A vast amount of user-generated content is uploaded on social media everyday, potentially being collected as training data for large language models, and thus poses severe threats to individual privacy. Existing approaches for protecting user-generated content often fail to detect implicit privacy leaks which are not directly given but could be inferred from the contextual text (clues). The precise detection of leaks and clues is difficult but critical in text sanitization. We propose a graph-based model for the user-generated content and build a privacy leakage detector PrivSniffer which integrates the inference capability of language models with the precise graph search, to capture the contextual privacy leakage (CPL). To evaluate the effectiveness of the framework, we create SynthLeak, a dataset of dialogues containing human-labeled implicit leaks, while featuring diversity and naturalness. Our experimental results on SynthLeak and several other benchmarks reveal PrivSniffer's superior capability in detecting implicit leaks and CPLs. Particularly in CPL detection, the state-of-the-art approach achieves only an F1 Score of 0.36, whereas PrivSniffer attains 0.59 on SynthLeak, showing great promise in real-world text sanitization.

Zero-shot generalized anomaly detection (ZGAD) plays a critical role in industrial automation and health screening. Recent studies have shown that ZGAD methods built on visual-language models (VLMs) like CLIP have excellent cross-domain detection performance. Different from other computer vision tasks, ZGAD needs to jointly optimize both image-level anomaly classification and pixel-level anomaly segmentation tasks for determining whether an image contains anomalies and detecting anomalous parts of an image, respectively, this leads to different granularity of the tasks. However, existing methods ignore this problem, processing these two tasks with one set of broad text prompts used to describe the whole image. This limits CLIP to align textual features with pixel-level visual features and impairs anomaly segmentation performance. Therefore, for precise visual-text alignment, in this paper we propose a novel fine-grained text prompts generation strategy. We then apply the broad text prompts and the generated fine-grained text prompts for visual-textual alignment in classification and segmentation tasks, respectively, accurately capturing normal and anomalous instances in images. We also introduce the Text Prompt Shunt (TPS) model, which performs joint learning by reconstruction the complementary and dependency relationships between the two tasks to enhance anomaly detection performance. This enables our method to focus on fine-grained segmentation of anomalous targets while ensuring accurate anomaly classification, and achieve pixel-level comprehensible CLIP for the first time in the ZGAD task. Extensive experiments on 13 real-world anomaly detection datasets demonstrate that TPS achieves superior ZGAD performance across highly diverse datasets from industrial and medical domains.

Distributed machine learning (DML) is promising for training large models on large datasets. In DML, multiple workers collaborate on the training of neural networks, significantly reducing the time required for neural network training. The efficiency of DML is heavily influenced by communication, making it crucial to balance the trade-off between communication cost and model performance in current research. Local methods are excellent at reducing communication costs, yet face degradation in accuracy and generalizability. Indeed, global knowledge is valuable for improving performance in local methods. However, the theoretical analysis of global knowledge validity is lacking, and global knowledge can currently only be used in the global aggregation of local methods due to communication limitations and staleness. To this end, in this paper, we establish the mechanism of global knowledge guidance and propose Adaptive Global Knowledge Guided Distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent (AdaGK-SGD) to extend the guidance of global knowledge to the whole distributed training process without any additional communication. Specifically, we define the maximum lifetime of global knowledge based on the mechanism, and establish a correlation between the maximum lifetime and the validity of global knowledge to circumvent the adverse effects of global knowledge staleness. The Maximum Lifetime of Global Knowledge module of our algorithm can be applied separately to other algorithms. In addition, considering the application, we provide a straightforward and efficient strategy for achieving the maximum lifetime adaptive setting. We establish the convergence rate of AdaGK-SGD for convex and non-convex scenarios. Numerically, we find that AdaGK-SGD can significantly improve the accuracy and generalizability of distributed algorithms compared with existing methods.

Federated Learning (FL) is an emerging direction in distributed machine learning that enables jointly training a model without sharing the data. However, as the size of datasets grows exponentially, computational costs of FL increase. In this paper, we propose the first Coreset Selection criterion for Federated Learning (FedCS) by exploring the Distance Contrast (DC) in feature space. Our FedCS is inspired by the discovery that DC can indicate the intrinsic properties inherent to samples regardless of the networks. Based on the observation, we develop a method that is mathematically formulated to prune samples with high DC. The principle behind our pruning is that high DC samples either contain less information or represent rare extreme cases, thus removal of them can enhance the aggregation performance. Besides, we experimentally show that samples with low DC usually contain substantial information and reflect the common features of samples within their classes, such that they are suitable for constructing coreset. With only two time of linear-logarithmic complexity operation, FedCS leads to significant improvements over the methods using whole dataset in terms of computational costs, with similar accuracies. For example, on the CIFAR-10 dataset with Dirichlet coefficient α = 0.1, FedCS achieves 58.88% accuracy using only 44% of the entire dataset, whereas other methods require twice the data volume as FedCS for same performance.

Model compression methods such as pruning and quantization have been proposed to facilitate the deployment of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on resource-constrained devices. Existing methods aim to combine the two for simultaneous improvement in compression ratio and runtime efficiency. However, most of the joint methods adopt linear tandem structures. Due to the lack of a unified framework, different optimization directions result in suboptimal solutions, especially when the compression ratio is extremely high. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive curvature-based compression (ACC) method, which achieves a dual-depth unified joint optimization of pruning and quantization. In the first depth, we unify the pruning and quantization criteria using mean curvature, which leverages the discrete nature of image data and the continuum theory of differential geometry. In the second depth, we replace the traditional training process in the joint pruning-quantization method with curvature-aware knowledge distillation (CKD), unifying the two-stage approach into a simple but powerful parallel step. Our method is effective and interpretable by utilizing inherent properties to promote the understanding of information distribution and the importance of feature maps. Extensive experiments on multiple advanced benchmarks and diverse downstream task datasets have validated the superiority and generalizability of our ACC. Notably, we can achieve a 1.05% Top-1 accuracy improvement over the baseline under an extreme compression ratio of 454.55×, outperforming existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

Interpreting remote sensing (RS) images plays a crucial role in numerous applications such as environmental monitoring, urban planning, agricultural management and disaster assessment. Nevertheless, remote sensing data is frequently dispersed among various organizations. Privacy concerns and data-sharing limitations make it difficult to utilize large-scale datasets within a centralized training framework. Federated learning (FL) provides a promising approach by facilitating collaborative model training across decentralized data sources, eliminating the need for data centralization. However, the application of FL in RS scenarios is challenging due to the resource-limited edge nodes cannot meet the high demand for computation and memory resources to train deep learning models. Neural network lightweighting techniques have the potential to enhance model efficiency, but existing methods still present significant challenges, such as reliance on initial training of dense models during lightweighting and potential performance degradation after lightweighting. To address these challenges, we propose RS-IML, a novel FL framework for RS Image Interpretation based on Intrinsic Mask Learning without training dense models. RS-IML comprises three key components. First, we introduce the intrinsic dimension of objective landscape that the neural network is projected onto a low-dimensional subnetwork to lightweight neural networks without training dense models. Second, we propose intrinsic dimension parameter averaging to aggregate inconsistent local intrinsic models while suppressing the adverse effects of non-intrinsic parameters between local models. Third, we fine-tune the specific parameters of local intrinsic models to mitigate global intrinsic noise for better performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed RS-IML. It achieves a significant improvement in model efficiency during lightweighting compared to existing methods while obtaining superior accuracy.

Revolutionizing the field of deep learning, Transformer-based models have achieved remarkable performance in many tasks. Recent research has recognized these models are robust to shuffling but are limited to inter-token permutation in the forward propagation. In this work, we propose our definition of permutation equivariance, a broader concept covering both inter- and intra- token per-mutation in the forward and backward propagation of neural networks. We rigorously proved that such permutation equivariance property can be satisfied on most vanilla Transformer-based models with almost no adaptation. We examine the property over a range of state-of-the-art models including ViT, Bert, GPT, and others, with experimental validations. Further, as a proof-of-concept, we explore how real-world applications including privacy-enhancing split learning, and model authorization, could exploit the permutation equivariance property, which implicates wider, intriguing application scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/Doby-Xu/ST

Running on host mobile applications, mini apps have gained increasing popularity these days for its convenience in installation and usage. However, being easy to use allows mini apps to freely access a large amount of user information, mostly without close inspection of privacy violations. Hence it becomes a crucial issue to automatically track sensitive flows in mini apps. Although flow analysis has been widely studied, unique challenges emerge: the analysis tool should not only handle mini app-specific features such as flows that interweave between rendering and logic, and asynchronous executions, but also deal with problems raised by Javascript development: the performance tradeoff between precision and efficiency, and function aliases. To this end, we proposeMiniTracker, an automatic sensitive flow tracking tool which well handles mini app features, constructs assignment flow graphs as common representation across different host apps, searches function aliases, and analyzes the graph by property chains. We show our design choices achieve a sweet spot in the tradeoff between precision and efficiency, with superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art. We also perform a large-scale study on 150 k mini apps, which reveals the common leakage patterns and offers insights into the privacy threats of mini apps.

We focus on the privacy-preserving problem in split learning in this work. In vanilla split learning, a neural network is split to different devices to be trained, risking leaking the private training data in the process. We novelly propose a patch shuffling scheme on transformers to preserve training data privacy, yet without degrading overall model performance. Formal privacy guarantees are provided and we further introduce the batch shuffling and the spectral shuffling schemes to enhance the guarantee. We show through experiments that our methods successfully defend the black-box, white-box, and adaptive attacks in split learning, with superior performance over baselines, and are efficient to deploy with negligible overhead compared to the vanilla split learning.