Flexible Differentially Private Vertical Federated Learning with Adaptive Feature Embeddings

The emergence of vertical federated learning (VFL) has stimulated concerns about the imperfection in privacy protection, as shared feature embeddings may reveal sensitive information under privacy attacks. This paper studies the delicate equilibrium between data privacy and task utility goals of VFL under differential privacy (DP). To address the generality issue of prior arts, this paper advocates a flexible and generic approach that decouples the two goals and addresses them successively. Specifically, we initially derive a rigorous privacy guarantee by applying norm clipping on shared feature embeddings, which is applicable across various datasets and models. Subsequently, we demonstrate that task utility can be optimized via adaptive adjustments on the scale and distribution of feature embeddings in an accuracy-appreciative way, without compromising established DP mechanisms. We concretize our observation into the proposed VFL-AFE framework, which exhibits effectiveness against privacy attacks and the capacity to retain favorable task utility, as substantiated by extensive experiments

DuetFace: Collaborative Privacy-Preserving Face Recognition via Channel Splitting in the Frequency Domain

With the wide application of face recognition systems, there is rising concern that original face images could be exposed to malicious intents and consequently cause personal privacy breaches. This paper presents DuetFace, a novel privacy-preserving face recognition method that employs collaborative inference in the frequency domain. Starting from a counterintuitive discovery that face recognition can achieve surprisingly good performance with only visually indistinguishable high-frequency channels, this method designs a credible split of frequency channels by their cruciality for visualization and operates the server-side model on non-crucial channels. However, the model degrades in its attention to facial features due to the missing visual information. To compensate, the method introduces a plug-in interactive block to allow attention transfer from the client-side by producing a feature mask. The mask is further refined by deriving and overlaying a facial region of interest (ROI). Extensive experiments on multiple datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in protecting face images from undesired visual inspection, reconstruction, and identification while maintaining high task availability and performance. Results show that the proposed method achieves a comparable recognition accuracy and computation cost to the unprotected ArcFace and outperforms the state-of-the-art privacy-preserving methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/Tencent/TFace/tree/master/recognition/tasks/duetface.Comment: Accepted to ACM Multimedia 202

Privacy-Preserving Face Recognition Using Random Frequency Components

The ubiquitous use of face recognition has sparked increasing privacy concerns, as unauthorized access to sensitive face images could compromise the information of individuals. This paper presents an in-depth study of the privacy protection of face images' visual information and against recovery. Drawing on the perceptual disparity between humans and models, we propose to conceal visual information by pruning human-perceivable low-frequency components. For impeding recovery, we first elucidate the seeming paradox between reducing model-exploitable information and retaining high recognition accuracy. Based on recent theoretical insights and our observation on model attention, we propose a solution to the dilemma, by advocating for the training and inference of recognition models on randomly selected frequency components. We distill our findings into a novel privacy-preserving face recognition method, PartialFace. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PartialFace effectively balances privacy protection goals and recognition accuracy. Code is available at: https://github.com/Tencent/TFace.Comment: ICCV 202

Defective Osteogenic Differentiation in the Development of Osteosarcoma

Osteosarcoma (OS) is associated with poor prognosis due to its high incidence of metastasis and chemoresistance. It often arises in areas of rapid bone growth in long bones during the adolescent growth spurt. Although certain genetic conditions and alterations increase the risk of developing OS, the molecular pathogenesis is poorly understood. Recently, defects in differentiation have been linked to cancers, as they are associated with high cell proliferation. Treatments overcoming these defects enable terminal differentiation and subsequent tumor inhibition. OS development may be associated with defects in osteogenic differentiation. While early regulators of osteogenesis are unable to bypass these defects, late osteogenic regulators, including Runx2 and Osterix, are able to overcome some of the defects and inhibit tumor propagation through promoting osteogenic differentiation. Further understanding of the relationship between defects in osteogenic differentiation and tumor development holds tremendous potential in treating OS

Optimizing microbial- and enzyme-induced carbonate precipitation treatment regimes to improve the performance of recycled aggregate concrete

Recycled aggregate concrete (RAC) typically suffers from inferior properties due to old mortar on the surface of recycled aggregate (RA), and the practical application of two proposed treatment methods, microbial-induced carbonate precipitation (MICP) and enzyme-induced carbonate precipitation (EICP), has encountered challenges in determining optimal culture medium and precipitation regimes. This study initially aimed to address these challenges by establishing the feasibility of using chloride-free cultivation medium to avoid introducing chloride ions that could damage the steel reinforcement. The optimal Ca concentration in the precipitation culture medium was determined as 0.3 mol/L for MICP and 0.5 mol/L for EICP. Furthermore, the optimal precipitation regimes for MICP and EICP treatments were identified as I-S (5 cycles) and M-S (3 cycles), respectively. The quantitative evaluation of the above factors enabled the direct practical application of these optimal treatment regimes. The performance of RAC was significantly improved after both MICP and EICP treatments compared to untreated RAC, with EICP treatment demonstrating superior performance. The precipitated CaCO3 formed during MICP treatment consisted mainly of spherical vaterite crystals, while the precipitation formed during EICP treatment comprised vaterite, calcite, and aragonite. These differences in phase and mechanism between MICP and EICP treatments could explain the variations in the performance of RAC

Key Physicochemical and Biological Factors of the Phase Behavior of Tau

Recent findings have garnered a substantial amount of attention toward tau based on its pathological contribution to neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease (AD). Studies investigating the structure and aggregation of tau under various in vitro and in vivo conditions have revealed its intrinsically disordered structures and amyloidogenesis process. The aggregation behavior of tau is strongly dependent on the experimental conditions due to the high sensitivity of both the soluble tau conformations and the amyloid nucleation process toward its surrounding environments. Herein, we review and discuss (1) the effects of different physicochemical and biological factors as well as intermolecular interactions with various molecular chaperones on tau aggregation, (2) context-dependent liquid-liquid phase separation of tau and its amyloidogenic transformation, and (3) the utility of the phase diagram in comprehending the phase transition and separation of proteins

Nickel/photoredox dual catalyzed arylalkylation of nonactivated alkenes

Abstract Alkene dicarbofunctionalization is an efficient strategy and operation-economic fashion for introducing complexity in molecules. A nickel/photoredox dual catalyzed arylalkylation of nonactivated alkenes for the simultaneous construction of one C(sp 3)−C(sp 3) bond and one C(sp 3)−C(sp 2) bond has been developed. The mild catalytic method provided valuable indanethylamine derivatives with wide substrate scope and good functional group compatibility. An enantioselective dicarbofunctionalization was also achieved with pyridine-oxazoline as a ligand. The efficiency of metallaphotoredox dicarbofunctionalization was demonstrated for the concise synthesis of pharmaceutically active compounds

Dual Effects of Presynaptic Membrane Mimetics on alpha-Synuclein Amyloid Aggregation

Aggregation of intrinsically disordered alpha-synuclein (alpha SN) under various conditions is closely related to synucleinopathies. Although various biological membranes have shown to alter the structure and aggregation propensity of alpha SN, a thorough understanding of the molecular and mechanical mechanism of amyloidogenesis in membranes remains unanswered. Herein, we examined the structural changes, binding properties, and amyloidogenicity of three variations of alpha SN mutants under two types of liposomes, 1,2-Dioleoyl-sn-glycero-3-Phosphocholine (DOPC) and presynaptic vesicle mimetic (Mimic) membranes. While neutrally charged DOPC membranes elicited marginal changes in the structure and amyloid fibrillation of alpha SNs, negatively charged Mimic membranes induced dramatic helical folding and biphasic amyloid generation. At low concentration of Mimic membranes, the amyloid fibrillation of alpha SNs was promoted in a dose-dependent manner. However, further increases in the concentration constrained the fibrillation process. These results suggest the dual effect of Mimic membranes on regulating the amyloidogenesis of alpha SN, which is rationalized by the amyloidogenic structure of alpha SN and condensation-dilution of local alpha SN concentration. Finally, we propose physicochemical properties of alpha SN and membrane surfaces, and their propensity to drive electrostatic interactions as decisive factors of amyloidogenesis.TRU

Accumulation of Sulfonic Acid Groups Anchored in Covalent Organic Frameworks as an Intrinsic Proton-Conducting Electrolyte

Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are a novel class of crystalline porous polymers, which possessed high porosity, excellent stability, and regular nanochannels. Two-dimensional (2D) COFs provided 1D nanochannel to form the proton transport channels. The abovementioned features afforded a powerful potential platform for designing materials as proton transportation carriers. Herein, we incorporated sulfonic acid groups on the pore walls as proton sources for enhancing proton transport conductivity in the 1D channel. Interestingly, the sulfonic acid COFs (S-COFs) electrolytes with binder free exhibited excellent proton conductivity about 1.5 × 10^-2 S cm^-1 at 25 ℃ and 95% relative humidity (RH), which ranked the excellent performance in standard proton-conducting electrolytes. The S-COFs electrolytes kept the high proton conduction over the 24 h. The activation energy was estimated to be as low as 0.17 eV, which was much lower than most reported COFs. This research opens a new window to evolve great potential of structural design for COFs as the high proton-conducting electrolytes

Strategies for developing flavonoids with multiple reactivities against pathological features in Alzheimer’s disease

The etiology of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is still unknown because of its complicated nature associated with various pathological components, including free radicals, acetylcholinesterase, and metal-free and metal-bound amyloid-beta. Thus, chemical reagents with modulating reactivities against multiple pathogenic factors are necessary for advancing our understanding of the complex pathogenesis. Here we report rational strategies for developing flavonoids that can control multiple pathological elements found in the brains of AD patients. Our investigations employing a series of flavonoids illuminated structural features critical for regulatory reactivities against desired targets. Moreover, the most promising flavonoid with multiple functions was developed based on our complete structure–activity relationship. Mechanistic studies confirmed that such versatile reactivities of the flavonoid are achieved by its redox potential and direct interactions with pathogenic factors. Overall, our studies demonstrate the feasibility of devising small molecules as multifunctional chemical reagents against pathological features found in AD