Xiangyang Luo

Both reviews and user-item interactions (i.e., rating scores) have been widely adopted for user rating prediction. However, these existing techniques mainly extract the latent representations for users and items in an independent and static manner. That is, a single static feature vector is derived to encode user preference without considering the particular characteristics of each candidate item. We argue that this static encoding scheme is incapable of fully capturing users’ preferences, because users usually exhibit different preferences when interacting with different items. In this article, we propose a novel c ontext- a ware user-item r epresentation l earning model for rating prediction, named CARL. CARL derives a joint representation for a given user-item pair based on their individual latent features and latent feature interactions. Then, CARL adopts Factorization Machines to further model higher order feature interactions on the basis of the user-item pair for rating prediction. Specifically, two separate learning components are devised in CARL to exploit review data and interaction data, respectively: review-based feature learning and interaction-based feature learning . In the review-based learning component, with convolution operations and attention mechanism, the pair-based relevant features for the given user-item pair are extracted by jointly considering their corresponding reviews. However, these features are only reivew-driven and may not be comprehensive. Hence, an interaction-based learning component further extracts complementary features from interaction data alone, also on the basis of user-item pairs. The final rating score is then derived with a dynamic linear fusion mechanism. Experiments on seven real-world datasets show that CARL achieves significantly better rating prediction accuracy than existing state-of-the-art alternatives. Also, with the attention mechanism, we show that the pair-based relevant information (i.e., context-aware information) in reviews can be highlighted to interpret the rating prediction for different user-item pairs.

Collaborative learning allows multiple clients to train a joint model without sharing their data with each other. Each client performs training locally and then submits the model updates to a central server for aggregation. Since the server has no visibility into the process of generating the updates, collaborative learning is vulnerable to poisoning attacks where a malicious client can generate a poisoned update to introduce backdoor functionality to the joint model. The existing solutions for detecting poisoned updates, however, fail to defend against the recently proposed attacks, especially in the non-IID (independent and identically distributed) setting. In this article, we present a novel defense scheme to detect anomalous updates in both IID and non-IID settings. Our key idea is to realize client-side cross-validation, where each update is evaluated over other clients' local data. The server will adjust the weights of the updates based on the evaluation results when performing aggregation. To adapt to the unbalanced distribution of data in the non-IID setting, a dynamic client allocation mechanism is designed to assign detection tasks to the most suitable clients. During the detection process, we also protect the client-level privacy to prevent malicious clients from knowing the participations of other clients, by integrating differential privacy with our design without degrading the detection performance. Our experimental evaluations on three real-world datasets show that our scheme is significantly robust to two representative poisoning attacks.

Auction is an effective way to allocate goods or services to bidders who value them the most. The rapid growth of e-auctions facilitates online transactions but poses new and distinctive challenges. It is difficult to establish trust among sellers, buyers, and auctioneers without centralized auction websites or platforms (the auctioneer) which collect bids and derive the auction results. However, these third parties may be untrustworthy, and malicious sellers or buyers may refuse to deliver the goods or payment according to the protocol. Moreover, the open and anonymous online environment may stimulate auction participants to form collusion coalitions to rig the auction and reap unfair profit. Many auction designs have been proposed to address these concerns, but they fall short of simultaneously achieving decentralization (i.e., held without a trusted third utility), strong consensus (i.e., the establishment of trust), collusion resistance, and practical implementation. We present CReam, the first decentralized collusion-resistant e-auction system that is implemented with smart contract on the blockchain. With the carefully designed smart auction contract, mutually distrustful and rational sellers and buyers are stimulated to operate properly, hence transact safely without trusted third parties. The auction mechanism in the smart contract can effectively prevent bidder collusion and realize economic robustness, i.e., truthfulness. We implement a fully functional CReam on the Ethereum network. Extensive experimental results confirm that CReam can greatly reduce the probability of collusion and achieve an approximate optimal revenue at a low cost of contract execution.

Voice biometrics is widely adopted for identity authentication in mobile devices. However, voice authentication is vulnerable to spoofing attacks, where an adversary may deceive the voice authentication system with pre-recorded or synthesized samples from the legitimate user or by impersonating the speaking style of the targeted user. In this paper, we design and implement VoicePop, a robust software-only anti-spoofing system on smartphones. VoicePop leverages the pop noise, which is produced by the user breathing while speaking close to the microphone. The pop noise is delicate and subject to user diversity, making it hard to record by replay attacks beyond a certain distance and to imitate precisely by impersonators. We design a novel pop noise detection scheme to pinpoint pop noises at the phonemic level, based on which we establish individually unique relationship between phonemes and pop noises to identify legitimate users and defend against spoofing attacks. Our experimental results with 18 participants and three types of smartphones show that VoicePop achieves over 93.5% detection accuracy at around 5.4% equal error rate. VoicePop requires no additional hardware but only the built-in microphones in virtually all smartphones, which can be readily integrated in existing voice authentication systems for mobile devices.

In this paper, a novel forensics scheme for color image is proposed in color quaternion wavelet transform (CQWT) domain. Compared with discrete wavelet transform (DWT), contourlet wavelet transform, and local binary patterns, CQWT processes a color image as a unit, and so, it can provide more forensics information to identify the photograph (PG) and computer generated (CG) images by considering the quaternion magnitude and phase measures. Meanwhile, two novel quaternion central moments for color images, i.e., quaternion skewness and kurtosis, are proposed to extract forensics features. In the condition of the same statistical model as Farid's model, the CQWT can boost the performance of the existing identification models. Compared with Farid's model and Li's model in 7500 PG and 7500 CG, the quaternion statistical features show a better classification performance. Results in the comparative experiments show that the classification accuracy of the CQWT improves by 19% more than Farid's model, and the quaternion features approximately improve by 2% more than the traditional.