Bo Zhang

Zhiyuan Yang, Bo Zhang, Yufei Shi et al.

Glaucoma is one of the leading causes of vision impairment. Digital imaging techniques, such as color fundus photography (CFP) and optical coherence tomography (OCT), provide quantitative and noninvasive methods for glaucoma diagnosis. Recently, in the field of computer-aided glaucoma diagnosis, multi-modality methods that integrate the CFP and OCT modalities have achieved greater diagnostic accuracy compared to single-modality methods. However, it remains challenging to extract reliable features due to the high similarity of medical images and the unbalanced multi-modal data distribution. Moreover, existing methods overlook the uncertainty estimation of different modalities, leading to unreliable predictions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework, namely ETSCL, which consists of a contrastive feature extraction stage and a decision-level fusion stage. Specifically, the supervised contrastive loss is employed to enhance the discriminative power in the feature extraction process, resulting in more effective features. In addition, we utilize the Frangi vesselness algorithm as a preprocessing step to incorporate vessel information to assist in the prediction. In the decision-level fusion stage, an evidence theory-based multi-modality classifier is employed to combine multi-source information with uncertainty estimation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/master-Shix/ETSCL}.

Kang Wei, Jun Li, Ming Ding et al.

Federated learning (FL), as a type of collaborative machine learning framework, is capable of preserving private data from mobile terminals (MTs) while training the data into useful models. Nevertheless, from a viewpoint of information theory, it is still possible for a curious server to infer private information from the shared models uploaded by MTs. To address this problem, we first make use of the concept of local differential privacy (LDP), and propose a user-level differential privacy (UDP) algorithm by adding artificial noise to the shared models before uploading them to servers. According to our analysis, the UDP framework can realize $(ε_{i}, δ_{i})$-LDP for the $i$-th MT with adjustable privacy protection levels by varying the variances of the artificial noise processes. We then derive a theoretical convergence upper-bound for the UDP algorithm. It reveals that there exists an optimal number of communication rounds to achieve the best learning performance. More importantly, we propose a communication rounds discounting (CRD) method. Compared with the heuristic search method, the proposed CRD method can achieve a much better trade-off between the computational complexity of searching and the convergence performance. Extensive experiments indicate that our UDP algorithm using the proposed CRD method can effectively improve both the training efficiency and model quality for the given privacy protection levels.

Bo Zhang, Ruotong Yu, Haipei Sun et al.

Machine learning algorithms, when applied to sensitive data, pose a potential threat to privacy. A growing body of prior work has demonstrated that membership inference attack (MIA) can disclose specific private information in the training data to an attacker. Meanwhile, the algorithmic fairness of machine learning has increasingly caught attention from both academia and industry. Algorithmic fairness ensures that the machine learning models do not discriminate a particular demographic group of individuals (e.g., black and female people). Given that MIA is indeed a learning model, it raises a serious concern if MIA ``fairly'' treats all groups of individuals equally. In other words, whether a particular group is more vulnerable against MIA than the other groups. This paper examines the algorithmic fairness issue in the context of MIA and its defenses. First, for fairness evaluation, it formalizes the notation of vulnerability disparity (VD) to quantify the difference of MIA treatment on different demographic groups. Second, it evaluates VD on four real-world datasets, and shows that VD indeed exists in these datasets. Third, it examines the impacts of differential privacy, as a defense mechanism of MIA, on VD. The results show that although DP brings significant change on VD, it cannot eliminate VD completely. Therefore, fourth, it designs a new mitigation algorithm named FAIRPICK to reduce VD. An extensive set of experimental results demonstrate that FAIRPICK can effectively reduce VD for both with and without the DP deployment.