Chuan Xu

Hanyao Huang, Ou Zheng, Dongdong Wang et al.

The ChatGPT, a lite and conversational variant of Generative Pretrained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) developed by OpenAI, is one of the milestone Large Language Models (LLMs) with billions of parameters. LLMs have stirred up much interest among researchers and practitioners in their impressive skills in natural language processing tasks, which profoundly impact various fields. This paper mainly discusses the future applications of LLMs in dentistry. We introduce two primary LLM deployment methods in dentistry, including automated dental diagnosis and cross-modal dental diagnosis, and examine their potential applications. Especially, equipped with a cross-modal encoder, a single LLM can manage multi-source data and conduct advanced natural language reasoning to perform complex clinical operations. We also present cases to demonstrate the potential of a fully automatic Multi-Modal LLM AI system for dentistry clinical application. While LLMs offer significant potential benefits, the challenges, such as data privacy, data quality, and model bias, need further study. Overall, LLMs have the potential to revolutionize dental diagnosis and treatment, which indicates a promising avenue for clinical application and research in dentistry.

Ilias Driouich, Chuan Xu, Giovanni Neglia et al.

In this paper, we initiate the study of local model reconstruction attacks for federated learning, where a honest-but-curious adversary eavesdrops the messages exchanged between a targeted client and the server, and then reconstructs the local/personalized model of the victim. The local model reconstruction attack allows the adversary to trigger other classical attacks in a more effective way, since the local model only depends on the client's data and can leak more private information than the global model learned by the server. Additionally, we propose a novel model-based attribute inference attack in federated learning leveraging the local model reconstruction attack. We provide an analytical lower-bound for this attribute inference attack. Empirical results using real world datasets confirm that our local reconstruction attack works well for both regression and classification tasks. Moreover, we benchmark our novel attribute inference attack against the state-of-the-art attacks in federated learning. Our attack results in higher reconstruction accuracy especially when the clients' datasets are heterogeneous. Our work provides a new angle for designing powerful and explainable attacks to effectively quantify the privacy risk in FL.

Francesco Diana, Othmane Marfoq, Chuan Xu et al.

Federated Learning (FL) enables multiple clients, such as mobile phones and IoT devices, to collaboratively train a global machine learning model while keeping their data localized. However, recent studies have revealed that the training phase of FL is vulnerable to reconstruction attacks, such as attribute inference attacks (AIA), where adversaries exploit exchanged messages and auxiliary public information to uncover sensitive attributes of targeted clients. While these attacks have been extensively studied in the context of classification tasks, their impact on regression tasks remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we address this gap by proposing novel model-based AIAs specifically designed for regression tasks in FL environments. Our approach considers scenarios where adversaries can either eavesdrop on exchanged messages or directly interfere with the training process. We benchmark our proposed attacks against state-of-the-art methods using real-world datasets. The results demonstrate a significant increase in reconstruction accuracy, particularly in heterogeneous client datasets, a common scenario in FL. The efficacy of our model-based AIAs makes them better candidates for empirically quantifying privacy leakage for federated regression tasks.