Privacy-Preserving Explainable AIoT Application via SHAP Entropy Regularization

The widespread integration of Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) in smart home environments has amplified the demand for transparent and interpretable machine learning models. To foster user trust and comply with emerging regulatory frameworks, the Explainable AI (XAI) methods, particularly post-hoc techniques such as SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), and Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME), are widely employed to elucidate model behavior. However, recent studies have shown that these explanation methods can inadvertently expose sensitive user attributes and behavioral patterns, thereby introducing new privacy risks. To address these concerns, we propose a novel privacy-preserving approach based on SHAP entropy regularization to mitigate privacy leakage in explainable AIoT applications. Our method incorporates an entropy-based regularization objective that penalizes low-entropy SHAP attribution distributions during training, promoting a more uniform spread of feature contributions. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we developed a suite of SHAP-based privacy attacks that strategically leverage model explanation outputs to infer sensitive information. We validate our method through comparative evaluations using these attacks alongside utility metrics on benchmark smart home energy consumption datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that SHAP entropy regularization substantially reduces privacy leakage compared to baseline models, while maintaining high predictive accuracy and faithful explanation fidelity. This work contributes to the development of privacy-preserving explainable AI techniques for secure and trustworthy AIoT applications.

Enhancing Adversarial Robustness of IoT Intrusion Detection via SHAP-Based Attribution Fingerprinting

The rapid proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has transformed numerous industries by enabling seamless connectivity and data-driven automation. However, this expansion has also exposed IoT networks to increasingly sophisticated security threats, including adversarial attacks targeting artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) to deliberately evade detection, induce misclassification, and systematically undermine the reliability and integrity of security defenses. To address these challenges, we propose a novel adversarial detection model that enhances the robustness of IoT IDS against adversarial attacks through SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP)-based fingerprinting. Using SHAP's DeepExplainer, we extract attribution fingerprints from network traffic features, enabling the IDS to reliably distinguish between clean and adversarially perturbed inputs. By capturing subtle attribution patterns, the model becomes more resilient to evasion attempts and adversarial manipulations. We evaluated the model on a standard IoT benchmark dataset, where it significantly outperformed a state-of-the-art method in detecting adversarial attacks. In addition to enhanced robustness, this approach improves model transparency and interpretability, thereby increasing trust in the IDS through explainable AI.

ALIF: Low-Cost Adversarial Audio Attacks on Black-Box Speech Platforms using Linguistic Features

Extensive research has revealed that adversarial examples (AE) pose a significant threat to voice-controllable smart devices. Recent studies have proposed black-box adversarial attacks that require only the final transcription from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. However, these attacks typically involve many queries to the ASR, resulting in substantial costs. Moreover, AE-based adversarial audio samples are susceptible to ASR updates. In this paper, we identify the root cause of these limitations, namely the inability to construct AE attack samples directly around the decision boundary of deep learning (DL) models. Building on this observation, we propose ALIF, the first black-box adversarial linguistic feature-based attack pipeline. We leverage the reciprocal process of text-to-speech (TTS) and ASR models to generate perturbations in the linguistic embedding space where the decision boundary resides. Based on the ALIF pipeline, we present the ALIF-OTL and ALIF-OTA schemes for launching attacks in both the digital domain and the physical playback environment on four commercial ASRs and voice assistants. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that ALIF-OTL and -OTA significantly improve query efficiency by 97.7% and 73.3%, respectively, while achieving competitive performance compared to existing methods. Notably, ALIF-OTL can generate an attack sample with only one query. Furthermore, our test-of-time experiment validates the robustness of our approach against ASR updates.

PAGE: Equilibrate Personalization and Generalization in Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) is becoming a major driving force behind machine learning as a service, where customers (clients) collaboratively benefit from shared local updates under the orchestration of the service provider (server). Representing clients' current demands and the server's future demand, local model personalization and global model generalization are separately investigated, as the ill-effects of data heterogeneity enforce the community to focus on one over the other. However, these two seemingly competing goals are of equal importance rather than black and white issues, and should be achieved simultaneously. In this paper, we propose the first algorithm to balance personalization and generalization on top of game theory, dubbed PAGE, which reshapes FL as a co-opetition game between clients and the server. To explore the equilibrium, PAGE further formulates the game as Markov decision processes, and leverages the reinforcement learning algorithm, which simplifies the solving complexity. Extensive experiments on four widespread datasets show that PAGE outperforms state-of-the-art FL baselines in terms of global and local prediction accuracy simultaneously, and the accuracy can be improved by up to 35.20% and 39.91%, respectively. In addition, biased variants of PAGE imply promising adaptiveness to demand shifts in practice.

Prompt Space Optimizing Few-shot Reasoning Success with Large Language Models

Prompt engineering is an essential technique for enhancing the abilities of large language models (LLMs) by providing explicit and specific instructions. It enables LLMs to excel in various tasks, such as arithmetic reasoning, question answering, summarization, relation extraction, machine translation, and sentiment analysis. Researchers have been actively exploring different prompt engineering strategies, such as Chain of Thought (CoT), Zero-CoT, and In-context learning. However, an unresolved problem arises from the fact that current approaches lack a solid theoretical foundation for determining optimal prompts. To address this issue in prompt engineering, we propose a new and effective approach called Prompt Space. Our methodology utilizes text embeddings to obtain basis vectors by matrix decomposition, and then constructs a space for representing all prompts. Prompt Space significantly outperforms state-of-the-art prompt paradigms on ten public reasoning benchmarks. Notably, without the help of the CoT method and the prompt "Let's think step by step", Prompt Space shows superior performance over the few-shot method. Overall, our approach provides a robust and fundamental theoretical framework for selecting simple and effective prompts. This advancement marks a significant step towards improving prompt engineering for a wide variety of applications in LLMs.

Towards Language-guided Interactive 3D Generation: LLMs as Layout Interpreter with Generative Feedback

Generating and editing a 3D scene guided by natural language poses a challenge, primarily due to the complexity of specifying the positional relations and volumetric changes within the 3D space. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning, conversational, and zero-shot generation abilities across various domains. Surprisingly, these models also show great potential in realizing and interpreting the 3D space. In light of this, we propose a novel language-guided interactive 3D generation system, dubbed LI3D, that integrates LLMs as a 3D layout interpreter into the off-the-shelf layout-to-3D generative models, allowing users to flexibly and interactively generate visual content. Specifically, we design a versatile layout structure base on the bounding boxes and semantics to prompt the LLMs to model the spatial generation and reasoning from language. Our system also incorporates LLaVA, a large language and vision assistant, to provide generative feedback from the visual aspect for improving the visual quality of generated content. We validate the effectiveness of LI3D, primarily in 3D generation and editing through multi-round interactions, which can be flexibly extended to 2D generation and editing. Various experiments demonstrate the potential benefits of incorporating LLMs in generative AI for applications, e.g., metaverse. Moreover, we benchmark the layout reasoning performance of LLMs with neural visual artist tasks, revealing their emergent ability in the spatial layout domain.

Compositional Text-to-Image Synthesis with Attention Map Control of Diffusion Models

Recent text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models show outstanding performance in generating high-quality images conditioned on textual prompts. However, these models fail to semantically align the generated images with the text descriptions due to their limited compositional capabilities, leading to attribute leakage, entity leakage, and missing entities. In this paper, we propose a novel attention mask control strategy based on predicted object boxes to address these three issues. In particular, we first train a BoxNet to predict a box for each entity that possesses the attribute specified in the prompt. Then, depending on the predicted boxes, unique mask control is applied to the cross- and self-attention maps. Our approach produces a more semantically accurate synthesis by constraining the attention regions of each token in the prompt to the image. In addition, the proposed method is straightforward and effective, and can be readily integrated into existing cross-attention-diffusion-based T2I generators. We compare our approach to competing methods and demonstrate that it not only faithfully conveys the semantics of the original text to the generated content, but also achieves high availability as a ready-to-use plugin.

Edit Everything: A Text-Guided Generative System for Images Editing

We introduce a new generative system called Edit Everything, which can take image and text inputs and produce image outputs. Edit Everything allows users to edit images using simple text instructions. Our system designs prompts to guide the visual module in generating requested images. Experiments demonstrate that Edit Everything facilitates the implementation of the visual aspects of Stable Diffusion with the use of Segment Anything model and CLIP. Our system is publicly available at https://github.com/DefengXie/Edit_Everything.

Class Attention Transfer Based Knowledge Distillation

Previous knowledge distillation methods have shown their impressive performance on model compression tasks, however, it is hard to explain how the knowledge they transferred helps to improve the performance of the student network. In this work, we focus on proposing a knowledge distillation method that has both high interpretability and competitive performance. We first revisit the structure of mainstream CNN models and reveal that possessing the capacity of identifying class discriminative regions of input is critical for CNN to perform classification. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this capacity can be obtained and enhanced by transferring class activation maps. Based on our findings, we propose class attention transfer based knowledge distillation (CAT-KD). Different from previous KD methods, we explore and present several properties of the knowledge transferred by our method, which not only improve the interpretability of CAT-KD but also contribute to a better understanding of CNN. While having high interpretability, CAT-KD achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks. Code is available at: https://github.com/GzyAftermath/CAT-KD.

GlyphDraw: Learning to Draw Chinese Characters in Image Synthesis Models Coherently

Recent breakthroughs in the field of language-guided image generation have yielded impressive achievements, enabling the creation of high-quality and diverse images based on user instructions. Although the synthesis performance is fascinating, one significant limitation of current image generation models is their insufficient ability to generate coherent text within images, particularly for complex glyph structures like Chinese characters. To address this problem, we introduce GlyphDraw, a general learning framework aiming at endowing image generation models with the capacity to generate images embedded with coherent text. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in the field of image synthesis to address the generation of Chinese characters. % we first adopt the OCR technique to collect images with Chinese characters as training samples, and extract the text and locations as auxiliary information. We first sophisticatedly design the image-text dataset's construction strategy, then build our model specifically on a diffusion-based image generator and carefully modify the network structure to allow the model to learn drawing Chinese characters with the help of glyph and position information. Furthermore, we maintain the model's open-domain image synthesis capability by preventing catastrophic forgetting by using a variety of training techniques. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our method not only produces accurate Chinese characters as in prompts, but also naturally blends the generated text into the background. Please refer to https://1073521013.github.io/glyph-draw.github.io