Aohan Li

Lingfeng Yao, Xincong Zhong, Chenpei Huang et al.

With the rise of AI-generated audio, watermarking has become widely used for detecting misuse and protecting intellectual property. However, adversaries may try to remove these watermarks, making it critical to evaluate how well watermarking schemes withstand removal attacks. Existing attacks are often impractical: they either noticeably degrade perceptual quality or require access to the watermarking scheme. We propose DiffErase, a black-box watermark removal attack that assumes no knowledge of the target watermarking scheme while maintaining perceptual quality. DiffErase perturbs watermarked audio to an intermediate diffusion noise level and regenerates it using a pretrained denoising model, effectively suppressing watermark signals. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments demonstrate that inaudible audio watermarks are highly vulnerable: across multiple audio domains, DiffErase consistently removes watermarks while preserving perceptual quality. These findings highlight the need for future audio watermarking designs to consider diffusion-based threats. Code and demos are available at https://differase.github.io/DiffErase/.

Aohan Li, Ikumi Urabe, Minoru Fujisawa et al.

The number of IoT devices is predicted to reach 125 billion by 2023. The growth of IoT devices will intensify the collisions between devices, degrading communication performance. Selecting appropriate transmission parameters, such as channel and spreading factor (SF), can effectively reduce the collisions between long-range (LoRa) devices. However, most of the schemes proposed in the current literature are not easy to implement on an IoT device with limited computational complexity and memory. To solve this issue, we propose a lightweight transmission-parameter selection scheme, i.e., a joint channel and SF selection scheme using reinforcement learning for low-power wide area networking (LoRaWAN). In the proposed scheme, appropriate transmission parameters can be selected by simple four arithmetic operations using only Acknowledge (ACK) information. Additionally, we theoretically analyze the computational complexity and memory requirement of our proposed scheme, which verified that our proposed scheme could select transmission parameters with extremely low computational complexity and memory requirement. Moreover, a large number of experiments were implemented on the LoRa devices in the real world to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme. The experimental results demonstrate the following main phenomena. (1) Compared to other lightweight transmission-parameter selection schemes, collisions between LoRa devices can be efficiently avoided by our proposed scheme in LoRaWAN irrespective of changes in the available channels. (2) The frame success rate (FSR) can be improved by selecting access channels and using SFs as opposed to only selecting access channels. (3) Since interference exists between adjacent channels, FSR and fairness can be improved by increasing the interval of adjacent available channels.

Aohan Li, Jiaxin Chen, Xin Liao et al.

The rapid advancement of social media platforms has significantly reduced the cost of information dissemination, yet it has also led to a proliferation of fake news, posing a threat to societal trust and credibility. Most of fake news detection research focused on integrating text and image information to represent the consistency of multiple modes in news content, while paying less attention to inconsistent information. Besides, existing methods that leveraged inconsistent information often caused one mode overshadowing another, leading to ineffective use of inconsistent clue. To address these issues, we propose an adaptive multi-modal feature fusion network (MFF-Net). Inspired by human judgment processes for determining truth and falsity in news, MFF-Net focuses on inconsistent parts when news content is generally consistent and consistent parts when it is generally inconsistent. Specifically, MFF-Net extracts semantic and global features from images and texts respectively, and learns consistency information between modes through a multiple feature fusion module. To deal with the problem of modal information being easily masked, we design a single modal feature filtering strategy to capture inconsistent information from corresponding modes separately. Finally, similarity scores are calculated based on global features with adaptive adjustments made to achieve weighted fusion of consistent and inconsistent features. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MFF-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods across three public news datasets derived from real social medias.

Yusaku Negoya, Feifei Cui, Zilong Zhang et al.

Omics data is widely employed in medical research to identify disease mechanisms and contains highly sensitive personal information. Federated Learning (FL) with Differential Privacy (DP) can ensure the protection of omics data privacy against malicious user attacks. However, FL with the DP method faces an inherent trade-off: stronger privacy protection degrades predictive accuracy due to injected noise. On the other hand, Homomorphic Encryption (HE) allows computations on encrypted data and enables aggregation of encrypted gradients without DP-induced noise can increase the predictive accuracy. However, it may increase the computation cost. To improve the predictive accuracy while considering the computational ability of heterogeneous clients, we propose a Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning (PPML)-Hybrid method by introducing HE. In the proposed PPML-Hybrid method, clients distributed select either HE or DP based on their computational resources, so that HE clients contribute noise-free updates while DP clients reduce computational overhead. Meanwhile, clients with high computational resources clients can flexibly adopt HE or DP according to their privacy needs. Performance evaluation on omics datasets show that our proposed method achieves comparable predictive accuracy while significantly reducing computation time relative to HE-only. Additionally, it outperforms DP-only methods under equivalent or stricter privacy budgets.

Aohan Li, Miyu Tsuzuki

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has emerged as an efficient approach to resource allocation due to its strong capability in handling complex decision-making tasks. However, only limited research has explored the training of DRL models with real-world data in practical, distributed Internet of Things (IoT) systems. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a novel framework for training DRL models in real-world distributed IoT environments. In the proposed framework, IoT devices select communication channels using a DRL-based method, while the DRL model is trained with feedback information. Specifically, Acknowledgment (ACK) information is obtained from actual data transmissions over the selected channels. Implementation and performance evaluation, in terms of Frame Success Rate (FSR), are carried out, demonstrating both the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed framework.