PATROL: Privacy-Oriented Pruning for Collaborative Inference Against Model Inversion Attacks

Collaborative inference has been a promising solution to enable resource-constrained edge devices to perform inference using state-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs). In collaborative inference, the edge device first feeds the input to a partial DNN locally and then uploads the intermediate result to the cloud to complete the inference. However, recent research indicates model inversion attacks (MIAs) can reconstruct input data from intermediate results, posing serious privacy concerns for collaborative inference. Existing perturbation and cryptography techniques are inefficient and unreliable in defending against MIAs while performing accurate inference. This paper provides a viable solution, named PATROL, which develops privacy-oriented pruning to balance privacy, efficiency, and utility of collaborative inference. PATROL takes advantage of the fact that later layers in a DNN can extract more task-specific features. Given limited local resources for collaborative inference, PATROL intends to deploy more layers at the edge based on pruning techniques to enforce task-specific features for inference and reduce task-irrelevant but sensitive features for privacy preservation. To achieve privacy-oriented pruning, PATROL introduces two key components: Lipschitz regularization and adversarial reconstruction training, which increase the reconstruction errors by reducing the stability of MIAs and enhance the target inference model by adversarial training, respectively

Fed-CPrompt: Contrastive Prompt for Rehearsal-Free Federated Continual Learning

Federated continual learning (FCL) learns incremental tasks over time from confidential datasets distributed across clients. This paper focuses on rehearsal-free FCL, which has severe forgetting issues when learning new tasks due to the lack of access to historical task data. To address this issue, we propose Fed-CPrompt based on prompt learning techniques to obtain task-specific prompts in a communication-efficient way. Fed-CPrompt introduces two key components, asynchronous prompt learning, and contrastive continual loss, to handle asynchronous task arrival and heterogeneous data distributions in FCL, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of Fed-CPrompt in achieving SOTA rehearsal-free FCL performance.Comment: Accepted by FL-ICML 202

A regular black hole as the final state of evolution of a singular black hole

We propose a novel black hole model in which singular and regular black holes are combined as a whole and more precisely singular and regular black holes are regarded as different states of parameter evolution. We refer to them as singular and regular states, respectively. Furthermore, the regular state is depicted by the final state of parameter evolution in the model. We also present the sources that can generate such a black hole spacetime in the framework of $F(R)$ gravity. This theory of modified gravity is adopted because it offers a possible resolution to a tough issue in the thermodynamics of regular black holes, namely the discrepancy between the thermal entropy and Wald entropy. The dynamics and thermodynamics of the novel black hole model are also discussed when a singular state evolves into a regular state during the change of charge or horizon radius from its initial value to its extreme value.Comment: 36 pages, 23 figures, references adde

Regular black holes: A short topic review

The essential singularity in Einstein's gravity can be avoidable if the preconditions of Penrose's theorem can be bypassed, i.e., if the strong energy condition is broken in the vicinity of a black hole center. The singularity mentioned here includes two aspects: (i) the divergence of curvature invariants, and (ii) the incompleteness of geodesics. Both aspects are now taken into account in order to determine whether a black hole contains essential singularities. In this sense, black holes without essential singularities are dubbed regular (non-singular) black holes. The regular black holes have some intriguing phenomena that are different from those of singular black holes, and such phenomena have inspired numerous studies. In this review, we summarize the current topics that are associated with regular black holes.Comment: Major revision, 45 pages, 2 figures, some references have ben adde

Viral video style: A closer look at viral videos on YouTube

Viral videos that gain popularity through the process of Internet sharing are having a profound impact on society. Existing studies on viral videos have only been on small or confidential datasets. We collect by far the largest open benchmark for viral video study called CMU Viral Video Dataset, and share it with researchers from both academia and industry. Having verified existing observations on the dataset, we discover some interesting characteristics of viral videos. Based on our analysis, in the second half of the paper, we propose a model to forecast the future peak day of viral videos. The application of our work is not only important for advertising agencies to plan advertising campaigns and estimate costs, but also for companies to be able to quickly respond to rivals in viral marketing campaigns. The proposed method is unique in that it is the first attempt to incorporate video metadata into the peak day prediction. The empirical results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, with statistically significant differences. Copyright 2014 ACM

Diaqua­bis­(4-carb­oxy-2-propyl-1H-imidazole-5-carboxyl­ato-κ2 N 3,O 4)copper(II) N,N-dimethyl­formamide disolvate

In the title complex, [Cu(C8H9N2O4)2(H2O)2]·2C3H7NO, the CuII ion, lying on an inversion center, is six-coordinated in a slightly distorted octa­hedral geometry. Two N atoms and two O atoms from two H2pimda (H3pimda is 2-propyl-1H-4,5-dicarb­oxy­lic acid) ligands are in the equatorial plane. The axial positions are occupied by two O atoms from two water mol­ecules. A two-dimensional supra­molecular network parallel to (001) is constructed by N—H⋯O and O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds. An intra­molecular O—H⋯O hydrogen bond is also observed

DEFB1 rs11362 Polymorphism and Risk of Chronic Periodontitis: A Meta-Analysis of Unadjusted and Adjusted Data

Objective: Chronic periodontitis (CP) is a growing problem that affects the worldwide population, having significant impacts on people's daily lives and economic development. Genetics is an important component in the determination of individual susceptibility to periodontal diseases. Numerous studies have been performed to investigate the association between beta defensin 1 (DEFB1) rs11362 polymorphism and risk of CP, but the results are still inconclusive. Therefore, we conducted this meta-analysis to ascertain whether this variation in DEFB1 is associated with CP susceptibility.Methods: The relevant studies were searched in PubMed and Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) databases up to January 9, 2018. Two independent authors selected citations and extracted the data from eligible studies. Odds ratios (ORs) with their 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) were used to assess the strength of the association.Results: Seven case-control studies were included in this meta-analysis. Based on unadjusted data, there was no obvious association between DEFB1 rs11362 polymorphism and CP risk in all genetic models (A vs. G: OR = 0.86, 95%CI = 0.61–1.20; AA vs. GG: OR = 0.83, 95% CI = 00.50–1.39; AG vs. GG: OR = 1.01, 95%CI = 0.73–1.39; AG+AA vs. GG: OR = 0.91, 95% CI = 00.74–1.11; and AA vs. AG+GG: OR = 0.83, 95% CI = 00.57–1.21); the results of adjusted data also showed no significant relationship. Subgroup analyses based on ethnicity, participants' smoking status, HWE in controls and severity of CP all revealed similar results to that of the overall analysis. Sensitivity analysis indicated the results were robust and no evidence of publication bias was found.Conclusions: Our meta-analysis suggests that DEFB1 rs11362 polymorphism may not have an important effect on the risk of CP. Further large-scale and well-designed studies are necessary to validate our conclusion in the future