VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Jie Zhang 0073
dblp:84/6889-73
· DBLP profile ↗
56ranked-venue papers
5as first author
53since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-4230-1077ORCID · conflict
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 23 · 4 first-author · 21 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 23 · 2 first-author · 21 since 2021Security and privacy · 16 · 16 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 3 · 3 since 2021Computer networks · 1 · 1 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Towards Effective Prompt Stealing Attack against Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Shiqian Zhao, Chong Wang 0013, Yiming Li 0004, Yihao Huang 0001, Wenjie Qu 0001, Siew-Kei Lam, Yi Xie 0011, Kangjie Chen, Jie Zhang 0073, Tianwei Zhang 0004 |
NDSS | 9 |
| 2026 | Ensuring consistency with benign predictions: Differential privacy-guided certified defense against poisoning-based backdoor attacks
Yukun Yan, Jie Zhang 0073, Peng Tang 0002, Rui Chen 0012, Qilong Han, Haibo Hu 0001, Qing Guo 0005 |
Inf. Sci. | 2 |
| 2026 | Exploring Security Vulnerabilities in Multilingual Speech Translation Systems via Deceptive InputsabstractAs speech translation (ST) systems become increasingly prevalent, understanding their vulnerabilities is crucial for ensuring robust and reliable communication. However, limited work has explored this issue in depth. This paper explores methods of compromising these systems through imperceptible audio manipulations. Specifically, we present two approaches: (1) adapting perturbation-based techniques used for automatic speech recognition (ASR) attacks to the ST context, making our work the first to apply this approach to ST, and (2) proposing a novel music generation-based method to guide targeted translation, while also conducting more practical over-the-air attacks in the physical world. Our experiments reveal that carefully crafted audio perturbations can mislead translation models to produce targeted, harmful outputs, while adversarial music achieve this goal more covertly, exploiting the natural imperceptibility of music. These attacks have proven effective across multiple languages and translation models, highlighting a systemic vulnerability in current ST architectures. Beyond immediate security concerns, our findings highlight broader challenges in the robustness and interpretability of neural speech systems. Chang Liu 0089, Haolin Wu 0001, Cong Wu 0003, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu, Tianwei Zhang 0004, Qing Guo 0005, Jie Zhang 0073 |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 10 |
| 2026 | Toward Trustworthy Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition via Information Bottleneck Modeling
Feng-Qi Cui, Anyang Tong, Jinyang Huang, Jie Zhang 0073, Meng Li 0006, Linsheng Huang, Dan Guo 0001, Meng Wang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. | 4 |
| 2026 | SSD: A State-Based Stealthy Backdoor Attack for IMU/GNSS Navigation System in UAV Route PlanningabstractUnmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly employed to perform high-risk tasks that require minimal human intervention. However, they face escalating cybersecurity threats, particularly from GNSS spoofing attacks. While previous studies have extensively investigated the impacts of GNSS spoofing on UAVs, few have focused on its effects on specific tasks. Moreover, the influence of UAV motion states on the assessment of cybersecurity risks is often overlooked. To address these gaps, we first provide a detailed evaluation of how motion states affect the effectiveness of network attacks. We demonstrate that nonlinear motion states not only enhance the effectiveness of position spoofing in GNSS spoofing attacks but also reduce the probability of detecting speed-related attacks. Building upon this, we propose a state-triggered backdoor attack method (SSD) to deceive GNSS systems and assess its risk to trajectory planning tasks. Extensive validation of SSD’s effectiveness and stealthiness is conducted. Experimental results show that, with appropriately tuned hyperparameters, SSD significantly increases positioning errors and the risk of task failure, while maintaining high stealthy rates across three state-of-the-art detectors. Zhaoxuan Wang, Yang Li 0055, Jie Zhang 0073, Xingshuo Han, Kangbo Liu, Yang Lyu, Yuan Zhou 0005, Tianwei Zhang 0004, Quan Pan 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Inf. Forensics Secur. | 3 |
| 2026 | JailGuard: A Universal Detection Framework for Prompt-based Attacks on LLM SystemsabstractThe systems and software powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have played a critical role in numerous scenarios. However, current LLM systems are vulnerable to prompt-based attacks, with jailbreaking attacks enabling the LLM system to generate harmful content, while hijacking attacks manipulate the LLM system to perform attacker-desired tasks, underscoring the necessity for detection tools. Unfortunately, existing detecting approaches are usually tailored to specific attacks, resulting in poor generalization in detecting various attacks across different modalities. To address it, we propose JailGuard , a universal detection framework deployed on top of LLM systems for prompt-based attacks across text and image modalities. JailGuard operates on the principle that attacks are inherently less robust than benign ones. Specifically, JailGuard mutates untrusted inputs to generate variants and leverages the discrepancy of the variants’ responses on the target model to distinguish attack samples from benign samples. We implement 18 mutators for text and image inputs and design a mutator combination policy to further improve detection generalization. The evaluation on the dataset containing 15 known attack types suggests that JailGuard achieves the best detection accuracy of 86.14%/82.90% on text and image inputs, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by 11.81–25.73% and 12.20–21.40%. Xiaoyu Zhang 0013, Cen Zhang, Tianlin Li, Yihao Huang 0001, Xiaojun Jia, Ming Hu 0003, Jie Zhang 0073, Yang Liu 0003, Shiqing Ma, Chao Shen 0001 |
ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. | 7 |
| 2025 | An LLM-Empowered Adaptive Evolutionary Algorithm for Multi-Component Deep Learning SystemsabstractMulti-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) are widely used for searching optimal solutions in complex multi-component applications. Traditional MOEAs for multi-component deep learning (MCDL) systems face challenges in enhancing the search efficiency while maintaining the diversity. To combat these, this paper proposes the first LLM-empowered adaptive evolutionary search algorithm to detect safety violations in MCDL systems. Inspired by the context-understanding ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), our approach promotes the LLM to comprehend the optimization problem and generate an initial population tailed to evolutionary objectives. Subsequently, it employs adaptive selection and variation to iteratively produce offspring, balancing the evolutionary efficiency and diversity. During the evolutionary process, to navigate away from the local optima, our approach integrates the evolutionary experience back into the LLM. This utilization harnesses the LLM's quantitative reasoning prowess to generate differential seeds, breaking away from current optimal solutions. We evaluate our approach in finding safety violations of MCDL systems, and compare its performance with state-of-the-art MOEA methods. Experimental results show that our approach can significantly improve the efficiency and diversity of the evolutionary search. Haoxiang Tian 0001, Xingshuo Han, Guoquan Wu, An Guo 0002, Yuan Zhou 0005, Jie Zhang 0073, Jun Wei 0001, Tianwei Zhang 0004 |
AAAI | 6 |
| 2025 | Oedipus: LLM-enchanced Reasoning CAPTCHA SolverabstractCAPTCHAs have become a ubiquitous tool in safeguarding applications from automated bots. Over time, the arms race between CAPTCHA development and evasion techniques has led to increasingly sophisticated and diverse designs. The latest iteration, reasoning CAPTCHAs, exploits tasks that are intuitively simple for humans but challenging for conventional AI technologies, thereby enhancing security measures. Gelei Deng, Haoran Ou, Yi Liu 0069, Jie Zhang 0073, Tianwei Zhang 0004, Yang Liu 0003 |
CCS | 4 |
| 2025 | SafeGuider: Robust and Practical Content Safety Control for Text-to-Image ModelsabstractText-to-image models have shown remarkable capabilities in generating high-quality images from natural language descriptions. However, these models are highly vulnerable to adversarial prompts, which can bypass safety measures and produce harmful content. Despite various defensive strategies, achieving robustness against attacks while maintaining practical utility in real-world applications remains a significant challenge. To address this issue, we first conduct an empirical study of the text encoder in the Stable Diffusion (SD) model, which is a widely used and representative text-to-image model. Our findings reveal that the [EOS] token acts as a semantic aggregator, exhibiting distinct distributional patterns between benign and adversarial prompts in its embedding space. Building on this insight, we introduce SafeGuider, a two-step framework designed for robust safety control without compromising generation quality. SafeGuider combines an embedding-level recognition model with a safety-aware feature erasure beam search algorithm. This integration enables the framework to maintain high-quality image generation for benign prompts while ensuring robust defense against both in-domain and out-of-domain attacks. SafeGuider demonstrates exceptional effectiveness in minimizing attack success rates, achieving a maximum rate of only 5.48% across various attack scenarios. Moreover, instead of refusing to generate or producing black images for unsafe prompts, SafeGuider generates safe and meaningful images, enhancing its practical utility. In addition, SafeGuider is not limited to the SD model and can be effectively applied to other text-to-image models, such as the Flux model, demonstrating its versatility and adaptability across different architectures. We hope that SafeGuider can shed some light on the practical deployment of secure text-to-image systems. Peigui Qi, Kunsheng Tang, Wenbo Zhou 0004, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu, Tianwei Zhang 0004, Qing Guo 0005, Jie Zhang 0073 |
CCS | 8 |
| 2025 | Evaluating Differentially Private Generation of Domain-Specific TextabstractGenerative AI offers transformative potential for high-stakes domains such as healthcare and finance, yet privacy and regulatory barriers hinder the use of real-world data. To address this, differentially private synthetic data generation has emerged as a promising alternative. In this work, we introduce a unified benchmark to systematically evaluate the utility and fidelity of text datasets generated under formal Differential Privacy (DP) guarantees. Our benchmark addresses key challenges in domain-specific benchmarking, including choice of representative data and realistic privacy budgets, accounting for pre-training and a variety of evaluation metrics. We assess state-of-the-art privacy-preserving generation methods across five domain-specific datasets, revealing significant utility and fidelity degradation compared to real data, especially under strict privacy constraints. These findings underscore the limitations of current approaches, outline the need for advanced privacy-preserving data sharing methods and set a precedent regarding their evaluation in realistic scenarios. Viktor Schlegel, Srinivasan Nandakumar, Iqra Zahid, Yuping Wu 0001, Warren Del-Pinto, Goran Nenadic, Siew-Kei Lam, Jie Zhang 0073, Anil A. Bharath |
CIKM | 9 |
| 2025 | Segue: Side-information Guided Generative Unlearnable Examples for Facial Privacy Protection in Real WorldabstractThe widespread adoption of face recognition has raised privacy concerns regarding the collection and use of facial data. To address this, researchers have explored "unlearnable examples" by adding imperceptible perturbations during model training to prevent the model from learning target features. However, current methods are inefficient and cannot guarantee transferability and robustness at the same time, causing impracticality in the real world. To remedy it, we introduce Side-information Guided Generative Unlearnable Examples (Segue). Using a once-trained multiple-used model to generate perturbations, Segue avoids the time-consuming gradient-based approach. To improve transferability, we introduce side information such as true or pseudo labels, which are inherently consistent across different scenarios. For robustness enhancement, a distortion layer is integrated into the training pipeline. Experiments show Segue is 1000× faster than previous methods, transferable across datasets and models, and resistant to JPEG compression, adversarial training, and standard augmentations. Zhiling Zhang, Jie Zhang 0073, Wenbo Zhou 0004, Ting Xu 0004, Daiheng Gao, Zixian Guo, Qinglang Guo, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu |
ICASSP | 2 |
| 2025 | VideoShield: Regulating Diffusion-based Video Generation Models via WatermarkingabstractArtificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has advanced significantly, particularly with the development of video generation models such as text-to-video (T2V) models and image-to-video (I2V) models. However, like other AIGC types, video generation requires robust content control. A common approach is to embed watermarks, but most research has focused on images, with limited attention given to videos. Traditional methods, which embed watermarks frame-by-frame in a post-processing manner, often degrade video quality. In this paper, we propose VideoShield, a novel watermarking framework specifically designed for popular diffusion-based video generation models. Unlike post-processing methods, VideoShield embeds watermarks directly during video generation, eliminating the need for additional training. To ensure video integrity, we introduce a tamper localization feature that can detect changes both temporally (across frames) and spatially (within individual frames). Our method maps watermark bits to template bits, which are then used to generate watermarked noise during the denoising process. Using DDIM Inversion, we can reverse the video to its original watermarked noise, enabling straightforward watermark extraction. Additionally, template bits allow precise detection for potential spatial and temporal modification. Extensive experiments across various video models (both T2V and I2V models) demonstrate that our method effectively extracts watermarks and detects tamper without compromising video quality. Furthermore, we show that this approach is applicable to image generation models, enabling tamper detection in generated images as well. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/hurunyi/VideoShield. Runyi Hu, Jie Zhang 0073, Yiming Li 0004, Jiwei Li 0001, Qing Guo 0005, Han Qiu 0001, Tianwei Zhang 0004 |
ICLR | 2 |
| 2025 | Aparecium: Revealing Secrets from Physical PhotographsabstractWatermarking photographs is a crucial tool for safeguarding copyrights and can serve as a more aesthetically pleasing alternative to QR codes. In recent years, watermarking methods based on deep learning have proved superior robustness against complex physical distortions than traditional watermarking methods. However, they have some limitations that render them less effective in practice. For instance, current solutions necessitate physical photographs to be rectangular for accurate localization, can’t handle physical bending or folding, and require the hidden area to be completely captured at a close distance and small angle. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel deep watermarking framework dubbed Aparecium. Specifically, we preprocess secrets (i.e., watermarks) into a visible pattern and then embed it into the cover image invisibly, which is symmetrical to the final decoding-then-extracting process. To capture the watermarked region from complex physical scenarios, edge distortion is also introduced. Finally, we adopt a three-stage training strategy for training convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Aparecium is not only robust against different digital distortions, but also can resist different physical distortions, such as screen-shooting and printing-shooting, even in severe cases including different shapes, curvature, folding, incompleteness, long distances, and big angles while maintaining high visual quality. Furthermore, some ablation studies are also conducted to verify our design. Zhe Lei, Jie Zhang 0073, Tianwei Zhang 0004, Haibin Kan, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu |
ICME | 2 |
| 2025 | A Watermark Updating Framework for Multi-stage Image Content DistributionabstractDeep image watermarking embeds identification data into images to facilitate source tracking. However, existing schemes are primarily designed for single-stage transmission scenarios, and in practical multi-stage distribution requirements, current methods degrade image quality and reduce watermark extraction accuracy. In this paper, we introduces WaterUp, a deep watermark updating framework. WaterUp automatically updates watermark information as the image is transmitted, preserving image quality while accurately recording the transmission path for traceability. The core of WaterUp is a flow-based encoder-decoder (FED), which utilizes a forward and backward network to enable efficient watermark updating with minimal computational and storage demands. Experimental results show that WaterUp outperforms state-of-the-art methods, maintaining high visual quality with a PSNR exceeding 38 dB across multiple transmissions. Bin Liu 0016, Jie Zhang 0073, Xiang Zhang 0011, Zehua Ma, Nenghai Yu |
ICME | 3 |
| 2025 | Cowpox: Towards the Immunity of VLM-based Multi-Agent SystemsabstractVision Language Model (VLM) Agents are stateful, autonomous entities capable of perceiving and interacting with their environments through vision and language. Multi-agent systems comprise specialized agents who collaborate to solve a (complex) task. A core security property is robustness, stating that the system maintains its integrity during adversarial attacks. Multi-agent systems lack robustness, as a successful exploit against one agent can spread and infect other agents to undermine the entire system’s integrity. We propose a defense Cowpox to provably enhance the robustness of a multi-agent system by a distributed mechanism that improves the recovery rate of agents by limiting the expected number of infections to other agents. The core idea is to generate and distribute a special cure sample that immunizes an agent against the attack before exposure. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Cowpox empirically and provide theoretical robustness guarantees. Yutong Wu 0009, Jie Zhang 0073, Yiming Li 0004, Chao Zhang 0008, Qing Guo 0005, Han Qiu 0001, Nils Lukas, Tianwei Zhang 0004 |
ICML | 2 |
| 2025 | EraseAnything: Enabling Concept Erasure in Rectified Flow TransformersabstractRemoving unwanted concepts from large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models while maintaining their overall generative quality remains an open challenge. This difficulty is especially pronounced in emerging paradigms, such as Stable Diffusion (SD) v3 and Flux, which incorporate flow matching and transformer-based architectures. These advancements limit the transferability of existing concept-erasure techniques that were originally designed for the previous T2I paradigm (e.g., SD v1.4). In this work, we introduce EraseAnything, the first method specifically developed to address concept erasure within the latest flow-based T2I framework. We formulate concept erasure as a bi-level optimization problem, employing LoRA-based parameter tuning and an attention map regularizer to selectively suppress undesirable activations. Furthermore, we propose a self-contrastive learning strategy to ensure that removing unwanted concepts does not inadvertently harm performance on unrelated ones. Experimental results demonstrate that EraseAnything successfully fills the research gap left by earlier methods in this new T2I paradigm, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of concept erasure tasks. Daiheng Gao, Shilin Lu, Wenbo Zhou 0004, Jiaming Chu, Jie Zhang 0073, Mengxi Jia, Bang Zhang, Zhaoxin Fan, Weiming Zhang 0001 |
ICML | 5 |
| 2025 | Learning from Heterogeneity: Generalizing Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition via Distributionally Robust OptimizationabstractDynamic Facial Expression Recognition (DFER) plays a critical role in affective computing and human-computer interaction. Although existing methods achieve comparable performance, they inevitably suffer from performance degradation under sample heterogeneity caused by multi-source data and individual expression variability. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework, called Heterogeneity-aware Distributional Framework (HDF), and design two plug-and-play modules to enhance time-frequency modeling and mitigate optimization imbalance caused by hard samples. Specifically, the Time-Frequency Distributional Attention Module (DAM) captures both temporal consistency and frequency robustness through a dual-branch attention design, improving tolerance to sequence inconsistency and visual style shifts. Then, based on gradient sensitivity and information bottleneck principles, an adaptive optimization module Distribution-aware Scaling Module (DSM) is introduced to dynamically balance classification and contrastive losses, enabling more stable and discriminative representation learning. Extensive experiments on two widely used datasets, DFEW and FERV39k, demonstrate that HDF significantly improves both recognition accuracy and robustness. Our method achieves superior weighted average recall (WAR) and unweighted average recall (UAR) while maintaining strong generalization across diverse and imbalanced scenarios. Codes are released at https://github.com/QIcita/HDF_DFER. Feng-Qi Cui, Anyang Tong, Jinyang Huang, Jie Zhang 0073, Dan Guo 0001, Zhi Liu 0002, Meng Wang 0001 |
ACM Multimedia | 4 |
| 2025 | On the Vulnerability of Text SanitizationabstractMeng Tong, Kejiang Chen, Xiaojian Yuan, Jiayang Liu, Weiming Zhang, Nenghai Yu, Jie Zhang. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025. Meng Tong, Kejiang Chen, Xiaojian Yuan, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu, Jie Zhang 0073 |
NAACL (Long Papers) | 7 |
| 2025 | Mask Image WatermarkingabstractWe present MaskWM, a simple, efficient, and flexible framework for image watermarking. MaskWM has two variants: (1) MaskWM-D, which supports global watermark embedding, watermark localization, and local watermark extraction for applications such as tamper detection; (2) MaskWM-ED, which focuses on local watermark embedding and extraction, offering enhanced robustness in small regions to support fine-grined image protection. MaskWM-D builds on the classical encoder-distortion layer-decoder training paradigm. In MaskWM-D, we introduce a simple masking mechanism during the decoding stage that enables both global and local watermark extraction. During training, the decoder is guided by various types of masks applied to watermarked images before extraction, helping it learn to localize watermarks and extract them from the corresponding local areas. MaskWM-ED extends this design by incorporating the mask into the encoding stage as well, guiding the encoder to embed the watermark in designated local regions, which improves robustness under regional attacks. Extensive experiments show that MaskWM achieves state-of-the-art performance in global and local watermark extraction, watermark localization, and multi-watermark embedding. It outperforms all existing baselines, including the recent leading model WAM for local watermarking, while preserving high visual quality of the watermarked images. In addition, MaskWM is highly efficient and adaptable. It requires only 20 hours of training on a single A6000 GPU, achieving 15× computational efficiency compared to WAM. By simply adjusting the distortion layer, MaskWM can be quickly fine-tuned to meet varying robustness requirements. Runyi Hu, Jie Zhang 0073, Shiqian Zhao, Nils Lukas, Jiwei Li 0001, Qing Guo 0005, Han Qiu 0001, Tianwei Zhang 0004 |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2025 | Towards Reliable Verification of Unauthorized Data Usage in Personalized Text-to-Image Diffusion ModelsabstractText-to-image diffusion models are pushing the boundaries of what generative AI can achieve in our lives. Beyond their ability to generate general images, new personalization techniques have been proposed to customize the pretrained base models for crafting images with specific themes or styles. Such a lightweight solution, enabling AI practitioners and developers to easily build their own personalized models, also poses a new concern regarding whether the personalized models are trained from unauthorized data. A promising solution is to proactively enable data traceability in generative models, where data owners embed external coatings (e.g., image watermarks or backdoor triggers) onto the datasets before releasing. Later the models trained over such datasets will also learn the coatings and unconsciously reproduce them in the generated mimicries, which can be extracted and used as the data usage evidence. However, we identify the existing coatings cannot be effectively learned in personalization tasks, making the corresponding verification less reliable. In this paper, we introduce SIREN, a novel methodology to proactively trace unauthorized data usage in black-box personalized text-to-image diffusion models. Our approach optimizes the coating in a delicate way to be recognized by the model as a feature relevant to the personalization task, thus significantly improving its learnability. We also utilize a human perceptual-aware constraint, a hypersphere classification technique, and a hypothesis-testing-guided verification method to enhance the stealthiness and detection accuracy of the coating. The effectiveness of SIREN is verified through extensive experiments on a diverse set of benchmark datasets, models, and learning algorithms. SIREN is also effective in various real-world scenarios and evaluated against potential countermeasures. Our code is publicly available here. Boheng Li, Yanhao Wei, Yankai Fu, Zhenting Wang, Yiming Li 0004, Jie Zhang 0073, Run Wang 0001, Tianwei Zhang 0004 |
SP | 6 |
| 2025 | CamLopa: A Hidden Wireless Camera Localization Framework via Signal Propagation Path AnalysisabstractHidden wireless cameras pose significant privacy threats, necessitating effective detection and localization methods. However, existing localization solutions often require impractical activity spaces, expensive specialized devices, or pre-collected training data, limiting their practical deployment. To address these limitations, we introduce CamLopa, a training-free wireless camera localization framework that operates with minimal activity space constraints using low-cost, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) devices. CamLopa can achieve detection and localization in just 45 seconds of user activities with a Raspberry Pi board. During this short period, it analyzes the causal relationship between wireless traffic and user movement to detect the presence of a hidden camera. Upon detection, CamLopa utilizes a novel azimuth localization model based on wireless signal propagation path analysis for localization. This model leverages the time ratio of user paths crossing the First Fresnel Zone (FFZ) to determine the camera's azimuth angle. Subsequently, CamLopa refines the localization by identifying the camera's quadrant. We evaluate CamLopa across various devices and environments, demonstrating its effectiveness with a 95.37% detection accuracy for snooping cameras and an average localization error of 17.23°, under the significantly reduced activity space requirements and without the need for training. Our code and demo are available at https://github.com/CamLoPA/CamLoPA-Code. Xiang Zhang 0011, Jie Zhang 0073, Zehua Ma, Jinyang Huang, Meng Li 0006, Huan Yan 0004, Peng Zhao 0024, Zijian Zhang 0001, Bin Liu 0016, Qing Guo 0005, Tianwei Zhang 0004, Nenghai Yu |
SP | 2 |
| 2025 | DiffLoc: WiFi Hidden Camera Localization Based on Electromagnetic Diffraction
Xiang Zhang 0011, Jie Zhang 0073, Huan Yan 0004, Jinyang Huang, Zehua Ma, Bin Liu 0016, Meng Li 0006, Kejiang Chen, Qing Guo 0005, Tianwei Zhang 0004, Zhi Liu 0002 |
USENIX Security Symposium | 2 |
| 2025 | When Translators Refuse to Translate: A Novel Attack to Speech Translation Systems
Haolin Wu 0001, Chang Liu 0089, Jing Chen 0003, Ruiying Du, Kun He 0008, Yu Zhang 0036, Cong Wu 0003, Tianwei Zhang 0004, Qing Guo 0005, Jie Zhang 0073 |
USENIX Security Symposium | 10 |
| 2025 | The Ghost Navigator: Revisiting the Hidden Vulnerability of Localization in Autonomous Driving
Shaoyin Cheng, Linqing Hu, Jie Zhang 0073, Chengyu Shi, Xingshuo Han, Tianwei Zhang 0004, Yueqiang Cheng, Weiming Zhang 0001 |
USENIX Security Symposium | 4 |
| 2025 | FaceTracer: Unveiling Source Identities From Swapped Face Images and Videos for Fraud PreventionabstractFace-swapping techniques have advanced rapidly with the evolution of deep learning, leading to widespread use and growing concerns about potential misuse, especially in cases of fraud. While many efforts have focused on detecting swapped face images or videos, these methods are insufficient for tracing the malicious users behind fraudulent activities. Intrusive watermark-based approaches also fail to trace unmarked identities, limiting their practical utility. To address these challenges, we introduce FaceTracer, the first non-intrusive framework specifically designed to trace the identity of the source person from swapped face images or videos. Specifically, FaceTracer leverages a disentanglement module that effectively suppresses identity information related to the target person while isolating the identity features of the source person. This allows us to extract robust identity information that can directly link the swapped face back to the original individual, aiding in uncovering the actors behind fraudulent activities. Extensive experiments demonstrate FaceTracer's effectiveness across various face-swapping techniques, successfully identifying the source person in swapped content and enabling the tracing of malicious actors involved in fraudulent activities. Additionally, FaceTracer shows strong transferability to unseen face-swapping methods including commercial applications and robustness against transmission distortions and adaptive attacks. Zhongyi Zhang 0001, Jie Zhang 0073, Wenbo Zhou 0004, Xinghui Zhou, Qing Guo 0005, Weiming Zhang 0001, Tianwei Zhang 0004, Nenghai Yu |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 2 |
| 2025 | InferDPT: Privacy-Preserving Inference for Closed-Box Large Language ModelsabstractLarge language models(LLMs), represented by ChatGPT, have greatly simplified text generation tasks. However, they have also raised concerns about privacy risks such as data leakage and unauthorized information collection. Existing solutions for privacy-preserving inference face practical challenges related to computational time and communication costs. In this article, we proposeInferDPT, the first practical framework for privacy-preservingInference of closed-box LLMs, implementingDifferentialPrivacy inText generation.InferDPTcomprises two key modules: the “perturbation module” utilizes the differentially private mechanism to generate a perturbed prompt, facilitating privacy-preserving inference with closed-box LLMs; the “extraction module”, inspired by knowledge distillation and phenomenon we observed, extracts coherent and consistent text from the perturbed generation result, ensuring successful text generation completion. To achieve a better balance between utility and privacy protection, we introduce RANTEXT, a novel differentially private mechanism integrated into the perturbation module ofInferDPT, which introduces the concept of “RANdom adjacency list” forTEXTperturbation within the prompt. Experimental results across three datasets demonstrate that the text generation quality ofInferDPTis comparable to that of non-private GPT-4, and RANTEXT surpasses existing state-of-the-art mechanisms, namely, SANTEXT+ and CUSTEXT+ in the trade-off between privacy and utility. Even with a privacy parameter$\varepsilon$value of 6.0, RANTEXT achieves an average privacy protection level of exceeding 0.90 against the embedding inversion attacks, which is 0.58× higher than that of SANTEXT+ and 3.35× higher than that of CUSTEXT+. Meng Tong, Kejiang Chen, Jie Zhang 0073, Yuang Qi, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu, Tianwei Zhang 0004, Zhikun Zhang 0001 |
IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput. | 3 |
| 2025 | Synthesizing Glyph Vectors for Practical Information Hiding in DocumentsabstractDocuments are ubiquitous vehicles for information transmission. Beyond the visible content meant for reading, there is a growing interest in hiding additional information in documents. Recent studies have focused on the utilization of glyphs, which are stored in vector format within computer systems. Specifically, glyph variants are manually designed to substitute the original ones in documents, thereby representing information. However, such strategies are costly, only effective for specific font types, and fragile to physical distortions. To address these limitations, this paper presents AutoStegaFont+, a two-stage and dual-modality learning framework designed to synthesize glyph vectors capable of conveying hidden information under real-world distortions. In the first stage, we jointly train an encoder and a decoder with a specialized distortion layer to achieve robust information encoding and decoding of glyph images. Then, the second stage employs a differentiable rasterizer to transfer the information from encoded glyph images to corresponding vectors, enabling the automatic generation of encoded vectors. Extensive experiments demonstrate the robust performance of AutoStegaFont+ across a variety of real-world scenarios, including screenshots, print-camera shooting, and screen-camera shooting, while maintaining compatibility with diverse font types. Additionally, we investigate the information-carrying capacity of individual glyphs, exploring their impact on robustness and visual quality. Jie Zhang 0073, Chang Liu 0089, Han Fang 0004, Zehua Ma, Kejiang Chen, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu |
IEEE Trans. Dependable Secur. Comput. | 2 |
| 2025 | Clean Image May Be Dangerous: Data Poisoning Attacks Against Deep HashingabstractLarge-scale image retrieval using deep hashing has become increasingly popular due to the exponential growth of image data and the remarkable feature extraction capabilities of deep neural networks (DNNs). However, deep hashing methods are vulnerable to malicious attacks, including adversarial and backdoor attacks. It is worth noting that these attacks typically involve altering the query images, which is not a practical concern in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we point out that even clean query images can be dangerous, inducing malicious target retrieval results, like undesired or illegal images. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to study datapoisoningattacks againstdeephashing(PADHASH). Specifically, we first train a surrogate model to simulate the behavior of the target deep hashing model. Then, a strict gradient matching strategy is proposed to generate the poisoned images. Extensive experiments on different models, datasets, hash methods, and hash code lengths demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our attack method. Jie Zhang 0073, Yuang Qi, Kejiang Chen, Tianwei Zhang 0004, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu |
IEEE Trans. Multim. | 2 |
| 2024 | Data-Free Hard-Label Robustness Stealing AttackabstractThe popularity of Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) has led to increased concerns about Model Stealing Attacks (MSA), which aim to craft a clone model by querying MLaaS. Currently, most research on MSA assumes that MLaaS can provide soft labels and that the attacker has a proxy dataset with a similar distribution. However, this fails to encapsulate the more practical scenario where only hard labels are returned by MLaaS and the data distribution remains elusive. Furthermore, most existing work focuses solely on stealing the model accuracy, neglecting the model robustness, while robustness is essential in security-sensitive scenarios, e.g, face-scan payment. Notably, improving model robustness often necessitates the use of expensive techniques such as adversarial training, thereby further making stealing robustness a more lucrative prospect. In response to these identified gaps, we introduce a novel Data-Free Hard-Label Robustness Stealing (DFHL-RS) attack in this paper, which enables the stealing of both model accuracy and robustness by simply querying hard labels of the target model without the help of any natural data. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The clone model achieves a clean accuracy of 77.86% and a robust accuracy of 39.51% against AutoAttack, which are only 4.71% and 8.40% lower than the target model on the CIFAR-10 dataset, significantly exceeding the baselines. Our code is available at: https://github.com/LetheSec/DFHL-RS-Attack. Xiaojian Yuan, Kejiang Chen, Jie Zhang 0073, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu |
AAAI | 4 |
| 2024 | GenderCARE: A Comprehensive Framework for Assessing and Reducing Gender Bias in Large Language ModelsabstractLarge language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capa- bilities in natural language generation, but they have also been observed to magnify societal biases, particularly those related to gender. In response to this issue, several benchmarks have been proposed to assess gender bias in LLMs. However, these bench- marks often lack practical flexibility or inadvertently introduce biases. To address these shortcomings, we introduce GenderCARE, a comprehensive framework that encompasses innovative Criteria, bias Assessment, Reduction techniques, and Evaluation metrics for quantifying and mitigating gender bias in LLMs. To begin, we estab- lish pioneering criteria for gender equality benchmarks, spanning dimensions such as inclusivity, diversity, explainability, objectivity, robustness, and realisticity. Guided by these criteria, we construct GenderPair, a novel pair-based benchmark designed to assess gen- der bias in LLMs comprehensively. Our benchmark provides stan- dardized and realistic evaluations, including previously overlooked gender groups such as transgender and non-binary individuals. Fur- thermore, we develop effective debiasing techniques that incorpo- rate counterfactual data augmentation and specialized fine-tuning strategies to reduce gender bias in LLMs without compromising their overall performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate a significant reduction in various gender bias benchmarks, with re- ductions peaking at over 90% and averaging above 35% across 17 different LLMs. Importantly, these reductions come with minimal variability in mainstream language tasks, remaining below 2%. By offering a realistic assessment and tailored reduction of gender biases, we hope that our GenderCARE can represent a significant step towards achieving fairness and equity in LLMs. More details are available at https://github.com/kstanghere/GenderCARE-ccs24. Kunsheng Tang, Wenbo Zhou 0004, Jie Zhang 0073, Aishan Liu, Gelei Deng, Peigui Qi, Weiming Zhang 0001, Tianwei Zhang 0004, Nenghai Yu |
CCS | 3 |
| 2024 | Robust-Wide: Robust Watermarking Against Instruction-Driven Image Editing
Runyi Hu, Jie Zhang 0073, Ting Xu 0004, Jiwei Li 0001, Tianwei Zhang 0004 |
ECCV (22) | 2 |
| 2024 | Attribute-Aware Head Swapping Guided by 3d ModelingabstractFace manipulation has ignited the interests of both academia and industry in very recent years. Existing face manipulation methods can be roughly categorized into two types: face attribute editing and face swapping. In this paper, we focus on swapping the identity. But unlike face swapping which only changes the face region, we attempt at a more challenging task: attribute-aware head swapping. Given a source video and a target video, we replace the whole target head with the whole source head while keeping the original target attributes. To address the inherent appearance gap (e.g., hairstyle, face shape), accompanying background incompatibility and lighting difference, our method consists of three key components: 1) a generative rendering-to-real-head model for source head modeling and attribute transfer; 2) a background modeling network to fix the background incompatibility during head swapping; 3) a deep harmonization network to fix remaining issues and makes the final composited result more realistic. We compare our approach to different face manipulation methods and the experimental results demonstrate its superiority for a lot of challenging cases. Wenbo Zhou 0004, Dongdong Chen 0001, Jing Liao 0001, Jie Zhang 0073, Kejiang Chen, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu |
ICASSP | 4 |
| 2024 | AquaLoRA: Toward White-box Protection for Customized Stable Diffusion Models via Watermark LoRAabstractDiffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generating high-quality images. Recently, the open-source models represented by Stable Diffusion (SD) are thriving and are accessible for customization, giving rise to a vibrant community of creators and enthusiasts. However, the widespread availability of customized SD models has led to copyright concerns, like unauthorized model distribution and unconsented commercial use. To address it, recent works aim to let SD models output watermarked content for post-hoc forensics. Unfortunately, none of them can achieve the challenging white-box protection, wherein the malicious user can easily remove or replace the watermarking module to fail the subsequent verification. For this, we propose AquaLoRA as the first implementation under this scenario. Briefly, we merge watermark information into the U-Net of Stable Diffusion Models via a watermark LowRank Adaptation (LoRA) module in a two-stage manner. For watermark LoRA module, we devise a scaling matrix to achieve flexible message updates without retraining. To guarantee fidelity, we design Prior Preserving Fine-Tuning (PPFT) to ensure watermark learning with minimal impacts on model distribution, validated by proofs. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies to verify our design. Our code is available at github.com/Georgefwt/AquaLoRA. Weitao Feng 0001, Wenbo Zhou 0004, Jiyan He, Jie Zhang 0073, Tianyi Wei, Tianwei Zhang 0004, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu |
ICML | 4 |
| 2024 | Transferable Facial Privacy Protection against Blind Face Restoration via Domain-Consistent Adversarial ObfuscationabstractWith the rise of social media and the proliferation of facial recognition surveillance, concerns surrounding privacy have escalated significantly. While numerous studies have concentrated on safeguarding users against unauthorized face recognition, a new and often overlooked issue has emerged due to advances in facial restoration techniques: traditional methods of facial obfuscation may no longer provide a secure shield, as they can potentially expose anonymous information to human perception. Our empirical study shows that blind face restoration (BFR) models can restore obfuscated faces with high probability by simply retraining them on obfuscated (e.g., pixelated) faces. To address it, we propose a transferable adversarial obfuscation method for privacy protection against BFR models. Specifically, we observed a common characteristic among BFR models, namely, their capability to approximate an inverse mapping of a transformation from a high-quality image domain to a low-quality image domain. Leveraging this shared model attribute, we have developed a domain-consistent adversarial method for generating obfuscated images. In essence, our method is designed to minimize overfitting to surrogate models during the perturbation generation process, thereby enhancing the generalization of adversarial obfuscated facial images. Extensive experiments on various BFR models demonstrate the effectiveness and transferability of the proposed method. Hang Zhou 0007, Jie Zhang 0073, Wenbo Zhou 0004, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu |
ICML | 3 |
| 2024 | Model X-ray: Detecting Backdoored Models via Decision BoundaryabstractBackdoor attacks pose a significant security vulnerability for deep neural networks (DNNs), enabling them to operate normally on clean inputs but manipulate predictions when specific trigger patterns occur. In this paper, we consider a practical post-training scenario backdoor defense, where the defender aims to evaluate whether a trained model has been compromised by backdoor attacks. Currently, post-training backdoor detection approaches often operate under the assumption that the defender has knowledge of the attack information, logit output from the model, and knowledge of the model parameters, limiting their implementation in practical scenarios. Yanghao Su, Jie Zhang 0073, Ting Xu 0004, Tianwei Zhang 0004, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu |
ACM Multimedia | 2 |
| 2024 | Detecting Voice Cloning Attacks via Timbre Watermarking
Chang Liu 0089, Jie Zhang 0073, Tianwei Zhang 0004, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu |
NDSS | 2 |
| 2024 | ART: Automatic Red-teaming for Text-to-Image Models to Protect Benign UsersabstractLarge-scale pre-trained generative models are taking the world by storm, due to their abilities in generating creative content. Meanwhile, safeguards for these generative models are developed, to protect users' rights and safety, most of which are designed for large language models. Existing methods primarily focus on jailbreak and adversarial attacks, which mainly evaluate the model's safety under malicious prompts. Recent work found that manually crafted safe prompts can unintentionally trigger unsafe generations. To further systematically evaluate the safety risks of text-to-image models, we propose a novel Automatic Red-Teaming framework, ART. Our method leverages both vision language model and large language model to establish a connection between unsafe generations and their prompts, thereby more efficiently identifying the model's vulnerabilities. With our comprehensive experiments, we reveal the toxicity of the popular open-source text-to-image models. The experiments also validate the effectiveness, adaptability, and great diversity of ART. Additionally, we introduce three large-scale red-teaming datasets for studying the safety risks associated with text-to-image models. Datasets and models can be found in https://github.com/GuanlinLee/ART. Kangjie Chen, Shudong Zhang, Jie Zhang 0073, Tianwei Zhang 0004 |
NeurIPS | 4 |
| 2024 | Dual-verification-based model fingerprints against ambiguity attacksabstractAbstract Efforts have been made to safeguard DNNs from intellectual property infringement. Among different techniques, model fingerprinting has gained popularity due to its ability to examine potential infringement without altering the model’s parameters. However, there is a concern regarding the vulnerability of previous model fingerprints to “ambiguity attacks,” where attackers may use fabricated fingerprints to bypass ownership verification, potentially leading to disputes. To address this issue, we propose a dual-verification-based fingerprint authentication system that incorporates the verification of fingerprint genuineness. Briefly, this system involves two authentication processes: conventional fingerprint methods for authenticating model copyrights and the incorporation of copyright information into the fingerprint feature map to confirm ownership of the model fingerprint. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in resisting ambiguity attacks and managing attempts to remove the fingerprint. Boyao Zhao, Jie Zhang 0073, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu |
Cybersecur. | 3 |
| 2024 | Robust Model Watermarking for Image Processing Networks via Structure ConsistencyabstractThe intellectual property of deep networks can be easily "stolen" by surrogate model attack. There has been significant progress in protecting the model IP in classification tasks. However, little attention has been devoted to the protection of image processing models. By utilizing consistent invisible spatial watermarks, the work (Zhang et al. 2020) first considered model watermarking for deep image processing networks and demonstrated its efficacy in many downstream tasks. Its success depends on the hypothesis that if a consistent watermark exists in all prediction outputs, that watermark will be learned into the attacker's surrogate model. However, when the attacker uses common data augmentation attacks (e.g., rotate, crop, and resize) during surrogate model training, it will fail because the underlying watermark consistency is destroyed. To mitigate this issue, we propose a new watermarking methodology, "structure consistency", based on which a new deep structure-aligned model watermarking algorithm is designed. Specifically, the embedded watermarks are designed to be aligned with physically consistent image structures, such as edges or semantic regions. Experiments demonstrate that our method is more robust than the baseline in resisting data augmentation attacks. Besides that, we test the generalization ability and robustness of our method to a broader range of adaptive attacks. Jie Zhang 0073, Dongdong Chen 0001, Jing Liao 0001, Zehua Ma, Han Fang 0004, Weiming Zhang 0001, Huamin Feng, Gang Hua 0001, Nenghai Yu |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 1 |
| 2024 | A Robust Database Watermarking Scheme That Preserves Statistical CharacteristicsabstractDatabase watermarking can be used for copyright verification and leakage traceability, effectively protecting the security of the database. However, the existing watermarking schemes commonly embed watermarks by modifying the original data, which changes the statistical characteristics and affects the statistical analysis of the database. Therefore, this paper proposes SCPW, aStatisticalCharacteristicsPreserving robust databaseWatermarking framework. First, we perform a theoretical analysis and propose a data modification scheme maintaining the statistical characteristics unchanged. Then, we establish the correspondence between the data and the watermarks that need to be embedded in it by grouping. Finally, the watermark message is embedded into the database through data verification and modification. Specifically, for data that needs to be watermarked, we first verify whether the potential watermark bits extracted from the data are the same as bits that need to be embedded. If they are the same, we regard this original data, usually a floating point number, as a “good number” and do not modify it. Otherwise, we modify the data until it becomes a “good number” using a data modification scheme that preserves the statistical characteristics proposed by the theoretical analysis. In addition, we also use the genetic algorithm to optimize the grouping results and increase the proportion of “good number”, thereby reducing the proportion of data that needs to be modified and further reducing distortion. To our best knowledge, SCPW is the first watermarking scheme that ensures the preservation of statistical characteristics, and the experimental results also prove its excellent ability to preserve statistical characteristics compared to existing schemes. Moreover, experiments also illustrate that our method is robust against a wide range of attacks. When under deletion attack (deletion rate = 90%), the bit error rate of watermark extraction is only 0.8%, which is more than 12% lower than the current best method. Zhiwen Ren, Han Fang 0004, Jie Zhang 0073, Zehua Ma, Ronghao Lin, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu |
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng. | 3 |
| 2023 | DeAR: A Deep-Learning-Based Audio Re-recording Resilient WatermarkingabstractAudio watermarking is widely used for leaking source tracing. The robustness of the watermark determines the traceability of the algorithm. With the development of digital technology, audio re-recording (AR) has become an efficient and covert means to steal secrets. AR process could drastically destroy the watermark signal while preserving the original information. This puts forward a new requirement for audio watermarking at this stage, that is, to be robust to AR distortions. Unfortunately, none of the existing algorithms can effectively resist AR attacks due to the complexity of the AR process. To address this limitation, this paper proposes DeAR, a deep-learning-based audio re-recording resistant watermarking. Inspired by DNN-based image watermarking, we pioneer a deep learning framework for audio carriers, based on which the watermark signal can be effectively embedded and extracted. Meanwhile, in order to resist the AR attack, we delicately analyze the distortions that occurred in the AR process and design the corresponding distortion layer to cooperate with the proposed watermarking framework. Extensive experiments show that the proposed algorithm can resist not only common electronic channel distortions but also AR distortions. Under the premise of high-quality embedding (SNR=25.86dB), in the case of a common re-recording distance (20cm), the algorithm can effectively achieve an average bit recovery accuracy of 98.55%. Chang Liu 0089, Jie Zhang 0073, Han Fang 0004, Zehua Ma, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu |
AAAI | 2 |
| 2023 | AutoStegaFont: Synthesizing Vector Fonts for Hiding Information in DocumentsabstractHiding information in text documents has been a hot topic recently, with the most typical schemes of utilizing fonts. By constructing several fonts with similar appearances, information can be effectively represented and embedded in documents. However, due to the unstructured characteristic, font vectors are more difficult to synthesize than font images. Existing methods mainly use handcrafted features to design the fonts manually, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Moreover, due to the diversity of fonts, handcrafted features are not generalizable to different fonts. Besides, in practice, since documents might be distorted through transmission, ensuring extractability under distortions is also an important requirement. Therefore, three requirements are imposed on vector font generation in this domain: automaticity, generalizability, and robustness. However, none of the existing methods can satisfy these requirements well and simultaneously. To satisfy the above requirements, we propose AutoStegaFont, an automatic vector font synthesis scheme for hiding information in documents. Specifically, we design a two-stage and dual-modality learning framework. In the first stage, we jointly train an encoder and a decoder to invisibly encode the font images with different information. To ensure robustness, we target designing a noise layer to work with the encoder and decoder during training. In the second stage, we employ a differentiable rasterizer to establish a connection between the image and the vector modality. Then, we design an optimization algorithm to convey the information from the encoded image to the corresponding vector. Thus the encoded font vectors can be automatically generated. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our scheme in automatically synthesizing vector fonts for hiding information in documents, with robustness to distortions caused by low-resolution screenshots, printing, and photography. Besides, the proposed framework has better generalizability to fonts with diverse styles and languages. Jie Zhang 0073, Han Fang 0004, Chang Liu 0089, Zehua Ma, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu |
AAAI | 2 |
| 2023 | Pseudo Label-Guided Model Inversion Attack via Conditional Generative Adversarial NetworkabstractModel inversion (MI) attacks have raised increasing concerns about privacy, which can reconstruct training data from public models. Indeed, MI attacks can be formalized as an optimization problem that seeks private data in a certain space. Recent MI attacks leverage a generative adversarial network (GAN) as an image prior to narrow the search space, and can successfully reconstruct even the high-dimensional data (e.g., face images). However, these generative MI attacks do not fully exploit the potential capabilities of the target model, still leading to a vague and coupled search space, i.e., different classes of images are coupled in the search space. Besides, the widely used cross-entropy loss in these attacks suffers from gradient vanishing. To address these problems, we propose Pseudo Label-Guided MI (PLG-MI) attack via conditional GAN (cGAN). At first, a top-n selection strategy is proposed to provide pseudo-labels for public data, and use pseudo-labels to guide the training of the cGAN. In this way, the search space is decoupled for different classes of images. Then a max-margin loss is introduced to improve the search process on the subspace of a target class. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PLG-MI attack significantly improves the attack success rate and visual quality for various datasets and models, notably, 2 ∼ 3× better than state-of-the-art attacks under large distributional shifts. Our code is available at: https://github.com/LetheSec/PLG-MI-Attack. Xiaojian Yuan, Kejiang Chen, Jie Zhang 0073, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu, Yang Zhang 0016 |
AAAI | 3 |
| 2023 | ProTegO: Protect Text Content against OCR Extraction AttackabstractOnline documents greatly improve the efficiency of information interaction but also cause potential security hazards, such as the ability to copy and reuse text content without authorization readily. To address copyright concerns, recent works have proposed converting reproducible text content into non-reproducible formats, making digital text content observable but not duplicable. However, as the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology develops, adversaries can still take screenshots of the target text region and use OCR to extract the text content. None of the existing methods can be well adapted to this kind of OCR extraction attack. In this paper, we propose "ProTegO'', a novel text content protection method against the OCR extraction attack, which generates adversarial underpaintings that do not affect human reading but can interfere with OCR after taking screenshots. Specifically, we design a text-style universal adversarial underpaintings generation framework, which can mislead both text recognition models and commercial OCR services. For invisibility, we take full advantage of the fusion property of human eyes and create complementary underpaintings to display alternatively on the screen. Experimental results demonstrate that ProTegO is a one-size-fits-all method that can ensure good visual quality while simultaneously achieving a high protection success rate on text recognition models with different architectures, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we validate the feasibility of ProTegO on a wide range of popular commercial OCR services, including Microsoft, Tencent, Alibaba, Huawei, Baidu, Apple, and Xiaomi. Codes will be available at https://github.com/Ruby-He/ProTegO. Yanru He, Kejiang Chen, Zehua Ma, Jie Zhang 0073, Huanyu Bian, Han Fang 0004, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu |
ACM Multimedia | 6 |
| 2023 | Ada3Diff: Defending against 3D Adversarial Point Clouds via Adaptive DiffusionabstractDeep 3D point cloud models are sensitive to adversarial attacks, which poses threats to safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving. Robust training and defend-by-denoising are typical strategies for defending adversarial perturbations. However, they either induce massive computational overhead or rely heavily upon specified priors, limiting generalized robustness against attacks of all kinds. To remedy it, this paper introduces a novel distortion-aware defense framework that can rebuild the pristine data distribution with a tailored intensity estimator and a diffusion model. To perform distortion-aware forward diffusion, we design a distortion estimation algorithm that is obtained by summing the distance of each point to the best-fitting plane of its local neighboring points, which is based on the observation of the local spatial properties of the adversarial point cloud. By iterative diffusion and reverse denoising, the perturbed point cloud under various distortions can be restored back to a clean distribution. This approach enables effective defense against adaptive attacks with varying noise budgets, enhancing the robustness of existing 3D deep recognition models. Hang Zhou 0007, Jie Zhang 0073, Qidong Huang, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu |
ACM Multimedia | 3 |
| 2023 | Investigating Neural-based Function Name Reassignment from the Perspective of Binary Code RepresentationabstractBuilding a model to reassign descriptive names for binary functions is considerable assistance for reverse engineering. Existing methods proposed for this issue are based on the low-level representation of binary code (e.g., assembly code), and especially the recent approaches employed neural-based models on instruction sequences. However, their performance is still unsatisfactory. Meanwhile, modern decompilers provide lifted representations of binary code, and their effectiveness has not been adequately studied. This paper further explores the issue of function name reassignment from the perspective of binary code representation. Specifically, we present a general and flexible NEural-based function name Reassignment framework NER, which leverages a decompiler to obtain a specific representation and applies the corresponding serialization strategy on it. NER then uses an alternative neural network to make predictions. Three levels of representation are investigated, including assembly code, Intermediate Representation (IR), and pseudo-code. We observe the binary code representations are significant for the final performance. It demonstrates that the pseudo-code is the most effective one. Based on these findings, we leverage the framework to implement a reassignment model NER-pc, which has 25% and 10% F1 score improvements against the state-of-the-art methods. Besides, more experiments are conducted to verify the design of NER and the effectiveness of NER-pc. Han Gao 0014, Jie Zhang 0073, Yanru He, Shaoyin Cheng, Weiming Zhang 0001 |
PST | 3 |
| 2023 | Perceptual Hashing of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Model Copy DetectionabstractIn recent years, many model intellectual property (IP) proof methods for IP protection have been proposed, such as model watermarking and model fingerprinting. However, with the increasing number of models transmitted and deployed on the Internet, quickly finding the suspect model among thousands of models on model-sharing platforms such as GitHub is in great demand, which concurrently triggers the new security problem of model copy detection for IP protection. As an important part of the model IP protection system, the model copy detection task has not received enough attention. Due to the high computational complexity, both model watermarking and model fingerprinting lack the capability to efficiently find suspected infringing models among tens of millions of models. In this article, inspired by the hash-based image retrieval methods, we introduce a novel model copy detection mechanism: perceptual hashing for convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The proposed perceptual hashing algorithm can convert the weights of CNNs to fixed-length binary hash codes so that the lightly modified version has the similar hash code as the original model. By comparing the similarity of a pair of hash codes between a query model and a test model in the model library, similar versions of a query model can be retrieved efficiently. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first perceptual hashing algorithm for deep neural network models. Specifically, we first select the important model weights based on the model compression theory, then calculate the normal test statistics (NTS) on the segments of important weights, and finally encode the NTS features into hash codes. The experiment performed on a model library containing 3,565 models indicates that our perceptual hashing scheme has a superior copy detection performance. Hang Zhou 0007, Jie Zhang 0073, Dongdong Chen 0001, Weiming Zhang 0001, Kejiang Chen, Gang Hua 0001, Nenghai Yu |
ACM Trans. Multim. Comput. Commun. Appl. | 3 |
| 2022 | Tracing Text Provenance via Context-Aware Lexical SubstitutionabstractText content created by humans or language models is often stolen or misused by adversaries. Tracing text provenance can help claim the ownership of text content or identify the malicious users who distribute misleading content like machine-generated fake news. There have been some attempts to achieve this, mainly based on watermarking techniques. Specifically, traditional text watermarking methods embed watermarks by slightly altering text format like line spacing and font, which, however, are fragile to cross-media transmissions like OCR. Considering this, natural language watermarking methods represent watermarks by replacing words in original sentences with synonyms from handcrafted lexical resources (e.g., WordNet), but they do not consider the substitution’s impact on the overall sentence's meaning. Recently, a transformer-based network was proposed to embed watermarks by modifying the unobtrusive words (e.g., function words), which also impair the sentence's logical and semantic coherence. Besides, one well-trained network fails on other different types of text content. To address the limitations mentioned above, we propose a natural language watermarking scheme based on context-aware lexical substitution (LS). Specifically, we employ BERT to suggest LS candidates by inferring the semantic relatedness between the candidates and the original sentence. Based on this, a selection strategy in terms of synchronicity and substitutability is further designed to test whether a word is exactly suitable for carrying the watermark signal. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, under both objective and subjective metrics, our watermarking scheme can well preserve the semantic integrity of original sentences and has a better transferability than existing methods. Besides, the proposed LS approach outperforms the state-of-the-art approach on the Stanford Word Substitution Benchmark. Jie Zhang 0073, Kejiang Chen, Weiming Zhang 0001, Zehua Ma, Nenghai Yu |
AAAI | 2 |
| 2022 | Deep Model Intellectual Property Protection via Deep WatermarkingabstractDespite the tremendous success, deep neural networks are exposed to serious IP infringement risks. Given a target deep model, if the attacker knows its full information, it can be easily stolen by fine-tuning. Even if only its output is accessible, a surrogate model can be trained through student-teacher learning by generating many input-output training pairs. Therefore, deep model IP protection is important and necessary. However, it is still seriously under-researched. In this work, we propose a new model watermarking framework for protecting deep networks trained for low-level computer vision or image processing tasks. Specifically, a special task-agnostic barrier is added after the target model, which embeds a unified and invisible watermark into its outputs. When the attacker trains one surrogate model by using the input-output pairs of the barrier target model, the hidden watermark will be learned and extracted afterwards. To enable watermarks from binary bits to high-resolution images, a deep invisible watermarking mechanism is designed. By jointly training the target model and watermark embedding, the extra barrier can even be absorbed into the target model. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the robustness of the proposed framework, which can resist attacks with different network structures and objective functions. Jie Zhang 0073, Dongdong Chen 0001, Jing Liao 0001, Weiming Zhang 0001, Huamin Feng, Gang Hua 0001, Nenghai Yu |
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. | 1 |
| 2022 | Poison Ink: Robust and Invisible Backdoor AttackabstractRecent research shows deep neural networks are vulnerable to different types of attacks, such as adversarial attacks, data poisoning attacks, and backdoor attacks. Among them, backdoor attacks are the most cunning and can occur in almost every stage of the deep learning pipeline. Backdoor attacks have attracted lots of interest from both academia and industry. However, most existing backdoor attack methods are visible or fragile to some effortless pre-processing such as common data transformations. To address these limitations, we propose a robust and invisible backdoor attack called "Poison Ink". Concretely, we first leverage the image structures as target poisoning areas and fill them with poison ink (information) to generate the trigger pattern. As the image structure can keep its semantic meaning during the data transformation, such a trigger pattern is inherently robust to data transformations. Then we leverage a deep injection network to embed such input-aware trigger pattern into the cover image to achieve stealthiness. Compared to existing popular backdoor attack methods, Poison Ink outperforms both in stealthiness and robustness. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Poison Ink is not only general to different datasets and network architectures but also flexible for different attack scenarios. Besides, it also has very strong resistance against many state-of-the-art defense techniques. Jie Zhang 0073, Dongdong Chen 0001, Qidong Huang, Jing Liao 0001, Weiming Zhang 0001, Huamin Feng, Gang Hua 0001, Nenghai Yu |
IEEE Trans. Image Process. | 1 |
| 2022 | JPEG Robust Invertible GrayscaleabstractInvertible grayscale is a special kind of grayscale from which the original color can be recovered. Given an input color image, this seminal work tries to hide the color information into its grayscale counterpart while making it hard to recognize any anomalies. This powerful functionality is enabled by training a hiding sub-network and restoring sub-network in an end-to-end way. Despite its expressive results, two key limitations exist: 1) The restored color image often suffers from some noticeable visual artifacts in the smooth regions. 2) It is very sensitive to JPEG compression, i.e., the original color information cannot be well recovered once the intermediate grayscale image is compressed by JPEG. To overcome these two limitations, this article introduces adversarial training and JPEG simulator respectively. Specifically, two auxiliary adversarial networks are incorporated to make the intermediate grayscale images and final restored color images indistinguishable from normal grayscale and color images. And the JPEG simulator is utilized to simulate real JPEG compression during the online training so that the hiding and restoring sub-networks can automatically learn to be JPEG robust. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to the original invertible grayscale work both qualitatively and quantitatively while ensuring the JPEG robustness. We further show that the proposed framework can be applied under different types of grayscale constraints and achieve excellent results. Kunlin Liu, Dongdong Chen 0001, Jing Liao 0001, Weiming Zhang 0001, Hang Zhou 0007, Jie Zhang 0073, Wenbo Zhou 0004, Nenghai Yu |
IEEE Trans. Vis. Comput. Graph. | 6 |
| 2021 | Initiative Defense against Facial ManipulationabstractBenefiting from the development of generative adversarial networks (GAN), facial manipulation has achieved significant progress in both academia and industry recently. It inspires an increasing number of entertainment applications but also incurs severe threats to individual privacy and even political security meanwhile. To mitigate such risks, many countermeasures have been proposed. However, the great majority methods are designed in a passive manner, which is to detect whether the facial images or videos are tampered after their wide propagation. These detection-based methods have a fatal limitation, that is, they only work for ex-post forensics but can not prevent the engendering of malicious behavior. To address the limitation, in this paper, we propose a novel framework of initiative defense to degrade the performance of facial manipulation models controlled by malicious users. The basic idea is to actively inject imperceptible venom into target facial data before manipulation. To this end, we first imitate the target manipulation model with a surrogate model, and then devise a poison perturbation generator to obtain the desired venom. An alternating training strategy are further leveraged to train both the surrogate model and the perturbation generator. Two typical facial manipulation tasks: face attribute editing and face reenactment, are considered in our initiative defense framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our framework in different settings. Finally, we hope this work can shed some light on initiative countermeasures against more adversarial scenarios. Qidong Huang, Jie Zhang 0073, Wenbo Zhou 0004, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu |
AAAI | 2 |
| 2021 | Deep Template-Based WatermarkingabstractTraditional watermarking algorithms have been extensively studied. As an important type of watermarking schemes, template-based approaches maintain a very high embedding rate. In such scheme, the message is often represented by some dedicatedly designed templates, and then the message embedding process is carried out by additive operation with the templates and the host image. To resist potential distortions, these templates often need to contain some special statistical features so that they can be successfully recovered at the extracting side. But in existing methods, most of these features are handcrafted and too simple, thus making them not robust enough to resist serious distortions unless very strong and obvious templates are used. Inspired by the powerful feature learning capacity of deep neural network, we propose the first deep template-based watermarking algorithm in this paper. Specifically, at the embedding side, we first design two new templates for message embedding and locating, which is achieved by leveraging the special properties of human visual system, i.e., insensitivity to specific chrominance components, the proximity principle and the oblique effect. At the extracting side, we propose a novel two-stage deep neural network, which consists of an auxiliary enhancing sub-network and a classification sub-network. Thanks to the power of deep neural networks, our method achieves both digital editing resilience and camera shooting resilience based on typical application scenarios. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve much better robustness than existing methods while guaranteeing the original visual quality. Han Fang 0004, Dongdong Chen 0001, Qidong Huang, Jie Zhang 0073, Zehua Ma, Weiming Zhang 0001, Nenghai Yu |
IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol. | 4 |
| 2020 | Model Watermarking for Image Processing NetworksabstractDeep learning has achieved tremendous success in numerous industrial applications. As training a good model often needs massive high-quality data and computation resources, the learned models often have significant business values. However, these valuable deep models are exposed to a huge risk of infringements. For example, if the attacker has the full information of one target model including the network structure and weights, the model can be easily finetuned on new datasets. Even if the attacker can only access the output of the target model, he/she can still train another similar surrogate model by generating a large scale of input-output training pairs. How to protect the intellectual property of deep models is a very important but seriously under-researched problem. There are a few recent attempts at classification network protection only.In this paper, we propose the first model watermarking framework for protecting image processing models. To achieve this goal, we leverage the spatial invisible watermarking mechanism. Specifically, given a black-box target model, a unified and invisible watermark is hidden into its outputs, which can be regarded as a special task-agnostic barrier. In this way, when the attacker trains one surrogate model by using the input-output pairs of the target model, the hidden watermark will be learned and extracted afterward. To enable watermarks from binary bits to high-resolution images, both traditional and deep spatial invisible watermarking mechanism are considered. Experiments demonstrate the robustness of the proposed watermarking mechanism, which can resist surrogate models learned with different network structures and objective functions. Besides deep models, the proposed method is also easy to be extended to protect data and traditional image processing algorithms. Jie Zhang 0073, Dongdong Chen 0001, Jing Liao 0001, Han Fang 0004, Weiming Zhang 0001, Wenbo Zhou 0004, Hao Cui 0004, Nenghai Yu |
AAAI | 1 |
| 2020 | Reversible Watermarking in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Integrity AuthenticationabstractDeep convolutional neural networks have made outstanding contributions in many fields such as computer vision in the past few years and many researchers published well-trained network for downloading. But recent studies have shown serious concerns about integrity due to model-reuse attacks and backdoor attacks. In order to protect these open-source networks, many algorithms have been proposed such as watermarking. However, these existing algorithms modify the contents of the network permanently and are not suitable for integrity authentication. In this paper, we propose a reversible watermarking algorithm for integrity authentication. Specifically, we present the reversible watermarking problem of deep convolutional neural networks and utilize the pruning theory of model compression technology to construct a host sequence used for embedding watermarking information by histogram shift. As shown in the experiments, the influence of embedding reversible watermarking on the classification performance is less than ±0.5% and the parameters of the model can be fully recovered after extracting the watermarking. At the same time, the integrity of the model can be verified by applying the reversible watermarking: if the model is modified illegally, the authentication information generated by original model will be absolutely different from the extracted watermarking information. Xiquan Guan, Huamin Feng, Weiming Zhang 0001, Hang Zhou 0007, Jie Zhang 0073, Nenghai Yu |
ACM Multimedia | 5 |
| 2020 | Passport-aware Normalization for Deep Model ProtectionabstractDespite tremendous success in many application scenarios, deep learning faces serious intellectual property (IP) infringement threats. Considering the cost of designing and training a good model, infringements will significantly infringe the interests of the original model owner. Recently, many impressive works have emerged for deep model IP protection. However, they either are vulnerable to ambiguity attacks, or require changes in the target network structure by replacing its original normalization layers and hence cause significant performance drops. To this end, we propose a new passport-aware normalization formulation, which is generally applicable to most existing normalization layers and only needs to add another passport-aware branch for IP protection. This new branch is jointly trained with the target model but discarded in the inference stage. Therefore it causes no structure change in the target model. Only when the model IP is suspected to be stolen by someone, the private passport-aware branch is added back for ownership verification. Through extensive experiments, we verify its effectiveness in both image and 3D point recognition models. It is demonstrated to be robust not only to common attack techniques like fine-tuning and model compression, but also to ambiguity attacks. By further combining it with trigger-set based methods, both black-box and white-box verification can be achieved for enhanced security of deep learning models deployed in real systems. Jie Zhang 0073, Dongdong Chen 0001, Jing Liao 0001, Weiming Zhang 0001, Gang Hua 0001, Nenghai Yu |
NeurIPS | 1 |