Shaowei Wang

Puning Zhao, Chuan Ma, Li Shen et al.

Label differential privacy (DP) is designed for learning problems involving private labels and public features. While various methods have been proposed for learning under label DP, the theoretical limits remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate the fundamental limits of learning with label DP in both local and central models for both classification and regression tasks, characterized by minimax convergence rates. We establish lower bounds by converting each task into a multiple hypothesis testing problem and bounding the test error. Additionally, we develop algorithms that yield matching upper bounds. Our results demonstrate that under label local DP (LDP), the risk has a significantly faster convergence rate than that under full LDP, i.e. protecting both features and labels, indicating the advantages of relaxing the DP definition to focus solely on labels. In contrast, under the label central DP (CDP), the risk is only reduced by a constant factor compared to full DP, indicating that the relaxation of CDP only has limited benefits on the performance.

Shaowei Wang, LingLing Zhang, Xuan Luo et al.

Recent studies on computer vision mainly focus on natural images that express real-world scenes. They achieve outstanding performance on diverse tasks such as visual question answering. Diagram is a special form of visual expression that frequently appears in the education field and is of great significance for learners to understand multimodal knowledge. Current research on diagrams preliminarily focuses on natural disciplines such as Biology and Geography, whose expressions are still similar to natural images. Another type of diagrams such as from Computer Science is composed of graphics containing complex topologies and relations, and research on this type of diagrams is still blank. The main challenges of graphic diagrams understanding are the rarity of data and the confusion of semantics, which are mainly reflected in the diversity of expressions. In this paper, we construct a novel dataset of graphic diagrams named Computer Science Diagrams (CSDia). It contains more than 1,200 diagrams and exhaustive annotations of objects and relations. Considering the visual noises caused by the various expressions in diagrams, we introduce the topology of diagrams to parse topological structure. After that, we propose Diagram Parsing Net (DPN) to represent the diagram from three branches: topology, visual feature, and text, and apply the model to the diagram classification task to evaluate the ability of diagrams understanding. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed DPN on diagrams understanding.

Shaowei Wang, Jiachun Du, Wei Yang et al.

Voting plays a central role in bringing crowd wisdom to collective decision making, meanwhile data privacy has been a common ethical/legal issue in eliciting preferences from individuals. This work studies the problem of aggregating individual's voting data under the local differential privacy setting, where usefulness and soundness of the aggregated scores are of major concern. One naive approach to the problem is adding Laplace random noises, however, it makes aggregated scores extremely fragile to new types of strategic behaviors tailored to the local privacy setting: data amplification attack and view disguise attack. The data amplification attack means an attacker's manipulation power is amplified by the privacy-preserving procedure when contributing a fraud vote. The view disguise attack happens when an attacker could disguise malicious data as valid private views to manipulate the voting result. In this work, after theoretically quantifying the estimation error bound and the manipulating risk bound of the Laplace mechanism, we propose two mechanisms improving the usefulness and soundness simultaneously: the weighted sampling mechanism and the additive mechanism. The former one interprets the score vector as probabilistic data. Compared to the Laplace mechanism for Borda voting rule with $d$ candidates, it reduces the mean squared error bound by half and lowers the maximum magnitude risk bound from $+\infty$ to $O(\frac{d^3}{nε})$. The latter one randomly outputs a subset of candidates according to their total scores. Its mean squared error bound is optimized from $O(\frac{d^5}{nε^2})$ to $O(\frac{d^4}{nε^2})$, and its maximum magnitude risk bound is reduced to $O(\frac{d^2}{nε})$. Experimental results validate that our proposed approaches averagely reduce estimation error by $50\%$ and are more robust to adversarial attacks.