Zhouyu Li

h-index4
2papers
51citations

2 Papers

6.2CRJun 15
Invisible Manipulation Channels in AI-Assisted Financial Advisory: Implications for Market Integrity and Regulatory Design

Liuyang Yao, Zhouyu Li, Junguang He et al.

AI systems are increasingly deployed for credit assessment and investment advisory in global financial markets, yet the integrity of their inference pipelines remains insufficiently addressed by existing regulatory frameworks. This paper identifies and empirically validates an invisible manipulation channel operating at the sampling layer of LLM inference--a vulnerability that allows adversaries to systematically bias AI-generated financial opinions while preserving full compliance with output-based audit mechanisms, including statistical watermarking. We show that this inference-stage manipulation is statistically hard to detect: the Kullback-Leibler divergence between manipulated and normal output distributions can be made arbitrarily small, so that any output-based detection scheme requires impractically large sample sizes to achieve reliable detection power. Empirical experiments across credit rating and investment advisory scenarios show that directional bias keywords can be amplified by 1.8-1.9x under stealth-preserving (aware) manipulation while triggering zero of six black-box detectors and preserving watermark integrity. The vulnerability generalizes across three mainstream watermarking schemes and three heterogeneous model architectures, establishing it as a systemic financial infrastructure risk. Software-based defenses including cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generators are entirely ineffective, while QRNG combined with TEE hardware isolation achieves 100% attack blocking--reducing the target rate to the natural baseline--by replacing the predictable hash key with quantum-derived entropy that renders all pre-computed manipulation targets invalid. We propose four regulatory amendments centered on mandatory QRNG certification for high-risk financial AI systems under NIST SP 800-90B, inference-layer supply chain audits, and output provenance mechanisms.

1.5CVMay 13, 2023
MetaMorphosis: Task-oriented Privacy Cognizant Feature Generation for Multi-task Learning

Md Adnan Arefeen, Zhouyu Li, Md Yusuf Sarwar Uddin et al.

With the growth of computer vision applications, deep learning, and edge computing contribute to ensuring practical collaborative intelligence (CI) by distributing the workload among edge devices and the cloud. However, running separate single-task models on edge devices is inefficient regarding the required computational resource and time. In this context, multi-task learning allows leveraging a single deep learning model for performing multiple tasks, such as semantic segmentation and depth estimation on incoming video frames. This single processing pipeline generates common deep features that are shared among multi-task modules. However, in a collaborative intelligence scenario, generating common deep features has two major issues. First, the deep features may inadvertently contain input information exposed to the downstream modules (violating input privacy). Second, the generated universal features expose a piece of collective information than what is intended for a certain task, in which features for one task can be utilized to perform another task (violating task privacy). This paper proposes a novel deep learning-based privacy-cognizant feature generation process called MetaMorphosis that limits inference capability to specific tasks at hand. To achieve this, we propose a channel squeeze-excitation based feature metamorphosis module, Cross-SEC, to achieve distinct attention of all tasks and a de-correlation loss function with differential-privacy to train a deep learning model that produces distinct privacy-aware features as an output for the respective tasks. With extensive experimentation on four datasets consisting of diverse images related to scene understanding and facial attributes, we show that MetaMorphosis outperforms recent adversarial learning and universal feature generation methods by guaranteeing privacy requirements in an efficient way for image and video analytics.