These works are subject to two major limitations: (1) They are dedicated to specific QG formats (e.g., answer-extraction or multi-choice QG), therefore, if we want to address a new format of QG, a re-design of the QG model is required. (2) Optimal performance is only achieved on the dataset they were just trained on. As a result, we have to train and keep various QG models for different QG datasets, which is resource-intensive and ungeneralizable. Wei Yuan 0003, Hongzhi Yin, Tieke He, Tong Chen 0005, Qiufeng Wang 0002, Li-Zhen Cui 0001 |
WWW | 1 |
| 2021 | Improving Neural Question Generation using Deep Linguistic RepresentationabstractQuestion Generation (QG) is a challenging Natural Language Processing (NLP) task which aims at generating questions with given answers and context. There are many works incorporating linguistic features to improve the performance of QG. However, similar to traditional word embedding, these works normally embed such features with a set of trainable parameters, which results in the linguistic features not fully exploited. In this work, inspired by the recent achievements of text representation, we propose to utilize linguistic information via large pre-trained neural models. First, these models are trained in several specific NLP tasks in order to better represent linguistic features. Then, such feature representation is fused into a seq2seq based QG model to guide question generation. Extensive experiments were conducted on two benchmark Question Generation datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art QG systems, as a result, it significantly improves the baseline by 17.2% and 6.2% under the BLEU-4 metric on these two datasets, respectively. Wei Yuan 0003, Tieke He, Xinyu Dai |
WWW | 1 |
| 2020 | Mining the Software Engineering Forums: What's New and What's Left
Wei Yuan 0003, Linyang He, Tieke He |
WISA | 1 |
| 2020 | N2One: Identifying Coreference Object Among User Generated Content with Siamese Network
Wei Yuan 0003, Mengyao Yuan, Tieke He |
WISA | 1 |