Sanguthevar Rajasekaran

Jieren Deng, Chenghong Wang, Xianrui Meng et al.

In this work, we consider the problem of designing secure and efficient federated learning (FL) frameworks. Existing solutions either involve a trusted aggregator or require heavyweight cryptographic primitives, which degrades performance significantly. Moreover, many existing secure FL designs work only under the restrictive assumption that none of the clients can be dropped out from the training protocol. To tackle these problems, we propose SEFL, a secure and efficient FL framework that (1) eliminates the need for the trusted entities; (2) achieves similar and even better model accuracy compared with existing FL designs; (3) is resilient to client dropouts. Through extensive experimental studies on natural language processing (NLP) tasks, we demonstrate that the SEFL achieves comparable accuracy compared to existing FL solutions, and the proposed pruning technique can improve runtime performance up to 13.7x.

Yijue Wang, Jieren Deng, Dan Guo et al.

Distributed learning such as federated learning or collaborative learning enables model training on decentralized data from users and only collects local gradients, where data is processed close to its sources for data privacy. The nature of not centralizing the training data addresses the privacy issue of privacy-sensitive data. Recent studies show that a third party can reconstruct the true training data in the distributed machine learning system through the publicly-shared gradients. However, existing reconstruction attack frameworks lack generalizability on different Deep Neural Network (DNN) architectures and different weight distribution initialization, and can only succeed in the early training phase. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose a more general privacy attack from gradient, SAPAG, which uses a Gaussian kernel based of gradient difference as a distance measure. Our experiments demonstrate that SAPAG can construct the training data on different DNNs with different weight initializations and on DNNs in any training phases.

Yijue Wang, Chenghong Wang, Zigeng Wang et al.

The large model size, high computational operations, and vulnerability against membership inference attack (MIA) have impeded deep learning or deep neural networks (DNNs) popularity, especially on mobile devices. To address the challenge, we envision that the weight pruning technique will help DNNs against MIA while reducing model storage and computational operation. In this work, we propose a pruning algorithm, and we show that the proposed algorithm can find a subnetwork that can prevent privacy leakage from MIA and achieves competitive accuracy with the original DNNs. We also verify our theoretical insights with experiments. Our experimental results illustrate that the attack accuracy using model compression is up to 13.6% and 10% lower than that of the baseline and Min-Max game, accordingly.

M. P. Sivaram Kumar, S. Rajasekaran

One of the major impacts of climatic changes is due to destroying of forest. Destroying of forest takes place in many ways but the majority of the forest is destroyed due to wild forest fires. In this paper we have presented a path planning algorithm for extinguishing fires which uses Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) for detecting fires. Since most of the works on forest fires are based on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and a collection of work has been done on coverage, message transmission, deployment of nodes, battery power depletion of sensor nodes in WSNs we focused our work in path planning approach of the Actor to move to the target area where the fire has occurred and extinguish it. An incremental approach is presented in order to determine the successive moves of the Actor to extinguish fire in an environment with and without obstacles. This is done by comparing the moves determined with target location readings obtained using sensors until the Actor reaches the target area to extinguish fires.