pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
VeriDIP: Verifying Ownership of Deep Neural Networks through Privacy Leakage Fingerprints
Authors: Aoting Hu, Zhigang Lu, Renjie Xie, Minhui Xue
Date: 2023-09-07 00:00:00

Deploying Machine Learning as a Service gives rise to model plagiarism, leading to copyright infringement. Ownership testing techniques are designed to identify model fingerprints for verifying plagiarism. However, previous works often rely on overfitting or robustness features as fingerprints, lacking theoretical guarantees and exhibiting under-performance on generalized models. In this paper, we propose a novel ownership testing method called VeriDIP, which verifies a DNN model's intellectual property. VeriDIP makes two major contributions. (1) It utilizes membership inference attacks to estimate the lower bound of privacy leakage, which reflects the fingerprint of a given model. The privacy leakage fingerprints highlight the unique patterns through which the models memorize sensitive training datasets. (2) We introduce a novel approach using less private samples to enhance the performance of ownership testing. Extensive experimental results confirm that VeriDIP is effective and efficient in validating the ownership of deep learning models trained on both image and tabular datasets. VeriDIP achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods on image datasets while significantly reducing computation and communication costs. Enhanced VeriDIP demonstrates superior verification performance on generalized deep learning models, particularly on table-trained models. Additionally, VeriDIP exhibits similar effectiveness on utility-preserving differentially private models compared to non-differentially private baselines.
Exploiting Machine Unlearning for Backdoor Attacks in Deep Learning System
Authors: Peixin Zhang, Jun Sun, Mingtian Tan, Xinyu Wang
Date: 2023-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack, Deep Learning, Machine Unlearning

In recent years, the security issues of artificial intelligence have become increasingly prominent due to the rapid development of deep learning research and applications. Backdoor attack is an attack targeting the vulnerability of deep learning models, where hidden backdoors are activated by triggers embedded by the attacker, thereby outputting malicious predictions that may not align with the intended output for a given input. In this work, we propose a novel black-box backdoor attack based on machine unlearning. The attacker first augments the training set with carefully designed samples, including poison and mitigation data, to train a `benign' model. Then, the attacker posts unlearning requests for the mitigation samples to remove the impact of relevant data on the model, gradually activating the hidden backdoor. Since backdoors are implanted during the iterative unlearning process, it significantly increases the computational overhead of existing defense methods for backdoor detection or mitigation. To address this new security threat, we proposes two methods for detecting or mitigating such malicious unlearning requests. We conduct the experiment in both exact unlearning and approximate unlearning (i.e., SISA) settings. Experimental results indicate that: 1) our attack approach can successfully implant backdoor into the model, and sharding increases the difficult of attack; 2) our detection algorithms are effective in identifying the mitigation samples, while sharding reduces the effectiveness of our detection algorithms.
Analysis and Detection against Network Attacks in the Overlapping Phenomenon of Behavior Attribute
Authors: Jiang Xie, Shuhao Li, Yongzheng Zhanga, Peishuai Sun, Hongbo Xu
Date: 2023-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Generative Adversarial Network

The proliferation of network attacks poses a significant threat. Researchers propose datasets for network attacks to support research in related fields. Then, many attack detection methods based on these datasets are proposed. These detection methods, whether two-classification or multi-classification, belong to single-label learning, i.e., only one label is given to each sample. However, we discover that there is a noteworthy phenomenon of behavior attribute overlap between attacks, The presentation of this phenomenon in a dataset is that there are multiple samples with the same features but different labels. In this paper, we verify the phenomenon in well-known datasets(UNSW-NB15, CCCS-CIC-AndMal-2020) and re-label these data. In addition, detecting network attacks in a multi-label manner can obtain more information, providing support for tracing the attack source and building IDS. Therefore, we propose a multi-label detection model based on deep learning, MLD-Model, in which Wasserstein-Generative-Adversarial- Network-with-Gradient-Penalty (WGAN-GP) with improved loss performs data enhancement to alleviate the class imbalance problem, and Auto-Encoder (AE) performs classifier parameter pre-training. Experimental results demonstrate that MLD-Model can achieve excellent classification performance. It can achieve F1=80.06% in UNSW-NB15 and F1=83.63% in CCCS-CIC-AndMal-2020. Especially, MLD-Model is 5.99%-7.97% higher in F1 compared with the related single-label methods.
TII-SSRC-23 Dataset: Typological Exploration of Diverse Traffic Patterns for Intrusion Detection
Authors: Dania Herzalla, Willian T. Lunardi, Martin Andreoni Lopez
Date: 2023-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Binary Classification, Diversity, Feature Importance, Intrusion Detection, Multi-class Classification, Network Intrusion Detection

The effectiveness of network intrusion detection systems, predominantly based on machine learning, are highly influenced by the dataset they are trained on. Ensuring an accurate reflection of the multifaceted nature of benign and malicious traffic in these datasets is essential for creating models capable of recognizing and responding to a wide array of intrusion patterns. However, existing datasets often fall short, lacking the necessary diversity and alignment with the contemporary network environment, thereby limiting the effectiveness of intrusion detection. This paper introduces TII-SSRC-23, a novel and comprehensive dataset designed to overcome these challenges. Comprising a diverse range of traffic types and subtypes, our dataset is a robust and versatile tool for the research community. Additionally, we conduct a feature importance analysis, providing vital insights into critical features for intrusion detection tasks. Through extensive experimentation, we also establish firm baselines for supervised and unsupervised intrusion detection methodologies using our dataset, further contributing to the advancement and adaptability of intrusion detection models in the rapidly changing landscape of network security. Our dataset is available at https://kaggle.com/datasets/daniaherzalla/tii-ssrc-23.
Nebula: Self-Attention for Dynamic Malware Analysis
Authors: Dmitrijs Trizna, Luca Demetrio, Battista Biggio, Fabio Roli
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Malware Analysis, Malware Classification, Malware Detection, Self-Supervised Learning

Dynamic analysis enables detecting Windows malware by executing programs in a controlled environment and logging their actions. Previous work has proposed training machine learning models, i.e., convolutional and long short-term memory networks, on homogeneous input features like runtime APIs to either detect or classify malware, neglecting other relevant information coming from heterogeneous data like network and file operations. To overcome these issues, we introduce Nebula, a versatile, self-attention Transformer-based neural architecture that generalizes across different behavioral representations and formats, combining diverse information from dynamic log reports. Nebula is composed by several components needed to tokenize, filter, normalize and encode data to feed the transformer architecture. We firstly perform a comprehensive ablation study to evaluate their impact on the performance of the whole system, highlighting which components can be used as-is, and which must be enriched with specific domain knowledge. We perform extensive experiments on both malware detection and classification tasks, using three datasets acquired from different dynamic analyses platforms, show that, on average, Nebula outperforms state-of-the-art models at low false positive rates, with a peak of 12% improvement. Moreover, we showcase how self-supervised learning pre-training matches the performance of fully-supervised models with only 20% of training data, and we inspect the output of Nebula through explainable AI techniques, pinpointing how attention is focusing on specific tokens correlated to malicious activities of malware families. To foster reproducibility, we open-source our findings and models at https://github.com/dtrizna/nebula.
Privacy Preservation in Artificial Intelligence and Extended Reality (AI-XR) Metaverses: A Survey
Authors: Mahdi Alkaeed, Adnan Qayyum, Junaid Qadir
Date: 2023-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Mixed Reality

The metaverse is a nascent concept that envisions a virtual universe, a collaborative space where individuals can interact, create, and participate in a wide range of activities. Privacy in the metaverse is a critical concern as the concept evolves and immersive virtual experiences become more prevalent. The metaverse privacy problem refers to the challenges and concerns surrounding the privacy of personal information and data within Virtual Reality (VR) environments as the concept of a shared VR space becomes more accessible. Metaverse will harness advancements from various technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Extended Reality (XR), Mixed Reality (MR), and 5G/6G-based communication to provide personalized and immersive services to its users. Moreover, to enable more personalized experiences, the metaverse relies on the collection of fine-grained user data that leads to various privacy issues. Therefore, before the potential of the metaverse can be fully realized, privacy concerns related to personal information and data within VR environments must be addressed. This includes safeguarding users' control over their data, ensuring the security of their personal information, and protecting in-world actions and interactions from unauthorized sharing. In this paper, we explore various privacy challenges that future metaverses are expected to face, given their reliance on AI for tracking users, creating XR and MR experiences, and facilitating interactions. Moreover, we thoroughly analyze technical solutions such as differential privacy, Homomorphic Encryption (HE), and Federated Learning (FL) and discuss related sociotechnical issues regarding privacy.
Extracting Physical Causality from Measurements to Detect and Localize False Data Injection Attacks
Authors: Shengyang Wu, Jingyu Wang, Dongyuan Shi
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, Graph Attention

False Data Injection Attack (FDIA) has become a growing concern in modern cyber-physical power systems. Most existing FDIA detection techniques project the raw measurement data into a high-dimensional latent space to separate normal and attacked samples. These approaches focus more on the statistical correlations of data values and are therefore susceptible to data distribution drifts induced by changes in system operating points or changes in FDIA types and strengths, especially for FDIA localization tasks. Causal inference, on the other hand, extracts the causality behind the coordinated fluctuations of different measurements. The causality patterns are determined by fundamental physical laws such as Ohm's Law and Kirchhoff's Law. They are sensitive to the violation of physical laws caused by FDIA, but tend to remain stable with the drift of system operating points. Leveraging this advantage, this paper proposes a joint FDIA detection and localization framework based on causal inference and the Graph Attention Network (GAT) to identify the attacked system nodes. The proposed framework consists of two levels. The lower level uses the X-learner algorithm to estimate the causality strength between measurements and generate Measurement Causality Graphs (MCGs). The upper level then applies a GAT to identify the anomaly patterns in the MCGs. Since the extracted causality patterns are intrinsically related to the measurements, it is easier for the upper level to figure out the attacked nodes than the existing FDIA localization approaches. The performance of the proposed framework is evaluated on the IEEE 39-bus system. Experimental results show that the causality-based FDIA detection and localization mechanism is highly interpretable and robust.
Enhancing Network Resilience through Machine Learning-powered Graph Combinatorial Optimization: Applications in Cyber Defense and Information Diffusion
Authors: Diksha Goel
Date: 2023-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization

With the burgeoning advancements of computing and network communication technologies, network infrastructures and their application environments have become increasingly complex. Due to the increased complexity, networks are more prone to hardware faults and highly susceptible to cyber-attacks. Therefore, for rapidly growing network-centric applications, network resilience is essential to minimize the impact of attacks and to ensure that the network provides an acceptable level of services during attacks, faults or disruptions. In this regard, this thesis focuses on developing effective approaches for enhancing network resilience. Existing approaches for enhancing network resilience emphasize on determining bottleneck nodes and edges in the network and designing proactive responses to safeguard the network against attacks. However, existing solutions generally consider broader application domains and possess limited applicability when applied to specific application areas such as cyber defense and information diffusion, which are highly popular application domains among cyber attackers. This thesis aims to design effective, efficient and scalable techniques for discovering bottleneck nodes and edges in the network to enhance network resilience in cyber defense and information diffusion application domains. We first investigate a cyber defense graph optimization problem, i.e., hardening active directory systems by discovering bottleneck edges in the network. We then study the problem of identifying bottleneck structural hole spanner nodes, which are crucial for information diffusion in the network. We transform both problems into graph-combinatorial optimization problems and design machine learning based approaches for discovering bottleneck points vital for enhancing network resilience.
Smart OMVI: Obfuscated Malware Variant Identification using a novel dataset
Authors: Suleman Qamar
Date: 2023-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Malware Analysis

Cybersecurity has become a significant issue in the digital era as a result of the growth in everyday computer use. Cybercriminals now engage in more than virus distribution and computer hacking. Cyberwarfare has developed as a result because it has become a threat to a nation's survival. Malware analysis serves as the first line of defence against an attack and is a significant component of cybercrime. Every day, malware attacks target a large number of computer users, businesses, and governmental agencies, causing billions of dollars in losses. Malware may evade multiple AV software with a very minor, cunning tweak made by its designers, despite the fact that security experts have a variety of tools at their disposal to identify it. To address this challenge, a new dataset called the Obfuscated Malware Dataset (OMD) has been developed. This dataset comprises 40 distinct malware families having 21924 samples, and it incorporates obfuscation techniques that mimic the strategies employed by malware creators to make their malware variations different from the original samples. The purpose of this dataset is to provide a more realistic and representative environment for evaluating the effectiveness of malware analysis techniques. Different conventional machine learning algorithms including but not limited to Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forrest (RF), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBOOST) etc are applied and contrasted. The results demonstrated that XGBoost outperformed the other algorithms, achieving an accuracy of f 82%, precision of 88%, recall of 80%, and an F1-Score of 83%.
Is there a Trojan! : Literature survey and critical evaluation of the latest ML based modern intrusion detection systems in IoT environments
Authors: Vishal Karanam
Date: 2023-06-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Intrusion Detection

IoT as a domain has grown so much in the last few years that it rivals that of the mobile network environments in terms of data volumes as well as cybersecurity threats. The confidentiality and privacy of data within IoT environments have become very important areas of security research within the last few years. More and more security experts are interested in designing robust IDS systems to protect IoT environments as a supplement to the more traditional security methods. Given that IoT devices are resource-constrained and have a heterogeneous protocol stack, most traditional intrusion detection approaches don't work well within these schematic boundaries. This has led security researchers to innovate at the intersection of Machine Learning and IDS to solve the shortcomings of non-learning based IDS systems in the IoT ecosystem. Despite various ML algorithms already having high accuracy with IoT datasets, we can see a lack of sufficient production grade models. This survey paper details a comprehensive summary of the latest learning-based approaches used in IoT intrusion detection systems, and conducts a thorough critical review of these systems, potential pitfalls in ML pipelines, challenges from an ML perspective, and discusses future research scope and recommendations.
Pedestrian Accessible Infrastructure Inventory: Assessing Zero-Shot Segmentation on Multi-Mode Geospatial Data for All Pedestrian Types
Authors: Jiahao Xia, Gavin Gong, Jiawei Liu, Zhigang Zhu, Hao Tang
Date: 2023-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Segmentation, Zero Shot Segmentation

In this paper, a Segment Anything Model (SAM)-based pedestrian infrastructure segmentation workflow is designed and optimized, which is capable of efficiently processing multi-sourced geospatial data including LiDAR data and satellite imagery data. We used an expanded definition of pedestrian infrastructure inventory which goes beyond the traditional transportation elements to include street furniture objects that are important for accessibility but are often omitted from the traditional definition. Our contributions lie in producing the necessary knowledge to answer the following two questions. First, which data representation can facilitate zero-shot segmentation of infrastructure objects with SAM? Second, how well does the SAM-based method perform on segmenting pedestrian infrastructure objects? Our findings indicate that street view images generated from mobile LiDAR point cloud data, when paired along with satellite imagery data, can work efficiently with SAM to create a scalable pedestrian infrastructure inventory approach with immediate benefits to GIS professionals, city managers, transportation owners, and walkers, especially those with travel-limiting disabilities, such as individuals who are blind, have low vision, or experience mobility disabilities.
Machine Learning Assessment of Damage Grade for Post-Earthquake Buildings: A Three-Stage Approach Directly Handling Categorical Features
Authors: Yutao Li; Chuanguo Jia; Hong Chen; Hongchen Su; Jiahao Chen; Duoduo Wang
Date: 2023-09-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: Sustainability 2023 9
Tasks: Feature Importance, feature selection

The rapid assessment of post-earthquake building damage for rescue and reconstruction is a crucial strategy to reduce the enormous number of human casualties and economic losses caused by earthquakes. Conventional machine learning (ML) approaches for this problem usually employ one-hot encoding to cope with categorical features, and their overall procedure is neither sufficient nor comprehensive. Therefore, this study proposed a three-stage approach, which can directly handle categorical features and enhance the entire methodology of ML applications. In stage I, an integrated data preprocessing framework involving subjective–objective feature selection was proposed and performed on a dataset of buildings after the 2015 Gorkha earthquake. In stage II, four machine learning models, KNN, XGBoost, CatBoost, and LightGBM, were trained and tested on the dataset. The best model was judged by comprehensive metrics, including the proposed risk coefficient. In stage III, the feature importance, the relationships between the features and the model’s output, and the feature interaction effects were investigated by Shapley additive explanations. The results indicate that the LightGBM model has the best overall performance with the highest accuracy of 0.897, the lowest risk coefficient of 0.042, and the shortest training time of 12.68 s due to its relevant algorithms for directly tackling categorical features. As for its interpretability, the most important features are determined, and information on these features’ impacts and interactions is obtained to improve the reliability of and promote practical engineering applications for the ML models. The proposed three-stage approach can provide a reference for the overall ML implementation process on raw datasets for similar problems.
A model of saliency-based visual attention for rapid scene analysis
Authors: L. Itti, C. Koch, E. Niebur
Date: 1998-11-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 1998 11
Tasks: Saliency Prediction, Scene Understanding, Video Saliency Detection

A visual attention system, inspired by the behavior and the neuronal architecture of the early primate visual system, is presented. Multiscale image features are combined into a single topographical saliency map. A dynamical neural network then selects attended locations in order of decreasing saliency. The system breaks down the complex problem of scene understanding by rapidly selecting, in a computationally efficient manner, conspicuous locations to be analyzed in detail.
Graph-Based Visual Saliency
Authors: Jonathan Harel, Christof Koch, Pietro Perona
Date: 2006-12-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19 2006 12
Tasks: Saliency Prediction, Video Saliency Detection

A new bottom-up visual saliency model, Graph-Based Visual Saliency (GBVS), is proposed. It consists of two steps: rst forming activation maps on certain feature channels, and then normalizing them in a way which highlights conspicuity and admits combination with other maps. The model is simple, and biologically plausible insofar as it is naturally parallelized. This model powerfully predicts human xations on 749 variations of 108 natural images, achieving 98% of the ROC area of a human-based control, whereas the classical algorithms of Itti & Koch ([2], [3], [4]) achieve only 84%.
Probabilistic Sampling of Balanced K-Means using Adiabatic Quantum Computing
Authors: Jan-Nico Zaech, Martin Danelljan, Tolga Birdal, Luc van Gool
Date: 2023-10-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Clustering

Adiabatic quantum computing (AQC) is a promising approach for discrete and often NP-hard optimization problems. Current AQCs allow to implement problems of research interest, which has sparked the development of quantum representations for many computer vision tasks. Despite requiring multiple measurements from the noisy AQC, current approaches only utilize the best measurement, discarding information contained in the remaining ones. In this work, we explore the potential of using this information for probabilistic balanced k-means clustering. Instead of discarding non-optimal solutions, we propose to use them to compute calibrated posterior probabilities with little additional compute cost. This allows us to identify ambiguous solutions and data points, which we demonstrate on a D-Wave AQC on synthetic tasks and real visual data.