Dongfang Zhao

Muhammad Jahanzeb Khan, Rui Hu, Mohammad Sadoghi et al.

Federated Learning (FL) is a machine learning approach that allows multiple clients to collaboratively learn a shared model without sharing raw data. However, current FL systems provide an all-in-one solution, which can hinder the wide adoption of FL in certain domains such as scientific applications. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a decoupling approach that enables clients to customize FL applications with specific data subsystems. To evaluate this approach, the authors develop a framework called Data-Decoupling Federated Learning (DDFL) and compare it with state-of-the-art FL systems that tightly couple data management and computation. Extensive experiments on various datasets and data management subsystems show that DDFL achieves comparable or better performance in terms of training time, inference accuracy, and database query time. Moreover, DDFL provides clients with more options to tune their FL applications regarding data-related metrics. The authors also provide a detailed qualitative analysis of DDFL when integrated with mainstream database systems.

Baigang Chen, Dongfang Zhao

With the ubiquitous deployment of web services, ensuring data confidentiality has become a challenging imperative. Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) presents a powerful solution for processing encrypted data; however, its widespread adoption is severely constrained by two fundamental bottlenecks: substantial computational overhead and the absence of a built-in automatic error correction mechanism. These limitations render the deployment of FHE in real-world, complex network environments impractical. To address this dual challenge, this work puts forward a new FHE framework that enhances computational efficiency and integrates an automatic error correction capability through new encoding techniques and an algebraic reliability layer.Our prototype is evaluated through encrypted low-degree activation timing, one experimental public Refresh skeleton invocation, and transport-fault simulations for the Ring--BCH layer. Our current prototype quantifies the cost of encrypted low-degree activation evaluation, the additional latency of an experimental public Refresh skeleton, and the robustness gained from the Ring--BCH transport layer. The Refresh prototype should be interpreted as a skeleton rather than a complete CKKS bootstrapping implementation, since it uses a low-degree surrogate rather than a validated EvalMod circuit. In transport-fault simulations, the BCH interleaver reduces failure rates to below $0.5\%$ under bursty faults and keeps the modeled accuracy within $0.5$ percentage points of the plaintext baseline.

William Zerong Wang, Dongfang Zhao

In the era of generative AI, ensuring the privacy of music data presents unique challenges: unlike static artworks such as images, music data is inherently temporal and multimodal, and it is sampled, transformed, and remixed at an unprecedented scale. These characteristics make its core vector embeddings, i.e, the numerical representations of the music, highly susceptible to being learned, misused, or even stolen by models without accessing the original audio files. Traditional methods like copyright licensing and digital watermarking offer limited protection for these abstract mathematical representations, thus necessitating a stronger, e.g., cryptographic, approach to safeguarding the embeddings themselves. Standard encryption schemes, such as AES, render data unintelligible for computation, making such searches impossible. While Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) provides a plausible solution by allowing arbitrary computations on ciphertexts, its substantial performance overhead remains impractical for large-scale vector similarity searches. Given this trade-off, we propose a more practical approach using Additive Homomorphic Encryption (AHE) for vector similarity search. The primary contributions of this paper are threefold: we analyze threat models unique to music information retrieval systems; we provide a theoretical analysis and propose an efficient AHE-based solution through inner products of music embeddings to deliver privacy-preserving similarity search; and finally, we demonstrate the efficiency and practicality of the proposed approach through empirical evaluation and comparison to FHE schemes on real-world MP3 files.

Dongfang Zhao

The increasing prevalence of high-dimensional data demands efficient and scalable compression methods to support modern applications. However, existing techniques like PCA and Autoencoders often rely on auxiliary metadata or intricate architectures, limiting their practicality for streaming or infinite datasets. In this paper, we introduce a stateless compression framework that leverages polynomial representations to achieve compact, interpretable, and scalable data reduction. By eliminating the need for auxiliary data, our method supports direct algebraic operations in the compressed domain while minimizing error growth during computations. Through extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, we show that our approach achieves high compression ratios without compromising reconstruction accuracy, all while maintaining simplicity and scalability.

Dongfang Zhao

One of the biggest concerns for many applications in cloud computing lies in data privacy. A potential solution to this problem is homomorphic encryption (HE), which supports certain operations directly over the ciphertexts. Conventional HE schemes, however, exhibit significant performance overhead and are hardly applicable to real-world applications. This paper presents Rache, a caching optimization for accelerating the performance of HE schemes. The key insights of Rache include (i) caching some homomorphic ciphertexts before encrypting the large volume of plaintexts; (ii) expanding the plaintexts into a summation of powers of radixes; and (iii) constructing the ciphertexts with only homomorphic addition. The extensive evaluation shows that Rache exhibits almost linear scalability and outperforms Paillier by orders of magnitude.