Shenghong Li

Yulong Wang, Tong Sun, Shenghong Li et al.

Adversarial attacks and defenses in machine learning and deep neural network have been gaining significant attention due to the rapidly growing applications of deep learning in the Internet and relevant scenarios. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the recent advancements in the field of adversarial attack and defense techniques, with a focus on deep neural network-based classification models. Specifically, we conduct a comprehensive classification of recent adversarial attack methods and state-of-the-art adversarial defense techniques based on attack principles, and present them in visually appealing tables and tree diagrams. This is based on a rigorous evaluation of the existing works, including an analysis of their strengths and limitations. We also categorize the methods into counter-attack detection and robustness enhancement, with a specific focus on regularization-based methods for enhancing robustness. New avenues of attack are also explored, including search-based, decision-based, drop-based, and physical-world attacks, and a hierarchical classification of the latest defense methods is provided, highlighting the challenges of balancing training costs with performance, maintaining clean accuracy, overcoming the effect of gradient masking, and ensuring method transferability. At last, the lessons learned and open challenges are summarized with future research opportunities recommended.

Zhicong Yan, Shenghong Li, Ruijie Zhao et al.

Backdoor attacks have emerged as an urgent threat to Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), where victim DNNs are furtively implanted with malicious neurons that could be triggered by the adversary. To defend against backdoor attacks, many works establish a staged pipeline to remove backdoors from victim DNNs: inspecting, locating, and erasing. However, in a scenario where a few clean data can be accessible, such pipeline is fragile and cannot erase backdoors completely without sacrificing model accuracy. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel data-free holistic backdoor erasing (DHBE) framework. Instead of the staged pipeline, the DHBE treats the backdoor erasing task as a unified adversarial procedure, which seeks equilibrium between two different competing processes: distillation and backdoor regularization. In distillation, the backdoored DNN is distilled into a proxy model, transferring its knowledge about clean data, yet backdoors are simultaneously transferred. In backdoor regularization, the proxy model is holistically regularized to prevent from infecting any possible backdoor transferred from distillation. These two processes jointly proceed with data-free adversarial optimization until a clean, high-accuracy proxy model is obtained. With the novel adversarial design, our framework demonstrates its superiority in three aspects: 1) minimal detriment to model accuracy, 2) high tolerance for hyperparameters, and 3) no demand for clean data. Extensive experiments on various backdoor attacks and datasets are performed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/yanzhicong/DHBE}

Yulong Wang, Minghui Zhao, Shenghong Li et al.

Typical deep neural network (DNN) backdoor attacks are based on triggers embedded in inputs. Existing imperceptible triggers are computationally expensive or low in attack success. In this paper, we propose a new backdoor trigger, which is easy to generate, imperceptible, and highly effective. The new trigger is a uniformly randomly generated three-dimensional (3D) binary pattern that can be horizontally and/or vertically repeated and mirrored and superposed onto three-channel images for training a backdoored DNN model. Dispersed throughout an image, the new trigger produces weak perturbation to individual pixels, but collectively holds a strong recognizable pattern to train and activate the backdoor of the DNN. We also analytically reveal that the trigger is increasingly effective with the improving resolution of the images. Experiments are conducted using the ResNet-18 and MLP models on the MNIST, CIFAR-10, and BTSR datasets. In terms of imperceptibility, the new trigger outperforms existing triggers, such as BadNets, Trojaned NN, and Hidden Backdoor, by over an order of magnitude. The new trigger achieves an almost 100% attack success rate, only reduces the classification accuracy by less than 0.7%-2.4%, and invalidates the state-of-the-art defense techniques.

Yutong Zhang, Lixing Chen, Shenghong Li et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across a wide variety of domains. Nonetheless, generalist LLMs continue to fall short in reasoning tasks necessitating specialized knowledge. Prior investigations into specialized LLMs focused on domain-specific training, which entails substantial efforts in domain data acquisition and model parameter fine-tuning. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the Way-to-Specialist (WTS) framework, which synergizes retrieval-augmented generation with knowledge graphs (KGs) to enhance the specialized capability of LLMs in the absence of specialized training. In distinction to existing paradigms that merely utilize external knowledge from general KGs or static domain KGs to prompt LLM for enhanced domain-specific reasoning, WTS proposes an innovative "LLM$\circlearrowright$KG" paradigm, which achieves bidirectional enhancement between specialized LLM and domain knowledge graph (DKG). The proposed paradigm encompasses two closely coupled components: the DKG-Augmented LLM and the LLM-Assisted DKG Evolution. The former retrieves question-relevant domain knowledge from DKG and uses it to prompt LLM to enhance the reasoning capability for domain-specific tasks; the latter leverages LLM to generate new domain knowledge from processed tasks and use it to evolve DKG. WTS closes the loop between DKG-Augmented LLM and LLM-Assisted DKG Evolution, enabling continuous improvement in the domain specialization as it progressively answers and learns from domain-specific questions. We validate the performance of WTS on 6 datasets spanning 5 domains. The experimental results show that WTS surpasses the previous SOTA in 4 specialized domains and achieves a maximum performance improvement of 11.3%.

Tengjun Ni, Xin Yuan, Shenghong Li et al.

Recent progress in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has led to more accurate and interpretable multi-hop question answering (QA). Yet, challenges persist in integrating iterative reasoning steps with external knowledge retrieval. To address this, we introduce StepChain GraphRAG, a framework that unites question decomposition with a Breadth-First Search (BFS) Reasoning Flow for enhanced multi-hop QA. Our approach first builds a global index over the corpus; at inference time, only retrieved passages are parsed on-the-fly into a knowledge graph, and the complex query is split into sub-questions. For each sub-question, a BFS-based traversal dynamically expands along relevant edges, assembling explicit evidence chains without overwhelming the language model with superfluous context. Experiments on MuSiQue, 2WikiMultiHopQA, and HotpotQA show that StepChain GraphRAG achieves state-of-the-art Exact Match and F1 scores. StepChain GraphRAG lifts average EM by 2.57% and F1 by 2.13% over the SOTA method, achieving the largest gain on HotpotQA (+4.70% EM, +3.44% F1). StepChain GraphRAG also fosters enhanced explainability by preserving the chain-of-thought across intermediate retrieval steps. We conclude by discussing how future work can mitigate the computational overhead and address potential hallucinations from large language models to refine efficiency and reliability in multi-hop QA.

Yulong Wang, Tianxiang Li, Shenghong Li et al.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial examples, while adversarial attack models, e.g., DeepFool, are on the rise and outrunning adversarial example detection techniques. This paper presents a new adversarial example detector that outperforms state-of-the-art detectors in identifying the latest adversarial attacks on image datasets. Specifically, we propose to use sentiment analysis for adversarial example detection, qualified by the progressively manifesting impact of an adversarial perturbation on the hidden-layer feature maps of a DNN under attack. Accordingly, we design a modularized embedding layer with the minimum learnable parameters to embed the hidden-layer feature maps into word vectors and assemble sentences ready for sentiment analysis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the new detector consistently surpasses the state-of-the-art detection algorithms in detecting the latest attacks launched against ResNet and Inception neutral networks on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and SVHN datasets. The detector only has about 2 million parameters, and takes shorter than 4.6 milliseconds to detect an adversarial example generated by the latest attack models using a Tesla K80 GPU card.

Ge Ren, Jun Wu, Gaolei Li et al.

The smartphone and laptop can be unlocked by face or fingerprint recognition, while neural networks which confront numerous requests every day have little capability to distinguish between untrustworthy and credible users. It makes model risky to be traded as a commodity. Existed research either focuses on the intellectual property rights ownership of the commercialized model, or traces the source of the leak after pirated models appear. Nevertheless, active identifying users legitimacy before predicting output has not been considered yet. In this paper, we propose Model-Lock (M-LOCK) to realize an end-to-end neural network with local dynamic access control, which is similar to the automatic locking function of the smartphone to prevent malicious attackers from obtaining available performance actively when you are away. Three kinds of model training strategy are essential to achieve the tremendous performance divergence between certified and suspect input in one neural network. Extensive experiments based on MNIST, FashionMNIST, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, SVHN and GTSRB datasets demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Qianqian Pan, Jun Wu, Xi Zheng et al.

The ever-increasing data traffic, various delay-sensitive services, and the massive deployment of energy-limited Internet of Things (IoT) devices have brought huge challenges to the current communication networks, motivating academia and industry to move to the sixth-generation (6G) network. With the powerful capability of data transmission and processing, 6G is considered as an enabler for IoT communication with low latency and energy cost. In this paper, we propose an artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) empowered energy-efficiency communication system for 6G IoT. First, we design a smart and efficient communication architecture including the IRS-aided data transmission and the AI-driven network resource management mechanisms. Second, an energy efficiency-maximizing model under given transmission latency for 6G IoT system is formulated, which jointly optimizes the settings of all communication participants, i.e. IoT transmission power, IRS-reflection phase shift, and BS detection matrix. Third, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) empowered network resource control and allocation scheme is proposed to solve the formulated optimization model. Based on the network and channel status, the DRL-enabled scheme facilities the energy-efficiency and low-latency communication. Finally, experimental results verified the effectiveness of our proposed communication system for 6G IoT.

Jinchao Huang, Guofu Li, Zhicong Yan et al.

The extra trust brought by the model interpretation has made it an indispensable part of machine learning systems. But to explain a distilled model's prediction, one may either work with the student model itself, or turn to its teacher model. This leads to a more fundamental question: if a distilled model should give a similar prediction for a similar reason as its teacher model on the same input? This question becomes even more crucial when the two models have dramatically different structure, taking GBDT2NN for example. This paper conducts an empirical study on the new approach to explaining each prediction of GBDT2NN, and how imitating the explanation can further improve the distillation process as an auxiliary learning task. Experiments on several benchmarks show that the proposed methods achieve better performance on both explanations and predictions.