Tao Xiang

Shangwei Guo, Xu Zhang, Fei Yang et al.

With the rapid demand of data and computational resources in deep learning systems, a growing number of algorithms to utilize collaborative machine learning techniques, for example, federated learning, to train a shared deep model across multiple participants. It could effectively take advantage of the resources of each participant and obtain a more powerful learning system. However, integrity and privacy threats in such systems have greatly obstructed the applications of collaborative learning. And a large amount of works have been proposed to maintain the model integrity and mitigate the privacy leakage of training data during the training phase for different collaborative learning systems. Compared with existing surveys that mainly focus on one specific collaborative learning system, this survey aims to provide a systematic and comprehensive review of security and privacy researches in collaborative learning. Our survey first provides the system overview of collaborative learning, followed by a brief introduction of integrity and privacy threats. In an organized way, we then detail the existing integrity and privacy attacks as well as their defenses. We also list some open problems in this area and opensource the related papers on GitHub: https://github.com/csl-cqu/awesome-secure-collebrative-learning-papers.

Liang Wang, Xiang Tao, Qiang Liu et al.

Self-supervised learning on graphs can be bifurcated into contrastive and generative methods. Contrastive methods, also known as graph contrastive learning (GCL), have dominated graph self-supervised learning in the past few years, but the recent advent of graph masked autoencoder (GraphMAE) rekindles the momentum behind generative methods. Despite the empirical success of GraphMAE, there is still a dearth of theoretical understanding regarding its efficacy. Moreover, while both generative and contrastive methods have been shown to be effective, their connections and differences have yet to be thoroughly investigated. Therefore, we theoretically build a bridge between GraphMAE and GCL, and prove that the node-level reconstruction objective in GraphMAE implicitly performs context-level GCL. Based on our theoretical analysis, we further identify the limitations of the GraphMAE from the perspectives of alignment and uniformity, which have been considered as two key properties of high-quality representations in GCL. We point out that GraphMAE's alignment performance is restricted by the masking strategy, and the uniformity is not strictly guaranteed. To remedy the aforementioned limitations, we propose an Alignment-Uniformity enhanced Graph Masked AutoEncoder, named AUG-MAE. Specifically, we propose an easy-to-hard adversarial masking strategy to provide hard-to-align samples, which improves the alignment performance. Meanwhile, we introduce an explicit uniformity regularizer to ensure the uniformity of the learned representations. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model over existing state-of-the-art methods.

Tao Xiang, Chunlong Xie, Shangwei Guo et al.

Natural language generation (NLG) applications have gained great popularity due to the powerful deep learning techniques and large training corpus. The deployed NLG models may be stolen or used without authorization, while watermarking has become a useful tool to protect Intellectual Property (IP) of deep models. However, existing watermarking technologies using backdoors are easily detected or harmful for NLG applications. In this paper, we propose a semantic and robust watermarking scheme for NLG models that utilize unharmful phrase pairs as watermarks for IP protection. The watermarks give NLG models personal preference for some special phrase combinations. Specifically, we generate watermarks by following a semantic combination pattern and systematically augment the watermark corpus to enhance the robustness. Then, we embed these watermarks into an NLG model without misleading its original attention mechanism. We conduct extensive experiments and the results demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and undetectability of the proposed scheme.

Tao Xiang, Hangcheng Liu, Shangwei Guo et al.

Deep hiding, embedding images into another using deep neural networks, has shown its great power in increasing the message capacity and robustness. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth study of state-of-the-art deep hiding schemes and analyze their hidden vulnerabilities. Then, according to our observations and analysis, we propose a novel ProvablE rEmovaL attack (PEEL) using image inpainting to remove secret images from containers without any prior knowledge about the deep hiding scheme. We also propose a systemic methodology to improve the efficiency and image quality of PEEL by carefully designing a removal strategy and fully utilizing the visual information of containers. Extensive evaluations show our attacks can completely remove secret images and has negligible impact on the quality of containers.

Tao Xiang, Hangcheng Liu, Shangwei Guo et al.

Adversarial attacks have threatened the application of deep neural networks in security-sensitive scenarios. Most existing black-box attacks fool the target model by interacting with it many times and producing global perturbations. However, global perturbations change the smooth and insignificant background, which not only makes the perturbation more easily be perceived but also increases the query overhead. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to perturb the discriminative areas of clean examples only within limited queries in black-box attacks. Our framework is constructed based on two types of transferability. The first one is the transferability of model interpretations. Based on this property, we identify the discriminative areas of a given clean example easily for local perturbations. The second is the transferability of adversarial examples. It helps us to produce a local pre-perturbation for improving query efficiency. After identifying the discriminative areas and pre-perturbing, we generate the final adversarial examples from the pre-perturbed example by querying the targeted model with two kinds of black-box attack techniques, i.e., gradient estimation and random search. We conduct extensive experiments to show that our framework can significantly improve the query efficiency during black-box perturbing with a high attack success rate. Experimental results show that our attacks outperform state-of-the-art black-box attacks under various system settings.

Shangwei Guo, Tianwei Zhang, Han Qiu et al.

Watermarking has become the tendency in protecting the intellectual property of DNN models. Recent works, from the adversary's perspective, attempted to subvert watermarking mechanisms by designing watermark removal attacks. However, these attacks mainly adopted sophisticated fine-tuning techniques, which have certain fatal drawbacks or unrealistic assumptions. In this paper, we propose a novel watermark removal attack from a different perspective. Instead of just fine-tuning the watermarked models, we design a simple yet powerful transformation algorithm by combining imperceptible pattern embedding and spatial-level transformations, which can effectively and blindly destroy the memorization of watermarked models to the watermark samples. We also introduce a lightweight fine-tuning strategy to preserve the model performance. Our solution requires much less resource or knowledge about the watermarking scheme than prior works. Extensive experimental results indicate that our attack can bypass state-of-the-art watermarking solutions with very high success rates. Based on our attack, we propose watermark augmentation techniques to enhance the robustness of existing watermarks.