Secure UAV-to-Ground MIMO Communications: Joint Transceiver and Location Optimization

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are foreseen to constitute promising airborne communication devices as a benefit of their superior channel quality. But UAV-to-ground (U2G) communications are vulnerable to eavesdropping. Hence, we conceive a sophisticated physical layer security solution for improving the secrecy rate of multi-antenna aided U2G systems. Explicitly, the secrecy rate of the U2G MIMO wiretap channels is derived by using random matrix theory. The resultant explicit expression is then applied in the joint optimization of the MIMO transceiver and the UAV location relying on an alternating optimization technique. Our numerical results show that the joint transceiver and location optimization conceived facilitates secure communications even in the challenging scenario, where the legitimate channel of confidential information is inferior to the eavesdropping channel.

Scene-Aware Prompt for Multi-modal Dialogue Understanding and Generation

This paper introduces the schemes of Team LingJing's experiments in NLPCC-2022-Shared-Task-4 Multi-modal Dialogue Understanding and Generation (MDUG). The MDUG task can be divided into two phases: multi-modal context understanding and response generation. To fully leverage the visual information for both scene understanding and dialogue generation, we propose the scene-aware prompt for the MDUG task. Specifically, we utilize the multi-tasking strategy for jointly modelling the scene- and session- multi-modal understanding. The visual captions are adopted to aware the scene information, while the fixed-type templated prompt based on the scene- and session-aware labels are used to further improve the dialogue generation performance. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method has achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance compared with other competitive methods, where we rank the 1-st in all three subtasks in this MDUG competition.

Cross-domain Federated Object Detection

Detection models trained by one party (server) may face severe performance degradation when distributed to other users (clients). For example, in autonomous driving scenarios, different driving environments may bring obvious domain shifts, which lead to biases in model predictions. Federated learning that has emerged in recent years can enable multi-party collaborative training without leaking client data. In this paper, we focus on a special cross-domain scenario where the server contains large-scale data and multiple clients only contain a small amount of data; meanwhile, there exist differences in data distributions among the clients. In this case, traditional federated learning techniques cannot take into account the learning of both the global knowledge of all participants and the personalized knowledge of a specific client. To make up for this limitation, we propose a cross-domain federated object detection framework, named FedOD. In order to learn both the global knowledge and the personalized knowledge in different domains, the proposed framework first performs the federated training to obtain a public global aggregated model through multi-teacher distillation, and sends the aggregated model back to each client for finetuning its personalized local model. After very few rounds of communication, on each client we can perform weighted ensemble inference on the public global model and the personalized local model. With the ensemble, the generalization performance of the client-side model can outperform a single model with the same parameter scale. We establish a federated object detection dataset which has significant background differences and instance differences based on multiple public autonomous driving datasets, and then conduct extensive experiments on the dataset. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Adversarial Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Against Physical Layer Key Generation

The development of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has recently advanced the research of physical layer security (PLS). Beneficial impact of RIS includes but is not limited to offering a new domain of freedom (DoF) for key-less PLS optimization, and increasing channel randomness for physical layer secret key generation (PL-SKG). However, there is a lack of research studying how adversarial RIS can be used to damage the communication confidentiality. In this work, we show how a Eve controlled adversarial RIS (Eve-RIS) can be used to reconstruct the shared PLS secret key between legitimate users (Alice and Bob). This is achieved by Eve-RIS overlaying the legitimate channel with an artificial random and reciprocal channel. The resulting Eve-RIS corrupted channel enable Eve to successfully attack the PL-SKG process. To operationalize this novel concept, we design Eve-RIS schemes against two PL-SKG techniques used: (i) the channel estimation based PL-SKG, and (ii) the two-way cross multiplication based PL-SKG. Our results show a high key match rate between the designed Eve-RIS and the legitimate users. We also present theoretical key match rate between Eve-RIS and legitimate users. Our novel scheme is different from the existing spoofing-Eve, in that the latter can be easily detected by comparing the channel estimation results of the legitimate users. Indeed, our proposed Eve-RIS can maintain the legitimate channel reciprocity, which makes detection challenging. This means the novel Eve-RIS provides a new eavesdropping threat on PL-SKG, which can spur new research areas to counter adversarial RIS attacks.

STD-NET: Search of Image Steganalytic Deep-learning Architecture via Hierarchical Tensor Decomposition

Recent studies shows that the majority of existing deep steganalysis models have a large amount of redundancy, which leads to a huge waste of storage and computing resources. The existing model compression method cannot flexibly compress the convolutional layer in residual shortcut block so that a satisfactory shrinking rate cannot be obtained. In this paper, we propose STD-NET, an unsupervised deep-learning architecture search approach via hierarchical tensor decomposition for image steganalysis. Our proposed strategy will not be restricted by various residual connections, since this strategy does not change the number of input and output channels of the convolution block. We propose a normalized distortion threshold to evaluate the sensitivity of each involved convolutional layer of the base model to guide STD-NET to compress target network in an efficient and unsupervised approach, and obtain two network structures of different shapes with low computation cost and similar performance compared with the original one. Extensive experiments have confirmed that, on one hand, our model can achieve comparable or even better detection performance in various steganalytic scenarios due to the great adaptivity of the obtained network architecture. On the other hand, the experimental results also demonstrate that our proposed strategy is more efficient and can remove more redundancy compared with previous steganalytic network compression methods.

Dog nose print matching with dual global descriptor based on Contrastive Learning

Recent studies in biometric-based identification tasks have shown that deep learning methods can achieve better performance. These methods generally extract the global features as descriptor to represent the original image. Nonetheless, it does not perform well for biometric identification under fine-grained tasks. The main reason is that the single image descriptor contains insufficient information to represent image. In this paper, we present a dual global descriptor model, which combines multiple global descriptors to exploit multi level image features. Moreover, we utilize a contrastive loss to enlarge the distance between image representations of confusing classes. The proposed framework achieves the top2 on the CVPR2022 Biometrics Workshop Pet Biometric Challenge. The source code and trained models are publicly available at: https://github.com/flyingsheepbin/pet-biometrics

Learning Task-relevant Representations for Generalization via Characteristic Functions of Reward Sequence Distributions

Generalization across different environments with the same tasks is critical for successful applications of visual reinforcement learning (RL) in real scenarios. However, visual distractions -- which are common in real scenes -- from high-dimensional observations can be hurtful to the learned representations in visual RL, thus degrading the performance of generalization. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel approach, namely Characteristic Reward Sequence Prediction (CRESP), to extract the task-relevant information by learning reward sequence distributions (RSDs), as the reward signals are task-relevant in RL and invariant to visual distractions. Specifically, to effectively capture the task-relevant information via RSDs, CRESP introduces an auxiliary task -- that is, predicting the characteristic functions of RSDs -- to learn task-relevant representations, because we can well approximate the high-dimensional distributions by leveraging the corresponding characteristic functions. Experiments demonstrate that CRESP significantly improves the performance of generalization on unseen environments, outperforming several state-of-the-arts on DeepMind Control tasks with different visual distractions.

One-shot Federated Learning without Server-side Training

Federated Learning (FL) has recently made significant progress as a new machine learning paradigm for privacy protection. Due to the high communication cost of traditional FL, one-shot federated learning is gaining popularity as a way to reduce communication cost between clients and the server. Most of the existing one-shot FL methods are based on Knowledge Distillation; however, distillation based approach requires an extra training phase and depends on publicly available data sets. In this work, we consider a novel and challenging setting: performing a single round of parameter aggregation on the local models without server-side training on a public data set. In this new setting, we propose an effective algorithm for Model Aggregation via Exploring Common Harmonized Optima (MA-Echo), which iteratively updates the parameters of all local models to bring them close to a common low-loss area on the loss surface, without harming performance on their own data sets at the same time. Compared to the existing methods, MA-Echo can work well even in extremely non-identical data distribution settings where the support categories of each local model have no overlapped labels with those of the others. We conduct extensive experiments on two popular image classification data sets to compare the proposed method with existing methods and demonstrate the effectiveness of MA-Echo, which clearly outperforms the state-of-the-arts.

Locality Sensitive Hashing for Structured Data: A Survey

Data similarity (or distance) computation is a fundamental research topic which fosters a variety of similarity-based machine learning and data mining applications. In big data analytics, it is impractical to compute the exact similarity of data instances due to high computational cost. To this end, the Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) technique has been proposed to provide accurate estimators for various similarity measures between sets or vectors in an efficient manner without the learning process. Structured data (e.g., sequences, trees and graphs), which are composed of elements and relations between the elements, are commonly seen in the real world, but the traditional LSH algorithms cannot preserve the structure information represented as relations between elements. In order to conquer the issue, researchers have been devoted to the family of the hierarchical LSH algorithms. In this paper, we explore the present progress of the research into hierarchical LSH from the following perspectives: 1) Data structures, where we review various hierarchical LSH algorithms for three typical data structures and uncover their inherent connections; 2) Applications, where we review the hierarchical LSH algorithms in multiple application scenarios; 3) Challenges, where we discuss some potential challenges as future directions.

Data-Efficient Backdoor Attacks

Recent studies have proven that deep neural networks are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Specifically, by mixing a small number of poisoned samples into the training set, the behavior of the trained model can be maliciously controlled. Existing attack methods construct such adversaries by randomly selecting some clean data from the benign set and then embedding a trigger into them. However, this selection strategy ignores the fact that each poisoned sample contributes inequally to the backdoor injection, which reduces the efficiency of poisoning. In this paper, we formulate improving the poisoned data efficiency by the selection as an optimization problem and propose a Filtering-and-Updating Strategy (FUS) to solve it. The experimental results on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-10 indicate that the proposed method is effective: the same attack success rate can be achieved with only 47% to 75% of the poisoned sample volume compared to the random selection strategy. More importantly, the adversaries selected according to one setting can generalize well to other settings, exhibiting strong transferability.