Ziba Parsons

Ziba Parsons, Fei Dou, Houyi Du et al.

This paper explores the challenges of implementing Federated Learning (FL) in practical scenarios featuring isolated nodes with data heterogeneity, which can only be connected to the server through wireless links in an infrastructure-less environment. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel mobilizing personalized FL approach, which aims to facilitate mobility and resilience. Specifically, we develop a novel optimization algorithm called Random Walk Stochastic Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (RWSADMM). RWSADMM capitalizes on the server's random movement toward clients and formulates local proximity among their adjacent clients based on hard inequality constraints rather than requiring consensus updates or introducing bias via regularization methods. To mitigate the computational burden on the clients, an efficient stochastic solver of the approximated optimization problem is designed in RWSADMM, which provably converges to the stationary point almost surely in expectation. Our theoretical and empirical results demonstrate the provable fast convergence and substantial accuracy improvements achieved by RWSADMM compared to baseline methods, along with its benefits of reduced communication costs and enhanced scalability.

Ziba Parsons, Ang Li

Deep neural network-based LiDAR 3D object detection serves as a critical perception component in safety-critical autonomous systems. However, recent studies have revealed its vulnerability to backdoor attacks. Existing attacks typically require white-box access or label modification and focus on geometric attacks such as object disappearance or bounding-box manipulation. In this paper, we present Mirage, a black-box and clean-label backdoor attack against deep neural network-based LiDAR 3DOD. Mirage injects a small number of label-consistent poisoning samples into the training set, causing the model to learn a malicious association between a trigger pattern and an attacker-chosen target class while preserving normal training semantics. As a result, the compromised model behaves normally on benign inputs yet systematically misclassifies triggered objects as the target class during deployment. We evaluate Mirage on multiple state-of-the-art LiDAR 3DOD models and benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that Mirage achieves a 73% misclassification success rate with a poisoning rate of only 0.5%, while maintaining detection performance close to that of benign models.