42.0LGMay 19
Causal Unlearning in Collaborative Optimization: Exact and Approximate Influence Reversal under Adversarial ContributionsAli Mahdavi, Azadeh Zamanifar, Amirfarhad Farhadi et al.
Federated learning systems must support data deletion requests to comply with privacy regulations, yet retraining from scratch after each deletion is computationally prohibitive. We present HF-KCU, a method that removes a client's contribution by approximating the influence function through conjugate gradient iterations in Krylov subspaces, reducing complexity from O(d^3) to O(kd) where k<<d.A causal weighting mechanism ensures that only clients holding the deleted data receive parameter updates, preventing spurious changes to unaffected clients. Our method is designed to handle bounded adversarial perturbations to the Hessian and gradient, providing graceful degradation under realistic threat models. We validate HF-KCU across convolutional (ResNet-18, SimpleCNN) and transformer (ViT-Lite) architectures on CIFAR-10, MNIST, and Fashion-MNIST. On CIFAR-10 under Dirichlet (alpha=0.5) partitioning, HF-KCU achieves 47.75 times speedup over retraining while maintaining test accuracy within 0.60% of the rational baseline(71.16 vs 71.76 %). Membership inference attacks on the forget set yield success rates of 0.499 matching the retrained model and confirming effective privacy restoration. We provide convergence guarantees showing that the Krylov approximation error decreases as O((k ^1/2-1)/(k^1/2+1)) where k is the Hessian condition number. The causal weighting mechanism ensures surgical updates, where only clients holding deleted data are modified, preserving model quality for unaffected participants and avoiding the instability of gradient-based approaches in asynchronous federated settings. This design provides interpretability as each update is directly traceable to the influence of the deleted data. The method's efficiency and precision make it suitable for production federated systems where deletion requests arrive asynchronously and computational budgets are constrained.
CRFeb 2
TinyGuard:A lightweight Byzantine Defense for Resource-Constrained Federated Learning via Statistical Update FingerprintsAli Mahdavi, Santa Aghapour, Azadeh Zamanifar et al.
Existing Byzantine robust aggregation mechanisms typically rely on fulldimensional gradi ent comparisons or pairwise distance computations, resulting in computational overhead that limits applicability in large scale and resource constrained federated systems. This paper proposes TinyGuard, a lightweight Byzantine defense that augments the standard FedAvg algorithm via statistical update f ingerprinting. Instead of operating directly on high-dimensional gradients, TinyGuard extracts compact statistical fingerprints cap turing key behavioral properties of client updates, including norm statistics, layer-wise ratios, sparsity measures, and low-order mo ments. Byzantine clients are identified by measuring robust sta tistical deviations in this low-dimensional fingerprint space with nd complexity, without modifying the underlying optimization procedure. Extensive experiments on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, ViT-Lite, and ViT-Small with LoRA adapters demonstrate that TinyGuard pre serves FedAvg convergence in benign settings and achieves up to 95 percent accuracy under multiple Byzantine attack scenarios, including sign-flipping, scaling, noise injection, and label poisoning. Against adaptive white-box adversaries, Pareto frontier analysis across four orders of magnitude confirms that attackers cannot simultaneously evade detection and achieve effective poisoning, features we term statistical handcuffs. Ablation studies validate stable detection precision 0.8 across varying client counts (50-150), threshold parameters and extreme data heterogeneity . The proposed framework is architecture-agnostic and well-suited for federated fine-tuning of foundation models where traditional Byzantine defenses become impractical
LGJul 25, 2025
SILS: Strategic Influence on Liquidity Stability and Whale Detection in Concentrated-Liquidity DEXsAli RajabiNekoo, Laleh Rasoul, Amirfarhad Farhadi et al.
Traditional methods for identifying impactful liquidity providers (LPs) in Concentrated Liquidity Market Makers (CLMMs) rely on broad measures, such as nominal capital size or surface-level activity, which often lead to inaccurate risk analysis. The SILS framework offers a significantly more detailed approach, characterizing LPs not just as capital holders but as dynamic systemic agents whose actions directly impact market stability. This represents a fundamental paradigm shift from the static, volume-based analysis to a dynamic, impact-focused understanding. This advanced approach uses on-chain event logs and smart contract execution traces to compute Exponential Time-Weighted Liquidity (ETWL) profiles and apply unsupervised anomaly detection. Most importantly, it defines an LP's functional importance through the Liquidity Stability Impact Score (LSIS), a counterfactual metric that measures the potential degradation of the market if the LP withdraws. This combined approach provides a more detailed and realistic characterization of an LP's impact, moving beyond the binary and often misleading classifications used by existing methods. This impact-focused and comprehensive approach enables SILS to accurately identify high-impact LPs-including those missed by traditional methods and supports essential applications like a protective oracle layer and actionable trader signals, thereby significantly enhancing DeFi ecosystem. The framework provides unprecedented transparency into the underlying liquidity structure and associated risks, effectively reducing the common false positives and uncovering critical false negatives found in traditional models. Therefore, SILS provides an effective mechanism for proactive risk management, transforming how DeFi protocols safeguard their ecosystems against asymmetric liquidity behavior.
CVJul 4, 2025
Source-Free Domain Adaptation via Multi-view Contrastive LearningAmirfarhad Farhadi, Naser Mozayani, Azadeh Zamanifar
Domain adaptation has become a widely adopted approach in machine learning due to the high costs associated with labeling data. It is typically applied when access to a labeled source domain is available. However, in real-world scenarios, privacy concerns often restrict access to sensitive information, such as fingerprints, bank account details, and facial images. A promising solution to this issue is Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (SFUDA), which enables domain adaptation without requiring access to labeled target domain data. Recent research demonstrates that SFUDA can effectively address domain discrepancies; however, two key challenges remain: (1) the low quality of prototype samples, and (2) the incorrect assignment of pseudo-labels. To tackle these challenges, we propose a method consisting of three main phases. In the first phase, we introduce a Reliable Sample Memory (RSM) module to improve the quality of prototypes by selecting more representative samples. In the second phase, we employ a Multi-View Contrastive Learning (MVCL) approach to enhance pseudo-label quality by leveraging multiple data augmentations. In the final phase, we apply a noisy label filtering technique to further refine the pseudo-labels. Our experiments on three benchmark datasets - VisDA 2017, Office-Home, and Office-31 - demonstrate that our method achieves approximately 2 percent and 6 percent improvements in classification accuracy over the second-best method and the average of 13 well-known state-of-the-art approaches, respectively.