UFDA: Universal Federated Domain Adaptation with Practical Assumptions

Conventional Federated Domain Adaptation (FDA) approaches usually demand an abundance of assumptions, such as label set consistency, which makes them significantly less feasible for real-world situations and introduces security hazards. In this work, we propose a more practical scenario named Universal Federated Domain Adaptation (UFDA). It only requires the black-box model and the label set information of each source domain, while the label sets of different source domains could be inconsistent and the target-domain label set is totally blind. This relaxes the assumptions made by FDA, which are often challenging to meet in real-world cases and diminish model security. To address the UFDA scenario, we propose a corresponding framework called Hot-Learning with Contrastive Label Disambiguation (HCLD), which tackles UFDA's domain shifts and category gaps problem by using one-hot outputs from the black-box models of various source domains. Moreover, to better distinguish the shared and unknown classes, we further present a cluster-level strategy named Mutual-Voting Decision (MVD) to extract robust consensus knowledge across peer classes from both source and target domains. The extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that our HCLD achieves comparable performance for our UFDA scenario with much fewer assumptions, compared to the previous methodologies with many additional assumptions.

An Attention-based Long Short-Term Memory Framework for Detection of Bitcoin Scams

Bitcoin is the most common cryptocurrency involved in cyber scams. Cybercriminals often utilize pseudonymity and privacy protection mechanism associated with Bitcoin transactions to make their scams virtually untraceable. The Ponzi scheme has attracted particularly significant attention among Bitcoin fraudulent activities. This paper considers a multi-class classification problem to determine whether a transaction is involved in Ponzi schemes or other cyber scams, or is a non-scam transaction. We design a specifically designed crawler to collect data and propose a novel Attention-based Long Short-Term Memory (A-LSTM) method for the classification problem. The experimental results show that the proposed model has better efficiency and accuracy than existing approaches, including Random Forest, Extra Trees, Gradient Boosting, and classical LSTM. With correctly identified scam features, our proposed A-LSTM achieves an F1-score over 82% for the original data and outperforms the existing approaches.