BlockEcho: Retaining Long-Range Dependencies for Imputing Block-Wise Missing Data

Block-wise missing data poses significant challenges in real-world data imputation tasks. Compared to scattered missing data, block-wise gaps exacerbate adverse effects on subsequent analytic and machine learning tasks, as the lack of local neighboring elements significantly reduces the interpolation capability and predictive power. However, this issue has not received adequate attention. Most SOTA matrix completion methods appeared less effective, primarily due to overreliance on neighboring elements for predictions. We systematically analyze the issue and propose a novel matrix completion method ``BlockEcho" for a more comprehensive solution. This method creatively integrates Matrix Factorization (MF) within Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to explicitly retain long-distance inter-element relationships in the original matrix. Besides, we incorporate an additional discriminator for GAN, comparing the generator's intermediate progress with pre-trained MF results to constrain high-order feature distributions. Subsequently, we evaluate BlockEcho on public datasets across three domains. Results demonstrate superior performance over both traditional and SOTA methods when imputing block-wise missing data, especially at higher missing rates. The advantage also holds for scattered missing data at high missing rates. We also contribute on the analyses in providing theoretical justification on the optimality and convergence of fusing MF and GAN for missing block data.

Enhancing the "Immunity" of Mixture-of-Experts Networks for Adversarial Defense

Recent studies have revealed the vulnerability of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to adversarial examples, which can easily fool DNNs into making incorrect predictions. To mitigate this deficiency, we propose a novel adversarial defense method called "Immunity" (Innovative MoE with MUtual information \& positioN stabilITY) based on a modified Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture in this work. The key enhancements to the standard MoE are two-fold: 1) integrating of Random Switch Gates (RSGs) to obtain diverse network structures via random permutation of RSG parameters at evaluation time, despite of RSGs being determined after one-time training; 2) devising innovative Mutual Information (MI)-based and Position Stability-based loss functions by capitalizing on Grad-CAM's explanatory power to increase the diversity and the causality of expert networks. Notably, our MI-based loss operates directly on the heatmaps, thereby inducing subtler negative impacts on the classification performance when compared to other losses of the same type, theoretically. Extensive evaluation validates the efficacy of the proposed approach in improving adversarial robustness against a wide range of attacks.

Decentralized Graph Neural Network for Privacy-Preserving Recommendation

Building a graph neural network (GNN)-based recommender system without violating user privacy proves challenging. Existing methods can be divided into federated GNNs and decentralized GNNs. But both methods have undesirable effects, i.e., low communication efficiency and privacy leakage. This paper proposes DGREC, a novel decentralized GNN for privacy-preserving recommendations, where users can choose to publicize their interactions. It includes three stages, i.e., graph construction, local gradient calculation, and global gradient passing. The first stage builds a local inner-item hypergraph for each user and a global inter-user graph. The second stage models user preference and calculates gradients on each local device. The third stage designs a local differential privacy mechanism named secure gradient-sharing, which proves strong privacy-preserving of users' private data. We conduct extensive experiments on three public datasets to validate the consistent superiority of our framework.

Fradulent User Detection Via Behavior Information Aggregation Network (BIAN) On Large-Scale Financial Social Network

Financial frauds cause billions of losses annually and yet it lacks efficient approaches in detecting frauds considering user profile and their behaviors simultaneously in social network . A social network forms a graph structure whilst Graph neural networks (GNN), a promising research domain in Deep Learning, can seamlessly process non-Euclidean graph data . In financial fraud detection, the modus operandi of criminals can be identified by analyzing user profile and their behaviors such as transaction, loaning etc. as well as their social connectivity. Currently, most GNNs are incapable of selecting important neighbors since the neighbors' edge attributes (i.e., behaviors) are ignored. In this paper, we propose a novel behavior information aggregation network (BIAN) to combine the user behaviors with other user features. Different from its close "relatives" such as Graph Attention Networks (GAT) and Graph Transformer Networks (GTN), it aggregates neighbors based on neighboring edge attribute distribution, namely, user behaviors in financial social network. The experimental results on a real-world large-scale financial social network dataset, DGraph, show that BIAN obtains the 10.2% gain in AUROC comparing with the State-Of-The-Art models.

Audio Tampering Detection Based on Shallow and Deep Feature Representation Learning

Digital audio tampering detection can be used to verify the authenticity of digital audio. However, most current methods use standard electronic network frequency (ENF) databases for visual comparison analysis of ENF continuity of digital audio or perform feature extraction for classification by machine learning methods. ENF databases are usually tricky to obtain, visual methods have weak feature representation, and machine learning methods have more information loss in features, resulting in low detection accuracy. This paper proposes a fusion method of shallow and deep features to fully use ENF information by exploiting the complementary nature of features at different levels to more accurately describe the changes in inconsistency produced by tampering operations to raw digital audio. The method achieves 97.03% accuracy on three classic databases: Carioca 1, Carioca 2, and New Spanish. In addition, we have achieved an accuracy of 88.31% on the newly constructed database GAUDI-DI. Experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art method.

Learnable Privacy-Preserving Anonymization for Pedestrian Images

This paper studies a novel privacy-preserving anonymization problem for pedestrian images, which preserves personal identity information (PII) for authorized models and prevents PII from being recognized by third parties. Conventional anonymization methods unavoidably cause semantic information loss, leading to limited data utility. Besides, existing learned anonymization techniques, while retaining various identity-irrelevant utilities, will change the pedestrian identity, and thus are unsuitable for training robust re-identification models. To explore the privacy-utility trade-off for pedestrian images, we propose a joint learning reversible anonymization framework, which can reversibly generate full-body anonymous images with little performance drop on person re-identification tasks. The core idea is that we adopt desensitized images generated by conventional methods as the initial privacy-preserving supervision and jointly train an anonymization encoder with a recovery decoder and an identity-invariant model. We further propose a progressive training strategy to improve the performance, which iteratively upgrades the initial anonymization supervision. Experiments further demonstrate the effectiveness of our anonymized pedestrian images for privacy protection, which boosts the re-identification performance while preserving privacy. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/whuzjw/privacy-reid}.

A framework for massive scale personalized promotion

Technology companies building consumer-facing platforms may have access to massive-scale user population. In recent years, promotion with quantifiable incentive has become a popular approach for increasing active users on such platforms. On one hand, increased user activities can introduce network effect, bring in advertisement audience, and produce other benefits. On the other hand, massive-scale promotion causes massive cost. Therefore making promotion campaigns efficient in terms of return-on-investment (ROI) is of great interest to many companies. This paper proposes a practical two-stage framework that can optimize the ROI of various massive-scale promotion campaigns. In the first stage, users' personal promotion-response curves are modeled by machine learning techniques. In the second stage, business objectives and resource constraints are formulated into an optimization problem, the decision variables of which are how much incentive to give to each user. In order to do effective optimization in the second stage, counterfactual prediction and noise-reduction are essential for the first stage. We leverage existing counterfactual prediction techniques to correct treatment bias in data. We also introduce a novel deep neural network (DNN) architecture, the deep-isotonic-promotion-network (DIPN), to reduce noise in the promotion response curves. The DIPN architecture incorporates our prior knowledge of response curve shape, by enforcing isotonicity and smoothness. It out-performed regular DNN and other state-of-the-art shape-constrained models in our experiments.

Resource-Aware Pareto-Optimal Automated Machine Learning Platform

In this study, we introduce a novel platform Resource-Aware AutoML (RA-AutoML) which enables flexible and generalized algorithms to build machine learning models subjected to multiple objectives, as well as resource and hard-ware constraints. RA-AutoML intelligently conducts Hyper-Parameter Search(HPS) as well as Neural Architecture Search (NAS) to build models optimizing predefined objectives. RA-AutoML is a versatile framework that allows user to prescribe many resource/hardware constraints along with objectives demanded by the problem at hand or business requirements. At its core, RA-AutoML relies on our in-house search-engine algorithm,MOBOGA, which combines a modified constraint-aware Bayesian Optimization and Genetic Algorithm to construct Pareto optimal candidates. Our experiments on CIFAR-10 dataset shows very good accuracy compared to results obtained by state-of-art neural network models, while subjected to resource constraints in the form of model size.

End-to-End Parkinson Disease Diagnosis using Brain MR-Images by 3D-CNN

In this work, we use a deep learning framework for simultaneous classification and regression of Parkinson disease diagnosis based on MR-Images and personal information (i.e. age, gender). We intend to facilitate and increase the confidence in Parkinson disease diagnosis through our deep learning framework.