Ju Chen

Ju Chen, Jun Feng, Shenyu Zhang

Multi-class classification annotations have significantly advanced AI applications, with truth inference serving as a critical technique for aggregating noisy and biased annotations. Existing state-of-the-art methods typically model each annotator's expertise using a confusion matrix. However, these methods suffer from two widely recognized issues: 1) when most annotators label only a few tasks, or when classes are imbalanced, the estimated confusion matrices are unreliable, and 2) a single confusion matrix often remains inadequate for capturing each annotator's full expertise patterns across all tasks. To address these issues, we propose a novel confusion-matrix-based method, PTBCC (ProtoType learning-driven Bayesian Classifier Combination), to introduce a reliable and richer annotator estimation by prototype learning. Specifically, we assume that there exists a set $S$ of prototype confusion matrices, which capture the inherent expertise patterns of all annotators. Rather than a single confusion matrix, the expertise per annotator is extended as a Dirichlet prior distribution over these prototypes. This prototype learning-driven mechanism circumvents the data sparsity and class imbalance issues, ensuring a richer and more flexible characterization of annotators. Extensive experiments on 11 real-world datasets demonstrate that PTBCC achieves up to a 15% accuracy improvement in the best case, and a 3% higher average accuracy while reducing computational cost by over 90%.

Yuzhe Tang, Ju Chen, Kai Li et al.

Authenticated data storage on an untrusted platform is an important computing paradigm for cloud applications ranging from big-data outsourcing, to cryptocurrency and certificate transparency log. These modern applications increasingly feature update-intensive workloads, whereas existing authenticated data structures (ADSs) designed with in-place updates are inefficient to handle such workloads. In this paper, we address this issue and propose a novel authenticated log-structured merge tree (eLSM) based key-value store by leveraging Intel SGX enclaves. We present a system design that runs the code of eLSM store inside enclave. To circumvent the limited enclave memory (128 MB with the latest Intel CPUs), we propose to place the memory buffer of the eLSM store outside the enclave and protect the buffer using a new authenticated data structure by digesting individual LSM-tree levels. We design protocols to support query authentication in data integrity, completeness (under range queries), and freshness. The proof in our protocol is made small by including only the Merkle proofs at selective levels. We implement eLSM on top of Google LevelDB and Facebook RocksDB with minimal code change and performance interference. We evaluate the performance of eLSM under the YCSB workload benchmark and show a performance advantage of up to 4.5X speedup.

Ju Chen, Yuzhe Tang, Hao Zhou

Mitigating memory-access attacks on the Intel SGX architecture is an important and open research problem. A natural notion of the mitigation is cache-miss obliviousness which requires the cache-misses emitted during an enclave execution are oblivious to sensitive data. This work realizes the cache-miss obliviousness for the computation of data shuffling. The proposed approach is to software-engineer the oblivious algorithm of Melbourne shuffle on the Intel SGX/TSX architecture, where the Transaction Synchronization eXtension (TSX) is (ab)used to detect the occurrence of cache misses. In the system building, we propose software techniques to prefetch memory data prior to the TSX transaction to defend the physical bus-tapping attacks. Our evaluation based on real implementation shows that our system achieves superior performance and lower transaction abort rate than the related work in the existing literature.